Album Design and Outsourcing

Lesson Info

Album Design and Outsourcing

I'm going to go to that place where it exists and remember we put it in the pictures folder we did it in an album production see that folder has been created and there's all of our j pegs that we're using for album design and now we're going to open up in design and this the first time I've opened in design on this computer as you can tell so I very rarely do album design, so while we're waiting for it open, I'll tell you who I have do my album design yeah, it is the line line album design is the people who do my album design so I don't need to do my own our design, they can do it for me I have no interest in doing album design, so on dh if you're interested, you can go album design, a line album design dot com and it's fifty percent off your first album design, so it's very inexpensive to try and now and then once you have someone do your album designed for you, you probably won't want to do it again so that's so if you're interested go toe album album a line album design dot com it's...

kind of a mouthful all right, so here we go, we go toe in design and we're going to create a new document, so we just create a new document that document is going to be whatever size, so you're gonna have a very specific size from your album but let's just assume it's a letter sized a book and hit create and then in the layout itself. So when we go to the book the document preset are the documents set up and then we would decide whether or not this is you you know you're going to have your, uh facing pages you're bleed all that kind of stuff is all going to be set up here inside of your template and then as you scroll through this image and add more pages so what I do is I go up to the top here and I insert pages and I decide how many pages this book is going to be, so if it's going to be twenty pages long and I tell him to answer after the first page and hit ok, then I've got twenty pages to fill right here and the best way to do this is to just kind of get your pages down to a decently small size like this and then you can just scoop this over to the side and then I like to just take this folder here and open it up like this so that is the same size you can do this in bridge if you like so bridge is a perfectly acceptable place to do this is well and usually these will kind of go on their own, but see, they're okay so now there's my images and there's my pages and here's how it works in design is really in design has come a long way in the last two updates it just really is slick, so I grab a set of images and I don't grab all of them, but I grabbed the ones that air pair pretty similar, so I just I just grab all of these images here these are the ones that I want to work with. First I grab him and I dragged him in and I let go and then when I get in here into the indesign, you'll notice that they're not placing him anywhere and if I could you khun see as as you're going through him, they're here and there's let's zoom in there, you see that little eight on there? There are eight images on my cursor, and so now I just grab an image and drag it like this and it's following the size of the photo see that so I just drag it where I wanted and let go. And now that one's where it's supposed to be so you didn't have to hold down the shift key no, it knows what size it is and so it's going to install that photo based on the size of the photo so I'm just going to increase the size a little bit scan down and say ok now I want this one to go here and I'm gonna put it this big and let go of it and then I mean if if you all you can also go in and just click so if you if you just click the photo it's going to make it as big a zit isthe so now it's kind of you know, in a it's following over the whole place and so then it you have come back and kind of play with this later eso I'll come back to this one in a minute so then I come here and I'm going to click and drag like this and then I'm gonna click here and drag him like this you see how easy that is too and then this one I want to put the whole I want to go the whole way across this guy so I'm going to grab him and I'm going to just drag him like this all the way across there like that and then I'm gonna do another one and I'm gonna do it like this so that it's over the side of it notice I clicked off the top of it and then if I want to move it um if you hold down the command key maybe it's command control there go command control I think does it well anyway we can always move it later but one of the keys I can't remember which will allow you just move that thing so we want the reason we have to we have to put this thing where it is is so that we can move it without getting in the way. So now I can take this and move it here, take this and move it here and then watch what happens when I go like this I grab it and I simply just go like that and if I hold down the shift key it maintains that aspect ratio and so I can just now I scroll through the entire set here and just kind of move things around in there until I like what I see this one is it'll see out pops into the center so that's all done this one's going to pop into the center is well go up to this one this one needs to be changed in the size again I hold the shift key down and go like that and it keeps the contains the size and notice how does it change the size of the full thing? I should have hit shift command but you can always fit this and so if you go to object and you say fit and you say I want to fill it proportionally in the frame or fit it if you go like that fits completely in there and there's a key stroke for that, but I always forget my keystrokes, because I can always just use a I can always just use a keyboard shortcut on my shuttle pro or on my or my rpg keys, by the way, where the rpg keys and the shuttle pro know what software you're in, and then whatever keystrokes you set up for that it will know I'm in this software, so I will use thes keystrokes. So then you can use those forms awesome and that, you know, that's something you want to jump on that it's not something we really talked a lot about with that with that hardware the last couple of days is the fact that you can use it in photo shop and in design and after effects, those things are, you know, worldwide, right? Yeah, absolutely. So there are things that you can use for everything. So did you notice that when I hit shift command and drugs drug, the image up the box and the image themselves grew grew? So then, once I've designed my entire album, which doesn't take very long because you notice that I'm just popping him in, and then I can just resize him, and because of all the smart lines and sizes, it knows, like it even knows. Where this photo is in relation to this one so if I drag it and I hit here, see it, tell that green line tells me ok, you are even with that tow, let go and now this one and this one or even with each other, so the design is really easy and then I can. Once I'm done with this design, I can save it out where over in the album production areas, so I would go file save as I'm just going to save the design, the designs going to go in the pictures folder in the album production in the salt flats book we're going to call this salt flat book it saved so now that's part of that album production, then, once I've done things to retouch these photos, whether I've replaced him with p s t s or maybe I've just gone in and changed, you know, a couple of these, so I'm in the public service right now, but even if I was in the main a collection of images, it would be doing this in the published service. So if I turn a bunch of these two black and white, so I'm just going toe, you know, turn a couple images to black and white here now that I've turned these images to black and white if I hit publish again it's going to go into that same published folder and it's going to take the old color images and throw him away and put the new black and white images in there with the same name on them. So that then when I go to I, you can see that it's changed things in here. But now, when I go to in design, you can see there's an exclamation point here that tells me this photo is now different than what you're looking at. And so then all you need to do is go in and synchronize your link. So you pop open your links here and then you can highlight all of your different links. So you just highlight your whole set of links there, and then you go up to your little menu there and you say, update all links and now that's black and white and you're ready to print your now you. Now you can either send the n design document off somewhere, or you can print it out as a pdf or you can save it is j pegs. However, your album company wants those that's going to send him. So that is a light room based and published service based system for album design in design or any any others. So most of these album design, uh, all the most of the album design software that you use has the ability to see that there's an update and it'll go on retrieve the new images and pulling men if if the album software doesn't have the ability to do that, you shouldn't be using it period because it's just not a viable system for a smooth quick work flow because you really again you remember yesterday we were talking about the idea of seeing the end from the beginning, right? And so we talked about the idea of making a ah workflow that allowed light room to create the final product before you did the re touching on the beginning this is the same concept, so when I design an album, I want to see the album designed before I decide what needs to be retouched it's it's totally it's bass ackwards to retouch and work on images and then design an album because if you do that you may have wasted a lot of time on retouching that you didn't need to dio and because you may make a little image that this small in an album that's this big if it's that small, you don't have to do any retouching to it, but you wouldn't know whether or not you need to do retouching to an image that's a small if you hadn't designed the album yet so you may go do hours of retouching on an image that will never even be seen big enough to meet even see what you did so you design the album first and then decide what needs retouching those things that need retouching get retired synchronized into the album and then print the album out that's the correct way to do album design if you're doing it the other way you're just doing it backward you're actually doing it forward, which is the wrong way to do it doing it backward is the right way to do it indeed okay, so always work backwards what's the finished product what needs to be done for the finished product toe look great that's the way you do things s oh, by the way, if you don't like doing album design goto ally an album design and then if you don't like doing your retouching we have shoot down at it and they couldn't do retouching they could do adjusting of your images in fact, while we're on that topic so shoot dot ad it is the is the group that does all of my retouching I'm not my read time I'm sorry my post production so they do all my post production and right now they have we talked about this earlier the unlimited plan so for two hundred ninety nine dollars a month they'll do all of your post production adjustments so that's what that means is you send them in a set of seven hundred images that you shot you've selected seven hundred image you send it to them they do all the adjusting send it back to you and you're looking at it in light room all finished and you haven't done anything to it so it's like hiring someone month by month to do all your work for you so the unlimited plan is two hundred ninety nine dollars a month and it's like hiring an employee for two hundred nine nine dollars a month to do all of your post production work and then you can also add other things too that service like you can you can also send them retouching to do you khun you know you can ask them to call your images if you want us well but the unlimited plan specifically is to do all of your adjusting of your raw imagery s o two ninety nine a month but the reason I mention it right now is because I want to show you a quick little thing about smart previews because they make the possibility of a group like shoot not at it to plug into your system so they it says shoot dot ed it becomes a plug in once you understand smart previews so what we're going to do is we're just going to go to a job inside of light room so let's just go to this thing this particular job once I have selected a set of images that need to go and be adjusted all I have to do and I can do it from a folder up here so I could go to any job doesn't matter what job I want to go to this job and grab all the selects everything that I want to keep and I can highlight that one folder that I want them to work on I can right click that folder and export the folder is a catalog when I do that I'm going to go to uh that job because that's where we want to keep all of our everything that everything that relates to a job you keep it in the job folder except for your album design because that just needs to go in tow production area and then when it's done you put it in the folder on dso we're going to go to the ballet portrait here and we're going to call this asked e catalog so that the std catalog is going to go out and it's going to go out with all three of these buttons check down here and those buttons are exporting the negative five I'm sorry you don't need the negative files that's the point of a smart premium so you do not need the ex toe export the negative files but you include the smart previous and include the available previous so let me tell you the difference a smart a regular preview the available previews is this stuff you're looking at light room creates a j peg that you're looking at the smart preview is a little tiny, itty bitty raw file it's, compressed and it's cropped it's small it's like it's, it's smaller and so it's got all of the information all the raw data, and so it allows for someone across the world toe work on your photos and adjust them without having the original files present because it's all inside the catalog, that means that instead of sending seven hundred images and taking thirteen hours tow, upload them to somewhere else to work on my files, I can upload seven hundred images in twenty minutes, so in twenty minutes I could have an entire wedding over to shoot dot at it worked on, and then all they do is email me back a little catalog file that's less than a megabyte in size, and I open it up and I point light room to it and tell it to update all of my settings with what they've sent me and bam! All of my work is done so because I'm able to send out smart previews, I can take someone who's, outsource, outsource group or even an assistant, it doesn't have to be an outsource group, it doesn't have to be shootout at it could be your assistant that lives across the city. But you can send your assistant who lives across the city who doesn't want to come into work today you can send him a couple of jobs to do and he can download and you can upload him twenty minutes and he can download them in like fifteen or ten because download speed is faster than your upload, and so within an hour, your assistant could have all the jobs that you want them to do today in smart preview type catalogs and work on him, and then he can email him back to the office and you can pull him up on dure you're good to go, so whether you're using an assistant tio or whether you're using shootout at it to do it doesn't matter. The point is that you understand the availability of smart previews, which of these little tiny raw files that now kind of travel with the catalog allows you to take outsourcing options and make them is plug ins to light room so now shoot dot ad it is my plug in they're literally up there. It makes them the most important plug and I have because I've got an entire staff of editors that literally plug in delight room because it takes me so little time to send it to him and get it back and that could be the same for your assistant your assistant now becomes a plug in tow light room because you can send it out, you can outsource stuff really easily and most of us really need outsource because most of us don't have, you know, a full on staff with us, we just have us so most of us need outsource a lot of that work, which means that if you're not using shootout at it, you need to start getting on your post production house and telling asking them why they're not using smart preach it is because it's the only way that makes sense so we go to so we make a shootout at a catalog, we build the smart previous and we build available previews and we have export to catalog, and once that catalogs been exported, which will be done very shortly here, then we right click the job folder itself and say show and finder and we look at that inside of that job and we see this s t e catalog and as soon as it's done exporting, we simply take this folder and upload it to our outsourcing partner, and then they're they're off to the races and and this size on why this keeps doing it and the size of that entire job catalog right there is drum roll seventy megabytes so for this it's this this entire job is the size of one photo shop file I can deliver that very easily somewhere and if I were to have the time to make a catalog for us for a new entire wedding, it would be like two gigabytes something like that so it's is very small the's the's little raw files or tiny but they are very useful. They're also useful because you khun you khun, take your catalogs with you on the road without bringing the original files same way so if I want to take files on the road and I don't need the original files with me I don't want to keep him. I can take this little file right here and put it on my laptop and then I can work on these files and I can adjust them and do whatever I want to him while I'm on the road because it's right there so ah great way to have a very small version of your portfolio catalog on your laptop is just take the whole for portfolio catalog and exported with smart previews without the original images and put that on your laptop and you would have your entire portfolio. How much faster is that working on individual photographs? It's actually faster so do you do that even at home? Sometimes yeah, if if you if you build all of these a smart previews and then detach the drives so that's forced to look at the smart previous it's actually faster oh okay, because it's not especially if you're using a nikon d eight hundred you know those air huge files, so if you're using something with a big file type and you make those little smart previous, your light room will go a lot faster because you just it hasn't has no difficulty accessing those files, so the smart previous air actually helpful and just speeding up here your workflow? Awesome, thank you. And I know we've been talking about a lot of different extra services when it comes to publishing albums. Do you have a go to album publisher that prints for you? Well, that might go to his kiss because it's quick and it's simple, they even have an automated designer online it zoe it's, an automated designer you drag your images into it and it kind of auto flows them just it actually reminds me a lot of the book module inside of of light room and so it's really quick and really easy, but I don't prefer design stuff online. I'm still you know, if I'm going to design something, I'm in design and in design because that's not it doesn't take very long to do it, but they a lot of people love using that online designing system but kisses the fastest, nicest quality book that's out there that if but it's simple there's there's only certain options if you're looking for a lot of options than graph is a pretty good go to for it. But it takes longer because it's coming from italy on dh, then there's, you know you gotto go back and forth with someone who speaks italian if there's an issue or something like that. So so it's not as quick and easy is a cz kiss. Wedding books is but white house custom color does amazing books. If I need something in two days, white house could get it there. Seriously, I think I have gotten in a bind where I totally did not have the book on time and I needed it. And I just called white house and said, I'm sending this to you now I needed overnighted friend boom! I had it so nice if you need quality right like quick, quick, quick. Within the week you can get a book from white house custom color so that's pretty impressive that there's no one that can do that except for them. So I would say, those are the three go twos that are that come to mind. But speaking of those services, if you are interested in shoot, dot eta or if you're using them there's five open seats right now for the unlimited plan on ly five so and I don't even know if they take their taken up yet, but you go to secure dot, shoot, dot, edit, dot com slash unlimited and it's a first come first serve the first five people to sign up, not only get the two hundred ninety nine dollars a month unlimited plans, so they do all your work for everything you do, but they also will give you all of september for free, so you don't actually start paying until october, but they'll keep they'll start working for you now so you could get, you know, fifteen jobs done in september and not pay a dime for him. So that's, that's, pretty impressive. So if you need an employee, this is the cheapest employees you will ever hire on dh yet they will be very good. So they're not it's. Inexpensive. I should say instead of chief, any questions out there? Those were the people we're looking for your go to. So that was perfect. Perfect. Okay, so, um oh, actually, we just got it in one more. Okay, good. Late breaking question. Late breaking. Chris lied. Lee. S would like to know. Do you reply upon shoot, dot edit for arctic artistic creative adjustments to your photos, or just for technical corrections just for technical corrections because again yesterday we talked about being a style editor or no money first day one we talked about being a style editor indeed on dh so I'm still the style editor and I'm glad that that's a good question so when something comes back from an outsource you what you want them to do is things that are technical you want because they can tell whether the skin tone is correct and they can tell whether they're the blacks have black and whether the whites or white and that's that's a doable thing it's very kind of science tiff iq so that's what we have them do is the scientific normalization of all images once the images come back from them then it's a matter of and that's where the my outsource pack of presets comes in so I will go to whatever wedding I'm looking at so if I go to a set of images and I want tio adjust them, then I'll take those images so here's some normalized images right here that have, you know like these images air just normalized so there's and I don't need to change them I don't need to stylized them, but what I'll do is I'll take this little painter tool click on the painter tool tell it I want to dio and let me zoom in here so you can see so the painter tool will allow you to paint all sorts of thing key words but it will also allow you to do settings so I choose settings and then I can choose from my outsource pack any of the presets that I want to use so I can simply choose, you know, black and white and then I can go and just look through the entire wedding and say, ok, I kind of want that to be a black and white image and all I have to do is click on it and it sprays black and white onto it and then I can click and spray all of these so if I click here and spray now I've got black and white and all of those so it's very easy tio two style eyes images in a kind of a grid mode type of way or the other option is you can go into your keys here so all of these keys here are just presets and those presets air accessing a different set of presets which are which come with the keys on dh those air called so when you look here they're called presets go down here it's called rpg developed keys by j p and these air all the presets that come with it and each one is assigned to a specific key so that when I click on an image if I say okay, you know these two images need to have c p a added to him. I just simply click on the cpi a button and it's going toe ad c p a to those images, although it didn't just now because I don't have my you actually have to have the keyboard application running so there we go. Okay, so what once once you have it running, then it will add alone. There we go. Okay, so before you start your editing process, make sure keyboard is running so if you click a set of images and you hit see pia it's just going to see it goes and it actually went and it goes and chooses those presets and add c p a to the images so you can just click on things that you want to add so that's how we style eyes I don't rely on them for artistic edits, but I will rely on them to do retouching. So once I'm ready to do an album, aiken, send them the album picks and have them retouch him. Send him back to me. Great! Thank you. Um, any other questions? Um, I think we're going to roll okay, are you know, we're going a little bit down a rabbit hole with album designs, yes, there are a few out there, but I wanted to keep your ruling on con yeah, I and I think it'll be more on topic. Well, I think the important thing to understand about album design is the automation of it. I didn't I didn't mean to I don't want to go into album design because that's that could be a whole nother course, but what I wanted to toss have you see was the idea of using a published service to automate the process of doing the album design in correct way, which is backward, right? Right. So we want to see the final design before we start deciding what edit and then once we edit them, we have to have a quick way to replace and synchronize the album design and that's what that's all about perfect good and so agonizingly enough, you know, there's, some great album design classes that's, right? And that they are that there are so if you want to learn in design so that you khun, design it as quickly as we were designing their, then just learn that at creative live and then plug in this idea of publication to your album and then you'll have the whole ball of wax put together, it'll it'll be all connected.

Class Description

Lessons

1. Introduction to Plugins
2. How Plugins and Actions Interact
3. Plugin Backup and Syncing
4. Sync Box
5. Creating Symbolic Link
6. Plugin Manifesto
7. Plugin Presets
8. Plugin Preset Profiles
9. Altering Presets
10. Function Keys

1. External Editor Settings
2. 9:30 am - Plugin Settings in Lightroom®
3. Nik Color EFEX Pro Test
4. Alien Skin Exposure 5 Test
5. Continued Plugin Tests
6. 12:45 pm - Why We Use Adobe® Photoshop®
7. Actions Using Plugins
8. Creating Actions Using a Plugin
9. Automating a Plugin
10. Automating Location Scouting

1. Editing HDR Images
2. Editing HDR in Nik Software
3. Meta Data Plugin Presets
4. Orginizing Images with Meta Data
5. Publish Services
6. Publish Sevices Continued
7. Album Design and Outsourcing
8. 2:30 pm - Palm Reading in Lightroom®
9. Analysis to Be a Better Photographer