Procrastination, lack of focus, distractions, too much sleep… They’re not friends of a creative person, but each of us is facing them from time to time. They make you less productive and efficient, but there are ways to beat them and raise productivity. Jakob Owens of TheBuffNerds shares seven simple, but effective tips for all you filmmakers out there to help you become more productive and get to work. And although Jakob places a focus on filmmaking, photographers will find these tips useful, too.
Dear Automated Sales Bots – F*#K Off and Leave Me Alone!
Sales 101 says that it is much more profitable to convert sales from existing customers than to retain new customers – but retailers have taken this to a fantastically annoying new level – to the point where I have to waste significant amounts of time and effort to ignore them.
Continue reading for a few examples of the most annoying practices of modern retailers and a few strategies that you can use to avoid them.
Photoshop’s hotkeys speed up your workflow and free up more time for shooting
Most of us have a fairly solid order of priorities in our lives. Family comes first, then photography, then everything else. For some folks, those first two are the other way around, but whatever allows us to spend more time with our family or our camera is a good thing.
I don’t really consider sitting at a computer to be photography, and as such, I want to spend as little time doing it as possible. So, I use shortcut keys. In this video, photographer David Justice shows us how much time we can save by letting go of the mouse and using keyboard shortcuts.
The BrushKnob USB dial wants to help you speed up your Photoshop workflow
External dials and gizmos have been common in the movie industry for years. Their sole purpose in live is to help speed up workflow and productivity, assisting with things like editing and colour grading. Now, they’re starting to become more popular for the regular desktop and stills editing with Photoshop.
BrushKnob, developed by Japanese concept artist, Wataru Kami, is a very inexpensive attempt to bring this kind of capability to the masses, releasing the entire project as OpenSource; circuit, code & all.
Edit your videos using a game controller
If, like some, you spend the same amount of time playing Doom 4K as you are editing videos, you will absolutely like this hack for using a game controller to control premiere.
Editor Casey Faris has a pretty sweet setup using Logitech Gamepad controller (about $20). The secret sauce is the actual mapping of the buttons. Casey uses a free software called xPadder (here is a link to the free version)
Of course, using the gamepad only makes sense if it actually expedites your workflow, if it makes you go slow, there is no point in using it. And the magic to making it fast is mapping the right buttons to the right shortcuts. And what do you know, Casey shares his layout on the video link.
Create an entire new keyboard of shortcodes with this hack
If you are editing a lot of videos, you know that shortcodes and hot-keys are essential for fast editing. We actually shared a tip on using gaming keyboards for editing becasue they have more keys that you can assign macros to.
But LinusTechTips just upped the game of adding shortcodes by creating a whole 87-shorcut keyboard form a cheap $15 keyboard. Of course, the video editor from LinusTechTips is kinda of an extreme-case in the sense that he already has his entire letter-set, numbers, shift, alt and control combos assigned to macros and he needed MORE macro buttons.[Read More…]
Von Wong’s 8 Tips To Help You Keep Your Shoots Entertaining While Being Productive
Hey all, Benjamin “Von Wong” Montreal Based photographer here.
As a photographer who does creative collaborations and who freely invites fans he has never met before to attend shoots, I often end up with large sets of people to manage. Many photographers I know prefer to keep groups small and tight knit because they find that things can quickly get out of control but I have found that with a little careful management you can keep things fun for everyone AND deliver awesome imagery at the end of it.
I think one of the things that became a signature for me is that attending one of my shoots if fun. In this post, I’ll share my thoughts on what makes the shoot fun, while keeping it productive. Bare in mind that this article is written specifically for creative collaborations, not for professional work. While it’s a good idea to keep always keep shoots fun getting the image becomes the first priority when it is a paid job.[Read More…]
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