Brian Lovelace | Los Angeles & Santa Barbara Wedding Photographer | admin
Brian Lovelace is a Santa Barbara Wedding Photographer.
wedding photograher, los angeles, los angeles wedding photographer, santa barbara wedding photographer, commercial photographer, headshot photographer, portrait photographer, high fashion photographer
1
archive,author,author-admin,author-1,qode-quick-links-1.0,ajax_leftright,page_not_loaded,,qode-theme-ver-17.2,qode-theme-bridge,disabled_footer_top,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-5.4.7,vc_responsive
 

Author: admin

30 Jul

Posted at 12:45h in Editing Tricks, For Photographers by
0 Likes

Over the past few months I’ve griped many times about Adobe Lightroom Classic CC being slow, almost to the point of it being unusable. After trial and error, I’ve figured out a workflow that is fast, efficient and makes my projects get finished in a timely manner without me wanting to throw my computer out of a window.

The first thing you need to do is analyze your computer. What are the specs you are starting with and what are things that you can do to improve performance? Are you using an external Hard Drive? Is your internal drive an SSD or a Hard Disk? How much RAM does your computer have access to? Do you have a quality graphics processor?

Here were my specs before optimizing my workflow.

Core i7 7700k (4-core 4GHz clock)
32GB of DDR4 @3200MHz
Nvidia GTX1070 OC Graphics Card
512GB 3.5″ SSD connected by SATA
24TB External Storage connected by USB 3.0

Looking at this, you might think that this should be just fine for editing photos in Lightroom. From an overall perspective, it should be, but it comes down to workflow, and optimizing components in your system for your workflow. What I found in my rig was that data transfer was the bottleneck in my system. I found myself editing off of my external Hard Disks instead of from internal components. This was huge for causing sluggishness, especially since Lightroom is constantly Reading and Writing Data simultaneously, which traditional Hard Disks cannot do very effectively. The fix for this issue was to move my catalogs and photos in the catalog onto internal storage that was SSD based. After trying this out, I saw an improvement but wondered if I could take it a step further.

This leads to understanding what components that you can upgrade to improve performance. After looking at my motherboard, I found that my board supports NVMe SSD drives. If you think of your data transfer inside of your computer as a city, NVMe drives are the expressways while anything connected with SATA or USB are like city streets. NVMe SSDs allow for data to get rushed via PCI-e through the processor almost instantaneously. After perusing Amazon and reading reviews, I settled on a 500GB Samsung Evo 960 NVMe SSD which has read speeds of 3500MB/sec and write speeds of 2500MB/sec vs 480-600MB/sec on USB 3.0 and SATA. That’s up to 6X the speed! This means that Lightroom can easily read and write to the drive without any bottlenecks in sight. If you can’t add an NVMe drive, just make sure you’re editing off of any internal drive since SATA is still much faster than USB 3.0. After doing this, it was all about optimizing my workflow.

These are the steps that I take after each shoot to ensure that my Lightroom workflow is optimized for speed.

1. Make sure your Lightroom preferences are set to use your graphics card and that editing with Smart Previews is turned on.

2. Make sure there’s space for your photo session on your computer’s internal hard drive or SSD. If there isn’t room, clear up room by backing up or cleaning up files you don’t need anymore.

3. Create a new Catalog for (each) new shoot.

4. Import your photos onto your internal drive. Optionally, convert to DNG. At the top right of the import window, select Previews “Embedded and Sidecar”, under that check the box that says “Build Smart Previews.” Start the import process… This can take a while due to heavy processing, especially if you’re converting to DNG.

5. Once it’s done importing (and converting to DNG, if applicable), back up your imported photos to your external hard drive(s) for safe keeping.

6. Start editing and enjoy the speed!

7. When you’re done editing, copy your catalog folder onto your external drive(s) for safe keeping.

8. Delete the catalog and photos off of your internal drive once you’re certain you’re sufficiently backed up to other locations.

If you need to go back to older catalogs and shoots, make sure you just copy the folder with both the photos and the catalog back to your internal drive and start editing again. Make sure you archive your catalog again once you’re done and you’ll be set!

I really hope this helps you speed up your workflow. If I helped you out or have any questions, feel free to reach out and tell me of your successes on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc!

 

18 May

Posted at 10:10h in Engagement Sessions, Photography by
0 Likes

What?: 

Santa Barbara Engagement Session

Where?: 

Hope Ranch Beach, Santa Barbara, CA

It was such a pleasure to take the photos of Alicia & Travis in Santa Barbara. It’s not every day you get to take photos of people who have already been together for almost eight years before taking the next step to becoming husband and wife.

While walking on the beach, we chatted about how they met and how they reached the point of becoming engaged.

I got to hear everything about how when Alicia first met Travis, she shrugged him off and it took him over three tries to successfully ask her out. This really surprised me since they are such a great for fit for one another. Hope Ranch Beach is truly a special spot for their relationship; everytime they’d get into an argument they would come to the beach and not leave until they had settled their differences.  This really echoed with me about how committed they were to each other and their relationship. I’m so lucky to be photographing their wedding this coming August!

03 Apr

Posted at 11:57h in For Photographers by
0 Likes

So here’s a quick comparison of the new profiles within Adobe Lightroom. As of the update today, Adobe has redone their camera profiles and put them at the forefront of the editing process rather than one of the last things a photographer thinks about.

In this post I’m going to be comparing the different profiles and how they make the image appear. All profiles are chosen by choice during the editing process to help a photographer reach the style they’re looking for. There is no right or wrong way to edit an image!

These comparisons are just changing the profile on a completely RAW image imported directly into Lightroom. If you slide the slider to the right, you will view the Legacy (Old) profile. If you slide to the left, you will view the New Profile.

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Color (New)

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Vivid (New)

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Portrait (New)

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Landscape (New)

Adobe Standard Monochrome (Legacy) vs Adobe Monochrome (New)

 

Here I’m going to compare Adobe Standard and Adobe Color to the DVLOP profiles that have been created for use with the DVLOP Presets.

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs DVLOP V1 Profile

Adobe Color (New) vs DVLOP V1 Profile

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs DVLOP V2 Profile

Adobe Color (New) vs DVLOP V2 Profile

 

The profiles, in combination with the base Mastin Labs Fuji 400H Preset combine the following effects.

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Color (New)

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs Adobe Portrait (New)

Adobe Standard (Legacy) vs DVLOP Profile (V1)

 

 

22 Mar

Posted at 21:03h in Engagement Sessions, Photography by
0 Likes

Riley and Nick’s engagement session was absolutely stunning. After some planning and some issues with getting a shoot scheduled, we finally got to meet up last month and get these absolutely incredibly cute pictures of these two. We shot at Corriganville Park in Simi Valley which has gorgeous tree tunnels and gorgeous chaparral. I was so lucky that the day that I started to edit these, the new Mastin Labs 1.2 Preset Pack update was released, which made this gallery one of the most simple editing jobs I’ve ever done. Most of these images were edited with one push and a quick dial spin for exposure adjustment. Get your Mastin Labs Lightroom Presets here: https://www.mastinlabs.com/shop/



21 Mar

Posted at 12:13h in For Photographers by
0 Likes

As professional photographers, we’ve all had the struggle of finding an efficient way of posting our photos to Instagram accounts. Whether you are on Mac or PC, it’s always a hassle to get your photos from Lightroom to your phone.

On Mac, you first needed to export from Lightroom, open up the file location, then Airdrop it to your phone… this means you need both your computer and phone on the same network. From there you need to write out your caption on your phone. Frustrating to say the least. An for Android, it is even worse, needing to export from Lightroom, upload to Google Drive, then downloading the photo to your phone, and then writing a caption.

I found this awesome plugin for Lightroom that takes your entire process and makes it simple. This plugin is called “LR-Instagram,” found for free on http://www.lrinstagram.com. The plugin is donationware and I encourage those who find it useful to donate to the developer. Once you install the plugin to Lightroom, it becomes extremely simple to do everything from uploading photos to Instagram, to easily apply captions to your Instagram —  and all from Lightroom!!!

After installation, LR Instagram will pop up in your Publish Services in the Library Panel like this.

You’ll need to click a similar button to the “Set Up” buttons you’ll see in the services above. From there you’ll log into your Instagram Account, and finish setting up the plugin. You can even set up multiple accounts to make your life super easy!

Unless you want your images that aren’t perfectly square to have to a border, you’ll need to select the “Force Crop for Instagram” and click insert to make it so that your images are perfectly cropped for Instagram.

For your caption, it is super easy, just change it to “Caption,” which will allow you to type in the caption for your Instagram post within Lightroom! For the example above, the caption will be “For being a rainy day, this couple pulled off the most gorgeous engagement photoshoot at The Griffith Observatory.” This will be automatically placed as the caption for your image once you upload it!

To put a photo into the upload queue, drag it from the filmstrip in the bottom to the “LR-Instagram” publish service.

Once it is within the LR Instagram Publish Service, click into “Instagram Photos.” Here you’ll be able to select the photo you want to push to Instagram. Click the Publish button and it will be live on your Instagram page within seconds!

I really hope this provided some insights into how I am able to easily plan out my Instagram posts and make it super simple to stay on top of your Instagram game!