Digital Scrapbooking 101

What "Finding Photo Flow" Is

I’ve had a few people ask me what I mean by “photo flow.”  Let me start by sharing what Photo Flow is not: A one-size fits all workflow solution.

Workflow is a term that is used by many when describing working with your photos.  On the professional photography circuit you can find class after class of photographers sharing their personal photo workflow. 

Workflow involves software, it involves steps and process (star ratings, keywords, etc.) and often a “best practice” idea of what works.  Students learn this workflow and then go home and apply it step by step in their workflow with a few tweaks.

While Photo Flow does involve some of these things (i.e. you can choose to use star ratings & keywords in your photo flow), it is very different.  There is no "best practice" involved in Finding Photo Flow.  

Finding Photo Flow is kicking things up a notch to work on a higher level.  It's more about how you feel about your workflow.  It’s about looking at a bucket full of blocks, each block representing a step you could choose to add to your workflow, but don’t necessarily have to.  It's about creativity. It’s about being engaged, happy and excited to work with your photos and building a process for yourself that supports that.

Most photo organization classes focus on how many photos you can keyword, rate, and print during class.  While the end goal of Finding Photo Flow is to help you process images and create amazing results, the four weeks in this class are about thinking, inspiring and creating an amazing workflow that will last long after the initial excitement fades.

After teaching photo organization for years, the one thing that gets to me is students who have followed my work all this time and write to me again and again saying, “This is it. I know what I need to do. This time it is going to stick and I’ll get caught up with my photos.”

Finding Photo Flow  came out of my thoughts of how to help students find something that "sticks."  In my own life there have been times when I have tried to adopt something someone else was doing because it looked amazing, and yet I never could keep it up for the long haul.  The lesson I learned from that was this: When you try to do something over and over again and it doesn’t stick, the reality is you just haven’t yet found flow.

Finding Photo Flow is about looking at your time, the current season of your life and then creating photo flow that supports that.  It’s about letting go and enjoying.  It doesn't matter if your workflow is highly complex or completely simplified, what matters most is that it engages you and supports your creativity.

Finding Photo Flow is about taking the time to absorb different ways of doing things in your workflow.  I want you to think about what is working now with your photos and creating a simple system that is sustainable.  A process that doesn’t overwhelm and at the same time gives you what you want from your photo library.

Quite simply, Finding Photo Flow is about finding joy in your photo library.  It's about inspiring creativity.

I hope to see you in the classroom!  You can learn more about Finding Photo Flow here.

 

 

 

Why Lightroom for Supplies Instead of Bridge?

After several comments and emails from readers asking, "Why not Bridge?"  I thought a post would be appropriate.

As you may know, I really pushed Bridge for my supplies last year.  It was the only program on a Mac that I liked and trusted to write metadata to the files.  However, there were a few problems I  ran into on my organizing journey in Bridge that I thought I would share.

Bridge was painfully slow.  When it comes to digital supplies we all have lots of folders.  Because Bridge is a browser instead of a catalog, I had to have everything attached to my computer to do anything or find anything. 
Without my external drive with all my supplies attached to my computer, Bridge would literally forget the stuff I had organized was there.  When I plugged it in, Bridge would have to re-build all the criteria and it was taking forever to just find everything again so I could start tagging.  On top of this, Bridge pretended to tag my PNG files when in reality there was no way those tags would stay with the files.

The main difference with Lightroom is that it works as a catalog.  Meaning it records where everything is and creates a thumbnail of the file so even after you unplug your external hard drive (EHD), you can still see what is on it and even add tags...  the only thing that is different is a question mark next to the folders and thumbnails to let you know the item isn't attached. 

There are things that Bridge does amazingly well, such as batch renaming files, image processing with Photoshop, etc.  However, when it comes to organizing quickly with ease, Bridge falls short.

 

 

 

Lightroom Class Questions: Is Bridge Absolutely Necessary? {No!}

I am happy to report that I have found a PNG conversion solution for those of you currently working in Photoshop Elements who want to start organizing in Lightroom.  This means that when you take my class, the only software programs you need are Lightroom and Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

Even though it is going to be a lot more work for me to do, the first offering of this class will have videos for both PSE and CS users in the same classroom.  They are similar, and also different processes, so the first group of students in the class will get both processes for the price of one whereas future classes will have to choose between the two.

So there you have it, if you don't have Bridge and you want to use Lightroom, this class is still a GO! :)

 

 

 

Create An Action in Photoshop and Batch Process Websave in Bridge

 

This question comes from my good friend Chris - thought it would be good to share the answer with everyone...

 

How to create a save for web action in Photoshop and then use it in Photoshop and also in Bridge to batch process.

A few links mentioned in the video - link to Songbird Avenue Template How-To.  Also, it was the Port Au Prince benefit kit used in the first layout.  The chipper kit for the second layout is available for free here.  You can also find the template used for both layouts for free here.

 

Adobe Bridge Quick Template Tip

A little obsessed with templates lately - but seriously they are the best way to scrap a lot of images quick. It is almost like channeling your favorite designer to work alongside you - you literally get to apply their design sense (or template) to your photos and layout.

Today's tutorial followed this tip on Julianne Kosts's blog. An amazing resource for finding all those hidden tips you never knew about everything Adobe. Fabulous resource.

Combine that tip with a December Daily template from Ali Edwards, a beautiful background paper from Jen Wilson and you get a quick layout in less than seven minutes.

Enjoy!

PS, if you are into fabulous and free templates, you won't want to miss CK's latest FREE digital template.

Quick tip on loading photos into one layered Photoshop file using Bridge. Working with a digital scrapbooking template and photos.

Organizing Digital Scrapbook Supplies Part 2

Continuing from this post, today we will be talking about organizational theory (how to design a good plan for your organization) along with using keywords and smart collections in Adobe Bridge. We will also cover searching.

Learn more about creating an organizational plan that works, along with virtual sets, and using keywords instead of folders to organize your products. Also using Smart Collections in Bridge.

Helpful Links:
The Organized & Inspired Scrapbooker by Wendy Smedley and Aby Garvey
(difficult item to find - you can also try here and here)

Digiscrap Info (great starting place for keyword list)

Organizing Digital Scrapbook Supplies Part 1

This will be the first of a series of posts talking about my journey to getting my digital supplies organized.

I moved to a Mac in September of 2008. Before that I used ACDSee. Sadly when things transferred to my Mac, I lost all that work because the categories and keywords weren't written to the IPTC fields... Added to that was an extra plethora of product. As a member of CK's Digital Scrapbooking Magazine team and other creative teams and assignments, I had gigs and gigs of free product and actual purchases added to that. It was overwhelming to think of organizing it all.

As I migrated to my Mac, I didn't want to lose data so I had double copies of everything as time went on, it was difficult to know what was new and old. Add to that two more new Mac upgrades and here I was with gigs and gigs of zip files, designer folders here and there, everywhere.

Long story short, I was a mess!

I started simply. My first task was to organize my Scrapbooking folder by designer. Then I began to move products into each folder. Within the designer folders, I chose to organize kit folders. Keep in mind that the deeper your folder structure hierarchy goes, the harder it gets for your computer to keep track of everything. Simplicity is good. Especially when you will eventually be adding keywords to the mix.

So, on that thread, each kit folder had all the contents of each kit dumped into the folder (minus of course alphabet folders which stayed in their own subfolder). That was great.

Then, as I moved into other folders with free PNG brush files downloaded from the web, I found that they didn't group as well in separate folders per set. Yet, when I went to combine them into one folder, the designer had named the brushes for each set - Brush 1, Brush 2, etc. So they would overwrite the other brushes as moved in unless I painstakingly renamed each file.

Enter Adobe Bridge. My go to organizing tool which I am using to organize and keyword my supplies. I love Bridge because it writes directly to XMP so the keywords stay with your photos even if you move them to another software later.

I used Bridge to not only rename each set, but also move the files into the folders. I love it when technology saves me time and stress. I thought you would too so I created this video to show you how I did it. Hope you enjoy! Stay tune to this blog for more posts about digital organization as I move forward with my own supplies I will be sharing what I have learned here.

Enjoy!

Learn how to batch rename your digital supplies in Adobe Bridge.

Video Tutorial: Post Processing RAW Images

Yesterday I was working on post processing some recent shots and I thought it would be fun to share a behind the scenes video here.

Basic Photoshop Post Processing RAW from Kayla Lane Lamoreaux on Vimeo.

Here are links to some of the actions I spoke about in the video:
Pioneer Woman's Actions
Totally Rad Actions

Video Tutorial: Using Bridge to Delete Duplicate Files

So you never quite got around to creating a workflow for your digital files...The thought of organizing them brings up thoughts of being tied to your computer for weeks...trying to find all the duplicates.

I know how you feel. Last year when I switched over to my Mac I had around 60,000 images, many of which were duplicated three to four times (I downloaded to the computer, took more photos without deleting originally downloaded items off my camera again and again...)

So this is what I did using Bridge. This is definitely an advanced tutorial I would not recommend doing unless you FIRST backup your images to an external hard drive and disconnect it from your computer... That way if for any reason you don't follow this exactly we haven't damaged your library of images...

Ok - so here it is - the secret behind my being able to quickly pare through 60,000 images and duplicates to 17,000 images - none of which are duplicates....

PS - this video is very large - so you may want to wait a moment while it loads...