Newbie help

mike.strock

I'm an eval pro customer. I shoot mostly sports. What I've been typically doing with my photos is bringing them into Lightroom as RAW files, then exporting the JPG files at 100 percent, processing them through BreezeBrowser and posting them to my own site.

Now that I'm considering Smugmug, I don't need to process through BreezeBrowser anymore, but do I still need to export to 100 percent from Lightroom in order to get the best picture quality out at the other end (IE, prints from SmugMug)?

I typically shoot somewhere between 200-300 per game, and would be posting on a per game/team basis for the individual teams.

Thoughts on this would be helpful.

Sorry for the newbie-ish question. So far, from what I've seen, Smugmug is a much better solution for me than my homegrown, half baked self hosted solution. If I only knew enough HTML to customize the homepage. So much to learn...

Thanks.

Mike.:rolleyes

denisegoldberg

You shouldn't need to export at 100%.

This page might help - http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-quality.

--- Denise

populus

mike.strock wrote:

I'm an eval pro customer. I shoot mostly sports. What I've been typically doing with my photos is bringing them into Lightroom as RAW files, then exporting the JPG files at 100 percent, processing them through BreezeBrowser and posting them to my own site.

Now that I'm considering Smugmug, I don't need to process through BreezeBrowser anymore, but do I still need to export to 100 percent from Lightroom in order to get the best picture quality out at the other end (IE, prints from SmugMug)?

I typically shoot somewhere between 200-300 per game, and would be posting on a per game/team basis for the individual teams.

Thoughts on this would be helpful.

Sorry for the newbie-ish question. So far, from what I've seen, Smugmug is a much better solution for me than my homegrown, half baked self hosted solution. If I only knew enough HTML to customize the homepage. So much to learn...

Thanks.

Mike.

For sports shooting, where you have to process a large number of pix fast, Lightroom is the best tool. You can upload to Smugmug two ways:

1. The safe way. Export from Lightroom using your regular presets. Create JPG at full size. You will want to sharpen them unless you are using Smugmug's Auto Color settings, which sharpens for you. I use Timothy Armes Mogrify plugin, which does a nice job and print in True Color. Then have a look at the pix, make sure they are right and upload with Send to Smugmug, creating new galleries as you upload. Keep each gallery small to minimize the difficulty of browsing.

2. The fast way. Use Jeffrey Friedl's Lightroom Export Plug-in for SmugMug. You can use the Mogrify plugin as a 'piglet', but I haven't been able to get that to work. This is quick, but if you don't like the results you have to delete the pix from Smugmug and reload them. That's why I stick with procedure 1.

Good luck! The combo of Lightroom and Smugmug is terrific for high-output sports shooting. Be sure to use the Proof Delay function. This allows customers to place an order, notifies you by email, and lets you polish up the ordered pix. This allows you to avoid wasting time developing pix that nobody buys. Basically you show all your good shots as batch-processed in Lightroom, but gives you a chance to touch up pix that people buy.