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The Value of Your Time

Lesson 3 from: How to Build and Use Lightroom Presets

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

3. The Value of Your Time

Lesson Info

The Value of Your Time

So the point is every second matters. I want you guys to look at this. I'm gonna say that the average image count for one of our weddings with two, a lead and a second shooter, along with a third shooter that's in training, is around 5000 images. Let's say that you're doing 20 weddings per year which is a good number. If you're a solo studio and you're doing 20-30, that's a great number. You can make a good living doing that. But if you think about it on a yearly basis, you're processing 100,000 images per year, you're taking that through your system. That doesn't count, we're not talking about engagements, portrait sessions, family sessions, just weddings alone. If you saved one second per image, just one second, that's 27 hours of your year. Which, honestly based on how photographers work, that's a full work week. Cause, I haven't met a lot of photographers that put in a whole 40-hour work week. So let's just say that's a full work week. 27 hours is a lot of time though, right? That ...

is a valuable chunk of time that you can place somewhere else. Now that's one second. And some of you guys are going, "Like, holy crap. Pie is getting down to one second differences?" Yeah. We build $5,000 machines that are overclock, because Lightroom is a fairly inefficient program at the moment, so we build machines specifically just to process in Lightroom to save one second per image. And you'll find out why in just a second. It's a big deal. Let's go to 5,000, so I would estimate that you guys could probably save 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds by just implementing a preset system like the one we're gonna be talking about, or like your own, that will teach you how to do in this course. You can save that much time on each image. Okay, what about 50 weddings a year? Well, your average times saved for one second goes to 69 hours. What about 100? 138 hours. We do 350 weddings a year, some of them are multi-day shoots. So some of them are between 8, 10, 12,000 images because they're multi-day shoots. This doesn't factor in engagements, and other commissions. We do about 1,000 client commissions a year. So in weddings alone, we're putting through nearly 2,000,000 images through the production system. Is one second important? It's massively important. Because, one second is 486 hours when you've strap-laid that out across a business. That's huge. And, you guys are saying to yourselves, "I don't shoot 350 weddings a year." "I shoot 20, or 10, or whatever." If you don't get control of this right now, you will never shoot the number of weddings you wanna shoot per year, because you'll never have the time to actually focus on your business to get to that place. Wherever it is that you want to go. And believe me, there is a lot of time to be saved and be put somewhere else. There's better places to put your time than this. I think we all agree on that, right? Okay. So here's one of our enduring tenets of our business. And, I want you guys to replace partners with owners because you guys are partners in your own studio. In our studio, we have 60 employees with 3 partners. Anybody that is a partner in the company, if you are an owner of your company, your time should be placed on the development of systems. That's it. Meaning, you should be creating the contract that your assistant fills out and sends out to your client. You should be creating the system of developing and processing that your people are gonna execute. Even if you're doing it yourself, you need to be making the system. Because, how would you ever- have you guys tried- how many people have run a business, and have hired an employee without proper systems in place. Has anybody tried that? OK, can you imagine what happens? Well, what ends up happening with your time? Like if I, Steve, if I brought you one and was like, "Steve, I need you to do this." And you say, "OK." OK. Perfect! It's literally all we needed you to do. So you say OK, and then you're probably gonna ask me, "What do I do?" Right? Where do you want me to go? What do you want me to do? Exactly, so if I have to spend my time teaching you how to do what it is that I need you to do, then what happens to my time? It's just, I'm now just spending all of my time managing one single employee. Right? One single person that is working for you. So the systems are what's going to enable you to say, "Steve, I've created a contract system, here it is, I just need you to send this out to every client and if you have any questions lemme know, I have a video right here that I made for you." SR Lounge started guys, SR Lounge started by me getting tired of teaching our people the same thing over and over and over. So I was like, "I'm gonna make a video for it." And then I made a video and I was like, "Hey, I'm gonna put it online and see if anybody watches it." And now there's 750,000 people a month that are on this site, watching the videos. So, small steps. First, create that video, create that system for your people. That's where that time needs to be.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with RSVP

Preset Installation Guide

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keynote Slides
Lightroom Presets

Ratings and Reviews

April S.
 

When I first saw this course being offered I thought, I know how to save my own Presets, and I didn't think there could be much in this course for me. I like to listen in to courses while working sometimes though so I tuned in to this one just for "noise" in the background. Well, I was quite wrong about the content. This short course is a jewel in my opinion. Pye does show how to name, save, store Presets, but there is so much more. He delves into some pretty great detail about why and how you would save some adjustments and not others (In Camera vs Universal settings), and he explains in a precise, clear way (with demonstration) of how each setting affects an image. I have watched and also own several Lightroom and Photoshop courses. All are great, but none of them covered this topic in such a way as to make me think I don't need this course. I'm going to buy this course now so that I can watch at my own pace and really glean every little gem from it and put this info to immediate use. Thanks Pye!

Suzy Petrucci
 

I was literally wishing for a class like this a few weeks ago because I spend way too much time meandering though LR wondering if there's a more methodical and efficient and consistent way to get through lighroom editing. This class nails it. The what, where and why about each of the sliders and a foundational order in which to use them. Great system Pye. Thank you.

Nicolet Groen
 

I was a bit hesitant to buy because I am an interior and still life photographer and Pye is working in a completely different niche. But boy, I am so glad I got it. I finally created a set of presets that adjust my images in the way I want. The content is very structured and jam-packed with info. Next thing to figure out is how to create and use adjustment brushes, and yes, that is also explained it this course. Love it.​ Thank you Pye!

Student Work

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