Skip to main content

Archiving the Job with Q&A

Lesson 12 from: Advanced Adobe Lightroom 5 Workflow

Jared Platt

Archiving the Job with Q&A

Lesson 12 from: Advanced Adobe Lightroom 5 Workflow

Jared Platt

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

12. Archiving the Job with Q&A

Lesson Info

Archiving the Job with Q&A

We've delivered images to the client we've delivered images tow us in our portfolio and now we just need to archive the entire job way we do that is click on the job itself so you can see that folder we right click that folder and we export it as a catalog itself when I export is a catalogue itself, I'm going to choose where and what I'm exporting so and pay attention to this because we will utilize this same process in some of the stuff we do tomorrow in other workflow ideas will be exporting catalogs as well, but not for archive for other purposes, so we're going to go to the original job so we're going to the working dr go to that job and inside there were going to call this the, uh, catalog and since we have other catalogues in there, see, I've got a couple of the little catalogs in there because obviously this is a teaching tool I'm going to call this catalog final so that I know that this is the most recent the best version of the catalog because you might have multiple catalogs ...

when all said and done you're doing different things with catalogues, andi I keep every version of the catalogue that I have so that if for some reason one of these catalogs got corrupted, I could always go to a different catalog and pull it up and be like partway where I wass the other thing that you could do is you know every time you quit light room and ask you do you want to save the catalog are back up the catalog how many of you say yes good so yes is the correct answer no is the incorrect answer so always back catalog doesn't take much space and it will protect you against a lot of sadness in the end so catalog final is what I'm gonna call this and then I'm gonna look at these options right here these are my options. So if I did none of them all it would do is send out a catalogue and the catalog contains keywords adjustments, titles, captions all meta data but no pictures. So then when you open it up it would have to go look where the pictures are and rebuild all of the previews. But the beauty of it is that that catalog is tiny little tiny thing because all it is the data if I want to be able to quickly see them then I would include the available previous so whatever previews air being shown right now with their one for one or standard or minimal whatever the previews are those will go with it so immediately when you open it it's just going to show you those so that's the that's, the leased space intensive version and the quickest to look at if you export the negative files, it's actually going to be making a coffee of the files and putting them with the catalog, which means that if you put them in the same folder because we're putting it in the same folder as our original raws right here, you would have two copies of the catalogue and you'd have two copies of the raw images and then a catalog. We don't need two copies of that. We don't need double r our size so we can unchecked the export negative files because they're right here next to the catalog itself. So raw images right there, that's. Why I remember we put remember how we talked about putting everything into the job folder. Everything that goes with that includes the catalogue and that's where the raw photos air going that's where the catalogue should be ok, then the last thing that we can choose is whether or not we need to include the smart previews. Smart previews are amazingly helpful and useful, but not at this stage. Smart creatures air good for working on files when you're exporting a file to your archive it's the least useful thing you can have because there's no point you're almost never going to go to those again. When you put him in the archive, you're you're basically saying the only reason I ever go back to these is if the client comes and asked specifically for a big print or something like that or wants a book out of it or something like that's the only time you go there otherwise you're done with the job anything anytime you want to access any images from that job in the future for yourself, you will go to your portfolio and choose the best images from that job. Otherwise the only reason I go there is the client comes back to you for it, so all that needs to be included with your archives is this include available previews that's it so we're going to hit export and it is right now it just made a light rum catalog, and now it's sent previews there's a couple previous that it didn't have and so it's reporting that, but we don't really care because it will just build them the next time it opens up. Once I've done that, I can right click this job and I can remove it from light room because and I'm not deleting it just removing it because now it's got its own catalogue over there, everything is a dmg, which means each image has all the settings, all the adjustments, all of the keywords associated with that image which means that if I lost the catalogue it wouldn't matter because I could still look at the dmg and it has all the information in it everything I've done to it but because now because I because I have the catalog now I can remove that from my main working catalog leaving the working catalog it's going to the archive and it's going to stay in the archive so here's here this is still my working dr got my images in there there's the job and inside the job I have the raw images here notice there's no rejects because the rejects air over here in the rejects drive so the raw images air here my high resolution images that I'm shipping off to the client or hear my final catalogue that I just produced is right here so that's all the details and if I open that it will show me those images as I last saw them. So if I double click this it's opening up at the re launch light room closing the old working catalog and it's opening up the new catalogue that is just this one job and noticed that there are no other jobs associated with this there's just the one job it's a small lean, very quick little catalog that can be used as though you never left it then I've got all of the stuff that's associated with it so I take this job and I grab it and I drag it to the archive of two thousand fourteen and let go it's going to copy that job over and it's going to take about a minute to coffee that entire job over not by the way the reason it only takes a minute to copy six gigs is because that's a solid state and this is a solid state and this is firewire eight hundred which is pretty fast actually if you had usb three or thunderball and be much faster and sierra is actually working on a thunderbolt version so someday soon hopefully I keep calling when when I want one so it's gonna copy over there but once we copy it this is the time where you worry because you're going to delete the originals and that scares the hell out of everybody so what we d'oh to make that less scary is we use something called delta walker and I don't know if delta walker is the pc program as well or not but it is my go to program for making me feel comfortable so I just come here and I compare folders so I click on this little compare folder icon and it creates a little is the least attractive program I can imagine but it does a great job so I don't know okay, so we've copied it over so here's my original I grab this and drag it into this folder area and then I come over to the archive version of it and I grabbed that and I dragged into this one here once I do that I hit compare and itjust compares thumb see that it's just going through and comparing all the files and at one point this little thing up here will stop spinning and once it stops spinning if this little area down here stays at zero then everything's fine if it sees something different it means that there's a deleted file there's an added file or there's some kind of difference in the files so it's comparing the ones and zeros to make sure that everything is equal to itself and this takes a little while you in the preferences you can choose how oh how serious the comparison is and I wanted to be dead on serious and so I have chosen in the preference is to make sure it compares bite toe bite so it's looking at every single bite and making sure that there are no bites out of place if I get a tru comparison that these bites are exactly as these bites I know that it's a good copy and I could delete it every once in a while it is time to take the archive and back it up so you take so I have remember we talked about the uh little toaster deal so if you end up working with a toaster get one with two because then you can stick the archive here and the archive back up there and then you can just simply back everything up to the archive back up and then just separate the two that way if your archive ever goes down like if your archive dr ever just takes a just goes kaput you can then just take that one out of circulation grabbed the archive back up and swap it and then create a new archive back up because you don't want an archive to go south on you I've had a ah whole archive dr goes south on me but if you have backups of it then it's not it's not catastrophic it takes some time to go get a new drive plug in and back it up but if you have backups you're okay and I have backups but I did as as a curiosity the drive went south on me and so I tried to recover it to see what I could get and I got about half the files out of it so half is good but it's not as good as just taking the other drive and swapping it and then you know grabbing it so fortunately I have all of the stuff on backup disks that was on that drive so I'm fine but that would have been cast catastrophic without a backup so so discs khun go south on you real fast and you won't know it until you need it, so just make sure you back up every time, so every year you buy an archive drive and an archive backup, and then every so often you're going to take that archive and just back it up. And once you get into, like, you know, my two thousand eleven back archive doesn't need to be backed up ever because I've got two coffees that are exactly the same. They don't change because nothing's happening, you know? But you're two thousand thirteen is going to need about be backed up on a fairly regular basis until you stop working in two thousand thirteen, and then once you know, your maybe june of two thousand fourteen, you kind of stop working on two thousand thirteen, and so then that doesn't need to be backed up so often. So just kind of you kind of after a while, they just become two dead copies of a drive, and then, you know, they just you never you never see him. Um, and of course, remember, your portfolio has all the stuff in those drives inside of it and that's all the best work from all the years. And so that's where you're really going to find all your images, so even if you know your two thousand thirty three dr died on you. By this point it doesn't really matter and you've got all your favorite stuff in the portfolio and if you're having to go back to two thousand three to find good work then you really need to start taking some classes and working on getting you know, going beefing up your work is he looking back that faras is a bad idea so I only have about maybe three or four images that I look too from the early two thousand something yeah, those air really still solid images so my mantra is if you if you are embarrassed by what you shot two years ago you aren't improving fast enough so I prefer to be embarrassed by stuff I shot a couple years ago yeah so do you back up your portfolio drive? Yes, yes, absolutely the portfolio drive is backed up has to be backed up, although because I have those same images in archives I don't find myself backing it up like religiously once a month I'll plug it in and back it up because it changes it doesn't change super rapidly, but you know, if I went a whole month without backing up and it went kaput, I would just take the back up and then I might have to add some stuff to it I'm lazy about that one I should be better about it, but I'm I'm pretty lazy about it so that's me being lazy backing up once a month then that everybody is like going oh my gosh what does that mean for me? You know like I back up once every third you know millennium leap year yeah really e think some people haven't backed up since backup became a possibility so you know but it's better than film I mean film we had no backup so we've all advanced beyond film you know so that's good okay um so we have confirmed the copy so all that banter was for copy confirming so see that it's done it's confirmed there's zero zero zero down there so we're good we are go for latin lift off and now we get to do the thing that makes everybody gas which is click on the original job and hit delete and now we are good to go and it is in my archive and I am thrilled that the job is done and so is my client because it's my wife and so that those images then could be delivered to her and she can play with them to her heart's content now for me I actually when I deliver something to my client which is my wife um I deliver the d n gs to her computer and then she has a lightning catalog that she can play with him you know she can alter them and change them a little bit do whatever she wants I'm so my client gets my my wife client gets dan ji's arrest my clients get j banks all right so now if we look then at whole enemy oh, and by the way, if you open light room if you hold the option key down while you open it I'm holding it down it gives you the dialogue to choose what you're which catalog you wanna work on so now I can go back and find the working working catalog which is where is that right there again so I'm opening up my working catalog there and so we're going to go back then to our schematics and I want to revisit this at the end of the day here on dh that is you throughout this day you have seen the following happen you've seen that we came from a c f card we went to the working dr we went we put everything into our job folder in the raw folder in tow untitled folders then we brought that we pointed at it from light room and imported it into the working catalog which had a whole bunch of other catalogues in it and then we built the one for one previous on the way in we adjusted some capture times we've selected organized the images keyword id we adjusted we reorganized them if necessary like if you wanted to change their organization and then we rename the images and we didn't really talk about renaming the images all that much, but if you are inside of light room and you want to rename images, simply go to the library menu, highlight all your images and go to rename photos right there halfway down if you re name the images, you can then choose from any of your presets that you've made, but you can edit those here in the bottom of the menu, and then you're just going to start number one and finish it number one hundred or whatever s o you rename your images and then you would go into the editing phase once you have renamed that's when you can end it if you don't, if you if you start editing photos before you've renamed him suddenly, then when you rename him, you're going to have a j they're gonna have a raw image that's going to be image number thirteen. The photo shop image is going to be called fourteen, but they're the same file, so if you rename them before you make any edits in photo shop, then file number thirteen when it's made into a photoshopped document will become file thirteen psd and will be stacked on top of that image and the raw will kind of essentially disappear, so now the only thing the client will see is a j peg spun off of the psd which will still be called number thirteen so you won't have any weird file name issues going on so it's just important to rename your image is before you go into the retouching phase of any job and that way you have perfect file naming all the way through um we'll talk more about round tripping and working in photo shop tomorrow and the next day as we go into our fun phases for photo shop and our for editing photos but we'll we'll work and photo shop a little bit over the next two days but this is a light room class and so were mostly going to be in light room we won't go to too many other programs although we will go to a couple and then of course we export the images we exported the images and we're going to deliver those images to our web solutions on by the way on day three we're going to talk about using published services to deliver to the web rather than exporting and then uploading we can let light room do all that for us so we'll talk about that a little bit too on dh then we can also work on making proof books or album designs you sauce remove the rejects and put him in the rejects folder we'll talk more about album design and proof books and stuff on on wednesday on dh then we converted to dmg I didn't export ex mps because the dmg has all the data in it if you insisted on keeping your original raws instead of going to dmg that's when you would export ex mp and to do that you would simply go up to the metadata menu and save the meditated to the files that's how you go that direction I don't prefer that direction I think it's the wrong direction to go because then you have two files that could be separated I prefer the dmg method but if you wanted to stay with just your original raw images then when you're done highlight all your images and instead of converting to dmg over here in the library right there just go to the metadata and hit command ass and save it to the files and that's how you would save all that information the key to that the reason that you're making the dmg or exporting ex mp is number one you want to fail safe just in case the catalog goes south you have the ability to find the information in the ex mp and if you then imported it into light room again it would rebuild and it would see all the changes you've made because they accept peace with the file either is a d n g or a sidecar file so that's good but if you if you that the second reason to do it is and this is only for d n gs second reason to do it is that you want to be crossed searchable on dh the on ly way to make raw images searchable anywhere outside of light room is to put the metadata into the dmg so that you have the ability to search through your system or through bridge to find those images so that's the way to find that on dh then of course we exported the catalogue and when we exported the catalogue it came out to our archive dr and we did it with all of the other sub no rejects but all the other stuff came with it so that the everything that's, everything that we ever did for the jobs in that archive job folder we coffee did it and then we confirmed it with our delta walker and then once we confirmed it then we can get rid of it at the same time that we were doing that, we delivered some d n g s and p s keys to our portfolio into the new additions folder and then when we open our portfolio catalog that will be able to look at the new editions folder and import anything new there on dh then of course we deliver j pegs to our client and we did that either through various web services or we did it through our disks or proofs or whatever whatever whatever you used to deliver so that's what we've accomplished today now are there any questions always questions from over here okay um okay so I'm gonna start with thompson world wanting to know how large your ss derives in your working drive system are so these are two hundred fifty six gigabytes right here um they're not as big as you would like them to be but but they will hold three or four five jobs depending I mean if it's a wedding it will hold a couple jobs three or four jobs maybe but the ideas that you need to move them through so I think the smaller the drive maur it forces you to be really good at your work clothes so it might actually be to your disadvantage to buy two terabyte drives is a working dr because it gives you this false sense of oh I've got plenty of space I can let that go for awhile and so that's that maybe good but you can get up you can get uh five hundred gigabyte drive solid state um out being h photo for right now um what did I say? It was two hundred and thirty dollars apiece something like that so in the end it was about six hundred dollars for two solid state five hundred and five hundred twelve gigabyte solid state drives that air good quality drives on dso at that price that's a pretty good deal for a very fast driving once you put a solid state drive on either a fiery one hundred or a usb three. Or it or even better, is a thunderball that the speed of that is insanely fast and especially, if you mean, you know, with this little thing right here, this little this little thunderball connector from c gate, will you plug this guy into a thunderball and you plug one of these solid states into it? And the and the speed at which it operates is phenomenal, you know? So I can't wait for raid ones to be available on a regular basis with thunderbolt, because then that kind of speed is just and light room is dependent on that speed. Light room is a memory hog. It really wants a lot of ram. It needs a fast cpu, and it needs a good connection to a hard drive that is solid state, because it's constantly looking at those files, it's constantly looking at the at the catalog and it's constantly drawing to those other images and pulling him in there's just so much that it's doing it really needs all that. And so the faster you khun faster drive, you can get it, and the faster connection, the better off it's going to be, so, um I just think solid states the way to go. Yeah, but you just have to it's an investment. But you again, if you the on ly way and we were talking about this the only way to make an investment like a solid state and rationally do it is to start implementing this philosophy, which is a working, driving away working cattle where things come in to get done and they get out is the on ly way to implement another catalog lean? Yeah, because otherwise you keep pounding by new drives, which are way too expensive. If you do this all on spinning drives, you know, sky's the limit you can get four terabyte drives now for almost nothing, so you know, but then you're going, you'll end up using the whole drive like, three years later, you're like how I really should get that job done. Yeah, so a question from mike d wanting to know did the light room default settings work for d n gs on lee, or will they work for raw sea? Are two files as well? Rod people think he's talking about camera default camera defaults are are input presets based on by the camera itself, so when it sees a camera file coming in, it reads the camera and says, oh that's a mark two or a mark three and then it applies the settings that you want applied to it and those air applied in the catalogue so it doesn't matter what the fight could be a jpeg and it wouldn't matter it just it's just going to apply settings from that camera two the files whatever files coming in could be a d e n g could be a it doesn't matter cool and then we also have a question um the beauty of the lake would want wanted to know if you could actually show how you make different folders within the export preset menu oh yeah eso I go the export dialog box here and so inside of this let me kind of move in here so if I go toe add a preset click on it and it gives me a dialog box and then I get to choose the folder and at the very top there's a new folder right at the very top so when I click on new folder I get to name the folder so I'm going to call this c l test for uh what's what's her lake beauty of the lake beauty of the lake so I just made a folder in honor of her awesome handle name and create and so now whatever preset I put in there is going to go to that beauty of the lake folder so I'm just gonna call it uh ut and hit create and so now there's a beauty of the lake folder somewhere. There it is right there. Test there's the test lake full of test beauty of the lake folder and there's. That beauty preset right there. Cool and actually a really nice, um, nice kind of fishing question here again, from beauty of the leg. Could you talk to us about your thought process about when you're choosing one, two, three, four or five stars for an image what's that what's that workflow for you were so p for me, a pic is just the client gets to see it. If it's picked, the client gets to see it. If it's not it's rejected and thrown on the rejects drive, one star means that I like it more than a pick. It means that I if if one stars for me, if I were the client, what would I want to see and that's very different than what the client sees. Because the client gets to see, like, on a wedding. I might, you know, provide in this case, the altman wedding. They get four hundred ninety's four images. So almost five hundred images are being shown to the client. If that were my wedding, I would show myself two hundred fifty images. But I hedge my bets and give them a little bit more because there's maybe family that they might react differently to or maybe they want to see more of this family or give them some more options so I give them a looser collection so that they can make some decisions on their own I'm not giving them, you know, uh, subtle variations on every image I'm not giving them, you know, five or six options on every pose, things like that I'm trying to choose those down as much as possible, so they get like a smiling in a serious or one looking at the camera when looking away, you know, stuff like that, but the one stars if I were choosing the job for me, what would I show myself? Two stars usually ends up being an album what would be in a book? What tells the story without any additional spill over and then three stars? What would go into my portfolio now? I know that quite frankly, that didn't turnout on my daughters and I don't really know I'm actually confused is how I got so many three star images it may be that I was doing I was teaching something and I just selected all hit three or something, but uh usually I would that wouldn't be much they're far less three star images I think that's just a mistake, but three start to mia's portfolio worthy stuff so if I were really looking at those images that that new year's day party would probably be like fifteen images from that that would go to the portfolio and then a four star image would be like something that's just mind blowingly cool and then a five star just doesn't exist andi I try not to even do four stars because a four star image I need someplace to go once against the portfolio I need to be able to increase from there so once I get to the portfolio then foreign five star become more relevant relevant and actually become mohr they happen more often but that's because I'm raising them from the rest of the crew so four in a five star in the portfolio just means they're better than the stuff that was in the portfolio but that's that's that's the methodology be tined you know the starring three is really kind of should be your top that way you have places to go in the portfolio without going crazy because once if you get to five stars within your job what do you do in the portfolio right? How do you do start downgrading everything that makes them feel bad? You know colors started six seven eight nine so yeah so I prefer to stay at about three stars and below on dh then use the portfolio for five stars

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Essentials Preset Collection
Outsource Pack
SnackPack Preset Collection
Making a Sync Box
Schematics
Presets Made on CreativeLive
Working Files - Images
Course Schedule
Great Deals
ShootDotEdit Catalog Template

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Jared is the best. Really, his class was absolutely awesome. He can teach you everything with an ease and you will not want to leave your computer untill you see the whole class. I am so happy I purchased this class, it was the best investment! Than you Jared for such a brilliant classes you bring to us.

a Creativelive Student
 

It takes a lot of devotion to spend so many hours in front of the computer but I found myself not able to leave the monitor. Thank you Jared Platt and Creative Live for providing this quality education and information. We also get the bonus of seeing beautiful images during the sessions. Jared is a wonderfully clear teacher. His extensive experience both behind the camera and in processing digital photography is so very evident in all that he covers in his seminars. I'm looking forward to the next time.

jane
 

I believe that this man has saved my life, or at the very least returned my life me. So many wonderful tips and time savers. I had never realized how much time I wasted at the computer for no good reason. He is funny, easy to listen too, and he explains in a way that can be understood. If you could only purchase one course, this is it! I attended WPPI and Jared's Platform Class and at the end I wanted more so thank you Creative Live for have him.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES