Yearbook Woes and Why I Love Lightroom SOOOO Much...

Warning: I'm about to use a whole bunch of words. And they'll probably sound whine-y. If you just want to get to the punch line -- why I love LR soooo much -- just skim right over all my blah-blah-yada-yada-yada-blah-blah and go straight to the end.

So, here was my process to create Middle Dude's School's Yearbook (and I surely hope to skip some of these steps next year!)...

1. Take LOTS of pictures. Collect pictures from teachers/students/parents.
2. Pull all pictures into Lightroom. Key word tag by grade, activity, etc.
3. Pick usable images. Edit EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM (yes, even the head shots supplied by the portrait photographer).
4. Export every usable image.
5. Pull exported images into Fotofusion to design each page according to specs supplied by company who will be printing the yearbook.
6. Export designed page.
7. Import designed page back into Lightroom.
8. December - Mac computer crashed. I panic and lose sleep. Big Dude saves the day ... and the data.
9. Get everything up and running on new computer. School pictures now reside in two different LR catalogs. For this year, I'm just resolved to do a bunch of jumping in between catalogs.
10. I resolve to regularly back up everything to house network/drive and export full-res files to Flickr also.
10. Export low-res copies of all pages & email to school to get clearance.
12. Upon completion of design, I renamed each file according to the printer's requirements; exported to a brand new folder; imported to Photoshop to convert each 300 dpi jpg to a pdf (a requirement by the printer), which I might add, made each file H.U.G.E.
12. Then I knocked my head against a wall trying to figure out how to upload to said printer using their ftp uploader. Wanna know how long it took to upload 42 pdf pages? 16.5 hours! Crippled my internet.
13. Sigh a huge sigh of relief when upload is done and yearbook is out of my hands.

Til this afternoon when the printer emailed that my measurements were all wrong for full bleed (remember, I was using their specs that I downloaded back in Sept). And they no longer needed crop marks, so I should remove those (I won't even tell you how long it took me to figure out how to include them in Fotofusion in the first place ... and yes, they were recommended by the printer back in Sept. but no longer due to new printing process). And, oh yeah, my pdfs were too large and were shutting down their computer, so I needed to reduce the size.

Now, please don't think I'm complaining about the printer. I'm actually quite grateful that they were so careful with my project and didn't just go ahead and print the whole thing as is, cutting off images.

But. I won't lie and say this little "hiccup" didn't make me want to vomit. I was picturing in my head redo-ing all these steps, and having to recreate from scratch some of the Fotofusion-layer-pages that got lost in the December computer snafoo. Having to move all these darn files back thru Fotofusion & LR & PS. ugh ugh UGH.

***Ok, here comes my LR rave...***

Long story short. Printer allowed me to send jpgs, not pdfs, to get smaller files. And LR saved the day on everything else. I resized ONE file and also cloned out the crop marks. I then copied those edits to the other 41 files with one click. PS does NOT let you do this. I LOVE LR. Upload to the printer only took 1.5 hours this time and didn't cripple my internet access like on Friday.

Sigh. I'm soooo NOT a techie. I just want to take pretty pictures. All this other hardware, software, stuff just makes my brain hurt. Oh yeah, and makes me feel very, very stoopid.

Ok, that's all. I'll now go back to being sparse with my words...