Lightroom Classic: Supercharge Your Workflow

1. L1 Introduction: What's up? My name is Ian Jukes. I'm an English photographer based in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. I have a bachelor's degree in visual communications, specializing in photography. I have been an Adobe Lightroom user since 2007, which is when it was released. Here are a few photos that I've taken during my time in Taiwan. This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn about the photographic workflow. Anyone who wants to use Lightroom in a more productive and effective way. My philosophy on photography is to keep it simple and spend more time shooting and less time editing. With that in mind, I have developed a workflow system that utilizes the smart collections within Adobe Lightroom. This workflow encourages you to be fast and efficient. Now I want to share that workflow system with you. This is what you will learn. The principles of digital asset management. These will help keep your images safe and find them in the future when you need to. How to incorporate apps and plug-ins into Lightroom to make it more efficient. How to build a series of smart collections that really boost your workflow. How to set up your screen to make the culling process lightening fast. How to better apply keywords and metadata. How to apply the workflow to shoots you did in the past. Are you ready? Let's jump right in. 2. Class Project: Let's talk about the class project. For this class, it's very simple. All I would like you to do is go out with your camera, take some images and then add them to Lightroom and work through the workflow as I show you. Okay, and then afterwards at the end you will have a number of images marked as done. Simply create a contact sheet and then share it. I'd like to see what kind of images you can come up with. See you in the next lesson. 3. The Principles of DAM: The principles of digital asset management, the first one obviously, don't lose the images. We need to keep our images save. Secondly, find the images when you need them. This might sound stupid, but trust me, in a few years, when you want that image of the dog with a cute bow in its hair, you won't find it unless you carefully add keywords and metadata. Next one, save time. If you have a good system in place, a good workflow in place, it will save you time in the long run. The next one is software independence. Obviously, this course is based upon Lightroom, but what happens if you decide to change your mind five years from now and switch to a different software. You want to be able to take your images out of the system we use now and use them. Systems in the past, such as Aperture from Apple, often locked the images inside of the software. And if you wanted to change, it was very difficult. So software independence is important. And forward compatibility. We want to know that ten years time, 20 years time from now we can still open the images that we have. And finally, peace of mind. If you have a system in place that is keeping your images safe, helping you to find them. And you know that everything is in order. You feel much more relaxed about your photography. Okay, let's move on to the next video. 4. Workflow Overview: Okay, time to discuss the workflow. Step one, copy images to a folder. So insert the memory card and copy the images over to your computer. I typically use a folder that I created called Import me. The benefits are it creates an initial short-term backup. We can add multiple memory cards, and it makes the next stage simple. The next stage is to add geotags at GPS metadata to our images. For this, I use software called Geotag Photos Pro 2 This makes the process very simple and effortless. Moving on to import into Lightroom. So we open Lightroom and plug-in the external hard drive. This external hard drive is the home for all of my images. The images in the Import me folder get copied across photo library. During this process, Lightroom will add, or auto create folders, rename the images, and it will also apply global metadata. Now we get to the main part of this workflow, which is the smart workflow. Using a series of smart folders, the images get processed through the system. So the first part of the system is the initial cull. So we use pick flags. We use pick and reject flags to decide which image is moved through. So only pick flags progress. The next stage is rate using stars. And only images that are three-star or better will progress to the next stage. The next stage is to add keywords and metadata. I only add keywords and metadata to good images. There's no point spending time adding keywords that all of your images only add this stuff to the images that are important to you. Next step, edit, and finally, mark them is done. The final part of the puzzle is the backup. As mentioned, all the images live on the photo library hard drive. So I use software called Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact copy of this photo library. I also have a Western Digital. My Passport Wireless Pro. This has a built-in SD card reader. This enables me to take the memory card that we imported earlier and inserted into here and copy across all of the files. So even if I choose to delete the rejected images in the photo library, I will still have them here on this drive. The final stage is to have a Cloud backup. You can use a service such as Backblaze to make an online backup of your computer, your hard drives, keeping everything safe. Okay. Time to move on to the next stage. 5. Recommended Tools: Okay, it's time to talk about tools. These are my recommendations. You don't have to use them. But I find that they speed up my workflow and make my images is more secure. The choice is yours. The first one I use is Geotag Photos Pro. This adds geotags to my Images and helps me to find them based upon location information. It's simple to use, and I find it brilliant when it comes to keywording. This is one of the areas that people often overlook or they struggle with because it's very tedious to do. Wordroom is a plugin that can automatically suggest up to 30 keywords depending on the photo is free to use, and I like to use your, I think it's wonderful. Keeping our images safe is very important. So I use Carbon Copy Cloner, so make an exact copy of my photo library. So my photo library lives on at least two drives. This is Mac only. So I did some research into Windows software and came up with this. They offer a free trial so, for you Windows users. Give it a shot, check it out. Let me know what you think. The final tool is a Cloud backup service called Backblaze. This backs up everything. He packs up your computer, your hard drives, and keeps them safe on the Cloud. I'm not sure whether it does network attached storage. I don't think so. If you use a network attached storage solution, I suggest that you contact them. Okay, That concludes the video on tools. Let's move on to the next stage. 6. Workflow Setup: I'm inside of a new Lightroom catalog. And before we get started on the actual setup, I just want to check a few preferences. So we go to Lightroom Classic Preferences. And in the general tab, I like to make sure that the show import dialog when memory card is detected is unchecked. I don't want Lightroom to open every time I plug in a memory card. That's the first one to check. And the second one, is in Catalog Settings on the third tab. So general file handling metadata, I like to make sure that automatically write changes into XMP is checked. This helps if we decide to move our images to a different software. Then the next thing to check is the address lookup. So make sure that these two are checked. The first one, lookup city, state, and country of GPS coordinates to provide address suggestions is really helpful because you remember that we are adding geotags. So when images have geotags and they get imported into Lightroom, Lightroom will automatically look up the address and insert it into the location fields in our metadata. Next, we will actually talk about the collections. We're getting to the most exciting part of the course really, because a lot of the workflow hinges on the collections. So before we set it up, I'm just going to show you just a quick recap on what collections can do. So if we tap on the collections there, you can see that I have the smart collections is like a default one. This is what Lightroom makes by itself. But the one above it is the one that I made. So this is the Skillshare workflow. As you can see, we have a number of collections inside of this. Before I show you exactly what these are, I'm going to just do a quick recap on what collections are and how they work. If we click on the Plus, you'll see that we have some options. The first one, create collection. This just creates a standard collection. So we can choose which images go inside and which ones don't. Simple as that. We can choose. The next one, create smart collection. Smart collections. The images displayed are dependent upon the criteria that we set. So images only get displayed inside if they match the criteria, if they match the parameters. And the third option here is create collection set. A collection set is like a folder or a box in which other collections can live. For example, here, this Skillshare Workflow is a collection set and the job is a collection. And the others here are smart collections. Sort by name, sort by kind, I leave it on sort by name purely because if you look at the structure of mine naming of these collections, it started 0,1,2,3,4,5. So if we change it to kind, watch what happens. I lose this flow because Job has gone to the bottom. It's better to keep it set to sort by name. And the final option here is to show the collection filter. That's just this little box at the top. Okay, So let's dive into this workflow. We have a collection set called workflow and the first one inside is called job. This is just a standard collection. You can't do anything to it. You can't open it, all you can do is transfer images to it or take images out of it. You'll notice there's a little plus here. This plus means that this is the target collection. If I right-click this, you will see that set as target collection is ticked. That means if you want to add images to this collection, if you press B, while the images are selected, they will be added to the collection. If they're inside of the collection and you select them and press B, they will be removed. So it's like a toggle to put images inside and put images outside this folder, this collection, sorry, is crucial to the workflow because we only want the workflow to actually work upon the images that are inside of this collection. Let's move on to the first smart folder, which is called cull. If I double-click it, we can see what's inside. So this one looks fairly simple, right? So it's number one cull. And the first parameter here is collection. Now, if I expand this, you will see that we have loads of options here. The first one is source collection and contains all the job name here. So this basically says only look at images that are inside of this job collection, don't look anywhere else. And what we want to cull is at the pick flag is unflagged. Next one is rate. So after we've culled our images, the next step is to rate them. So again, the first parameter is the collection because we only want, as I said before, images in this job collection to be referenced. So this time, the pick flag needs to be flagged and the rating needs to be less than a star. That means is that once we've, once we've culled the images, we put them into here and then once we start adding, adding stars to them, they will start disappearing from the rate and go to the next stage. This is like a workflow is stage that we go through. The reason I created this is because I was very, well, it wasn't disciplined when it came to processing images. I would be jumping around from one thing to another and I'd leave things half, half flagged and half rated and stuff. And I'll just edit the images with the best. And it just wasn't a very methodical workflow. This one's much better. Okay, so the next step is keywords and metadata. This one starts to get complicated. I have to warn you, it gets complicated from now on. So the first one is the same, the collection, job, pick, flag picked. This time, the rating needs to be greater than or equal to three stars. Because what I want to set up is the fact that we don't want to be adding keywords and metadata to all of our images. We only want to add them to the best images. That's a key, one of the key fundamentals to the system. Because adding keywords and metadata takes a lot of time. So don't add them to images that are mediocre, only add them to your best images. Okay, So let me delve into this in a bit more detail. So this first one, match all of the following rules. So the collection, pick flag and rating. It must match all of these. Now the next one is different. It's if any of these, sorry, if any of the following are true. Now, to access this, you have to have a modifier key. On Mac you hold down Option. Pretty sure that that's gonna be Alt on Windows. And watch what happens to the plus sign here. Because let me just show you something. We can add parameters and we can take them away. Just by clicking on the little plus or minus. So this one, if you want to get this option, you have to hold down the Option or the Alt key. And then this changes to a hash sign. And if I click on this and expand it, but you will see now I have another one of these conditional things. Okay? So if I click on this, you'll see any of the following are true. We can have all of the following are true or none of the following are true. Now, for images to go to the next stage, they have to be what I would consider to be done. So they must have a title, they must have a caption, they must have keywords, and they must have GPS data. This is the only way that we can do it is using this system. So title is empty, caption is empty. Keywords are empty, GPS data is empty. Okay, so if any of these are true, it will not pass to the next stage. That's crucial to understand this. It might take you a little bit of time to get your head round it. So I'm going to say, I'll actually, I'll just cancel so I don't bother messing it up. The next one, edits. Okay, let me expand this just a little bit. There we go. So this is a bit simpler than the previous one actually because there's less, less parameters to worry about. This time it must be in job, must be flagged. It must have three stars. The title is an empty caption is an empty keywords or an empty. But next time, any of the following are true. If it doesn't have adjustments and if it doesn't have a green label. Okay, So this is the same principle. We have to hold down the option key or the Alt key to get the special menu. But the reason I have this is because we need to have a label, because has adjustments is false. So if we didn't have the label and we started to make adjustments to the image. As soon as you change one little parameter, maybe the exposure or the shadows or whatever, the image would then be classed done because it's got an a, it's got one adjustment. So we need to keep it held in this state until we're ready. So the key is that we have adjustments is false. And then we can adjust the images to our heart's content. And once we're happy with the adjustments we've made, we just apply the green flag to that image and then it will go through to the next stage, which is done. Let me show you that one now. This is the done. So as you would expect, this one is pretty straightforward. It's just a long list of parameters. So collection is job, flagged three stars, title isn't empty, caption is an empty. Keywords on empty has adjustments is true, labor color is green, and GPS data is coordinates. Okay, So you have a choice. Now folks, you have a choice. You can either have an attempt to copy this system. So go through each one step-by-step and copy it. Or what I've done is I've actually exported this catalog out. Exporting the catalog is the only way that I can share smart collections with you. So you will find it as a download. What you can do is download the catalog and then you go to file, import from another catalog and then choose the downloaded catalog. This will put this collection of collections, if you like, inside of your Lightroom catalog. It will also add one thing which is one image. This one, which just says, just says, thank you for taking this class. You can delete it. Don't worry about this image, you can just delete it. That's the collection setup complete. Let's move on to the import stage. 7. Initial Copy: It's time to do the initial copy. As you can see, I have to finder windows open. My memory card is inserted. I'm going to copy the images from my memory card to a folder called Import Me, which lives inside of the Pictures folder on my computer. So I select the images by selecting the first one, then pressing Command-A to select them all. And that's Control-A on Windows and then drag them across. There are several reasons why I prefer to do this. The first one is it creates a backup to start with. The second reason is that you can add multiple memory cards this way. And the third reason is it makes it easy to add the geotags to our images, especially if there's more than one memory card. Okay, see you in the next video. 8. Add Geotags: A geotag adds the location where the photograph was taken. This can be incredibly useful when used in conjunction with the Map module within Lightroom, I use Geotag Photos Pro 2, to add tags. This is a two-stage process. The first stage uses a phone app to record GPS locations during your shoot. The second stage uses a desktop app to apply the geotags to the images. Let's see how it works. Tap the plus in the top-right corner to start a new trip. Then give the trip a name. I go with the suggestions the app provides. Then tap Done. Make sure your cameras date and time is set. Next, set the logging interval. I normally use thirty-seconds tap start to begin. The app will run in the background so you can do other tasks or lock your phone and put your phone in your pocket. When the shoot is over, tap Stop. Check that the data has been uploaded. Now onto part 2, the desktop app. The second part of the process to add geotags uses the desktop app. Click here, navigate to the directory, Import me, select it, and press open. The software will compare the photos to the data we recorded earlier using the phone app. Then it's just a matter of clicking Start geotagging. Then the software adds the geotags to the images. It's quick, easy, and very reliable. Okay, Next up is importing into Lightroom. See you there. 9. Lightroom Import: It's time to bring those images into Lightroom. So click the Import button, find the Import Me folder inside of Pictures. Then we choose the method here at the top. So I'm going to choose Copy to leave the originals there. I don't want to import duplicates. I don't want to make a second copy, but I do want to add to collection. And I want to add to the job collection. Renaming is fairly straightforward with one caveat. And that is that I add the original file name at the end. Why do I do this? I hear you ask? Good question and that is because at the end of each shoot, after I've imported the images, the memory card goes into another separate external drive. Those images never get renamed, they never get touched. It's just the original file names. So should I want to find one, I need to know what this filename is. Moving on. The next one, applied during imports. I have a basic metadata presets that just puts on my contact details and the copyright notice. The next one is the destination. So I organize by date and then year, month, day. For this example, I've made a separate folder called Skillshare library. And inside of that Lightroom will organize these files based upon their captured time. So it goes inside of 2022. May. And if you see this little grayed-out folder with a plus, it means that Lightroom is actually making this folder for us. So we don't need to make the folder. Lightroom will do that for us. Then it's a matter of just clicking Import. And if you see with the collections is open now, it's currently showing nothing. If I click on job, we have to wait for the images to be imported. There's not many, only about 47 images, I believe so. It shouldn't take long. There we go. The image are now inside of the Lightroom catalog and they're inside of the job collection. And as you'll see, we have 47 images in Job. Remember the first stage, the first stage is to cull the images, and they are here. So we have 47 images ready to be culled. That's for the next video. 10. Processing Overview: Processing overview. Before we use the workflow for real, I want to explain a few things. So the collections are open and the images are currently inside of the collection called job. When we use collections, images are not physically located inside of them. It's just a reference. If I right-click the image there and then go to folder in library, we can see exactly where in the library this image lives. Likewise, if I right-click and put Show in Finder, we can see that it's on the photo library, hard drive, skillshare library 2022, 05,19. Back to collections and to the job collection. So this is the process we have Job, Cull, Rate, Keywords, Edit, and oh, by the way, if you have jumped to this lesson and didn't do the previous ones, I strongly suggest that you go back and look at lesson six. Because in lesson six I go through the actual process of setting up these smart collections. So we have job. The first stage is cull, where we use pick flags to pick or reject. The next one, we use star ratings to choose which ones will progress through the system. So only images that are three-star or better, weill go to the next stage of keywords and metadata. Then once keywords, a title or caption has been added, then we can actually move to the Edit stage o. And GPS geotags needs to be added too. Then we can actually edit them and then finally mark them as done. Okay, Let's move on to part one of the workflow which is culling. 11. Culling: Now we start the process of actually culling the images. So make sure that the first smart collection is selected. Culll. Now, most people would at this point, probably press E on their keyboards to go to the first image. And then they would go through the images either using P or X. Like this. I used to do it this way, but I don't think this is the best way. And the reason for that is that you can't really see very clearly the images around this one. So if there are a number of images that are similar, It's very difficult to see which one possibly is the best. So what I do, I go back to that and I go back to the Grid View. And I like to go as big as possible with this. So I would hide the panels by clicking Shift and Tab that hides everything. And then I even go full screen. In my case, I have to press function and F that takes it full screen. Then I go one stage further by actually zooming in this view by pressing plus, I can actually come down. So I've only got like six images on display now, I'm using a 27 inch monitor. So it's quite good for this. If you're on a small monitor, it probably won't be quite as efficient. But now I can see six images. So the first one selected, and then all I have to do is choose. Do I want to keep it or don't want to get rid of it. Simple, a simple choice. And that's P or X on the keyboard. So just one finger on P, one on X, and away we go. So this one, I'll keep that one, I'll keep. Yeah, I like that one, that one, most of these I'll probably keep actually, pick that one's a bit of a nothing shot. X. Pick, pick, pick, pick, like beer so, pick this one. Yeah, pick. Be true, be your true self. Have to keep that one. This is a Vespa that's being used as a fence. I'll keep that one. And that and this is a very strange little parking lot, very small, only a few spaces. I think I'll just keep one of them. This one, not that one. That one's like an establishing shot for the market, So I'll keep it. Keep it. That one no. That one, no. Yes. Yes. Keep pick . Need two here I think so. pick. Reject, pick. Keep it. Keep it. Keep it. Yeah, I'll keep it on that one. This one no. That one, No. That one. This one didn't work out the way I wanted. So no. This one? No. That one, yes. For sure. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I like that one and that one. I have some similar here, so I think I'll get rid of this first one. Do I need a girl using her phone? No. And yeah, I'll keep that one on that one. So that's pretty much it. And if I just open up the panels at the side, let's see what's happened. So over here, the Job folder obviously still has 47 images in. But now the cull folder has gone to 0 because we've gone through them all. And the next one, the rate folder now has 34. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that there's a separate collection set here called status. If I click this one, there are a number of extra smart folders here. So I can see obviously 47 minus 34 is 13. So I can see there are 13 rejected images. If I click this one, I could, I could, if I wanted to revisit these and go through them again for a second time. But I'm not going to for this video. This one's done. Let's move on to the next stage, which is rating the images. 12. Rating: The next stage is to rate the images. Once again, make sure that this smart collection is selected. And then it's just a matter of going through and deciding how good the images are. Personally, don't judge me on these images. I went out just literally the other day to just shoot these. So there's nothing special in here. But nevertheless, this is just to give you a demo of the workflow. So we go through them and only only images there are three stars or above, will pass to the next stage of having keywords and metadata added to them. So bear in mind every time you click a three or four or five-star, it's giving yourself more work. So only assign those stars to images that you are prepared to put keywords and metadata run. So be, be wise at this point. Don't, don't just, like, say yay, That's three stars, that's three stars. You have to be smart here. Okay? So let's start with the first one. I'm going to do the same as I did before, where I will go to the go to the full-screen. This first one. Actually, I do, I do like that one because it's kind of both of the bikes together. So this one's going to have three. Don't forget, as soon as you put a star on these, they will disappear. That one's going to be three, two, three. To that one is a two, two, two two the Vespa, quite like three to two. You can do this very quickly. It makes it very efficient to work like this. That one I like It's a three, that one's a three, that one's a two, that one's a three to two. Nothing special, really. Nothing special. Nothing special. That one's special like that. And the rest of these, I'm just going to leave them at two because nothing really stands out at me, really. Nothing goes. Yeah, you know, I'm a three-star. Okay, so let's have a look back to the workflow. And now we have gone from 47 images in the job down to eight. Only these eight need keywords and metadata apply to them. Okay, Onto the next video. 13. Keywords and Metadata: The next stage is to add keywords and metadata. This is the stage that most people find difficult and problematic, but it needn't be so. Let's just see. So I'll just select one image here. The first thing to do in my opinion is to clean up this area because we have far too many things open here. If we select one of these headings, we can actually right-click it and then we can hide it so we don't need to see comments. We don't need to see the keyword list. We don't need the quick develop. This just simplifies the process for me anyway. So the top one is where we add the keywords and this one is where we add the metadata. You see we have different kinds of presets here. So this is the default one. The ones I typically use our defaults and I'll check the location one from time to time. So the location where you will see this data here has been automatically added because this image has geotags attached when it was imported. So Lightroom automatically puts this information in for us. Let's go back to the default one. Now this likely looks different to yours because I only have two things selected here. If we click customize, we can actually choose which options we show here. So I only have caption and title selected. Caption is inside of basic info and the title is inside of IPTC status. Click Done. So that's the basic overview of how the, how the setup should be to start with. Next up is the Wordroom. The plugin Wordroom is a plugin that helps us to keyword images. So select an image, go to library, plugin extras, auto keyword. We have the option now to choose which of the keywords is appropriate to the image. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good, but it gives us a good start. So I typically de-select them all first and then go through one by one and add them. So motor vehicle, vehicle, engine, wheeled vehicle transportation, conveyance, road, wheel, metallic transport, motor, metal, machine, and classic. You could add extra keywords here, but I choose to add them actually over here later. So next up is just click the Add to keyword tags and click Close. I'm just going to add an extra keyword and I'm going to call it scooter because there's no scooter tab there. So scooter and I will also add the name Vespa. Okay, I'm going to show you how to make it more efficient because having to go to library, Plugin extras and also keyword is quite slow if you have to do this many times, as you can see, I have a keyboard shortcut here. I'm going to explain how to do that now. Unfortunately, Lightroom doesn't allow us to change keyboard shortcuts, but we can do it with inside of the Mac OS. I think windows also has a similar option. So to do it means go to the System Preferences and choose Keyboard. Shortcuts. And down at the bottom we have App Sortcuts. This is the one that I created. So to do it, you just click the little plus here. And then you choose the application that you want. So for example, this one, Adobe Lightroom Classic. Then in the menu title, you need to add exactly three spaces, 1,2,3, and then enter the exact name of the menu command that you want, plus the keyboard shortcut that you want to use. So this one is Auto-keyword. Let me show you where that is. So library plug-in extras. And then here you have to do it exactly as this. Capitalize the a, don't and don't miss out the hyphen. And then that will allow you to just use the keyboard shortcut instead of having to search through the menu like that. Okay, so back to this image. To complete the image, a title and a caption needs to be added. So this is a scooter that's being used as a fence. So I'll just go in here and I'm just going to type in scooter fence. Then go to the next, next field by pressing Tab. Okay, there we go. As you can see, I've been practicing an old Vespa being used as a fence. There we go. So when I press Enter now to complete the caption, this image will disappear. That this means that that one is now moved on to the next stage, which is the edit over here. Okay? What happens when there are multiple images that are very similar, that could use the same keywords and the same metadata? Well, what I do is I select the first one because we have three here that are very similar. So the first one, I would use Wordroom again to add the keywords. So let's use the shortcut this time command and tilde. And we have some keywords here. I'm just going to add these without changing them because it's faster. So keywords have been added. Click Close. Now, I don't want to put the title and caption yet because if I do, this image will also disappear. So just select all three images and make sure that the selected photos is chosen here, not target photo. Okay? And then you can just go down here to sync metadata. And then you have to go through and see which ones are inside, but you can tick them or not tick them here. Down at the bottom should be keywords. Down here. Yeah, keywords. This is checked, so click Synchronize. And now each of these images will have the same keywords. And a similar process can be used for the title and the caption. So let me show you, click the first one. Shift-click to select all of them, and then we can put in the title. So old, old Kawasaki, press Tab to go to the next key. And old Kawasaki's in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, press Enter. And that applies them to all three at the same time. Then the same process is applied to the rest of you are rated images until you have no more images inside of this smart collection like this. So now the next step is to edit these images. Because each of them now has the metadata and the keywords added. See you in the next video. 14. Keyording Update: Hello folks, I've decided to add an extra video to this course because I found a better way or a different way to do keywording or to automate the keyword in process. So before we use Wordroom and we'll room works pretty well. But I find this solution now that I'm going to show you to be better or different, shall we say? Okay, so I have an image selected here of the Statue of Liberty. As you'll see, there are no keywords applied. So go to File, plug-in extras and any vision analyse. We are presented with a number of options here. I'm going to select Labels, landmarks and safety, and then just press, Okay. And it's very fast. And I think you will agree that this is a better, a better option than Word room, because you can actually do multiple images at the same time. Wordroom's a bit clunky when it came to actually doing many images together. Let me show you what I mean. Let me take an example of, let's go through one. Let's do a number of images like this. If I click file, plugin extras, analyse, keep it the same. Press. Okay. You can see he was busy. We see many, many keywords here because they're all selected. When it's finished, I'll just go through one-by-one to see what we've got. It's almost done. Okay, Let's finished. The first one. So this one is found, it's a sign. It says exit on there, which is good. The next one, statue of liberty, should be similar to the previous one. Let's go for this one. What do we get? Apartment building cityscape. Yeah, it's pretty good, isn't it? And this one is the history spear flag. This is the 911 memorial. By the way. This one commercial building. Didn't really notice that it's actually a fire station. This one it should notice emergency service, emergency vehicle, fire apparatus here. Good. This one should be the same. How about this one is one of the weird one. Yeah. Cone. It's found that it's found that it's a cone. So strange image, isn't it? Look at it. Anyway. Not to worry about that. Yeah, so I think this one works better because purely because we can actually add keywords to more than one image easily. And it seems very, very good. I'll show you where the plugin is, file Plug-in manager. And this one, any vision. Okay, I will now switch over to Safari and show you how to get this plugin. So open up Google. And then there's type in any Vision plugin. And it will be the first hit. John R Ellis. Now this website is very good. He goes into full detail about how you need to link up with Google to make this work and what you need to do. So let me just show you. You can try it for free, limited to 50 photos, and then you need to buy a license at a price you name. Now there's two parts to this. The first part is the pricing of the plugin, which is this one by licensed with a plugin. And I think it defaults to $10 or $9.99. But you can choose whatever price you want when you pay. It's like donationware once you've bought a license, you then need to link it up to Google. And if you follow the instructions here, actually, it tells you everything that you need to know to download and install the plug-in. And then you need to actually get a Google Cloud key. But if you go to this website and follow the instructions on this page, you should be good to go. Give it a shot and let me know what you think. Thanks. See you in the next video. 15. Editing: The next stage of the workflow is to edit the images. This is not a class about how to edit in Lightroom, so I'm not going to do too much of a fancy job. I'm just going to show you the process, okay? So just bear in mind one thing, bear in mind one thing. I'm just going to open up this smart collection before we start. And do you remember that obviously, it needs to be inside of job flagged three stars. Title isn't empty, caption isn't empty, keywords aren't empty. So now it's being kept in this collection because it has these two parameters. Adjustments is false. Color label is not green. So we start off by doing the edits. Once we're happy with the edits, then we hit the 8 key, which will apply the green label, and the image will disappear. So let's start with the first one. Go to D, to the develop module. And let's start simple edits. I'm just going to use the Auto key. Then I'm going to add a little bit of presence over here. Then a bit of vignette. Just to bring the eye in. Actually, I might change the I, change this to Acros. It's quite nice in color, isn't it? But now I'm going to keep it. I'm gonna make it Acros. I like the red one. There we go, Acros Red. So there you go. A little bit of a zoom in, a bit of sharpening, maybe a little bit of noise reduction actually. Okay. So I'm going to say that that image is what I would call to be done. Now to save time. To save time, because these images, these first four, are pretty similar. I can just click the first one. Click on this one here. And then you can just sync settings. Click Synchronize. And all of them now have a similar kind of an edit to them. Yeah. Okay, good. So now these four, if I press the 8 key to apply the green label, they disappear. And they go from being in the edit smart collection to being in the done smart collection. So we're looking at this guy here is go to the develop module. Basic tab, auto. Okay, again, some presence. This just puts 50 and 25 respectively. Quite like that. A little bit more. Lift the shadows, a bit more. Bit of a vignette around the outside. And I want to say that one's done. So now you would just hit the 8 key. And the next image appears. These are not wonderful images, are they? It's got to be said, white balance on this one, shoe, something that should be whitish. It's better, I think. Maybe 3500. Okay. And then again, a bit of a vignette around the outside. Don't like this woman here, so I'm going to crop crop her out, sorry. But you have to go and a bit too much space on the left. Here we go. Okay, So that one's done. So press 8. This one. Auto. Presence. More. Raise the shadows. I like how the light comes through the money. Here. This stuff is disgusting, looks disgusting, isn't it? Oh, well, each to their own, I guess. More sharpening. Sharpening. Noise reduction. Okay, zoom back out. That one I'm going to mark as done. This one. Basic presence. Okay? Just some quick edits so you guys can get the idea. You can be as elaborate as you want when you're doing it. Crop a little bit. Incidentally, it's one thing to notice about this process. If you solely crop an image, if you'd just crop the image and do nothing else to it as far as adjustments are concerned. That does not tick the adjustment box. So it wouldn't progress. You would have to you have to change something else. So that one's done. There are and then hit the 8 key. That's it. All the photos have now been processed. If we go back to the, back to the Library module, we will see that we still have 47 photos inside of the job folder. And we have nothing left to do here. The eight final images are actually all here. Let me zoom out a bit. And they've all been finished as far as I'm concerned. Okay, let's move on to the next lesson. 16. Existing Images: In the previous lesson, we edited these images down and mark them as done. So what happens now? How can we use this workflow to do other things? So let's see. So if we go to the job collection, we still have the 47 images inside. So we really want to remove these now from here so we can do other tasks. So select the first image, press Command a or Control a on a Windows PC, and then we just press B on the keyboard. If you remember, b is the shortcut to add and remove things from a collection. So when I press B, all of these will disappear. That doesn't mean to say that they're deleted. They just no longer live inside of that collection. So what we need to do now is to add some images into the workflow. It just so happens that if we go to folders, I have some more images that I didn't process yet. So if you have existing images on your hard drive or in your catalog that you would like to clean up using this workflow. All you have to do is go to the folder that they're contained in. And then you just click on the first one, select all of them and press B. So all of these have been added to the collection now. So these four are in. Now let's go to the collections. You'll see that we have four here and there already. To start with culling. Let me just add the other ones too. There's another 48 here. So you can add multiple folders at once if you like. There's no rule that says you can only do one folder. You can add as many or as few images to this workflow as you like. So CMD-a, press B, and they've now been added to the collection. One thing that's happening that I wanted to just check is do as it gone. Also advance. Yeah. We don't need to have auto advance on. Okay. Let's go back to collections. And now we have 52 inside of job. It's sometimes good to check the status of these things. So we can see if we go to this other collection we have status because like imagine that you've done a, done some work two or three years ago and you want to process like this, it's often good to check them to see what the status is. So we can see here that we have we have no keepers. We have one with no GPS then the rest of that just have no keywords and no metadata. So this is interesting here. One is, one has no GPS. So we go to this one. If you want to add some GPS to it, I say the best way or one of the easiest ways to do it is to highlight it. Go to the map module. Then you just find it, excuse the Chinese language here, but obviously I'm in Taiwan. Let me just zoom out a bit and I'll find the location where this was. It was all here. It was a Huangbu Park. So if I zoom in there like this, I know that image was taken right about here. And you can choose the roadmap or you can switch to the satellite view if you find that easier. Yeah. That image was taken. Let me just pull up the bottom. Filmstrip view so you can see the image. Here's the image and if I make that bigger, it's in front of a gate, and that gate is right here. So I can just take this image and drag it into that location and drop it. Now that image is gone. And why did it go? Because if I go back to the library module and look in collections, she let me go to the, why did it go to the library look in collections? Let's just go back to the map. So why, why did it go? Because it no longer fulfills the criteria for the smart collection because now it has GPS. So then it's a matter of going to the first section which is the cull. And then let me just hide the bottom filmstrip for now. And then just go into the same process again. So just going through cull, cull and then rate and so on until you've finished. Then when you've, when you're finished, you can just add and remove these things as you see fit. Let me just process one quickly. Let me just process must choose one. You do. Which ones any good, I don't know. None of them probably, you could say lets us process some clouds. This one. Okay. I'm going to hit pick for that one. Go to the rate flag. I'm going to hit this one. I'm going to have three stars. Keywords, metadata. Zoom in big. Can go with this one. Just going to click add keyword tags, close. Switch to default, zebra crossing. Cmd all. Copy and paste. Zebra crossing with clouds. And edit. Edit. Go to the develop module. And basic black on white. Clothes. Also. Quite a bit more texture in this, a bit more a bit more contrast. Okay Yeah. Okay, that's good for me. So let's go back to the so it's still edit because I didn't put a label on there, so add the green label. It's now clusters done. Right? So if you remember before we add eight images from the previous session. So now we've got one here from this session. So one of the cool things about this is we can have some global filters. So if I just show you, if I close this and go to the smart collections, I actually added one inside of here, and it's called global. Global done. So this will show it, show us any images that we've processed in this way. So this could be, let me just show you. So now we have nine images. If I go see we have nine because we did before and just done one. Now, this is very powerful because we can use this to, to see exactly which images we've processed in which we haven't. If you wanted to publish them online based on this, you could actually have a collection that, that you know is just contains you're done images, and you can modify this in many ways. Let me just right-click and duplicate smart collection. So now we have an exact copy of this one. Double-click it. And we could say Done. Let's think, done in the last 30 days. Done last 30 days. Or you need to do now is simply click on a plus sign here. And then you just go in and you change this to date. Capture date is in this month, or let's think in the last 30 days. In the last 30 days. Obviously, nothing's going to change because these images were all captured in the last 30 days. But you could have many different versions of this folder. And then you can use this data to really find out where your best images are. Okay, it's time to go onto the next part of this class which is about backup. See you there. 17. Backup: Let's talk about backup. This is not very glamorous and this is the thing that many people often overlook. And it can be very painful when you lose files. I know I've lost several years worth in one go when a hard drive failed. So don't put all your eggs in one basket. So I have a number of hard drives here. Let me just explain them. Samsung T7. That's just like an extension of my main hard drive because this Mac mini only has 500 gigs of storage on it. So this is like an extra storage space for the Mac. The photo library, as you know, is where my images live. And this one touch drive is a copy of the photo library. So if the photo library fails, this one has exactly the same things on it as this. So the software I use is called carbon copy cloner. Here it is. And this software allows us to make copies. So what it will do, it will look at your drive and it will see what's different from the last time and just add the new stuff so it keeps both drives synced up. You can add a number of tasks here. So it's not just for the one thing. Like for example, this course. This course here is this is backed up as well because I wanted to keep this safe because there's a lot of a lot of work went into this and I didn't want to risk losing it. So literally you just add your source drive, you add your destination drive, and then you just click start. And it'll just do its thing and very easy. So if I've done a shoot and everything has been processed, so it's finished. All the images are on the photo library. I will just come here and open up carbon copy cloner click start. And I know that this is going to get copied across to the, to the OneTouch. One thing for this, this is just for Macs. This doesn't work on Windows computers. If you go back to level less than six and look in the workflow setup, I did a little bit of research and found that there's some windows options. If you're a Windows user, I would suggest that you find a program that is good for you. So this handles the drives locally. I would also recommend keeping an online backup because should anything disastrous happened in like in your home, I mean, I hope it doesn't, but should there be a fire or a flood or something like this? And both of you drives get wiped out. That means all of your work is gone. And this is very important if it's client work. So I think it's important to have a Cloud backup service too, so I can recommend this one. It's called Backblaze. What this does. It backs up everything to the Cloud. Well, actually, you can choose what you want it to backup. But in my case, it backs up the, the Mac and it backs up the photo library and it backs up the T7. So should anything happen like my computer gets stolen, there's a fire, there's an earthquake, some disaster happens, and everything's destroyed. I could still go to Backblaze and just download everything to a new computer. I also use a Western Digital my passport wireless probe. This is a standalone portable hard drive that has a built-in SD card reader. And if it's good to just take with you when you're travelling. And it is also at the end of every shoot, I take the memory card inserted into here and make an additional backup. So this keeps original copies of all the files. So even if I delete some from my photo library on Lightroom, I still have another backup of the original file. Okay, that pretty much wraps up the section on Backup. Guys, it doesn't sound very glamorous, but make it part of your workflow because one day something will happen and I don't want you to lose all your, all of your images and all of your memories. Okay, see you in the next lesson. Bye. 18. Project Completion: Don't forget to complete your class project by making a contact sheet out of your finished images. Okay, so to do that, go from the library module to the print module. And then on the left-hand side inside of template browser, if you expand the Light Room templates, you will see that we have some pre-existing options. So click on the first image, shift, click to select all of them, and then choose which one works best for you. So let's see, 4x5, 5x8, I think I'm going to try the 4x5. And then we can change some parameters over on the right side. If you don't see these parameters yet, you have to expand them. So under layout, we can choose how many, how many rows and how many columns we have. I think I'd like to have more. Let me say try and make them bigger. So let's go to two. And you can just play around this until you get something you like the look of I think this one's pretty good. At the moment. We have the file name selected. We can change that by going to down here and we find it. Yeah, photo info. You can turn that on and off if we don't want invading, turn it off. But I'm going to change it to, let's think title. You can have caption. I'm going to change the title though. So title there. And then when it's finished and you're happy with it, go down to the bottom, and you can change it here from printer to print to JPEG file. So print to JPEG file. You can choose your resolution, your quality. Don't worry about the settings for now. This is more for printing to an actual printer. Then is click print to file and then save it somewhere, you will find it. And I'm just going to call this one projects. And let's click Save. This is a nice way to view your images together just to see what they look like overall. If you have a printer, it's, it's nice to print these off so you have a record of your best images. Great. Okay, see you in the next class. 19. Conclusion: Well, you got to the end of the course. Fantastic. I hope you had fun. I had a load of fun making the course and look forward to doing the next one. Don't forget Lightroom. It's very personal. This workflow was my method. You can tailor this method to suit yourself, but hopefully, the speed that you will have gained will help you take your photography to the next level. Because at the end of the day, we want to spend time out there shooting, not time on our computers editing the photos. So I wish you well in your photographic journey and hope to see you again in the future. Bye.