Lessons

Lesson Info

Photo Mechanic

as far as the workflow is concerned of, what order we do this and how we actually start this first step. As you could see from our really cool Whiteboard Project folder, it's to build the actual Project folder build directory structure before ingesting before plugging in your memory cards before doing anything. It's to build the structure first, and we're talking about the full structure. The top level folder for the project. All the sub folders. We even bring in a template catalogue. A light room calories is an empty catalogue, an empty database record that has no photos in it. No images. It's just a template. It's ready to go. So that structure is, is there. It's created. I'm actually were saying before, we have now automated. This is gonna be automated in the AP, and the idea is, you basically click through it. Does this all for you. It makes all of those folders inside of the big folder, which we call the project, and that light room catalog as well, right? Like I said before, we u...

sed to script this week to do it by hand. Wait, have a copy of a blank folder structure and just copy it in every single time. It's the same concept. Only now it's one push button. So at this point, once the project is built, then you can do your ingestion calling. So we do the ingestion calling from the memory cards into that project when it's all ready to go. So Jen is actually going to demonstrate a little bit and talk about how we do our calling cause I know this name calling Yes, for is which application use? Because I know some people use light room. Some people use photo mechanic. We happen to be in the photo mechanic camp. Yes, yes, let's switch seats. We have got our little structure here that we created for creative life. I'm not actually gonna ingest. I'm not gonna grab cards because Susan was shooting tethering any tethered anyway, So there's nothing on the cards, But I'm just gonna talk about what I would do if I were going to ingest. I used photo mechanic because it is much faster, in my opinion. Um, then using light room, I don't want a slow light room down by bringing in all those files now and then looking through them and making selects. Instead, I do this and photo Mechanic. It's a great program. I've had it for a very long time. Embarrassingly, I probably haven't done the update in, like, five years, but it still works great for me. So you know, I save money by sticking with it. And the way that I ingest my cards is like we talked about. We create this file structure, and then when I ingest, I plugged the card into the memory reader. It goes onto my hard drive, and I put everything in the folder that is called Reject Raw. It is the re jacks. People are probably saying, Why in the world are you putting everything into rejects? I do this because I do what they call additive editing. I did not invent additive editing. It's been around forever. What it basically means is it's the difference between going through the images and selecting the keepers or going through the images and selecting the non keepers. I, um, and a lot of other people find it faster to just go through all of the images and select only the ones that I want to keep. So that's why everything goes into the Rejects because if I take 3500 photos at a wedding when I go through and I make my selects, I'm going to be somewhere between, you know, probably 6 to 700 images. So rather than than moving stuff out of the keepers, I would much rather take those 600 photos out of rejects and move those into the Master Raphael. So hopefully that makes sense. Um, so when I go in and I do my calling, find you re Jackson here. So I have already done this because it's like a cooking show. You got to get this stuff done ahead of time. But when I and in photo mechanic and I have this small window, I don't pick in the small window, I hit the magnifying glass and I blow it up These air from season shoot for those of you have been watching her. It's a much lower volume than she would typically have because he was tethered eso. When I would go through here, I would select an image. Let's say that I wanted to keep this image, which I did because I've already started. I'll hit a one on that and I have my photo mechanic set up so that when I start something, it automatically goes to the next image. So it just one more thing moving a little faster. This is the theme you're saving. Seconds here. Seconds there. It's all speeding you up. We'll get to the big timesaver in a minute. The next section. But essentially the goal here is I will one star all of the images from the shoot that I want to deliver to my clients. I will to star images from the shoot that I want a blawg. So obviously these are images that I'm excited about, that I really love, that I want to show the world so that we'll get a cheese star. So 6 to will get a one star, and then maybe 25 will get a two star, you know, in my typical wedding. And then I might even I might even send that out to a couple of my photographer friends and even get it down a little further because I'm not gonna blawg you know, 100 photos. I'm just not going to want to show my best. And then then there is the legendary three star marking a three star marking is on Lee. An image that I took that I think is going to be one of my best images from the entire year. So I can go three weddings for weddings and not have one of those photos. I just might not have a photo that I think represents my absolute best work for the year. But there might be one or two photos in a wedding that I am so excited about, and I'm gonna give them a three star designation. What that means is it's going on the blawg and it's probably going into my portfolio. Or if I want to do a print competition, I can use that three star designation to track down those images that I think are worth presenting. Makes sense. So when I go through, Fed a mechanic and I'm giving things stars and it's jumping ahead and let's say that I started this and then I go back and say, I've got three shoe images. Maybe I don't need them all. I decided, don't want this one. I just hit. I just hit zero just to return it. T zero Keep going. I make my selects. And I've already done this now, so I will go back to the main. That sounds done. Gone for the whole thing started up. But the other thing you're doing in that blow up window to this is where you're checking sharpness and focus. Yes. Make sure that when it leaves the photo something you want to keep, But it wasn't actually in focus, right? And if you want getting a little post realization, I assure you, it doesn't look like this when you actually want to check something. If you have a family formal that's taken from far away, you could always use this zoom key. Zuman. Oh, is the makeup Russian in focus? It is. That's great. And you can zoom back out. So once I'm done with that, I might want to take a look and see how many one star images I have, because I might be curious to see like that I over pick that I under pick, we'll click it. And in this case, I've got 47 obviously not what I would deliver for a typical wedding. I told Season she's gonna be in big trouble with these clients because she really is under delivering on this wedding. But obviously, once we have this era down, then you know, you're kind of said the next thing that I would do is I would determine if I had any problem with time sinking for me. I have three cameras that I go out without a typical wedding, and I tried to every couple of weeks sync up the times. Okay, I saved myself the heartache of having to redo this later. But if you sync up the times on your cameras, it's just helpful. It just helps you move a little faster. So once I've done that, if I haven't done it and my cameras are off for some reason, like I decided to take my ex 100 with me one day and I was way off on the timing of that, you can use photo mechanic to reset the timing. So let's say that the shoe photos were taken. We know at the same time, but one camera was way off. You can go into tools. We find it here, just captured time there. I found it. Just captured dates and times You go in here, it gives you a dialogue. Let's say that your shooter forgot to adjust for daylight standard time. You know, after the time change, you can go in here and you can say this is actually an hour later. If you hit a just photos, it will go ahead and it will take all of the foot. Is he selected? And it will push them forward an hour. If that makes sense in your situation, you can also do it by minutes again. If you want to sync up the first kiss, it can just be helpful after that. Once I have all of these, I typically will select only the one star images. I'll either move them into master Raw and rename them or all rename them and move them into Master. Raw really doesn't make any difference. But the key is the move. Right move is the key because we're working on these in this reject raw folder and we're picking the ones that we want. We're pulling out of that reject and we're staging him in a Master Rafel. They're getting pulled on, moved from one location to the next, right, So I've actually now moved them and they're now in master, raw and master raw basically says these are the photos that I'm going to work on for the clients. These are the chosen ones, if you will. So I would select them all and I would go to rename them, um and I would select rename photos. And again, you can do this in bridge. You can do this and other things, but I'm trying to cut down on my work. I'm already in photo mechanic. I'm just gonna go ahead and do it here in a photo mechanic. So the what I would typically dio is I would take the sequence number and there's a little variable in photo mechanic that will just put it in for you. And then I would do something like underscore. And what are we using? We're using? I use ego. So I would use ego in this because the name of my company, Zygo Media and you go is short. But I could use in this case, let's say SS for season startling. Whatever you use here in this case, you can save it as a variable. So that Hernandez very but as a template, Really? So that next time you don't have to recreate this everything. I could do it like this. I could also then add If I wanted Teoh, I could do something like I could add the original file name. I happen to know these shortcuts so you could do something like this. I would set the sequence variable 2001 Because everyone I do you is different. And then right here, it's actually gonna tell me what the new final name is, so you can just check and make sure that you didn't make a mistake. If you forgot to reset the sequence variable, you don't want to start them with 462. So this basically takes the sequence, the studio, And then I keep the original file name just because I might want to go back sometime and find a sequence. Let's say that I was just really tired and I accidentally picked a family formal where Mom's eyes were closed. It's helpful for me to have that sequence name so I could just jump back into my rejects and grab that one. It happens. We'll hit rename. It will rename them for you. Um, all the select, um and that's it. I'm done at this point with photo mechanic. I don't need to do more. The last thing we're gonna cover really quick before we we break for the session is now that this actual selection. So now this selection process is done. Um, again, we're still not enlightened. We've done all of this prop work in this project. That structure that we've built, we've done our ingestion were calling or select. We've moved this stuff around. The last thing that we do is we want to generate a report of what we're working with. So the flashcards that we've copied these images off of have 12,000 images. We selected a certain number of those. We staged them in our master raw folder. This is kind of the launching point for the next phase of our work flow. What we really want to do is make sure that we keep track of how many of those raw images were actually selected. So what we've actually done is and we do this manually, you know, and we may still, for certain people, I would recommend that you still do this manually. If you don't have a script. Part of what our application is is doing now is generating a report of how many raw files we've selected and what kind they are. If there's a multi camera, multi shooter environment, it's helpful to know that there were certain number of Nikon files, certain number of canon files, certain refugees. So we keep this record. I'm not only the totals but the breakdown inside of what each of those specific types were. This is just report. It's just account that tells us initially where we're starting with. We referenced this later when we import things in a light room and then when we expert back out of light room, want to make sure that all of these counts match at every stage. You don't want to accidentally lose things because you've made a mistake on your filters light room. Now we're missing 35 raw files, right? It's just a way of checking your own your own work, just a way of following that. So if I've got 177 total photos that I've selected for processing, I need to have 100 77 in light room and they need to have 100 77 deliver bulls when they come out of light room. It's just a good way to keep track of your projects. So and that is basically where we are for this session. So Right. So do we have a little time for questions? We do. We could probably take one or two questions in the audience. Go ahead. Quick question. So all of this is happening in your middle size drug drive, right? And so you are saving in Justin straight into this, and then you're going to move once we get into into your fast drive and whatnot? Yes. After we do something really cool, which is coming in, you can actually see here. What we still have highlighted in Finder is this project director. It's probably small on really hard to read, but yet this directory structure still holds all those pieces. I could take that. Move it somewhere else. I already Okay, I have a two farther on the naming convention, so I understand that you're creating the folders beforehand, so they're all empty and then you're just moving files it as necessary. Correct. Um, at any point, are you going to go over? Why? You have that particular set of folders and what they're used for. And then, uh, these naming conventions don't carry themselves into the file naming convention. Right, cause you just showed that file naming convention. It's not really related to the way this is. Okay, Crack correct. Yes. You guys are asking the exact questions that the Internet is. So go, go for one more was my question way alternative photo mechanic. Maybe if somebody is never know budget yet Or actually I do. I do know of one having a chance to test it myself. But I've been I've been researching a lot. It's called Ingest A Matic, I think. Oh, yeah, that was in need. Neat little program. It is a much lower cost alternative to phone mechanic. It does the calling. It does the renaming right? Does renaming time and just leave it Does the time adjust? The only thing we don't know is how the keyboard maps. If you want it really quickly map something for moving and marking in that sort of thing. I would recommend checking that one out because I did read a little bit about it. There's this is something called the color Nater, which I haven't actually set up. But I have one. It's like a little joystick that helps you kind of call faster. It's pretty cool. I can't really be to it because I haven't set it up. But, I mean, I just like the fact that it's a joystick e giving me a kick back. I'm just mentioning stuff that I know about. Yeah, you wanna Did you have something? When you are doing your two stars and you come to a series of photos and you see the 1st 1 and you think this is great you to start and then you go to the next one and you realize, Oh, this might be a little bit better. How are you handling? Choosing the two or the three Cerrado? Sometimes Well, do is all start with one starring and all one star everything first. Unless something in such a standout that I just have to give it two stars and then I give myself a little that on the back. But generally speaking, I would mostly do the one stars prime, and then I would filter. You saw me filter to see how many one stars I have Then I might go through and check my two stars then because that would give me a chance to look at a syriza little more carefully and determine what was the number one photo out of that series. Or did I want to take two out of the Siri's and maybe put them together in a block? If it's like a moment, you know, the broad sees the groom and then goes like this, you know, that might be a good storyteller to have both the images. Is there a way and put a mechanic to do like, you could do a light room where you select for hide images and put them all up one time and even sort of element eight photos and come out with that. They don't know. I don't get someone in who have never done it. OK, maybe somebody on the Internet knows What about timing? How long does it typically thank you Me to call? I'm like the coal master, so I'm not a good example. I can call a wedding and an hour, but I'm brutal about my own work. So for me, I know exactly what I did. And you know I sell Flowed while I do it. And then I try to think about what I can do better. But I usually I usually takes me about an hour.