Tag: The Turning Gate

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My Favorite Lightroom plugin Client Response Gallery gets Upgraded!

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I’ve talked about and shown The Turning Gate’s Client Response Gallery plugin for Lightroom. This plugin produces a totally customizable web gallery to get feedback/pic selections from your client. I couldn’t imagine being a photographer without this awesome solution. Last year The Turning Gate moved all of their popular web publishing solutions to their CE4 platform. The obvious omission was the Client Response Gallery (CRG). What the CE4 platform enabled was the ability to use Lightroom’s “Publish Services” to update your website (no matter where it’s hosted) with the same ease as publishing directly to Facebook or Flickr. No more having to export a gallery and use FTP or having to configure and use Lightroom’s FTP. Although the front end of my photography website (http://terrywhitephotography.com) was created with Adobe Muse CC, the galleries are all powered via the The Turning Gate’s Web Publishing Suite. This means that all I have to do to update my site is drag photos into a collection and hit the “Publish” button – Done!

Now imagine that same convenience for putting up a web gallery of “proofs” for your client to look through, select and send those selections back to you. That’s exactly what the NEW CE4 Client Response Gallery brings to the table.

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Now I can just create a new Lightroom Collection under the Client Response Gallery Publish Service and click the Publish button.

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My images are uploaded at the web resolution I specify with my copyright watermark on them. Once the upload completes I just send my client an email or text message with the link to their gallery.

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They can scroll through the thumbnails, click to view the larger versions, play a slideshow and make selections. Even the color labels that I use for identifying my favorites or their (in studio) favorites are shown to make the selection process go faster. They click the Send button, put their name, email address and any comments in and I get an email with the exact photo “titles” that they chose. Now I can simply select the names in the email, copy them and then paste them in the Text search in Lightroom to show me exactly which ones I need to retouch.

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The NEW CE4 Client Response Gallery offers even more customization options and the overall performance has been improved. While the price has increased from $25 to now $50 (upgrade pricing is available), it is worth every penny as it saves me time and headache with every single shoot that I do.

You can get the CE4 Client Response Gallery here.

If you’re looking for a GREAT place to host your website or your web galleries, check out Bluehost.com as they’re having a sale on their hosting from now through the end of January 2015.

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My Photography Website Makeover with Adobe Muse CC

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After posting my  last update about how I had built my photography website with Adobe Lightroom and plug-ins from The Turning Gate, I started getting questions like: “Could you build your site with Adobe Muse CC?” Of course the answer was always “yes I could, but…” There was a big reason that I built this particular site with Lightroom instead of Muse. I’m always updating my photography galleries with new photos and removing older photos. I manage all of my portfolios and this process with Collections in Lightroom. With the Web Publishing Bundle from The Turning Gate I’m able to update those galleries at any time with the click of the “Publish” button right in Lightroom. However, on the other hand Adobe Muse would allow me to customize the look and feel of the site more easily and basically do anything I wanted on any page at any time without having to write code or CSS.

Hmmmm, why not use them both?

The more I thought about it the more I figured I could have my cake and eat it too. I could build all the non-gallery pages (Home, About me, Contact, etc.) using Adobe Muse and use Lightroom and The Turning Gate plug-ins to continue to update the galleries. It would take a little more setup up front, but once the work was completed I would have the ease of updating the galleries anytime that I like right from Lightroom AND the ease of customization for the rest of the site using Adobe Muse.

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Using Adobe Muse CC I customized the look of the site and navigation

I set out to complete this task this past weekend and I put the new site up (terrywhitephotography.com) on Monday. As with any new site I’m still tweaking things here and there, but I’m LOVING IT so far! I built a standard Adobe Muse site with all three layouts (Desktop, Tablet and Phone) and I also made sure to include the pages that would need to be in the menu, but not actually built in Muse (Galleries, Videos, Tutorials and Buy Prints). Using the trick of Excluding those Pages from the menu allowed me to put custom links in to the Galleries and Videos pages produced by Lightroom/The Turning Gate. I also had to modify my Lightroom produced pages to point back to the main site when someone clicks on home, about and contact.

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Using Lightroom and the CE4 Web Publishing System from The Turning Gate I can publish my galleries to my website.

I’ve anticipated at least some of the questions you may have, so here we go:

FAQ

Q. What did Muse let you do that you couldn’t have done with The Turning Gate?

A. The first one was I’ve always wanted a full screen slideshow on the homepage of the desktop layout. It was so easy to do this with the Widgets in Muse and I’m not sure if there was an effective way to do this in The Turning Gate AND have the slideshow work the way I liked.

Q. Your older site was “responsive” and currently Muse isn’t. How did that work out with this website makeover?

A. Well the pages from Lightroom/The Turning Gate are still responsive and therefore when you click on my Galleries page on a mobile device you still get that experience. However, for the rest of the pages made with Muse I was able to optimize the content for Desktop, Tablet and Phone just the way I wanted. So it works out fine.

Q. If you had to do this from scratch, which Turning Gate Plug-ins would you need?

A. Since you’re going to need at least 3 of their plug-ins (Gallery, Auto-Index and Publisher) you’re still better off going with the CE4 Web Publishing Bundle as it will include everything you need for one price.

Q. Will Adobe Muse ever be “Responsive”

A. I get that question a lot and Adobe Muse improves rapidly with new features. Since “ever” is a long time, I would guess that you’ll see the features that people demand the most at some point! (how’s that for a non-committal, keep my job kinda answer?)

Q. Since you’re using Adobe Muse to create the home page and the full screen slideshow, what happens when you want to update it?

A. I did give up the ability to update the homepage slideshow with Lightroom automatically, but since I don’t update it as often I’m ok with exporting images from Lightroom manually when I want to update that one slideshow.

Q. What if I want to add music to my Muse site, HTML 5 video (like you did with the Turning Gate) or even have a template to get started with, what can I do?

A. I have really been impressed with MuseThemes.com. They make a variety of add-ons for Muse including widgets and templates that take Muse beyond the standard set of functionality. They (like most 3rd party add-ons) fill in the gaps.

Q. Will you be adding more Muse features to your site?

A. Yep, now that the hard part (which wasn’t so hard) is out of the way, I can add more features from Muse and use this site to showcase what can be done with Adobe Muse over time. I’ve already take advantage of the full screen slideshow, full width slideshow, SVG support, contact forms, social widgets, composition widget (for my phone menu), menus, TypeKit fonts, custom hyperlink colors, transparency and of course some gratuitous use of scroll effects 🙂 .

 

One more thing…

Your site is only as good as the web hosting that serves it up to your visitors. So far I couldn’t be happier with Bluehost.com. I was originally turned on to them by The Turning Gate and now they now host all my websites.

 

 

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Updating My Photography Website Just Got A Lot Easier

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I’ve talked about and raved about the Lightroom Plug-ins from The Turning Gate here before. I use their Lightroom Plug-ins to build and maintain my photography website. I also use their awesome Client Response Gallery to provide my clients proofs via the web. I’ve been in contact with the developer on many occasions and I often beta test and give feedback on what he’s planning next. There was one plug-in though that caught me completely off guard. It isn’t often that something comes along that revolutionizes my entire workflow! The new TTG CE3 Publisher has done just that!

The old process of updating my galleries

I maintain my web galleries in Lightroom as Collections. So I have a Fashion Collection, Travel Collection, Beauty Collection, Fitness Collection, Recent Work Collection, etc. When it comes time to update one of those Collections, the process in Lightroom is very easy. Just drag in new images and delete old images. It takes all of a few seconds to do it. After updating the Collection then the time would come to update my website. This would involve a trip to the Web module and selecting one of my Gallery presets. This would choose the appropriate TTG gallery and restore all my settings for color, styles, text descriptions, etc. Great so far! Now I would either hit the Upload button in Lightroom or the Export button so that I could upload via my own FTP client. While this procedure wasn’t hard, it was time consuming. Each time you update a web gallery in Lightroom, Lightroom has to upload the entire gallery and all of the images from scratch. It has no way of just adding the new images and deleting the old ones.

Continue reading “Updating My Photography Website Just Got A Lot Easier”

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My Websites are Responsive and More Mobile Friendly

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In case you haven’t noticed this site was updated with a “responsive” design a couple of weeks ago by the very talented web designer Erik Bernskiold. With the use of custom CSS he has made it so that the same site/content is displayed nicely no matter what screen you’re viewing it on. If you’re looking at this post on your computer go ahead and give it a try by simply resizing the window to be more narrow from the right. The page will respond and the content will scale or readjust as needed all the way down to a smartphone size. The same goes for my BestAppSite.com While I have the good fortune of Erik working on my terrywhite.com and bestappsite.com sites, I have other sites that I maintain myself. My Terry White Photography.com site is also now responsive thanks to an update to the The Turning Gate Lightroom Plug-ins that I use to generate my photography site. At last my photography site also looks even better on desktops, tablets and smartphones. The fun doesn’t stop there. I use Adobe Muse to author my MacGroup.org site and using Adobe Muse I was able to add both Tablet and Smartphone layouts to that site. Adobe Muse doesn’t currently offer responsive design, but it does offer the ability to create tablet and smartphone friendly layouts. There are pros and cons to both and here’s a great article that weighs in on the Responsive vs. Mobile Layout Debate. With that said, the MacNews blog (blog for MacGroup-Detroit) is now Responsive thanks to a template update by Page Lines.

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Like I said, I have Erik to work on my major sites that don’t require as much day to day design updating as my other sites and thanks to Adobe Muse, 3rd party WordPress plug-ins and The Turning Gate I can have a good mobile experience on all my other sites. I’m in no way a “professional” web designer/developer, but I do have websites to maintain. If you’re wanting to make your site Responsive and you don’t have an “Erik” you should check out the new Adobe Edge Reflow tool. If you want to build your own sites with mobile layouts, check out Adobe Muse.

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My Photography Website & Studio Updates

   

I just wanted to take a moment and update you on two things. First off I'm enjoying my time off and having a ball with my photography hobby. As I stated in my "I'm on Sabbatical" post, I'm in the process of moving into a new larger studio and for the most par the move is complete. I'm thrilled with the way everything turned out and although at times it felt like "work", I am enjoying the break from my day job "work". 🙂 With that said, I updated my Photography website with pics of the new studio AND a NEW Portfolio look/template.

 

The Turning Gate Horizon CE Plug-in

I wrote a post a while back about using The Turning Gate (TTG) Lightroom Plug-ins to generate and update my website completely from within Adobe Lightroom 3. While I dabble in web work with my day job, I'm not a web guy and I don't have one on staff either. This means that I either have to do the work myself or pay someone each time. While I certainly see the value in paying a pro (like Erik who designed my blog templates), when it comes to my photography website I need the ability to update it as frequently as I want to. This means doing the updating myself. That's why I'm glad that The Turning Gate plug-ins exist. 

The New Horizon CE Plug-in is what I'm now using for the Portfolio pages. I first saw this "scrolling" kind of web gallery on Scott Kelby's site and back then Scott did a post on how his was created by the very talented "RC Concepcion". While Scott's site is great, I don't have an "RC" on staff 🙂 . At first I wasn't sure that I would like the Horizon plug-in. It was just so different from the ones I've used in the past in terms of navigation being a simple scroll bar. However, after I loaded my images in and tested it I got used to it right away. Also it's important to me that my site work on mobile devices like smartphones, iPads, iPhones and other tablets. The Horizon CE Plug-in generated pages are mobile compatible and use the device's built-in scrolling capabilities. This means no need for Javascript or plugins when viewed on non-desktop browsers. 

While my old TTG plug-ins worked both on the desktop and on mobile devices, I was using the AutoViewer galleries for desktop viewing and they are Flash based. I liked the way they worked, but it was a two step process to update them. I'd first have to export the container/mobile gallery and then the AutoViewer gallery. With the Horizon CE plug-in I only have to do one export for each gallery and replacing it is as easy as doing another export with new pics. 

Check out The Turning Gate Lightroom Plug-ins here. Thanks again Matthew for making my life a little easier.

The Plug-ins That Created My Site:

TTG Pages CE, TTG Stage CE, TTG Auto Index & TTG Horizon CE

 

The New Studio

Like I said, I'm having a blast now that I get to use the studio. Above is a production shot of the Westcott Spiderlite TD6 and the 54"x72" LARGE shallow softbox.

You can check out the Studio pics and my updated photography website here.