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Welcome to our review of the Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection DVDs from SLR Lounge. Hey guys,
welcome to Phlearn. My name is Aaron Nace, you can find me on Twitter at @aknacer. Today
we’re doing a review of the Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection DVD from SLR Lounge.
Now, here at Phlearn we talk a lot about Photoshop and we talk a lot about photography, and for
the most part it’s because that’s kind of our image editing style. We tend to spend
a lot of time on each image. We do a lot of manipulations and compositing, things like
that, and that’s really not what Lightroom is made for. Lightroom is much better if you’re
going to be taking a large amount of photos and you want to edit through them very quickly,
and that’s exactly what this DVD helps you guys do. So if you guys are wedding photographers
or portrait photographers and you’re taking 100, 200 images and you’re going to have
to deliver a lot of images, this is a really awesome system to help you get really fast.
So that’s what Lightroom is for, and these guys have done an awesome job kind of bringing
you everything you need to know about how to use Lightroom as well as a great preset
system to really make your images pop. So right off the bat, guys, it’s an incredibly
well-done DVD series. There’s like 27 hours of content in it. It’s all extremely professional
and your host is Post-Production Pye. What I really loved about this is it’s not like
a money grab, it’s not like, “Oh, we can make DVDs and sell them for a lot of money.”
Pye is a super genuine guy and he’s basically in charge of the production for a wedding
and a portrait studio doing all the post production, over 500,000 images per year. Basically he
developed this really great system having done this year after year of having to look
through millions, literally millions of images and produce over 100 weddings for this company
every single year. So he came up with a really great system of editing, culling the images,
choosing the images that you actually want to have edited, choosing your picks, editing
them, applying presets, just basically making this very quick and easy and getting a system
in place to where you can manage a lot files, a lot of images at the same time. So he developed
a system kind of out of necessity and that’s what he’s bringing you guys in this DVD
series. So it’s just awesome. It’s not something that’s not useful at
all, it’s something that he really used in place and I think you guys are going to
find it incredibly useful as well. I would say one of the biggest focuses of this DVD
series is to help you guys save a lot of time when it comes to editing. If you guys are
wedding photographers or portrait photographers you have to deliver a lot of images. I’ve
shot like five weddings in my day and it took a long time to go through the images, find
your picks, and get them out in post production, and then like, “Okay, how do I want to edit
these? How do I make them look special? How do I actually deliver these?” It took absolutely
forever and I hated doing it. For me, that was the worst part of shooting the wedding.
The actual shooting the wedding was totally fine. I loved it. I got to hang out with people,
and then you’ve got to go look through thousands of images, and I think that’s probably what
most people hate. So the whole idea behind this is to basically get that step of the
worst part of your job out of the way. So if it’s taking you over 10 hours to go through
a wedding and kind of look through all these images and edit it and deliver it, you guys
can cut that down a serious amount down to one or two hours, and that extra time you
just get back in your life so you can do whatever you want. If you want to teach your dog how
to play Tetris, you can do that too. I really love the workflow DVD. It’s really
great because a lot people don’t really have a really nice system in place, or if
they do have a system it’s just kind of something they developed on their own which,
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, but getting something that’s a little more
standardized and something that makes a lot more sense from someone who’s been doing
this a long time really will help out. Everything from shooting to importing, archive, working
with catalogues, syncing, developing, culling, exporting, archiving- I already said archiving,
but they go over it twice, maybe- All of these things are covered in this DVD. So it’s
basically everything from when you actually shoot to delivering the pictures. The entire
workflow is catalogued and it’s in a way that’s going to make it a lot easier for
you guys to get a system in place to where you can just kind of run through these images,
get some really great results out of it, and not take a lot of time doing it. I thought
it was really cool because this was actually developed by photographers and what that means
is that they’re not just going over what’s going on in Lightroom. All these people are
actually the photographers who took these pictures as well, so they go over some really
great tips on what you can do during your photoshoot to make sure your process of culling
and editing, developing, editing, and syncing, all that stuff is going to be a lot smoother
and easier, and delivering your products is going to be a lot faster. So all the way from
shooting all the way to post-production, they just go through the entire process and it
makes it really cohesive and very easy to understand, and it should make you guys a
lot faster. The next DVD is the Lightroom 4 preset system,
and while the workflow DVD was all about how to actually use Lightroom, this is going to
be your bread and butter when it comes to actually editing. The reason is they created
these amazing presets that really just take care of most of your editing for you, and
I can tell you, before this I really was not a big fan of presets and plug-ins. You guys
know from watching Phlearn that I don’t use any plug-ins, but they kind of changed
my mind about that. I used one of these presets last night on some images we took around the
studio and they made them way better. I posted them on Twitter and people were like, “Wow,
those are really nice.” And I was like, “Yeah, I just pushed the button that I got
from these guys.” So I felt kind of bad because I teach Photoshop, but they really
are good. The thing that I like the most is that the way they named them, and I know it
sounds like a small detail, but the way they named them wasn’t like “cherry sunburst”
or like “a midsummer’s day.” All the descriptions say basically exactly what you’re
going to get. So the whole system, it makes complete sense. You can just kind of look
through, you can scroll through and see the previews really quickly and easily and you
know exactly what you’re going to be getting before you do these presets.
If you guys are relatively new to Lightroom, I recommend starting here. This is the third
DVD and this is the A-to-Z tutorial. Basically it takes you through Lightroom. If you’ve
never even opened the program before, by the end of this DVD you guys are going to be really
great. What was really cool is I’ve been using Lightroom for years so I knew quite
a bit of this, but they make it really easy for the advanced users to kind of skip through
the beginner stuff, and I learned some sick techniques. My favorite technique that I actually
learned through these DVDs was I could get rid of all those different modules. I could
kind of “hack” Photoshop. So, you know at the top you have your library and you have
develop and then you have the map and web and slideshow and print and all? I don’t
use any of that stuff, and they showed me how to hack Lightroom so none of it shows
up. It takes up less of the system resources and now I can just focus on what I actually
do. So, really cool systems about actually making Lightroom fit your needs and getting
the most out of the program. Now one thing about this DVD collection is
it’s a bit long. It’s like 27 hours long. But what I did to kind of combat that is I
actually went into disc utility on a Mac, I loaded these into my computer, and then
I ripped the disc image to my desktop. So I had the disc image on my desktop and I went
ahead and did it for all three DVDs. When you do that, you don’t have to actually
have the DVDs with you, they’re kind of mounted on your hard drive. What that means
is I was able to, if I was on a flight and if I had some down time, I could just kind
of open these up and watch them through a little bit here and a little bit there. It’s
a ton of content. Don’t feel like you have to go through all of it within one sitting.
It would take 27 hours to do it. What I found a little bit more manageable is just kind
of get them on my computer. When I had an hour or two here or an hour or two there,
it was a really nice way to kind of get through them. Not only that but they make it really
easy broken down into chapter by chapter, so you can kind of look at the chapter thing
and say, “Oh, I already know how to do that. I can skip that thing.” You don’t have
to just watch it all the way through. There are really nice chapters and menus that make
it very navigable. I wanted to say that word; navigable.
Guys, thanks for watching this review. I know a lot of you have been asking on Phlearn,
like, “Hey, can we learn a little bit more about Lightroom?” And the honest truth is
I know Photoshop very well, and just as well as I know Photoshop, these guys know Lightroom,
and it’s not my specialty. They school me on it and if you really are interested in
learning Lightroom at that really high level, I would totally recommend this any day. They
really set the bar very high and I can’t wait for their new products. I don’t know
if they’re making any but very good, well done, and I was extremely impressed.
Guys, thanks so much for watching. We’re going to set a little bit more details down
below where you guys can check this out. Phlearn you later. Bye everyone.