Fully Automated Tether, Retouch, and Export Workflow (ft. Evoto)

So, this video is going to focus on a full automated setup in Evoto. And this is a a setup that I have used three times in the last week. Twice helping friends of mine and uh yesterday for a client of mine. This video is sponsored by Evodto. But before you click away, I promise you it's going to be very informative and very helpful, especially if you searched for this topic and found this video. This is going to cover exactly what I promised.

If you're a regular viewer of this channel, you've probably heard me mention Evoto before, but I haven't gone too indepth. And part of that is because I really wanted to get a good feel for the software. And I would say I'm I'm really good with the software. Now, Evoto originally approached me a little over a year ago to do a sponsored video. And I hadn't used their software. Honestly, I use it on every single shoot.

Now, the idea here is to have a fully automated setup so that when you click a shutter, Evoto is handling all of the retouching and the exporting of the images, the final image without you having to touch the software at all. That requires some setup. So, I'm going to cover in the first part of this video how I go about setting up Evoto to do that. And in the second half of the video, I'm going to go to the studio and show you how I'm using this in action. and it's being fully automated and images are being exported seconds after the shutter is being released.

A fully retouched, finished image, sized how I want it, formatted how I want it. So, in order to get started, the first thing that we need to do is create some presets. Hey guys, very quickly here, you might want to download Evodto using the link below. I'll put a QR code up here as well. Download that and install that so you can follow along in the process. Use the code builder to save 15% off on all annual subscriptions for 20% off a 200 credit top up.

And trust me, you will not regret using Evoto. It has been an absolute gamecher and timesaver in my business. Check it out. The first thing I've done is I've created a project in the library of Evoto and then I have added a number of images to the library.

Now, the images that I've selected are specific to making sure that I have enough variety in terms of uh skin tones and blemishes, fixes that need to be applied. So, glasses with uh glare in them, shirts with lint on them, things that will allow me to make adjustments to the sliders in Evoto so that I can save them into a preset. If there are no glasses in the photo, then the slider to adjust the glasses glare is just going to be grayed out and not available for you to make an adjustment to.

So, looking at this first image here, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click this link button, and that is going to apply these changes to every person, whether they're a male or female, non-binary, uh, child or a senior, because I want this to act as a baseline for everyone. So, it doesn't matter if it's a a man or a woman, an older person. I want to make sure that the retouching is realistic.

So, it's not removing the character from their face, but it's also just cleaning things up. So, we're going to start with a blemish removal here. And I'm going to come in with freckles and acne. And I'm going to set the that at 50%. I'm going to bring that up to 100. I'm going to bring the freckles down to about 35 30 35%. Face shine I definitely want to get rid of that. I'm going to take that to about 90%.

Dark circles uh 25. Eye bags I want at about 50%. And I want to make sure that we're maintaining the integrity of the lower eyelids. If we bring that down to zero, it gets rid of her lower eyelids. And we don't want that. Remove glasses glare. Even though there isn't a lot of glare in these glasses, I'm just going to bring that to 100%. So that anyone who does have glare in their glasses, it will get rid of that glare.

Lip wrinkles and flakes, I'm going to bring that to about 40%. Double chin, I'm going to bring that up to about 80%. You can turn on beard protection for guys like me. Forehead wrinkles, there's a few here. This isn't going to be the best example for forehead wrinkles. Okay, in terms of this image, uh before and after on that is pretty pretty good at the moment. Something about that feels a little overdone to me.

It's this face shine. Okay. So, face shine I'm going to bring to about 60 65%. Yeah, that's better. So, I'm going to sync that across all of the images. Turning off these color adjustments and then we'll allow that to update. So, as we're looking down, our next setting is facial wrinkles, forehead wrinkles. Uh, I'm going to click in here to Jeff who's got some nicely defined forehead wrinkles here.

See, if we turn this up too far, that just gets rid of the character in the face. The arched eyebrows cause these forehead wrinkles. So, we don't want to do that. What I do want to do is basically you would be dodging and burning inside the shadow areas to lighten up the shadow areas. And that's what this slider is doing. It's just going to lighten up those shadow areas a little bit. I'm going to bring that to just 15%.

So, it's a slight reduction, but you can still see the definition in the lines there. 11 lines. He has a very small one here. And I'm just going to again reduce that a little bit. I don't want it reduced too much. For the eye wrinkles, I do want to bring make that a little bit more, but not so much. Again, to remove the character of the person's face. Smile lines, marionette lines, we are not going to touch those because again I find that can eliminate the character from people.

Body blemishes, not worried about body blemishes in the shoot at all. If you are, then make those adjustments before saving the preset. So, what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to save this uh preset. I'm going to call this a retouch baseline. And so, that's where we're going to start out in uh the retouch. Again, I'm going to sync across all the images to make sure all the images are updated with the same settings.

So, if we come in here, you can see the glasses glare has been dealt with, the dark circles have been dealt with. Now, with Jeff, Jeff has a lot of these defining moles on his face. So, I don't want to get rid of those. That's why we want to keep this not so high, right? We don't want the the freckles and acne to be too high, cuz that's just going to get rid of, you know, who he is as a person. So in terms of skin retouching, this is where we can introduce some dodge and burn.

Dodge and burn. You can see it's maintaining the moles, but it is getting rid of the microtransitions in the skin tones. It is definitely getting rid of some. You can see here it's reducing some of these freckles. So we don't want that. Okay, great. Uh so contouring, not worried about body skin, skin texture. We're going to leave everything else here as it is. Close up skin retouching. And then I'm going to go up to the preset, click on the more, and then hit update with current settings, and then update that preset.

I'm not going to use any face reshaping or facial expressions. But I do want to come in and take a look at the teeth. So, I'm going to click into this image here, hit that retouch baseline preset to update the image with all those current settings. And then with teeth, I'm going to look at upping the teeth flaws removal. And you can see what's that what that's doing is that's removing the uh coloration transitions in the teeth themselves and and addressing those characteristics of the teeth.

You have a toggle here for fixed teeth edge. You can see that just like cleans up the edges of the teeth without making the teeth look weird. In terms of whitening, I I do want to whiten the teeth. I don't want to bring it up all the way. That's a little much. And you can see when you pan out, your eye is just drawn to the teeth because it's the brightest spot in the image. So, I do want to bring this down.

I do want to have the whitening. Let's keep that at about 60%. The desaturation, I want to increase that. Let's bring everything there to about 60%. I think that's going to be good. There's a before and after. I think that's good. Still looks natural. And again, coming in and I'm updating my preset for my my settings. Next, we're going to look at the the eyes. We already have the glasses glare on, but I'm going to add brightness.

Something I I I find is uh overly done by people is that they really bring up the scara, which is the white part of the eyes. And and if you really look at someone's eyes, they're not white. They're not this like bright white color that looks unnatural. Even when I'm bringing the brightness up all the way, I want to focus on the iris of the eye. So I tend to keep this the scara down here at a maximum maximum of 20.

I want the iris up. That reflection is going to increase the amount that you're seeing the catch light here. You can see the catch light changing as I increase that reflection. Really what we want to do is bring up the brightness in the iris and add a tiny bit in terms of the iris flare. That's a little too crazy for me. So, I'm going to bring the whole thing down to about 80%. Might even bring that down a bit more.

There. That feels more natural. You can adjust it to however you want, but this is where I'm going to keep it for now. Update my preset. I'm not going to touch the makeup as far as the hair goes. What I do want to focus on is stray hair removal. So, when we come into the hair here, we can see here's a before, here's our after. And that's just by bringing that slider up. I want to bring that to about 90%.

I think that's a good setting right there. It's getting rid of the stray hairs and what it's leaving in. That helps make the hair look natural. I'm coming into this image here because it has my hands in it. And I'm going to just turn up the vein removal to about 80%. Now, this is an image I created specifically to address the lint. And if you have not updated to the latest version of Evoto, it has deblenmish clothing.

So, we're just going to bring that up right to 100% and the lint is gone. Uh the lint, the dandruff, uh if there are stains on the clothes, it'll get rid of the stains. What we're also going to do is turn on the edge smoothing. And I'm going to bring that up to 100%. You can see how it uh adjusts the edges, especially here in this shoulder. It just smooths them out. It's not getting rid of these lumps.

This is a natural lump because of the way the shirt is cut and my arms are raised. Update my preset. Now I'm going to come in and look at this shirt here. I picked this shirt because of the wrinkles it has in it. And now I'm going to use the d-rinkle clothing slider. I scale that back to about 90%. Next I'm going to go into the background adjustments. You can see the background here isn't uh smooth.

Uh, it's a seamless paper, but there are some wrinkles that are casting shadows here on the paper. First thing I'm going to do, solid background, distractions removal, clean background, then unify the lighting. Look at that. That's such a fan. I'm going to turn on color banding removal. There isn't any in this image, but I'm going to leave it on. And now I'm going to update the preset. Again, constantly updating the preset when we're building the preset.

Okay.

Okay, so now that we have our preset, we can just close Evodto and head to our shoot tomorrow because when we log in to Evodto on the laptop, all of the presets will automatically be in our account in Evodto, which I think is great and just syncs across different computers within the app just by logging into your account. And that's just such a a great I don't have to export and import all the different presets.

Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to include these presets for you. The code for that will be in the description below. And when you want to, you just go to add presets and then import preset and then a preset token. And you can copy it and paste it from the description below right into there. And these presets will be available for you to use.

All right, so let's head over to the shoot. For our tether station, I'm using an Asus ProArt P16. This laptop was provided to me by ASUS. This is a beast of a machine. It's uh running an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370 processor, 2 GHz, 12 cores, 24 threads. It has an independent graphics card, which you need to have. You need a good laptop to do this. This is running a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with 8 GB of GDDR6 and it has 64 gigs of RAM in it.

And this laptop is just absolutely amazing. I do have to send it back though and I am very sad about that.

Okay, so in Evoto here you can see I'm shooting at f4. This is a straight f4 lens at 24 to 105. I'm at 1 over 320 of a second. My ISO is at uh 1250. And if I use the the button here, I can take an image of Alex. I can also just hit the space bar and it will take a photo. And you can see in my settings down below with the capture effect settings, I have a preset to retouch baselines.

Okay, so in Evoto here, you can see I'm shooting at f4. This is a straight f4 lens at 24 to 105. I'm at 1 over 320 of a second. My ISO is at uh 1250. And if I use the the button here, I can take an image of Alex. I can also just hit the space bar and it will take a photo. And you can see in my settings down below with the capture effect settings, I have a preset to retouch baseline. So you can see as the image is coming in, it's applying the preset to it.

And you can see the adjustments are being made in real time. Okay. So if we want to look at automated exports, we're going to click on the autoimp import and export icon on the right. So we bring up the autoimp import and export panel. For the auto export interval, I'm going to set it to 10 seconds so that it will just check every 10 seconds if there's a new image. You can set it to a minute, 10 minutes.

You can set it to whatever increment you want. So, we're going to go down to the cog wheel here at the bottom to adjust our settings for automated export. We have effect preset, and that is the adjustments preset that we can use. So, right now, it's set to current effect, but you could change that to any one of your other presets that you already have. So, it will apply this adjustment prior to exporting the image.

I'm going to leave it at current effect because I've already set the effect. It's already processed the image as the image was taken. For export location, I have an output folder and I'm exporting all my images into the same folder. Don't need to worry about preserving the source directories. File name, I'm going to leave it as original file name. Image size right now. I'm going to set it to 2048 on the long edge. uh percentage.

I'm going to set my percentage of my JPEG to 100% instead of 80%. And for export adjustments, I have a sharpening. I'm going to set that for screen for with a standard amount. And then I'm going to add a watermark. And so I have a uh studio builder watermark there. Then I can just hit export. And that will start the auto export. So at this point, our system is fully automated and set up. And as Alex uh you know changes his poses, those images are coming in and the adjustments are being applied automatically as they're coming in.

You can see them happening in real time and then it is exporting the images. So every 10 seconds it's checking for new images and those images are automatically being exported. If we check the export Q, we can see those images are now batched. the initial 12 and then each subsequent export Q is set up. So every 10 seconds it's checking for new images and if there's a new image it's going to add that export to the export queue. [Music] Take that new image and then we'll see it uh show up in our output folder within a matter of seconds.

And there's that. That red's a little harsh, but you can see you can just make those changes in the export settings and it will apply all the adjustments that you uh have in your preset. You have a nice uh simple export process, fully automated process. This whole system really comes to life when you pair it with a piece of software like headshot tools. We've even been using the system with a die sublimation printer.

So, Alex, who you see in the video, is a photographer, and I've helped him out on a couple shoots using a photo while we're uh tethering and exporting the images and processing everything in real time. And then the images are going to a die sublimation printer. We're printing out the images in front of a step and repeat and for graduates. And they're getting the images. They're getting the images before they even walk away.

We're taking the photograph. We're processing the images. We're exporting it. and we're printing and giving them a physical copy of the image that's retouched, fully retouched as they walk away, like just minutes later. I I really love it and I do use it on every shoot. Let me know in the comments if you use Evoto or if you're going to start using Evodto and if you would like to see more videos about Evodto.

I'm going to do them anyways. Let me know what you would like to see in the videos that I do about Evodto and I will add them to my list. So, click the URL in the description, download the software, get your discounts, use the code builder to save 15% on annual subscriptions and 20% on pay as you go credits on the 200 packs of the pay as you go credits. And um just start using it. I would not recommend this software and I would not accept the sponsorship if I did not believe in it, if I did not use it, if I did not love it.

And I I think it's great and I think you're going to love it too. Thanks for watching and sticking with me through this whole video. It's been a bit of a process. It's my first time shooting with multiple cameras. It's a lot going on. Multiple cameras, screen recording, 360 camera. There's there's there was a lot going on and uh it took me a while to get through this one, but I appreciate you sticking through to the end.

In the meantime, uh watch this video here. or YouTube thinks you're going to love