Lessons

Lesson Info

Workflow Recap

we've had, you know, three days of information packed, um, sessions where we've gone from importing photos, sorting through the photos, picking and rejecting photos, adding stars, adding keywords to our picks, adding map location to our photos, um, then moving on to the develop module to develop, bend to export. So it's been a lot of information, So I thought it might be useful to dio a small chute where we work through a complete set of photos from beginning to end. It will be a small one, but I want you to have a good sense of the workflow since it's kind of been chopped up into multiple days. So we're going Teoh for people in class here. We're going to go ahead and import a set of photos that we're gonna pretend are coming from a memory card. I'm going to go ahead and click on Import, and these photos are in our day three folder. So we're going to click on this memory card Death Valley folder on her desktop. Now, if you can't get to your desktop, you're not sure where your desktop i...

s. Come up to this top left box here and choose desktop So there are some shortcuts in this top left box. And then if you're not seeing it on your desktop, you may need to collapse whatever showing on your desktop to go into Day three, Click on memory card, Death Valley. Now, Really, if I had plugged in a memory card, that would show directly up here at the top of the source panel, but we're just simulating that. Okay, so I have my photos here. They're from a memory card, so I'm going to copy them onto my hard drive. I could also choose to copy as D N G Digital negative format. And then on the right hand side, we're gonna first scroll down to the mission critical panel. So the mission critical panel is the destination panel. Where on our hard drive or these photos going to go? Okay, these photos are going to go inside of my pictures folder, and I don't know if you can tell, but my pictures folder should be inside of instructor, but I'm not seeing it here so again, I need to collapse. What I am seeing inside of my user folder, collapse the desktop, scroll down to pictures and come to image files here because that's where I'm putting my photos. We talked about this on set on Thursday in terms of where I put my photos. So my photos were going to go into image files, and I'm gonna organize thumb by date so that they go into a shoot folder within a year folder. So up above here, I'm gonna go ahead un check into sub folder and say, organized by date. Then I'm going to scroll down and look at what I've got in a Tallix. So right here, I've got these photos going into actually there. Are there some subsets of photos here? But here they are, 2009. April 15th through 21st. So they're gonna go into these date folders, Okay, so that's exactly where I want them. I could also choose to organize them into one folder, but let's go ahead and and well, also both options. Okay, so they're organized into individual date folders. I can leave it. Is that if I want to group them into one, I need to change my instructions. Toe light room here. I'm going to say I want to put them into and nine and rather than by date, I'm going to choose Organize into one folder, Okay, click on sub folder and choose death else a April 15th Death Valley so they all go into one. So if you review the lesson from Thursday, you'll see that I cover in detail both scenarios. Splitting them out by date or into one folder. Now, you can see Here's my April 15th. That Valley folder in italics is where they're gonna go with in 2000 and nine. I'm in great shape, and I've done the mission critical work. Now I can scroll up and do any additional work that I need to dio I could rename the files if I chose to. I can apply my copyright with this preset that that we created on Thursday, and then I'm gonna add a few key words. So these air all Death Valley photos. So I'm just gonna add keywords that apply to just our toe every single photo in this shoot, and I believe they're all in California. This will add that as well. I'll click on import here in the folders panel, we have the Death Valley folder, and now that they're imported we can start working through and evaluating which ones were our picks in which rejects minor sorted backwards. I can tell I have the Zita a turned on but turn on a dizzy and collapse the filmstrip here. So now you can see we've got this set of photos toe work through and to evaluate. So let's go ahead on this first photo and move from grid view toe loop few. So I'm in greed for you down here. I'm gonna go toe loop few, which is the e So the for loop. And we'll use the system that we used on Thursday where we have pick and reject flag and five stars if we think they're the best. But we won't distinguish further than that now that I'm in loop here. The filmstrip can come in handy here, so I'll type I for information to get rid of this information. And I'm going to click on this photo to zoom in and it doesnt look completely sharp to me. It sure did zoomed out, but it doesn't look sharp, so I'll click back on it and I'll type X for reject. Move to the next photo. We'll zoom in on this one. I'm not gonna zoom in on every photo during this example, but this one, this one looks sharper in the foreground. So I'm gonna type P for pick. The next set of photos look very similar. So what I have is my figure on the shift key. And as I hit the right arrow key, I can just select all five of those without having to pick up by mouse. And now I'm going to go to compare view. That's to compare view on this one. So compare view again is this third button. All of this is covered in detail on day one, by the way, you know, collapse that with compare view. My goal is to come up with one single photo as the select. But my goal is to come up with one select. So I'm throwing up various candidates against the select. So of these two photos, frankly, they look the same to me. They must just be two different exposures. I'm going to keep the left one. So on the right one, I'm gonna click on it, and I'm gonna type X for reject. And then I'm gonna hit this right arrow button to say, Give me the next candidate. I'm ready for the next one. Now, In this case, I like the candidate better than the select. So I'm gonna click on the select type X for reject, and I'm gonna make the candidate than new select. So now it's time for this ex this ex y button down here a the bottom. So when I do that, it not only makes that candidate the new favorite, but it also throws me the next candidate. Okay. Now, before I decide on these, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in. So when I got the padlock locked as I zoom in it zooming in both of them so I could just see if there's any any difference in sharpness here, So I'll zoom back out. I'll keep this one is the select. I'll make this one the reject go to the next candidate. And like the placement of this one a little bit better. The focus, a little different background began. Let's just make sure that I didn't completely miss the focus. And guess what? I missed the focus on that one. So this one is the reject. And now I'm at the end of the list. So I'll click on Don and this one that's left, I'll make a pick. Next. I have two photos that are pretty similar. I don't need to go through that complex, select and compare, but I think that I do want to see them side by side. So I'll select the to. I'll click on survey view and let's see, I kind of like this one. I'm a crop it. We'll see that I have more of the road, but I need to zoom in now. In survey view, my mouse is not zoom tool compare. I could have zoomed in directly, but I chose survey So minute type Z for Zoom and that seems me in so I can come up here, see how sharp this is, see to zoom again. I can also do this on the other one, so that one looks a little bit sharper, but I like this one better anyway. So monotype x for reject on this one p for pick on this one, and then I'm gonna go to my next Siri's. So let's use compare view again. Well, let's go ahead and select the next three photos so sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what the difference is here. And frankly, I think the difference in this case is simply the exposure. If I select one photo, I can see the hissed a gram on it. If I select the other photo, Well, I can't really even see a difference. So that certainly means don't sweat. It looks a little different on the left hand side. So I'm gonna go ahead on Zoom in, though, and see how these people are. So they look a little bit sharper in this right hand one. So I'm gonna click on the right one or click on the left one. Make that a reject click on the candidate, Make that they make that the new select and then I have a new candidate here. Now, this may be a little small from at home, but the candidate doesn't have any people in it. And I really for me having people in the photo made the photo, So I'm going to reject the candidate, and I'm gonna go to the next candidate, except that there is no next one. So as I click on that, it says that I'm done. Ah, click done P for pick five stars, and we'll do one more serious. I think I have more Siris in here than I really need. Yeah, definitely. Um, let's go ahead and do this. Siri's here. Now, I may end up with more than one that I really, really like on this one. So I'm just gonna do end for survey rather than do the select compare where my goal is really one photo and looking at these side by side again, they they're so similar. Except this horizontal one, that really the factor for me is going to be is going to be sharpness. So let me zoom in on this one Z for zoom, and maybe this one looks a little bit better. Okay, so I'll pee for pick on this one x for reject X for reject. And then I also like the idea of having a horizontal option. So as I closed these ones I've already evaluated There's room for the other one to get larger, see for zoom. And now you see how it's loading each time. Now, eventually it starts to get annoying that we have to wait. Right? So if When I import the photos, I choose to render the 1 to 1 previews that setting we talked about on Thursday. All of that work would have been done up front. The downside is that we would have had to wait longer for the import, So it's just to pay now versus pay later decision. So I'll do P for pick five stars and we would just continue. There's a few more Siri's here, that I think you've gotten plenty of of reinforcement on that for now. So the next step for me would be to go back to grid view and look at well, first, do a quick review to make sure that I didn't miss any value evaluating any of the photos. So here in the filmstrip, I would use this filter bar and I would filter. We have pick, flag, unflagging and rejected. I would click on the unflagging Now, the first time we just activate the filter. The second time would actually give me just those subset of photos. I would confirm that Yes, I actually haven't evaluated all of them. I did skip thes, and I would in fact evaluate them. Then I would turn this filter back off by clicking back on it, and then I would just filter on my rejects. Now, I just want to see my rejects. As I scroll down here, you'll see that. Am I seeing just my rejects? You know, with those filters, I don't see the there. There. It took a while for those black flags to show up on those photos. And that confused me. So I see my rejects here, I would select all. And then if I'm disciplined about the leading my rejects, I would hit the delete key delete from desk if I wanted Teoh keep them around, but stack them up and set him aside. I would right click inside one of the photos se stacking group into stack again. I know I'm going through these things fast. All of this was day one work. So I've got this stack of 10 rejects here. I can expand that at any time Now that I've got the rejects all stacked up, I'm going to go ahead and turn off this reject flag. I can also do it at the top here. Whether I do it in the filmstrip or the top doesn't matter. turn it, click back on to turn it off. I see all of my photos. I'm gonna use the minus key to make the thumbnail smaller. I'll take the rejects and I'll drag them down to the bottom of the shoot. That's what I mean by setting them aside. Okay, so now I've decided which ones are keepers and which ones are not keepers. The next step is to add a few key words to them. Um, I just find that if I just take enough time to add a few, it preserves my sanity When I come to find these photos later. So we'll go ahead and select this first photo. Open up the key wording panel here. Now, this is a ghost town outside of Death Valley, and I don't remember what it is. So I'm just gonna say Ghost Town and I could also ill do that different separately. So just type goes town. Remember, they all have Death Valley in California on them already. So this second photo, how I keyword this just depends on how I'm going to think of this photo when I want to find it. Right. Well, this is the sandal in the desert. So to me, sandal or flip flop actually is an appropriate key work, because that's how I'm gonna think of it. So I'm gonna type in flip flops. I'm gonna end up putting desert on all of these photos. Otherwise I would type that now as well. The next one. This one is that begin sign. So that's what I think of this photo as so began and highway, and we'll just do a few more of these Finally, on this one, I'm gonna go ahead and put landscape and these two I'm gonna select together because I'm gonna put the same keywords on them and I'm gonna type abstract and I think metal. So those two words along with Death Valley will allow me to get to to these photos. And I would again, I would continue down to the rest of these as well. T to put a few key words on these. Now I like to assign one additional piece of information to these photos, and that is now they have light room for location using the map module. Now, I did put in California and Death Valley here in key words, because that's my habit from light room three. A lot of you don't have light room for at this point. So using keywords for location gin is a perfectly acceptable way to be able to find your photos based on location. But let's go ahead and go to the map module and I want to search here. I'm in British Columbia right now in Victoria here. I want to get Teoh Death Valley. So let's see if I just search for Death Valley. So this relies on Google Maps. I covered this first thing yesterday morning, and it's really up to me in terms off how precise I want to be in assigning these photos. So I'm gonna go ahead and open the filmstrip so that we can see these photos. Now, if I remembered where in Death Valley these were, I could assign subsets of the photos. I could take this one from the ghost town, for example, and and put it out. You know where it might be. I could take other subsets, shift, click, shift, click and put them in different places. Now, In fact, what I'm gonna do is take all of the rest of these. Actually, these I guess the rest of these are actually not from Death Valley there from Banik. So let's put them in. Banick will come up here to the search bar, see if Banik State Park comes up, which is a great ghost town. I really enjoyed photographing there, So click, shift click. I could zoom way in, put them exactly in the right place. But this is close enough for May and his f If I zoom back out here with the minus, Kate, you're my scroll wheel. You'll see that I'm starting to build up photos on the map. And if I hover over one of these pins like this pan of 15 at Banik, I can scroll through and easily preview my photos in that location. I'm gonna go back to the one of the Death Valley photos and let's see. Okay. All right. Just looking through these photos, I noticed that I've selected one of these photos and what I wanted to show you I'm not seeing so I assigned GPS location. But over here in the right hand side, I wanted light room toe automatically populate country, state and city when I dragged to the map or if my camera signs that that assigns GPS location, but I'm not sure why it didn't do that. I want to check my preferences. I'm gonna go up to light room edit on the Mac, edit on the PC rather catalog settings. Ah, so when I was talking about catalog settings, I've turned off reverse geo coding. So if I enable that I'm wondering if light room will catch up with me. Otherwise maybe I can drag them back to the map. So let's do that. Let's take these four, click and drag them. I'm gonna miss Death Valley, but just for the sake of being quick. So once I enable that correctly. Then when I select a photo, you can see that in fact, light room populates the location information. So that's why I go to the map module is too quickly assigning to the map so that location information is filled in so that I can search for photos based on location, the handy additional feature. So that kind of checks off my my library module work or my information assigning work for a photo shoot, import it, sort him out, assign keywords and location, and then I'm ready to go on and develop the photos. Let's do a few. Just a little bit of reinforcing of that sink. Auto Sync, Working out groups of photos since we have we have a little bit of time left here. So I made it a do G for grid hurt. I don't need to do. Let's just go straight to develop, actually, because I'm in the folder of photos that I'm working with now. I have some individual photos here that I need to work on one at a time. But let's skip ahead to some of the ones that are. Groups of photos will do these two photos here, so I'll select these two photos in the filmstrip. So click shift click And I noticed that I have Auto Sync turned on here. So somehow I forgot my own advice to turn it off after using the last time. But let's go ahead and use it. So if you don't have Auto Sync turned, Don hit this switch here and let's work these two photos together, I'll go to the top of the basic panel. Let me go ahead and make this film strip a little bit smaller here now I can click inside the thumbnail on either one of those two photos to have that one be the one that I see as I'm working on both of them. So they're both selected. But I clicked inside this thumbnail. I got auto Sync turned on, and now I can can work through the basic panel. I'm not sure about white balance yet, but I'm gonna go down to exposure. The photo feels this is light room four thinking exposure for the mid tones. The average values feels a little bit too bright. So I'm gonna go ahead and reduce the exposure a little bit and go to shadows and bring the shadows down dark in the shadows. Actually, before I do that, I'm sorry if I flaked out here. What? It had some contrast Now. Contrast brightens the brights and darkens the dark's. Sometimes the brights get too bright, meaning the overall photo gets too bright. If there are a lot of rights in the photo, so sometimes we'll add contrast and then I'll just back off a little bit on the exposure. And so now the highlights are fine, but the shadows air not dark enough. So well dark in the shadows, and all of a sudden I've got something that's not quite so flat now. I don't feel that the shadows need to get darker. I don't need to turbocharge the shadows with the black slider. The bright tones look fine to me. I think I would experiment with white balance and really, in a photo like this, it's a matter of Well, what looks good doesn't look good warmer. Does it look good? Cooler? Just a matter preference. It's not like skin tones where there's Ah, there's, you know, there's there's really and there's there's fake right, come down to presence. Try some increased clarity. This this photo doesn't have normal. It doesn't have any three dimensionality to it. Clarity's used to add that. So it's you know, it's It's not always obvious to me whether I'm gonna like it or not. And then vibrance and saturation will affect color a little bit differently. So from here, let's just do one more thing. It's it's I'm just debating my whether I actually needed in this photo, but I'll go with with Yes, we'll take the adjustment brush so we'll click on the word effect and what I'm thinking of is darkening this top right corner, so I'll go with negative exposure. Stark in that a little bit. I might actually, in this case, want to use the highlight slider to just dark in the whites up. They're not really too dark in the blues, So actually, let's reset exposure and just use the highlight slider. So now, even though I painted that entire area up there because I'm using the highlight slider, I'm basically leaving the Blues alone and focusing on the issue. Which was the whites up there. Now that's actually encouraging me. Teoh do a little bit more elsewhere, but then I'll put the adjustment brush away. Now let's look at it. It's It's hard for me to remember sometimes when I'm working at Auto Sync that I'm actually working on multiple photos even though I'm only seeing one. So let's see what the effect of this has been on other for on this other photo. Well, it's too heavy handed for this other photo, right? This other photo has a different mix of tones, and it's got so much of that red and it's just gone. It's gone over the edge, so I'm gonna turn off Auto Sync and select just that photo. And then I can just back off a little bit on some of my decisions, back off a little on exposure, maybe not take the shadows down quite as much. I might actually just reject it all these red blobs or kind of not as attractive as this one in my purse. From my perspective, let's go further into the Siris of photos here and do that one more time with Okay, with these four here now, these these four so similar that I would probably be better off making a decision on one versus the other. But again, we're just practicing. So I'm in sync mode. I'm going to switch back to Auto Sync, and I'm going to come up to the basic panel. The photo seems to bright, so I'll reduce the exposure. Add some more contrast. Well, contrast tends to make I like it in certain parts of the photo. I don't like it in the in the camper, but I'm hoping that if I go with it that the shadow slider will then add some light back into the camper and save me on that one And sure enough, it does a great job as usual come down in this photo. So I'm looking at that. The highlights seemed fine. Accepted that on the top of this camper here, it seems a little bright. The dark tones in the photo are are dark enough. They're not so dark that I've lost any detail. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and from down to clarity, you can see what too much clarity might dio. And then I'll back off on that. Vibrance is gonna focus. It looks like on the sky in this photo come back up. Shadows tryto fight that. Okay, now, when I go to do adjustment brush work on this photo, it's on Lee ever adjustment brush work does not work in auto sync mode. It will fooled me into thinking it does in that I'm not gonna get error if I start painting now, but I know that it won't affect the other photos. So, um, at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and call this this work on the multiple photos done. Turn off Auto Sync, go into the adjustment brush. I've got negative exposure set, actually, let's do negative highlights and just paint along the top of this toe. Tone it down a little. Maybe down here is well, and then I can adjust the amount, put the adjustment brush away. Let's do a few more things to this photo will add a vignette to it. Uh, we can look at sharpening it and and we'll go from there. So let's scroll down to the effects panel. What I'm thinking of is just bringing the I'm or into the center. You know, I definitely could go for something something obvious, but just kind of something a little a little subtle. Now the blue the sky starts to get pretty dark pretty fast, so I might want to go up and work on the blues a little bit, even after applying that vignette. Totally personal preference. But it seems like the top has gotten darker than the bottom, based on how they started out. So let's let's do that. Let's go up to H S. L Click on the luminous tab. We want to brighten the blues. Luminous is brightness and darkness. Handle. Slide. The blue slider. I didn't click on Lou Minutes, the blue slider up to brighten that blew a little bit. And then finally, let's go ahead. I want to zoom in on this. Let's see if it's let's see you. But sure, So it's not the sharpest photo. So we're gonna go ahead and just go through the exercise of sharpening, but it and I'll focus more on my thought process. But, you know, sharpening is not meant to bring out of focus photos into focus. But that being said it could help a little bit, you know we can. We can fool people some of the time were hit. So let's go ahead and go down to the detail panel and let's click on in the presets panel. What I'd like to do in sharpening is click on the light room general presets and say, sharpened Scenic as a starting point that sets thes sliders. And now it collapsed. The hissed a gram. Turn the switch on and off. Yeah, see, not not a lot of effect. Light rooms later, monsieur. Bogging down here. That's where we're not seeing anything, I think pleased to see that Windows also has a circle of death. Now it's just blue. It's not the color wheel, Okay, it's yeah, so what? We'll skip the sharpening on this. Um, it's just not responding. So But since we just went through that a few hours ago, that's perfectly fine. The next thing I need to be done, of course, is to work through the rest of photos, right. Work groups of photos to the extent you can. Then move on to working individual photos to fine tune to do local adjustments. And then you're ready to go to whatever kind of output you want to do. Right? Click select photos, right click email the photos out, Um, select the photos. Click on the export button Export J. Pegs or frankly, from here you could go to any of light rooms output modules so we could go to book slideshow, print your Web and build any kind of output. When we get into the what else is new in light before I'll show you a little bit about the book module. Um, but we would simply go from from developed straight to book. Or actually, we might start back in the library module and do a little grouping of photos again, um, to prepare for that process, let me check the notes here and see how we're doing. I have I have one topic that I have skipped that I can go back to. I was gonna cover it in the what else is new light room for? But but let me just open up the questions. The questions you wanna ask based on this, this whole kind of workflow process that I've been through? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for going through that Yeah, circle that brings it all kind of back together. Um, so look for some questions. Well, Sam Cox is asking when you are adjusting for your photographs and light room, Do you have unending mind or is it just a stream of consciousness? Do you have an internal checklist that you're using? How? What is your thought process going through? The whole thing? Well, in terms of the end in mind, I mean, keep in mind that I am an amateur photographer, right? I mean, I'm not making I'm not a professional portrait wedding photographer, so I'm developing my photos toe. What? I like to be used by myself or just to share with people casually. So, given that, um, yeah, I just follow this General work flow through the basics panel, thinking about how to optimize the photo. But it's really a preference or an aesthetic personal, preference driven process. So basically it I have a question goes back a little ways. But from Shasta, can you use the back slash to go between auto Sync images? The back slash the backslash shows you before and after in the develop module. So in terms of moving back and forth between photos here in this selection, I believe it's light arms hanging up. Gonna have toe close it down. But I have a selection of four issues here for photos Here, I can use the left and right arrow keys to move amongst those photos. What about anyway? Of erasing photographs from the camera after the import after the important well, after you've got the month So you've done your import, they've been copied to the hard drive. They've been backed up multiple times. Then I would suggest to use the camp the format option in your camera to erase the photos from the memory card rather than using finder or Windows Explorer to delete those from the memory card. I did have a question a little bit ago. Um, Martha Bravo wanted to know. If you ever use a tablet like a welcome to use light room, does that make it easier? It's a lot of people use that photo shop, but yeah, a lot of people use it for a photo shop. A lot of people also use it for light room. I have a big advocate of them. I think that they're great and you know, people that most people that use them love them. So, you know, I definitely recommend them. I have to say that there are a small subset of people that just never get used to them. You know, you have to. It's a little bit of rewiring of the brain, and I'm personally, I have to admit, just one of those people that have never gotten used t using one and just choose not to. Someday I may try it again, but I definitely you know, you just think conceptually that it's easier to be precise, particularly in the adjustment brush with a pen rather than a piece of plastic having a brick right? One more question going back. Teoh compare mode from Claire of our A in compare Moken. You end up with more than one pick Or does it force you to pick one? No, it doesn't force you at all. I you know I tend to use compare mode when I'm going to select just one. But when I'm in compare mode, So let me see. I have these four photos selected. See for compare. I can certainly like, let's say this candidate here. I I want to keep it, but it's not, you know, but I don't want to make it the select rather than select it and hit the X for reject. I can select it and hit p for pick and then continue on to my next candidate so I can assign whatever information I want to it. I don't have to reject it.