SmugBlog: Pro Corner

So some of you are not yet using Proof Delay for your event or large volume shooting work. Let’s dig deeper into it, mkay? Today, I shot a Tae Kwon Do event. My preparation began yesterday, when I created the gallery for today’s event. Why? Simple, I needed the URL so I could put it on the flyers that I gave to all the parents. Make it easy and simple, and they will buy. OK, at the event, I set my camera to shoot RAW, plus a small jpg - yet the jpg is large enough to handle the biggest size I want to sell. But on my Canon 5D, this still resulted in JPGs of over 1mb, which makes for longer uploading times. So, I quickly made an action in Photoshop, to save the jpgs at compression level 7 (yes, 7…. remember, upon order, I’ll be replacing these with jpg 10 new files!), and I soon had file sizes of about 350-400Kb. Of course, you can also use Photoshop’s Image Processor. I’ve reached my happy medium. I have files that are large enough to support all print sizes, they look good on screen, and they’re small enough to upload fairly fast. BTW, 370 files, about 200megabytes, uploaded in 38 minutes or so. If you are doing events with lots of proofs, or have to upload many many photos at once, I highly recommend you try either (or both!) SendToSmugMug and Star Explorer. So, the first part of the workflow - make it easy for your customers to find the photos for sale, and make it easy for you to get the photos there!

OK now what? Well, the parents will now order And then, because I set a proof delay on this gallery, when they do order, I’ll get an email, telling me about it. And I can look in my control panel, pro sales, and see the order, and the crop that they customer picked. Whoops, look at how poorly the customer cropped…

Well, no worries! Proof and Retouch to the rescue Simply go to the crop button in your pro sales tool, and recrop the image. Of course, if you are retouching, or otherwise changing the photo, you’ll want to do that first, then “replace photo.” THEN do your crop adjustments.

There you have it. Hit the “ship it” button, and off it goes to our lab. Proof Delay is a wonderful tool. If you have any questions at all, just holler for me or any of our Support Heroes, we’ll be there for you!

Tonight, our guest was photographer Jim Fuglestad. Jim took us through his take on on-location portrait photography:

• choosing the location
• working with the clients to get them at ease
• engaging your subjects (not!)
• equipment, workflow, business

iTunes Link

RSS Link

You can also listen by telephone: Playback Number: (641) 985-5033.  Access Code: 1094243#

Next roundtable TBA in January 2007.

New SmugMug Pro? An old hand looking for a makeover? We want to help you with a fast start.

We held our first Pro Roundtable tonight - featuring Pro Photographer Shay Stephens, on the topics:

• publicity and marketing
• getting and keeping clients
• pricing your services and photography
• leveraging web resources

You can listen to the hour-long conference, via iTunes or via this RSS Link.

I hope to make this a regular feature so keep checking in here, and also on our SmugMug Pro Sales Support Forum on Digital Grin!

Just a quickie for your photoshop gurus! We have a new advance review of Dan Margulis’ new book, Professional Photoshop, 5th edition.

Here’s the full review. Enjoy!

It’s really great when you can attract talented people to come work for you! SmugMug is very fortunate to have two new folks join our team this week - to help out on the help desk

Ivar Borst and Barb Gates have been helping many of our customers already on The Dgrin Customization Forum for the past year and more. And Ivar has created a bunch of our Themes!. Both are experience Smuggers and will be wonderful additions to our help desk. So, when you next write to SmugMug Help you may hear back from some new folks!

Today, we announced a major Pro Release Over the coming days I’ll be making posts here and on Digital Grin on how all the new features work, and how you can begin using them immediately! I and the team are also available every day at our help desk to answer any questions you might have regarding all the new goodness:

• Digital Downloads
• Custom Watermarks
• Backprinting
• Pro sales notification
• Proof Delayed Shipping

We’re really excited about this release and we thank ALL of our pros who’ve stuck with us. We hope this is just the beginning of even more great pro features yet to come!

We’ve written about Prophoto RGB and sRGB vs aRGB on many occasions. This is not a debate about one color space or another - but for display on SmugMug and printing at our lab, your photos must be in sRGB color space. For most of you, this is not an issue, you are aware and either you shoot and process in sRGB or your final step is a conversion to sRGB. Cool. But for some folks, unaware, they’d upload Adobe RGB or Prophoto RGB files and the prints would be the YUCK!. No worries, though, becuase The SmugMug Guarantee covers you and your customer for reprints. And convert color space, color correct, and reprint I did

Well, no more! Now, if we see Adobe RGB or Prophoto RGB files on upload, we automatically convert them on our end to sRGB. You need to know this, because this is one only times when we’ll actually change your original uploaded file. But your prints, and your customers, will thank you.

Not long ago, we had a customer write into the help desk asking for HELP! with his customization. For lots of reasons, he was unable to do any of it himself, despite our best efforts to guide him along the way. Our pro was about to give up when I asked him if he’d mind if I hooked him up with some basic customizations. Now mind you, we can’t possibly set up all of our customers like this one-at-a-time, but the experience was a good one for me, and for the customer. Still, the photographer has to provide the inputs and ideas on colors, fonts, designs, layout, flow, navigation, and more. So it’s a cooperative venture. Our customer is Velographie Photo and our pro’s name is Dick Louderman. Dick’s a super guy, and was a pleasure to work with. Here’s what he had to say:

“this has been a terrifically positive experience for me in many ways. I have been moved by your generosity in helping. I have been very impressed by the knowledge that you and the other pros have shared with me (and others) and also the enthusiasm. AND the sense of community among the smugmug pros. this makes a BIG difference and it is a super important aspect to participation. it is a big reason why I came to smugmug in the first place and a good reason to stay connected. this is what it is all about.I love it! I am hoping that, even with some of my limitations, I can give back in some way to the others. I mean that.”

I got plenty of help from the good folks on our customization forum over at Digital Grin. You can even see that we’re doing it again, for another customer, ellepixels - stop by, learn a bit, and see that you can do it, too!

PhotoRank is a brand new feature at SmugMug. You may have noticed those green and red thumbs. So, what are they, and why’d we do it? The idea is to answer two questions we’ve been hearing for a very long time:

1. How do I find the most popular photos of (Rome, hot-air ballons, bike racing, equestrian jumping…etc)?

2. I want my great photos to float to the top somehow and get noticed. How do I do that?

We get loads of traffic, millions and millions of visitors, every day to SmugMug - and much of that traffic uses our Browse page. Our old browse page was erem, not as good as it is now… so check it out, and see! Already, pros are writing me saying that they’ve been “found” by new customers via this cool new feature. And being “found” means new clients, new gigs, and more business!

Some of you would like to know how to turn it OFF. No problem, we have an easy way to do that! Check out the help page above, or visit Digital Grin and find out how.

Now, before you go and say “ewwwwww gross - I don’t want to ruin my pristine photos with those thumbs,” think about this: you’re online already - you depend on “being found!” Why not do everything and anything possible to increas that chance? Smart, huh? So before you nuke the thumbs for your entire site, and miss out on a bazillion eyeballs each day, consider this: enable PhotoRank on some of your galleries - your portfolio samples, etc. Oh and don’t forget to keyword the heck out of them, too, so that you will be found via SmugMug search and the traditional search engines as well.

I’m available to help - you know where to find me!