Transcripts
1. Batch Process a Shoot in Lightroom Classic and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, batch process, a shoot in Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the graphic design for lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today we're going to look at batch processing in Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw. We're going to talk about the situations in which you may want to use batch processing, and how you're going to go about doing it. If you're watching these videos using a browser, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read, and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started batch processing in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. We're going to start with Adobe Camera Raw.
2. Pt 1 - ACR Batch Edit - Method 1: When you're talking about batch editing, what you're talking about is applying a series of edits to more than won image at a time. The reason you may want to do this is it's just a whole lot more efficient, if you've got a whole lot of images that need the same treatment, then being able to edit them all at once makes better sense than doing it individually. It's most appropriate for photographers who shoot series of images that are all taken in a similar situation. For example, this might be appropriate for a wedding photographer, where you're taking a lot of shots of your bride and groom, you would be able to batch process the images particularly those that were shot in a single location in similar lighting conditions. It would also be appropriate for product photographers, for studio photographers, where you're under controlled lighting situations and where you can expect that most of the images in the shoot are going to be similar in terms of lighting. Here's a shoot that I did of a young rescued kitten. Obviously, these five images have similar lighting. They're all taken within a short period of time. The kitten is being held by somebody with a dark shirt and they all have a similar sort of lighting look to them. These could all be batch processed. But these where the kitten has been moved and is now being held by somebody with a much lighter shirt, you can see that the lighting is very different in these. Even though they were shot on the same day in the same lighting conditions, this is a different batch of images. I could process these five images all at once and I could process these five all at once. But I probably wouldn't get a lot of mileage out of batch processing all of these together because these are just dissimilar shoots. Let's seen how we would go about batch editing just these first five images. The first thing we need to do is to select them. I'm going to click on the first, and then I would hold the Shift key down as I click on the last, and that just selects all these images. If I didn't want to include one image, this is how I'd do it. I'd click on the first image, and then I would just hold down the Control or Command key on the Mac, and just select the images that I did want to edit, leaving out any images that I don't. But in this case I do want to select all of them. I'm going to do so. Now I'll just right-click and I can choose 'Open in Camera Raw.' You can get to that too from the File menu and there's also this little icon here, which is an open in Camera Raw icon. I'm going to click here and open in Camera Raw. Once we're open in Camera Raw you'll see that this image hear has a sorted of blew border around it. This image is selected and write now if I edit it, only this image is being affected, you can see nothing's happened to the other images. Let me just reset this back to what it was. If we want to edit all these images at once, we'll just click on the first one and shift click on the last one. This is the one that we're seeing here, it's got this border around it. But if I make changes to the image, you'll see that the changes flow through to all the other images. Whenever you see that little yellow exclamation mark, all that's telling you is that Adobe Camera Raw is just trying to create a preview for you. It'll disappear really quickly and it's really annoying because it draws your attention, you think there's something wrong but there isn't anything wrong so you can just happily ignore it. Any changes I'm making to this image now, here, are being reflected in all the other images. If you want to see a different image as a reference image, just click on it to select it and then hold the Shift key as you select the other images. Then hold the Shift quay as you click on the other images. You can click on this one and still holding the Shift key, click on this one. This is the reference image you can see it's already got the change that I maid previously, but I can also make changes now just referring to this one but they're flowing through to all the other images. You have a choice about which image you use as your reference image. Provided all these images are selected, then Adobe Camera Raw is going to flow the changes through to all of these images.
3. Pt 2 - ACR Batch Edit - Method 2: In the last video, we looked at the process of editing a whole series of images all at once so that the changes we made were being applied to every single one of these images. Having gone through that process, you may now feel that you want to make changes on an individual basis, and you can do that. What you need to do is to de-select the other images. So I'm going to click on this one and you can see that when I did, the other images were de-selected. Now, because this is the only selected image, any changes that I'm going to make to this image are going to be made to it alone. I'm just going to increase the exposure on it because I think it needs a little bit more exposure. The others have not been altered. If I go now to this image and look at it and think, well, maybe it was the same as the other one and I should have given it the same amount of exposure, let's see how we would deal with that. I'm going to select both of these images, but I'm going to make sure that the blue area is surrounding the image that has the changes that I want to flow through to this image. That's really important. I'll right-click and choose Sync Settings. Now I get an option to sync the settings from this image onto this image, and I can choose which settings I want to sync. In this case, I only made an exposure change, so I could select, Check None and just click on Exposure and now only the exposure change will be flowed through to this image. If there were multiple changes I've made to this image alone, then I can be selective here about which of those changes I want to flow through to this other selected image. I'm choosing exposure. I'll click Okay and you can see that the exposure adjustment has now flowed through to this image. You have multiple options here in Adobe Camera Raw when it comes to batch editing your images. You can either select all the images at once and edit them as a group, or you could edit one and then flow the changes through to the other images. When you do that, you can be selective about the changes that flow through. But what happens if you're not pre-prepared? What happens if you don't think ahead? Well, let's look now and see how we can still use a batch processing process, but when we think about it after the fact and not before.
4. Pt 3 - ACR Batch Edit - Method 3: I'm back here in bridge and I'm going to take just this one image into Adobe Camera Raw, and I'm going to make some edits to it. I obviously need to increase the exposure here and I want to increase the saturation of blue just a little bit. So I have saturation selected here because these kitten's eyes really were an amazing blue color. I'm going to bring down the highlight a little bit and I'm just going to check for a white and a black point. I'm holding Alt or Option as I check for my white point and Alt or Option as I check and fix a black point. So this is the adjustment I've made to this image and I'm looking at it now and thinking, well, I have four other images that were all shot in the same sequence. It would be nice if I could apply these adjustments to all those four images all at once. But it's a little bit late for that because I haven't brought these images into Adobe Camera Raw. Well, I can always create a preset. So I'm going here to the presets panel, and I'm just going to click here, and I'm going to choose "Save Settings". I'm going to select all these settings because I want all of these settings to be applied to the other images and I'll click "Save". Now in situations like this where you have a temporary need for a preset, you'll probably want to give your preset a name like AAA, so it appears at the top, and so it's going to be very easy for you to remove later on. Now this little kitten's name was Fergus. So I'm just calling this AAA Fergus shoot and I'm going to click "Save". Now I'm going to click "Done" because I'm finished with this image, but I need all these images. So I'm going to click on this one, Shift click on this one, right-click, and I'm going to open in Adobe Camera Raw. These images have not been fixed, but I can select this one and Shift click on the last one so all four images are now selected. Now I'm going to my preset. Here it is at the very top. I'm going to click on it. You can see that the changes are now being added to every single one of these photos. Like we did before, we can go to individual photos and say, well, you know what, that fix wasn't enough for this image. So it needs a little bit of something else. So in this case I'm going to move on and edit this image just a little bit because it needs a little bit of extra attention over and above what the other images got.
5. Pt 4 - ACR Export a Batch of Images: Before we finish up here in Adobe Camera Raw, let's have a look at the situation where we have processed a batch of images and we're really happy with exactly how they look here in Adobe Camera Raw. They don't need to go to Photoshop. We just want to save our changes. Now if we want to save our changed images but perhaps we want to get them ready to go out as a slide show, we can do that from inside Adobe Camera Raw. I'm going to select this image and I'm going to shift click on the topmost image so all four images are selected. Here is an option for saving images out of Adobe Camera Raw. The first option is where I'm going to save the images so I can send them to the same location. I can select a file naming convention if I want to. There all the typical file naming options that you have in Adobe Camera Raw that are available to you here. Now I'm actually going to call these Fergus. I want them to have sequential numbering, so I'm just going to choose a two digit serial number and that'll be like 01, 02, 03. I'm going to send them out as JPEGs. I'm going to add the extension.jpg, which automatically selects JPEG as the format. Now in the format options you can select to export them as Digital Negative, JPEG, TIFF, or Photoshop, but I'm going to select JPEG. I can select what of the metadata I have in these files is going to be saved with them. I can also set the quality. For example, if it were going out to Facebook or to a client website, probably High would be sufficient. For the color space, if I'm sending it to the web, I'm going to be choosing sRGB. I can also resize the images at this point just for this save. So I'm going to select "Resize to Fit". I'm going to select the "Long Side". So that means that the long side of all of these images, I'm just going to specify as 750 pixels. I can sharpen if I wish, so I'm going to sharpen for "Screen". Now if I click "Save", the images are all going to be rendered according to the settings that I've specified and saved as JPEGs. But of course, I still have the original DNGs open here in Adobe Camera Raw. If I click "Done", then the changes that I've made are going to be written back into the DNG files. If you're working with Camera Raw files, then they're going to be saved to Sidecar XMP files. So that next time you open this image, it's going to look like this. The changes are going to be written back to the DNG images, but you also have the option from Adobe Camera Raw to export your images in another format so that basically, with a single shoot, you could do a lot, if not all of your processing, here in Adobe Camera Raw and you would never take the images to Photoshop. I'm just going to click "Done" so that the changes to these images will be written to the DNG files. Here, we're back in Bridge and as expected, we have our Fergus images. This is the four JPEGs that I exported. Here are the original five images from that shoot. This one was not included in that export so that's why we don't have a companion JPEG for it. Here are the other DNG files that we edited earlier. You can do a lot in Adobe Camera Raw. If you don't have specific need to go to Photoshop, then you can not only do your editing in groups, in batches, but you can also export the images in a format that makes sense to you for whatever purpose it is that you need those images for.
6. Pt 5 - Lightroom Batch Edit - Method 1: The same reasoning applies in Lightroom as it does in Adobe Camera Raw for batch processing your images. You would do this whenever you have a large number of images that have all been shot in similar lighting conditions. The situations you might have in portrait shoots with controlled lighting, product shoots. You may also find this if you're a wedding or an event photographer, and sometimes just in the shoots that you do when you're shooting a lot of images that are all in similar lighting conditions. Obviously this series of images across the top here are all of this rescue kitten all shot in similar lighting conditions. Here we have the same kitten, a series of four images, all similar lighting conditions, but very different to this. Again here another series of the same kitten, again shot in similar lighting conditions. Let's see how we would go about processing these images in Lightroom using the batch processing features that Lightroom has built in. Well, in this case, I'm going to start by processing these images. I'm going to click on the first one, and I'm going to hold the Shift K and click on the last of the images. This one is the most selected image. Lightroom shows selected images with slightly lighter gray borders around them, and the most selected image is quite a bit whiter. When you have these images selected, if you just click here on another image, you'll see that it becomes the most selected image. Hear again, the most selected image by selecting on the actual image, I can change which image it is that Lightroom is focusing on. If I go to the Develop module now, it's this image we're going to see, and here it is in the Develop module. You can see it here in the film strip, but all these images are selected. But just because they're selected doesn't mean anything specific it's going to happen to them write now. Let's go and adjust this particular image. I'm going to increase the exposure on it because it's grossly underexposed. You can see here in the film strip that this image in the film strip is showing a thumbnail that is clearly better exposed, but nothing has happened to these other images. Unlike Adobe Camera Raw, for example, the simple process of selecting the images on the filmstrip, doesn't result in them being edited as a series, and the edits are not flowing through to the other images in the series. Let's just zero this back out. I'm going to double - click on the word "Exposure" to take it back to where it was. If we want the changes that we're making to this image to flow through to all the other images, we have to tell Lightroom that that's what we want to happen. There's a sync option here. If you click here, you will see that it changes to Auto - Sync. We're flipping the switch, if you like. Now let's go and make a change to this image and watch the thumbnails across the bottom. In fact, I'm going to make the thumbnails a bit bigger for you so you can see them really clearly. Now I changed to one image is flowing through to all the other selected images, so we need to do two things in Lightroom. Firstly, we need to select all the images that we want to sync, and we need to turn Auto - Sync on, and then all the changes that we make are going to flow through to all these images. Here, all these images have now had these changes that I've made here, made to them. Now, there is a bit of a gotcha with Lightroom because that is later on. If you come here and select the series of images for whatever purpose, the auto - sync option is still enabled, and so if you start making changes now, it's going to happen to all these images, even though there's nothing similar in terms of lighting in those images. You're going to want to be really careful when you turn Auto - Sync on, to make sure that you turn it off when you don't actually want the changes to be synced across all the images that you have selected.
7. Pt 6 - Lightroom Batch Edit More Methods: Now, sometimes it's possible that you won't think ahead in terms of editing. Let's go to this image and let's make some minor edits to it. Obviously, the exposure needs to be beefed up, and it probably needs a little bit of white balance here as well. Probably going to take some detail out of the shadows and increase clarity a bit. If I look at this image and say, "Oh, then I've made all these changes to this image. I really wanted to make the same change to these other images that were shot at the same time," you have a few options. One of them is to just go and click on this next image. You'll see here that there's an option called previous. What previous does, is if you click it, is it takes the edits from the previous image and applies it to this image. You can roll the changes through a series of images. Another possible option is to go back to the image that you made the changes in, right-click, and choose "Settings," then you have options such as Copy Settings. What this allows you to do is to select the settings that you want to move forward to other images. For example, I'm going to click "Check None" and say I just want to move the basic tone adjustments over, but not clarity or vibrance. We'll, I'll just select the tonal changes to this image that I want to copy onto another image and click "Copy." Now, I can select another image, right-click, choose "Settings," and choose "Paste Settings." In this case, only the settings that I chose to have copied and pasted onto this image are actually made and clarity and vibrance, which although they were changed in this image here, are not actually altered in this image because the settings were not pasted onto this image. Another situation that you might encounter in lightroom is that you've got some settings that you want to apply to an image that's actually not available to you at the time. I'm working on a collection write now. So I've only got a subset of the images that I want to edit. But say I've selected all four of these images, and I'm just going to edit those a little bit. I'm just making some really minor edits to them. I'm going to Alt or Option drag on the white setting to set a white point and Alt or Option drag on the blacks just to set a black point. I've adjusted this image, but of course it hasn't been synced across the other images because I didn't select to do so. Since these images are selected, I can click "Sync" and then "Synchronize." The changes are now synced across all the series of images. But I know that I took some other images off the cat in this location, in this light, and I might want to apply these changes to those images later on. Well, it would be possible for me later on to found one of these edited images and copy and paste the settings from it onto another image. But I could also, at this point, take advantage of presets. So I could click here and just add another preset. Since I known that this was a Fergus shoot, the little kitten's name is Fergus, I might call this Fergus striped shirt. I want to select all the options here so that I can apply them to any other image that was shot in the same sequence, and I'll click "Create." Now I can go back to the folder in which those images were located. Here's another image from that same sequence that hasn't been edited. I can open it in the develop module. I'll go back to my Presets. Here is the Fergus striped shirt preset. If I click on it, those same changes are being applied to this image. Of course, this is going to need some editing because it's grossly overexposed by that edit. But I just need two wind back perhaps on the Exposure and a little bit on the highlights. But you can seen that you've got plenty of options for fast tracking your processing by batching your images together, either by processing them all at one time, or by copying the changes that you've maid to one image onto a series of other images, or a worst-case scenario is just creating a preset for that and using that later on to edit those images. If you don't want the preset later on, you can just right-click it and delete it. You won't be clogging up your presets with presets that are only used on a temporary basis, and by deleting a preset, it's not going to have any effect on the image because a preset is nothing more than a set of settings. So if you delete the preset, the image is still going to be adjusted the way that it was set up in that preset.
8. Pt 7 - Lightroom Export a Batch of Images: Now, I'm back in the library view for this small collection of images that we've just been editing and we're going to look now at the process of getting these images out of Lightroom once they've been batch processed. If you wanted to make individual adjustments to any of these images, you can do so, but if you're happy with the adjustments as they are now, you will select on the first of the images you want to export and shift click on the last. If you don't want to export all of these images, you would just click on the first image that you want to export, hold the control or command key on the Mac, and then just select the additional images that you want to add to this export. Right-click and choose Export and then export again. In the export dialogue, you can select where you want to send these images. So you can choose a specific folder. You can select whether you want to rename the images and you've got similar process here to the process that you would have had in Adobe Camera Raw. I'm going to choose Custom name and sequence, so the custom name is going to be Fergus, the name of this kitten, and I've got a start number here of two that I'm just going to change to one. So this is going to be Fergus 1, Fergus 2, Fergus 3 etc. In the file settings, I can choose the export format. So for example, if this were going to the web in a slide show or going to Facebook, then I would select JPEG. I would select color space as sRGB if it's going to the web, and I'll select a quality generally for the web about 80 percent is just fine. You can size the image. In this case, I'm going to re-size the long edge of these images, I'm looking at a sequence of landscape images so I'm going to set their longest edge to 1000 pixels. The shortest edge is going to be automatically adjusted to whatever it needs to be to keep these images in proportion. I'll sharpen for screen just a standard amount. I can select here what metadata is included in the images on export. After export, I can determine what I want to see and in this case, I want to see the images in Explorer on a Mac that would read, see, and find that. I can also click Choose and go and select the location for these images. I'm actually going to make a folder that's going to read edits. To put them in a different folder, I'll click Select folder and now I'll click Export. The images have now been exported as JPEGs. They're all sRGB format and they've all been sized to 1000 pixels on their longest edge with their shortest edge being whatever it needs to be to keep them in proportion. Whenever you have a series of images that have been shot in similar lighting conditions, batch processing can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend editing your images, and of course nothing set in concrete, any one of these images can be reopened in the develop module and you can apply specific edits just to this image. Batch processing at the very least will give you a good start to processing your images saving you a lot of time and effort. The beauty of it is that you don't really need to think about it ahead of time, it certainly helps you if you do, but even if you think about it after you've edited the first one or two images, you can easily copy and paste the settings onto other images effectively getting the same benefits as if you'd edited them all together in the first place.
9. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to process a series of images using the sync options or the batch processing options available to you in either Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. Locate the series of images and use the sync options or create a pre set or in Lightroom, just copy and paste the settings from one image to the next. So you can see it first hand how you could benefit from the batch editing tools built into these applications. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about the batch processing and sync options available in your choice of software whether it be Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
