The secret's in the workflow

Last Thursday, Susan and I were hired to help two photographers from upstate New York photograph a very large event at the Marriott World Center Hotel. The client was a large medical company and they needed headshots for a company directory to be shot during their annual conference. Sounds easy enough  . . . except there was to be as many as 900 of them . . . and they had to be shot in one day.

There was a graphic designer on site who was putting the directory together. Her requirements were very specific. She needed each image to be 2x2 inches at 300 dpi, renamed to Lastname_Firstname.jpg and in the CMYK color space. We only had 2 or 3 days to plan how we were going to do this - but we did have a plan and in the event, it worked beautifully.

First, the lighting had to be simple - just a main light and an on-axis fill against a plain white background. We used a Paul Buff Einstein 640 as main and an Alien Bee AB800 as fill - both in reflective umbrellas. Second, we needed to be very efficient in how we produced the final files for the graphic designer. Here's how we did it.

We shot every image tethered to a Macbook Pro laptop computer running Adobe Lightroom 3.3. Before we started the actual shoot, we shot a grey card so we could get an accurate white balance. We then created a Develop Preset in Lightroom and applied this automatically to each image we shot. This made sure that every image was perfectly color-corrected. We shot two images of each individual and picked the best one for inclusion in the directory. We quickly renamed and cropped the selected image square in Lightroom.

We then made use of Lightroom's Publish Services feature to create JPG's sized according the the graphic artist's requirements. The beauty of doing it this way is that Lightroom kept track of what images had been processed - very important when subjects are coming at you almost as fast as you can shoot! Here's how this was set up. All we needed to do was drag new images on to the Publish Services tab and hit 'Publish' to have Lightroom work its magic.

The last thing to do was to convert the images to CMYK. Unfortunately, Lightroom cannot do this yet, so we created an Action in Photoshop to accomplish this and ran it from Photoshop's Image Processor script. This converted dozens of images at a time, so that all that was left was to copy the completed files in to a flash drive and hand them off to the graphic artist.

Every time there was a lull in the action we worked on renaming and cropping images. This way we were done within a few minutes of the last image being shot.

Like I said, the secret's in the workflow, and in this case, we could not have done it without Lightroom!

 

Comments

[Chet Nichols]

What a pair, you two are. I think I will go back and read it again....cn

[Wbeem]

I disagree with the last sentence. Aperture could do that, too.

[John Francis]

HI Bill. Well, the statement is correct. We have LR but not Aperture. Therefore WE could not have done it using the other tools that we had. The other photographers were doing it in Bridge, and while it got the job done, it definitely took a lot longer. Having said that, I am sure Aperture could be used to similar effect. I know Aperture supports tethered shooting, although I was not aware that it also had a publish to hard drive feature.

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[Mike]

I was wondering if you could expand on this part of the workflow:
"We shot every image tethered to a Macbook Pro laptop computer running Adobe Lightroom 3.3. Before we started the actual shoot, we shot a grey card so we could get an accurate white balance. We then created a Develop Preset in Lightroom and applied this automatically to each image we shot. This made sure that every image was perfectly color-corrected."

I'm currently doing a yearbook, and shooting against a Lastolite hilite portrait background to help me then digitally inserting two different background variations into the shot.

My colors are all off, and if I shoot in different locations, the subjects have different lighting on them. In this regard, I spend too much time tweaking (or at least trying to tweak) the images.

I'm shooting tethered and can capture in either LR, Capture One, or Express Digital Darkroom Pro. Each of these programs allow for white balance and color correction afterwards, but I need to reduce if not eliminate this step from my workflow completely. IN this regard, explain to me how your shooting the grey card and then how you create presets in LR (from that grey card shoot), and then have them automatically applied to the captured image? (I'm sure this is just a configuration feature in the tether operation.

Please elaborate, I'm facing a deadline and I've got hundreds of photos to do. I've shot many photos so far, and can't "go back" or am at the Point of No Return back to those photos and need to establish consistency in the tone, level, color, WB for the photos now so that when you flip through the year book you do not see different color variations.

Note, I'm also handicapped at any user corrected color/white balance because I do not have access to a calibrated monitor, and am dependent on what my "eye" sees on the laptop screen - which is a poor way to do anything as far as enhancing a photo.

Also, did you shoot JPEG/RAW during the shoot above?

[John Francis]

No problem Mike and thanks for asking!

Before the shoot started, we simply photographed a grey card under the exact same lighting conditions and in Lightroom, used the WB tool to click on it to set an accurate white balance. If you like, and using the same image, you could make any exposure or additional color adjustments you wanted. Then, you create a Develop Preset from this image making sure that you only check those adjustments that you changed.

Now, in the tethering dialog under Develop Settings you select the Develop Preset you created above as the one you want to be applied to each image as it is captured and imported into Lightroom.

The other way to do it is to shoot the grey card image as described above and make the necessary corrections in Lightroom. Then, when you start your tethered capture, select "Same as Previous" from the Develop Settings drop-down. With this method, you have to be sure that your corrected image was the last one you touched in the same folder as the ones being captured.

Hope this helps!