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Albums and Soft Proofing

Lesson 20 from: The Lightspeed Workflow System

Kevin Kubota

Albums and Soft Proofing

Lesson 20 from: The Lightspeed Workflow System

Kevin Kubota

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Lesson Info

20. Albums and Soft Proofing

Lesson Info

Albums and Soft Proofing

there you have it. You have your presentation. You've got taking your order in there. Um, you've put them on the blog's your marketing, these images out here, the last thing maybe would to be to work on an album. And the same thing would go with the album folder. Really? The same concept as you're looking at your images, all your images. Maybe you want all of the what? We're looking at all the flagged images. Maybe just want all one stars. We'll take all these images and put together a nice little album. So either keeping them as they are. Um, I don't want the rejects Heitman rejects, probably cropping them in the album. These air need to be stacked because they're multiple copies to stack the other ones behind them. But say we're going all in on the album, except we don't want that one in the album. We don't need that one in the album and we don't need This is a Stecher, those in the album and only that with the album, those ones we decided we're gonna keep in the album dragged those ...

to our album collection here Main album and now rapists and those off to either Photoshopped. If you can design yourself or use an export preset to send those to Red boot design so she can design for you there or put him into your own design software for your album again, we you know, I advocate using either professionally designed templates or using some sort of software to help you design that has nice looking templates or using a service for years. I designed my own albums and it took so much time, and I really realized that I wasn't the best person to be doing album design, and so many photographers do that themselves. But this is your final albums, a big representation of you and your quality of your business. So if you're not a great designer and you're hacking together these albums and they're not really representing, you will, you're not doing yourself any any service, you know what I mean? Just like I have a soapbox about designing your own logos and business cards. And if you're not a good desire, don't design your own logo because you can tell Ah, homemade logo and it really makes you look cheap and that it's it's harsh words but it it's true. I've seen a lot of talk rivers where their work is actually really, really good. But they're marking materials air so homemade looking that I would never have guessed their work is that good by looking at their marketing materials because you naturally associate that. So one of the first things you can do as a new photographer whether you're out there in the inter world or right here in this audience is is put some time and effort into a good branding of you and your package or logo, anything that your world is going to see. Um, as you're building up the quality of your photography. But don't start with with a homemade looking brand. It's just not gonna ever help you. You'll be limited by how far you can actually reach with your as your photography grows. It's gonna be harder to get clients that we're gonna take on that higher level of quality if you still look like you're, you know, homemade. All right, so it's hard to is invest in that I think is a photographer, but I think it's really important. It's like investing in good products or hiring a designer When you're not a designer, is hard. Do you think I can't afford that money? But it pays off because you'll sell more and you'll hire better clients because of it. Okay. All right. I think we got a little more cover. Was gonna double check if you have questions while we're gonna just make sure we've covered things I need to cover for you guys. Just a comment. Just wanna appreciate from Mia's. Ah, art director and graphic designer. Thank you. Okay. Yes. Desires because they look at stuff, they go. What is that person thinking? You know, designing their own. Whatever. They appreciate that so much more. I think when you're doing yourself, you don't really think about that, but that you have to look at, step back and say, How many times do you get a card from somebody or brochure? And you go, This is terrible. And you don't even really want it. Talk to the person. They could be the nicest person, the best business person, the world. But you don't want to talk to him cause he think they're terrible, cause their stuff looks terrible. Their business materials are terrible. All right, so it's ah, It's one of those things where you really have to dress the part in every part of your business before you even before you get there. Dress for success. Yeah, Cool. Very important. Okay, I think Gosh, we have covered almost every step of the way. One of the things that I mentioned in my work. I'm gonna just pop back to our flow chart here. So you guys could see where we've come and what we've covered so far. Open this up real quick. Jump back to the workflow flow chart and we'll take a peek. E wiki wiki given don't don't mean to sidetrack. Yeah, um, good aspirations. There's one thing light room that's called self proofing. Yeah. I don't think you touch upon that Good yet. Yes. I don't know if I can if somehow we can make it. Yeah, there was a little bit of color management that we can talk about both in photo shop and in light room, which involves a soft proofing. And let me just kind of point us out in the flow chart that will do that. That's a good question to we've gone through all this editing, enhancing uploading full rez toe are selling, gathering the orders into collections when we did that. Right, Um, creating the print, ready virtual copies if you did, and then we crop them specifically for the size we're gonna order. We exported them for the lab. And then the last thing we have to do is just simply export our save our metadata. We haven't done that. We should have done that right here after that. I kind of did that in the break, but I didn't make mention of it, but we should do that, Ato. Last point as well as where it says update metadata Command s in the end of the enhancing stages. So let's do that. And we'll talk about that color management little question there. So with all your images selected So before you close out this job, make sure all photographs here on the top left are selected command A. Helps you select all images, control a on a PC, and then command or control s. And it's a saving metadata. Boom. That's it. I don't have to be hard. Don't be paying full one of the other things that you can do. If you did do the D and G conversion. There's another option right here. It doesn't have a shortcut for but says update, DMG previews and metadata. And this ensures that your DMG actually has the cool little thumbnail that matches the image here is Well, ah, a nice little visual things. If you want to embed that new thumbnail in the D and G boom, just going to do that, too. That's not is critical because the metadata is already there. But sometimes it's nice, because when you're browsing in the finder and if you're finder shows thumbnails, you'll see an accurate thumbnail on the D and G of the raw file as well. Okay, so we just did. If we did a DMG preview and a metadata update, everything's clean. Um, I want to make sure that my good sink has backed all this good stuff up. So go over to my finder, look inside a special K image backup and, like, super sweet and I can see already. Here's the an emotive folder that we created a while ago My master's original cards here, all the d and G s air there. Uh, what else do we create? Log log images were all there. Our print files are all here. So good thing was working in the background this whole time, keeping us all backed up and safe. And, gosh, guys, that's that's the nut workflow. In a nutshell. We powered through quite a lot of stuff. Let's do that color management thing real quick. Yeah, Then we have a question or two from us and them. Okay, perfect. Perfect. So color management is, let's start in photo shop, and this will be real quick. It's pretty simple. And open up a recent image here. No one of those. Let's go back here, and I'll just open up any image that has some color. Those same in photo shop in light room. There's called soft proofing and soft proofing is only effective if you've calibrated your monitor. What you talked about yesterday to write with a spider device little doohickey, hardware thingamajig and you've calibrated your monitor. And so you want a soft proof. Now what is soft proofing? The big misconception with a lot of Tarver's is I can make my lab print exactly what I see on screen, and that could be frustrating because that doesn't always happen But what you can do if you have a proper lab profile, as you can at least make your screen show you what the lab will do. Slight difference there, Right? You can't force the lab to print what they can't print. So I got this amazing, rich depth color image I'm looking at on LCD monitor and I've got this three dimensional. And now these colors that are out of this world, but not within the range of my printer. And I want to make my lab print this color. And you're frustrated because you get prints back and they don't match your screen. That's not realistic. Not all printers can do what you see exactly. Screen. But your screen can change to show you exactly what the lab are pretty exactly could actually print. And once you understand that big, uh, kind of fundamental difference, you can relax a little bit and you realize, OK, I'm gonna go with that. Let me just make sure, Aiken, What the lab is gonna do is gonna be okay with me. So here's what we'll do and your view menu. There's a proof set up, and you're going to get color profiles from your lab and load them into photo shop. I have profiles here for a super book. So when imprinting albums, I can double check them. And I have proof profiles from White House. I've just loaded them in here via the custom dialogue box. And you asked. You have to ask your lab and they'll tell you how to get these profiles and all that. Okay, they get into your system. We're not gonna go through that because that's kind of sidetracked. But get him in your system, ask your lab for the profiles and then you simply turn that on. So say I want to double check with this. Will look like printed from White House watches. I select that one. Did you notice a change in the color slightly? Here's proof. I can see it's on and off with a command. Why the toggle it? A little bit of change to the Reds, right? Mostly in the mustang. A little bit on her face and the eyes. So when I look at that change, am I all freaked out about it? Does that freak you out? Are you upset now? You don't want to print this anymore. No, it's fine. Right? So I'm like, Fine. Yeah, print like that. That's cool. That's close enough. So the idea of the soft proofing is to just show you this is what you're gonna get. But it only works if you're calibrated and you have the lab profile loaded up in there so that you can view it. All right, So I want to say, What would this look like on a super book? Also like the Super Book profile and toggle that here's original changing again. Slight changes in the depth of the red. Not so much the right. See a little bit The shadowy read part. It's hard to reproduce the dark, dark, rich reds in C m y que, which is what all press books print in. So you're gonna lose a little bit of that in the red deep shadows, but again, and I upset about it. Not really. It's good. Okay, that's what soft proofing is. That's it. You don't need to make it more complicated than that. Uh, if you're working the good lab as long as you include your color profile another This is working in Adobe rgb. As long as I've included that profile when I saved the image, which it naturally does view when you export from light room and they have that profile, they can convert it to their profile, and it should be pretty darn close to this. But when you start working with an experienced a new lab that don't have a grasp on color management, that you often get wacky things going on, yeah, so real quick Back in light room in developed mode here, there's a little button for soft proofing. And if you turned that on is a proof preview. And this this right here is not actually that bad. That's actually showing you the out of gamut areas, areas that it can't quite do perfectly. And you don't have to look at it like that. You just click this little but in the top right here to turn the gamut warnings often on. But right here, same thing. I have my profile. Here's on my White house. I'd just loaded these in here. So all my White House printing profiles air in here. So say I'm gonna print luster print up to 12 by 18. I select it. That's what it's gonna look like. Okay, check off. That's the original. That's what it will look like again. Same shift, slight shift in the reds in the shadows. That's the hard part to reproduce and print. And I know it's OK, so I'm not gonna worry about it. If you want to make adjustments, that's when you create a proof copy. You make adjustments. But I really think if you are doing wedding portrait work where something like that slight shift in the red is not that big a deal to you, it's like I have to have that other red. Then you would have to massage the image to make that, but most every 99% time when I saw proof, I just do it quickly to double check. It looks like it's fine. Either way, I just go with it. Don't worry about messing with the image anymore. Check. Yeah, Thea Adobe RGB color space. And we know our lab is printing an S rgb. At what point do we make that transition? That's a good question. You want to ask your lab? Can I send you adobe RGB files? Uh, are you gonna convert them to SRT to be once you get them or should I send us surgery files? Because the key thing is that if the lab is strictly working in s RGB, then you might as well just convert s rgb and avoid the confusion. But a lot of labs actually have a specific profile for their printer. Like White House. They don't work in S RGB. They have a printer profile that's dialed exactly for their printer. And you want to convert from a bigger color space like adobe to their printer profile. Let me show you something real quick. I have time for this is kind of cool. Yeah, I Okay, this is ah, color sink utility talk about color space. It's kind of geeky, but this actually helps to make geeky stuff Not so geeky. Right? So here's ah visual way to see color as a three D model. This is all the colors that can be used accessed. When you work in adobe rgb, Here's s rgb. It's a smaller It's different, right? Well, check this out. I'll say, hold this for comparison. Click on Adobe and let's actually that the opposite way This click on adobe first and then click on the s okay. So look, the grey area. That's the adobe space when we drop it down to s RGB space. Look how much we're losing in the color world. Right? So here's more that then. That's cool. But check this out. Yeah, well, pro photos even bigger than that. There's pro photo. Whoa! Hello, world. That problem. Pro photo. It's almost too big. You know, there's nothing that can really print full pro photo space Me. Some of the printers now are getting better, but they're really it's too much for most uses. But check this out. Okay, So here's here's White House compared to let's compare that to an S rgb, um should hold that told the White House. Sorry, going fast. I'm getting excited. A hold of her comparison and I'll goto s rgb Look what happens. So the s is the gray one. It doesn't even fit. It doesn't match the White House what they can do with their printer. If I send a man s RGB file, I'm actually short changing myself because they can actually do a lot more with their printer that I'm actually sending them with my file. I'm sitting on file in this srg be this little great box makes sense versus if I go to Adobe RGB and the told that one for comparison and go down to White House. Okay, I've almost covered the full gamut of what they could do with my adobe rgb of just a little bit off of it, but lot less difference in the S RGB. So if I send them in adobe space, they'll massage it down to their printer space, and it's gonna be pretty much using all of their available printer space. Where is vice and don't SRT file. I'm just losing a lot of information that so you can use, I guess that profile tool to find out who is going Teoh, I guess, give you the best different for best bang for your books. Yeah, So let's say I'm gonna compare. Say, here's White House is space versus, um a lab that says, Oh, we just use s RGB Hold that for comparison. Do the SRG be okay again? I think we do this one already. We can see that the White House spaces bigger. Um outside the gamut of the s rgb space. There's just more information there, so they dialed their printer better than s RGB. So why would you send a man s RGB file? In other words, the big one That's kind of freaks. People out is that is the seem like a When you look at C m y. Case based, Yeah, this gets really confusing here. Seem like a right. That's what most magazines and book printing things use and you send. Hold that for comparison. And you said an s RGB file. There's a lot of mismatch going on there. So there's areas that you can't touch at all versus ah, if we go to Adobe RGB we've covered that seem like other than this very little bit Adobe again will convert better to see him like a that s Argenti will convert to seem like a Okay, so, um, plus, this is just fun to just go like this. You does that kind of making things a little more clear for you guys to see it that way. Eso That's why we suggest his prose working in adobe rgb ideally have a lab that will take your adobe files and, you know, welcome them with open arms and massage and convert them to their printer profile and that we're going to get the most out of their printer versus Cinnamon s RGB file and saying, Well, we'll fit it in there. But there you're missing a lot of information you could have sent us. You know what's happening?

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