Send Byline Image with airSlate SignNow

Send byline image

hi I'm Andrew Childress for tots plus today we're talking about using photo mechanic with Adobe Lightroom so why use photo mechanic at all the answer is it's all about speed I'm working with the recent set of images here and you can see as I flip through them it's loading all of them instantly as I'm using the arrow keys to switch between them these are raw images and I'm switching between them with no lag at all photo mechanic is a great tool to review and Mark the images you want to work with it doesn't offer correction tools or ways to adjust the look of your images so it works best with another app in tandem because of the speed I think a great workflow is to use photo mechanic to review and then send your selections over to Lightroom for raw image processing we'll use star ratings and color labels one bit of metadata that carries over between the apps to do just that let's learn how to do it so we need to make a couple of tweaks to make this work the way I want to first let's hook photo mechanic up to Lightroom in the preferences I'm going to go up to the photo mechanic preferences menu this is where all of the settings live so first let's click this drop-down and choose launching from the list of preferences I'm going to look at this default application to edit photo section and choose assigned default application we're basically telling photo mechanic when we send images to an external editor this is the app we want to use so I'll press choose and then go ahead and browse for Adobe Lightroom on my computer I'll go ahead and choose Adobe Lightroom and now we've told photo mechanic that this is the other editor we want to use along with it so the next tweak that I'll make is to change the color labels that photo mechanic uses if you're familiar with Lightroom's color labels you probably know that they are red yellow green blue and purple if I switch the drop-down option to the general section you'll see here that the default colors in photo mechanic aren't the default colors in Lightroom so we'll need to change these over so that we can send images with a certain colour label seamlessly over to Lightroom I'm going to go ahead and press this lightning bolt arrow and go ahead and choose Adobe Lightroom from the drop-down now the color labels that we're using match the ones in Lightroom of course we won't use the cyan brown and gray ones instead we'll just use the read through purple ones one last week let's change the bored shortcuts to be easier to use let's again return to the Preferences drop-down and this time choose accessibility I'm going to change the keyboard shortcuts to 0 to 5 sets rating this is a totally optional tweak but it makes the keyboard shortcuts most similar to Lightroom ok we're all done setting up our options and can get on to the exciting part let's press ok and we'll jump back to photo mechanics image viewer from this screen I can press the number of keys between 1 and 5 to add a corresponding number of stars if I press 4 for example you'll see that 4 stars show up on the image at the bottom and on the sidebar remember that all of these changes we're making will show up when we send the image over to Lightroom we can use star ratings to color our images or basically cut down the ones that we want to keep working with on the Lightroom side I might use flags to Col but we can't carry that data over from photo mechanic to Lightroom so in place of that we could use a star rating instead the key is that whatever star rating I'm applying will show in Lightroom let's keep it simple and just use one star to signal any image that we want to work with in Lightroom I can use the arrow keys to flip between these images really quickly and press the 1 number key on my keyboard in order to add that one star rating we're using this just to mark any image that's worth sending over to Lightroom in this way we might take a full shoot in photo mechanic work through the ones we think are worth working with and then send those over to Lightroom the speed advantage of photo mechanic makes it an ideal choice for this stage I love Lightroom but this type of speed just isn't possible with it another bit of data that will carry over from photo mechanic to Lightroom are the color labels now these are added with the keyboard shortcut command plus a number so with this image selected I can press command + 1 to add a red color label I'll press the down arrow key to select another image then command 2 to add a yellow color label command 3 to add a green color label command 4 to add a blue color label and command 5 to add a purple color label so the keyboard shortcuts that we're working with here are 1 through 5 to add a star rating or command plus 1 through 5 to add a color label so let's say that we've finished up reviewing our images and now we're ready to send them over to Adobe I'm in the preview window here which I'm going to close just by pressing escape and now we're back at the contact sheet view let's go ahead and filter for our one-star images the filtering options live in the lower right corner of photo mechanic to filter for any of these criteria I can just hold alt on the keyboard and press the item that we want to filter for so if I hold alt and click on one star for example it only shows us the images that have one star now if I held Alden clicked on four stars for example it would switch to just the images that have four stars however if we aren't holding alt and we click on another selection criteria it adds it to the filter the key idea is that if you hold all your filtering for just one item or you can toggle multiple things on by clicking on them so now we have a small subset of images selected that we're ready to send over to Adobe Lightroom I'm going to go ahead and choose edit select all to select all of the images now they're ready to send over to Lightroom let's go ahead and go up to the image edit photos option and once I do that it'll say do you really want to edit all of the selected photos I'll go ahead and click yes now Lightroom will begin loading up and when it opens we're at the import window now although it's selected all of the images that are in my shoot folder it only has checked the ones that we sent over from photo mechanic so when I press import it's only going to carry through the same images that we were just looking at and notice that it's carried through the star ratings and color labels that we set up at an earlier stage you see the red color label just as it appears in photo mechanic for this one image and all of the images have either the one or the four stars that we added to it that's it if you need to bring some more speed to your workflow photo mechanic might just be the way to do it and as it turns out it works incredibly well with Lightroom thanks so much for joining me