Skip to main content

Export Presets

Lesson 26 from: Post-Processing for Outdoor and Travel Photographers

Ben Willmore

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

26. Export Presets

Next Lesson: Watermarks

Lesson Info

Export Presets

first we're going to talk about some refinements and light room we actually haven't talked about creating export presets you know we talk about processing all these images organizing and everything we haven't really talked about getting them out of light room to give the other people and use them for other purposes so I'd like to show you how to create export presets where we can very quickly created j peg or a tiff file of a particular size without having to remember all the settings or anything like that instead it'll just be one menu choice that automatically khun generate some of these things also show you how when you do that to add a watermark to your image so if you want it to be visually marked with your copyright or something else whenever I upload an image the internet I have a little bee round a badge that goes in the corner just because I find people end up emailing pictures to other people and then it gets uploaded on the interest and then it's all over the place but there...

's no link back to the original website there's no information that lets people know whose photo is this so I put a visual marker on mind some people are annoyed by that but I see too many of my photos out there with absolutely no information about who took the picture so I like to have it on there I said we'll do that we'll also talk about published services published services is where I can use something like facebook or smug mug or flicker in automatically upload my photographs from light room directly to those services without having to use the website itself instead it'll just be managed right in light room and we can do it where if we make a change in one of our photos and we go back to that area that talks about let's say smugmug which is a the service their hosts my website as faras the photo section goes it will remind me that this photo's been updated and asked me if I'd like to replace the one that's already up there with a fresh newer one maybe I figured out a better processing technique or something like that but that's published services where we can interact with other websites then we'll also talk about light room mobile lightner mobilised where I can actually use a limited functionality version of light room on my ipad or my iphone and that sounds a little weird but for me what is nice about it is I can easily get portfolios on both of those devices so then any time anywhere and somebody goes oh you're a photographer what kind of stuff do you shoot I find it much easier to show them that describe and so I have them at the ready and the other thing that's nice is I can take photos on my iphone in process them with light room and get them to show up here in my desktop then the process version and I can even process my normal raw files that are sitting on this laptop using my iphone hey it's going to sink back to light room update my picture so it's kind of interesting so anyway we'll cover all that stuff in the first session along with a bunch of other information about light room after that we're going to get into more photo shop where some things we haven't had a chance to get into yet like creating time lapse videos also howto stitch hd ours in that type of thing just a whole bunch of things also would get into the more advanced features and light room when it comes to adjustments and we'll talk about retouching and photo shop so yeah bunch to do today we got jumping to get started so let's do it so first off if we adjusted our images will have a pile of them sitting here but if all they do is sit inside of light room then it's of limited use what I want to do is be able to get any one of these images out and very easily maybe email it to a friend or go put it on a web sites or do whatever it is I want but whatever it is I want it to happen outside of leg room so I'm gonna click on an image here that I might want to send to a friend and I'm going to go to the file menu and you remember how all your changes in light room are attached to your pictures just text and it could be in a little bitty file column ex mp if you wanted to for rafael well that means that other programs won't know how to deal with that little text file we don't want to give other people that that's our secret sauce for how we processed our images and I want to keep that in house don't want to share it with others other than you guys uh but if I want to get it out I go to the file menu and we have a choice called export now when I first opened this don't be concerned there's a lot of stuff in it but we're just going to use it to make presets meaning we might spend ten minutes in there going through a bunch of weird settings that you don't want to think about being to do it once and from then on you'll just apply it through preset what I mean by that is if you look in the file menu and you go down to the choice called export with preset here are a bunch of presets and under the section called user presets these air all ones that I've made and so if I want to send somebody a six hundred pixel wide jpeg file and that's what I use on certain websites if I let go right now in this menu choice on my desktop there'd be a six hundred pixel why j peg sitting there waiting for me it would automatically create it even if I had fifteen hundred images selected it would be fifteen hundred files sitting there it might be a little progress but I have to wait for remember how in the upper left of light room on occasion you see a little progress far like when we're importing photos we see the same thing for exporting so I just want to show you how these could be made so I'm gonna choose export that brings up this big complex dialog box and there's a whole bunch of settings in here they're all under these different headings that are in the middle but before I get into those look in the left side on the left side this is a list of presets and under the area called user presets these are all the ones I've personally made and currently have installed in my machine once I'm done figuring out all the settings I want to use to make a preset on left side there's an ad bun I'll end up clicking that and I can type in a new name and you can organize these presets into various folders I'm just using the generic holder called user presets because I think that's what light room gave me and I never had a reason toe need to change it but I could create a new folder maybe I have one that's just for web related things and I have a bunch of different sizes that various sites need so I put him in there whatever however you'd liketo organize him I find it's just finding one list and so that's where we're going to eventually end up saving a preset and if you ever have a preset you don't need it anymore maybe only needed it for one project you could click on the particular preset it will load in the settings over here but if you just click on it here once so it's highlighted you have a remove button so you could delete him so you know you can add in the lead and this is just the same list that shows up when I go to the file menu and there's a choice called export with preset so let's make some presets I'm just gonna go through these setting c know what's available and we'll just make one precept for now and you only need to see the settings just to have an idea of what it's capable of so over here first export location it wants to know where should the file end up one is done do you want it on your desktop or do you want it in a special folder what's nice about that where you can tell it a specific folder is sometimes you have a folder that is used for something like for instance your screen saver on your computer and you have your computer set to change the picture that's used in the screen saver so that it's more like a slide show going by your screen well you could have this set up so it's automatically exports to the folder that is for your slide shows that are part of your screen saver or your desktop pattern mind can also change the desktop pattern every half hour kind of thing in it goes to a particular folder well I could point it to that particular folder here I also have a folder on my uh laptop called portfolio four projector and that's one where I have images that have been scaled down for the size of in aspect ratio of ah projector and it automatically puts the images there when I tell it too and that's just where I put images whenever I finished when I pop it over there and then any time we give a seminar I always have folder full of fresh images that during breaks and things I just put up on the screen as a slide show but I don't have to think about it much because I could tell it right here where to export things so if you choose here you have the choice of same folder as original photo that means it would look on your hard drive in your folder structure in wherever the original raw files are that's what it would end up deposit it I don't often do that because then I'd have to go searching for it I usually want it somewhere like my desktop where I can grab it and do something to it right away if you choose the um choose folder later you can enter it at the time but if you go over here to specific folder then on the right side there's a choose button and if I click on it I can tell it exactly where it should save it so if I have that portfolio folder or or whatever I can put it here but I'm gonna have it here said to my desktop now you can tell it to put it in a sub folder meaning create a brand new folder sitting there and I do that for some things I might do that for time lapses because if I want to take a serious of images and turned into a movie well I don't want it have these things you're sitting on my desktop because oftentimes it's like five hundred images and why would you want it to just sit there on the base level of your hard drive I also want to remember wise it's sitting there so I'll give it a very specific name and I can tell it to add that back to the catalogue or not I don't usually because most of the time I think of my original raw files is what I want in my catalogue and whatever I export is usually something in the give to somebody else and then throw away and somebody needs another copy I'll just export another set and be able to do that here's his existing files and that means let's say you exported to your desktop if there's something there that has the exact same name what should it do and that's one reason wives good to always rename your files when you import them so they all have unique names then unless you're exporting the exact same photograph second time you're not gonna run into name conflicts but you could just tell it what to do should it skip over that image and not do it should override it without warning you be careful of that one or should it prompt you and choose a new name so I'll just say asked what to do because I don't know why it's goingto run into one of the same name below that we have filed naming and if you will just leave this alone it can use the original files name and just not change it but sometimes the original file names might have information you don't want to get out to other people I'm going to choose rename too because with time lapses the thing is is it could be important to have the numbering on the files sequential so that if you export let's say two hundred images and if you look at the image names they have a number on the end just like here's image number one number two number three you don't want it to skip a number when you have time lapse it can kind of mess up the process so here I can say what's edit this created little template that it uses and I'm gonna come in here and say that I wanted to have the file name and then I'm just going to go over here and say sequence number in since that time lapse can have a lot of images I'll use a lot of digits I'll put a dash in there so that I can easily see the little separation between that so it should be the original file name and then the just a number that is five digits long gonna click done if I didn't want to use the original file name I could just type something in here like time lapse and then they'd all be called time lapse I'll do that like that gun it asked me for the start number if I for some reason don't want it to start at one but this should be fine it wants to know if they're any video files in there should it include them uh or not and I don't do that much with video when it comes to in light room but that is something you could usually use here for file sightings it wants to know what file format you wanted saved in so we have j peg which is usually the most convenient file format to send to other people because the file size is small just remember it's not a good working file format so if that person is going to make changes to the image and do a lot of them say that close it doom or I would rather send them a photo shop or a tiff because it doesn't degrade the quality of the image at all and it's a good working file format uh j peg is a good ending file format in this case I'm going to end up using j peg but just so you know on some of my presets I haven't said to original because I just want to get a copy of my original file out for some reason maybe I'm going to do a demo about adjusting the raw file I need the raw file out there whatever it is but I'm going to do j peg since we can choose the quality here the higher the quality of the bigger the file size but the better it looks so it depends on what it is you need to use it for below that is a checkbox called lim file size too some websites will tell you to upload photos and they'll say but no larger than a certain file size like especially when you enter photo competitions and things that will say you know file up to a certain size and we'll say no more than three megabytes or something well I could click there and type in their file size limit and it would calculate the quality slider on its own to make sure it's no bigger than what I type it it's rare that I need to do that but when I do you notice the quality gets great out because that means that will determine the quality to try to keep it under that number color space is about the range how vivid colors could be within this image if it's going to be used on the internet or it's going to be sent to someone else that is not color savvy they're not a professional photographer there not a professional graphic designer there just a normal everyday person s rgb is usually the safest setting it is kind of the lowest common denominator setting your picture will look fine and as long as you just send it to somebody for them to look at it if on the other hand somebody is going to print your image you could either ask what they could accept here or adobe rgb is going to give you ah wider range of colors available in your picture but just know that for most just average images you've never noticed the difference it's on ly if you have images that have extremely vivid colors if it's a picture of flowers in the really vivid if it's a sunset and the sun's just looking crazy colorful that's when you'd see it an average just street scene with a person standing there in a building you would never notice the difference it's only those vivid colors where you'd be limited in here so we can choose that I'm going to go toe with us rgb image sizing I can have it resized it down to a certain size so for instance if I knew I'm going to do a time lapse here and I want it to be for hd video hd video is nineteen twenty by ten eighty is the size if you ever forget just do a google search for hd video pixel dimensions if you want to know the with the height for anything type in what it is like iphone pixel dimensions all that means is width and height pixels but that's what it is when it comes to video this number is an important resolution is only important when you're printing this means how big are those pixels when I hit the print button are they huge so they look pixelated are they small save a nice fine print the most common setting for printing is between two forty and three hundred but for screen used generically people type in seventy two for this particular purpose which is a time lapse it doesn't matter I could have any number in there uh it just doesn't matter below that we have it where we can have it sharp my image automatically and I can tell you I want to sharpen this for screen where you're going to see it on screen and that's going to make sure it doesn't over sharpen the image because you'd easily see it if it was on screen because you can see every little nuance of your picture if on the other hand you're going toe prints it then you don't see the individual pixels that make up the image when you print then usually need a little bit more sharpening to compensate for that and it just needs to know are you using matter glossy paper to print on here we're using a time lapse so I can say for screen it on the right side you can ask it how much sharpening would you want standard works for most everything in this looks overly simple ous far as the menus but just so you know to the best of my knowledge this the technology behind this was developed in coordination with somebody by the name of bruce frazier who's no longer with us but he wrote an entire book justine sharpening and he helped come up with some of the routines that are being used here so it's not as simple as it looks is just trying to present you with a simple interface then I'm gonna come down here metadata remember how we can enter our copyright information we created a little template when we import our pictures where it automatically adds copyrights has all rights revert reserved it had my website listed and all that well do I want to include that or do I want include mohr information and if you look at what's here if you just do copyright and contact info only then you're not going to be sharing with other people things like your key words if I tagged my images they won't be able to see all my keyword tags I can say everything except for my camera and camera info meaning that I don't want people to know my aperture setting in my shutter speed and all that stuff or if you choose all meta data you get all that stuff and that includes your all your key words will be attached to the picture as well but only those key words that you said ex include on export remember there was a little check box and we turned it off for a lot of key words that weren't things related to the image they were just things that helped me organize my key words like that what how where you know those kinds of words those wouldn't be included below that we have a choice for water marking in if I turn on this little check box I can choose from preset watermarks and I have one here that's just called best of ben badge and if I turn that on it automatically adds a little round graphic in the lower left corner of the image in just automatically puts it on their everytime I export I don't want it on there for a time lapse though so I'm going to turn it off here but I'll show you how to create and edit your watermarks once we're done in here but for now just remember you could choose a preset here and you also have the choice of editing them then at the very bottom it wants to know when it's done saving this picture shouldn't do anything and in here you could say showing finder which would open a window in your operating system showing you where the files are so you can easily find them you can actually have it open it and photoshopped so it saves it out and pops it into photo shop and you can sometimes have other applications in here if I choose open in other application I could choose what application it would open it in so if you do something weird right after that you're welcome to and all that kind of stuff you can also even have it apply in action a few end up having one from photo shop but that I'll leave for now so what have we done here we've chosen our export location we are going to call it time lapse and we're scaling it down seven is a j peg on the left side I'm going to create a new preset by hitting the ad but and I'm just going to call this whatever I whatever's useful for me to remember why the heck I got up there and I'll go over here and create a new folder I'll call this one creative live so we got a new folder in the list up here and we have that create now I could create variations on that because if I click on one of these over here it loads the settings on this area so instead of going through every single one of these sayings to make sure it's right I could just click on one of these things and know that I have all the settings here and now I'm just going to modify it to create a second preset so let's see what I'm going to do for this particular one is I'm going to go down to image sizing and I'm going to tell it not to resize and I'll show you why when it comes to time lapses once we get into that if we don't re size it your camera captures a lot more information than what we need to do a time lapse your picture is much wider in taller than it needs to be so usually have to scale it down to use it for a time lapse but if we use it full size we could make it look as if the camera was moving when you had the time lapse or the lens was zooming as you did the time lapse because we have all this extra information where we can afford to zoom up on the picture and it doesn't degrade because we have way more information than we need and so sometimes I end up doing it where we just don't recite it so let's make a second preset all he did was turn off that checkbox in over here I'll add and I'll call this one so now we have to and all we need to do it if I wanted j peg for to be saved out if I already have a preset for it just click on it it loaded everything in here and just make whatever changes need make it so you have a slightly larger version yet the ad but and you khun ad mohr so it's not like you have to look through the whole list all the time once you get about six or seven presets in there coming in here to make another one is just click on what you want it based on make a change to the settings and hit add some makes sense so I'm going to not click the export button this feels really weird but I'm gonna click cancel you now in my head I would think cancel means get rid of all that I just did but what it means here is just cancelled the export process if you've already made a preset over here you can't cancel that this just means don't export the photo I have selected all right now I want to save this image out I'm going to go over here to the file menu I'm going to choose export with pre set and you see my list here are the user presets those are the ones I usually used in up here where it says creative live these are the two that we just created so I'm going to choose one of these I want to come in here and just get eight hundred or not ten twenty four on my desktop so I choose it up here do you see export one file its scaling that image down saving it out and once that's done if I go and look at my desktop there's a file sitting right here and on a mac I can hit the space bar it will zoom up on it and I could see it that's a file like you go email to a friend the original file always stays in its original location it hasn't changed that all this is a copy and it's only the copy that has those adjustments baked in finalized so create a good number of pre sets for whatever your particular uses I don't know what you want to use your pictures for it's just a matter of if you were to be in there and spend a half an hour playing around you could probably come up with about a dozen presets where after that any time you need a picture out of light room you just click on one maybe I hold shift and I get this whole looks like you needed like that get these three just choose file export with pre set and this time I'm going to get a bigger one on my desktop or I could go over here and just say I'll choose copy to desktop that means used the original file format well it's going to have a little progress here and I should end up with three images gemma they're bigger file so it might take a little while but when that progress bar has done they're going to be sitting on my desktop in since I had it set up to use the original file format I have one two three files one of those files was a tiff file because it had been taken into federal shop to do further retouching on it so it was no longer a raw file but the raw files don't they usually come with ex mp files to well it came with those as well because it's a copy of the original

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Handbook
Bonus Packet
Post Processing Practice Files

Ratings and Reviews

Photoracer
 

After catching parts of each of the three days, I knew that I would need to have access to this wealth of information. What is great about the program is the ability to stop and go back over something that is not fully understood...and be able to do that until confident enough to move on. I saw no "fluff" in the course, just great information imparted with a style that is makes it easy to understand. CreativeLive scored a big hit with this course! The bonus material is SO valuable, especially the presets. That saves an enormous amount of time for me. My appreciation of the power behind the software is becoming ever clearer. Thanks, Ben, for another outstanding presentation!

Shannon Beelman Photography
 

Ben has been amazing! He is a wealth of information on organizing images as well as great tips to make your travel images pop just a little more. I came into this class feeling like I had a good handle on lightroom and have come out with a better understanding of the power of the software to make artistic life easier. He covers tips, tricks and little known options that help make workflow smother. I have sat here watching as much of the free broadcast as I can and in this last week I have gotten control over years of images in my lightroom. This is one I know I will be buying soon.

johninblackhawk
 

Great class! Somehow, it was enjoyable not having Ben default to "curves for everything"! I don't think the title for this course did it justice, tho. This class was 90% Light Room and 10% Photoshop. I was very happy to discover that dynamic and equally as happy to purchase this course! If you are new to Light Room, this class is a MUST. Creative Live offers several LR classes but this is the one to own. Ben is working on his new book about Light Room Mastery - can't wait! In the meanwhile, I'll be watching Ben's thorough approach to LR in this video. So, don't let the title throw you a curve ball, if you are new to Light Room or a seasoned user, there's plenty of great information - delivered as only Ben can! Thanks CL for this great class!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES