A Workflow That Works in Lightroom
Lesson 26 from: Wedding Photography: Capturing the StoryRocco Ancora, Ryan Schembri
A Workflow That Works in Lightroom
Lesson 26 from: Wedding Photography: Capturing the StoryRocco Ancora, Ryan Schembri
Lessons
Class Introduction
04:18 2Define the Goals of Wedding Photographers
15:04 3The Importance of Wedding Photographers
11:42 4Shooting Philosophy
09:22 5How to Build a Shot List - Bride, Groom & Formals
22:42 6Tye the Wedding Story Together
07:19 7Capture Stories in Wedding Pictures
05:53 8Get the Right Exposure
16:20The Theory Behind Lighting
10:19 10The Power of Short Lighting & Backlight
30:08 11Shoot with Low Ambient Light Indoors
05:25 12Seven Fundamentals of Pose
13:56 13Continuous Light Sources for Indoor Photography
25:36 14Use Available Light for Indoor Photography
35:06 15Flash for Indoor Photography
18:59 16Outdoor Photographing with Available Light
20:27 17Group Posing & Lighting Techniques
12:22 18Groom and Groomsmen Posing & Lighting Techniques
11:43 19Couple Together Posing & Lighting Techniques
16:21 20Creating a Memorable Client Experience
12:40 21The Power of a Same Day Slideshow
12:07 22What do Couples Look For in Wedding Photographers?
05:51 23How to Successfully Interview a Couple
05:11 24The Importance of Wedding Photography
09:07 25Example Couple Interview
22:49 26A Workflow That Works in Lightroom
09:34 27Workflow Overview in Lightroom
19:28 28Manage Wedding Images in Lightroom
21:30 29Export Pictures to Animoto
04:28 30Color Correcting Images in Lightroom
14:09 31Optimize Images Through Lightroom
13:35 32Color Management in Photoshop
03:04 33Rocco's Skin Retouching Technique
33:27 34Image Toning to Create Distinct Looks in Photoshop
24:27 35The Value of a Wedding Album
05:27 36Traditional Design Elements in a Wedding Album
19:05 37Magazine Design Elements in a Wedding Album
20:04 38What Makes a Good Wedding Album?
07:47 39How to Sell the Wedding Album to Your Clients
10:37 40Wedding Album Workflow
08:13Lesson Info
A Workflow That Works in Lightroom
Gonna get into some real workflow stuff now. I'll probably just preempt this session by saying you're joined by probably one of the most premier workflow solution and digital artists on the planet at the moment, his work is just absolutely phenomenal. Thank you Mike. We trust him, there's a lot of us that trust him with our prints, our prints for competition, so this is a real pleasure. I'm sitting here so I can learn a lot as well today. (laughing) Very good okay, let's talk about that dirty word of workflow. And the idea for us photographers guys is to have a workflow in place so it's all about workflow and not workslow, because you know how many people just kill their lives, their social lives, their family time, with being chained behind a computer. I used to. Yeah you used to? I used to yeah. Yeah now you aren't so-- Now I send it to him so that's good. (laughing) But it's all about being efficient with your workflow and today we're gonna show you how we do it, a...
nd talk you through the steps of being organized, and you know being efficient. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the image making process first. Now as a photographer we have a creative vision and there are very, very important elements that make up that creative vision. On earlier sessions we spoke about capture, but it doesn't just end on good capture. Capture is the key to everything that we do, sure, but post production is there to enhance what we've already captured. And then last but not least it's all about the final print. Whether that prints gonna be a fine art print, or whether that print's gonna be an album or a book. Okay these are all the things that come together to create your creative vision. So essentially what we do as photographers, we need to be able to see the end result before we actually start. It's like driving somewhere without a map: if you don't have a map, you don't know how you're gonna get there, or if you'll ever get there, or where that is. Okay the idea is to have a destination and to have a plan of attack, and to have your workflow map clearly in place so that you know when to stop and when enough is enough, okay? So understanding post production effectively does equal better capture, because if you know where you can go with things you'll know where to place those tones. We spoke about it at the shooting session, you know, where we needed to place highlights to be highlights so that our shadows will have enough information so that we weren't having to deal with noisy shadows in post production. So if you understand what happens in post production to a file, then you understand that it needs to be captured correctly, and it needs to be given due respect. When Lightroom first came out photographers did probably about 10% of their work in Lightroom and used it as just an image management software, and 90% was still done in Photoshop. Well everything's changed. Cause Lightroom now for us 90% of what we do is done in Lightroom, 10% is done in Photoshop, and there are very two distinct different workflows: one is our wedding workflow, which we're gonna be discussing today and which is relevant to the course that you're viewing now, but then there's a totally different workflow when we talk about high end retouching, for fine art printing, and competition leveling. So today we'll stick with the wedding workflow. So if you're a wedding photographer you should definitely use these two pieces of software: Photoshop and Lightroom. And it's a marriage made in heaven. A lot of people think that I've got Lightroom, I don't really need Photoshop. Well hopefully today I can debunk that myth because I think you do need Photoshop, especially when it comes down to you know pixel based editing. When we need to retouch skin and effectively remove distractions from backgrounds, because of a request of our couple. So that we need to be very clear and effective as to what can be done in Photoshop, and what can be done in Lightroom. The beauty of course of light room is that everything that we do, any adjustments that we apply to a file, are non destructive. Which is awesome. That means that we have a preview on a screen of an image and we can play with it to our hearts content without actually really affecting our real file. Nothing changes until we export that file and those adjustments are applied to that raw file and we have our output, whether it be a JPEG or a PSD or a TIFF. So why is having a consistent workflow really so important? First and foremost it's all about efficiency. Number two it's about the quality of what you produce. Last but not least, and the most important part of workflow, is profitability. There's no point shooting a wedding and then coming back and spending three weeks editing it, because when you do the math how much are you really making an hour? I did an exercise with a colleague of mine, we worked out he was making about $4.00 an hour. Not really the sort of rates you wanna be making as a professional photographer. He used to spend hours and hours in Lightroom going around and around in circles never knowing when to win, and never knowing when enough was enough! And what needed to be done to an image. I can directly relate to that. Because my early years spend, especially in Photoshop, were spent with many many late nights playing, and I call it playing because it was it was just playing with images. And yes I learned a lot but I also learned that I lost a lot of money at that time, because my efficiency went down throughout the whole process the whole studio went down in flames because of me and my slowness in this workflow. So it may not be relevant to you at this direct stage, maybe you're just early on in your career shooting weddings but especially when you get to even 10, 15, 20 weddings, this efficient workflow, and keeping the quality of that workflow up to standard, is really key to you making money. Yeah and I mean as photographers I guess at some point we develop a series of routines for capturing, copying, processing our digital photographs however if these routines are sloppy or unorganized this error keeps on multiplying as you go along, and it's detrimental to your profitability at the end of the day. The idea is to develop a consistent workflow the speeds up the entire process, and is consistent and does not sacrifice quality. First and foremost we still wanna produce the highest possible quality that we can to give our clients. So workflow without compromising the quality or sacrificing my creative control as a photographer. Let's draw a bit of a map, the road to success, how do we get there? Top of the list once again is capture. In the earlier sessions we really, really honed in on capture and how important it was to get it right in camera. Number two, an effective downloading system. Editing/culling: what do you keep, what do you take out and why? Enhancing, stylizing, and then the final piece of the jigsaw is the exporting phase. Now with the exporting phase there are different, many many different directions we can take out of Lightroom based upon the final destination of the image. Whether it's gonna be a JPEG that'll end up on a web or whether it's gonna be a high end 16 bit PSD that we'll then bring into Photoshop to do further editing. Lightroom controls all of that. So Lightroom, the beauty of Lightroom now we're using Lightroom CC, is really all about having image processing and great image asset management. All combined into one little, beautiful bundle. Isn't that awesome? I love it. So of course Lightroom, breaking it down even further, is able to process a large number of images at once and as wedding photographers we shoot a lot of files. However I'm gonna just allude to a little something now, it's not about the quantity of files we deliver our clients. It's about the quality of files we deliver our clients. It is an extremely high quality image processor, it is an image database management system, and the part I love the most is that it's not destructive editing. So everything we do in Lightroom is non destructive. And we can do so by making virtual copies and so on, so it's endless what we can do in Lightroom. Having said that there is a danger: just because it's endless doesn't mean that we need to spend hours on it. Once again, we need to have a map, and we need to stick to our plan. We need to stick to your destination and get there.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Jerry Willis
Ryan & Rocco, in my very humble opinion, are THE best wedding photography instructors in the entire industry! I've been watching their work for years now, which just so happens to win a most grand-scaled competitions, and they somehow continue to keep getting better! I first drilled Ryan at WPPI inquiring about what made his workshop different from all the others. His response, me paraphrasing, "If you're looking for tools to learn, come to my workshop. If you're looking for inspiration and smoke blowing, don't come." That's exactly what I needed to hear. Straight tools, no fluff. THE BEST photography workshop I've EVER taken, by far. You want the best photography education, learn from the best. This CreativeLive workshop is the PERFECT complimentary refresher and companion to what I learned! Thank you so much for having them! It's not the same as the workshop, which it shouldn't be, but they ARE reinforcing many things that have slipped my memory! I'm for sure buying this! :-)
Neeraj Arora
WOW!!! I have started a few CL courses but not finished as I got distracted by "life" and it took me a while to get back and finish them. But these guys!! They were simply superb. I finished this course really fast. Amazing artists, they explain things so well, Ryan is such a charmer and engaging teacher, Rocco is a fountain of knowledge. I am an enthusiastic photographer with aspirations to start my own business soon. I learn't so much from this class that will help improve my photography even if I don't become a professional wedding photographer. Great job guys, keep it up. I will need to come back to the lessons and I very much appreciate the key note pdf. All CL courses should include the slides like they did here. Thanks CL.
user-3a41db
I am a newborn photographer by trade, but I really want to venture out and photograph more weddings so I decided to purchase a wedding class on creative live. Of course when I typed in wedding, quite a few classes came up. But when I saw the image and title "capture the story" I was definitely intrigued. I've always been touched by the photographs that have emotion and that's what I'm passionate to photograph! Always a little nervous when you purchase a class because you don't want to feel like it was a waste of money, but this knocked it out of the park for me! Thank you to Ryan and Rocco for explaining so much, showing the pull backs, and moving your subject and explaining why! This has opened my eyes so much to how beautiful photographing a wedding can be and not so terrifying as I've been making it out to be. I'm really so thankful to hopefully being a great wedding photographer and making more income for my family, while having fun creating something beautiful
Student Work
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Wedding Photography