lightroom

All posts tagged lightroom

Post Processing a little bit more

Posted by Paul on March 30, 2010
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , , .

PDL_20100320_057.jpg

Having downloaded the latest Beta release of Lightroom and having played with it for a month or so, I find that I am starting to experiment more and more with the various sliders and controls, in particular, the brush control. It allows me to put a lot of expressiveness into the photo, darkening shadows, increasing highlights, guiding the eye to where I want it to go.

Take this photo, for instance. When it came out of the camera, it was pretty ho-hum, in my opinion. The camera captured everything faithfully, but seemed to ‘average’ everything out. Technically, it was exposed well but lacked any real spark. Spending some time with the brush, adjusting highlights, shadows, clarity, and saturation in different stages made it into what you see here. Unfortunately, exporting it to web size and JPG seems to have sapped a bit of the color fidelity out of it, but I still like it. Before working on it, you could barely see the sunlight shining on the grass and the rock, which was what really attracted me to this shot in the first place. Now, after PP, this is what I remembered. :-)

I find that it is very rare that I use Photoshop anymore, unless there is something that I cannot do in Lightroom, which is very rare.

I’m enjoying the post processing a bit more, other than just the contrast and exposure adjustments that I used to use. This stuff is pretty cool.

Lightroom 3 Beta – a quick look

Posted by Paul on March 9, 2010
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , .

Leica_20100308035.jpg

Ilford HP5+ – Rodinal 1:50 – Leica M6

There are many reviews out there about LR 3 Beta; however, you just want to try something yourself, sometimes. Although this version has been out for some time, I finally downloaded it about a week ago. I had a lot of time on my hands during the day, let’s say. :-) Having used it for about a week, I’ll give my impressions thus far on the pieces that I’ve used.

Importing
The import has been radically changed. It is a lot faster than previous versions of LR, plus they have made the import dialog a lot more convenient by making commonly used items available at the single click of the mouse rather. From this single, simple dialog you can add keywords, indicate the import behavior (copy as DNG, copy, move, or add), and specify where to place the files. The dialog seems to be arranged logically, input on the left, keywords and behavior in the middle, output on the right. There is a larger, more comprehensive import dialog where you can most any and everything that you want, including which photos to import, how to rename them, etc. You can do everything that you could do before, except that it is arranged much better. Lastly, the actual importing of the photos is noticeably faster. They’ve done an impressive amount of speed improvement in this area. Certainly worth upgrading just to get this feature especially if you import logs of files. It will save you a great deal of time.

Vignetting
Vignetting is something that I use rarely; however, in some cases it really can make a significant difference in the photo. The new version of LR functions the same as the old in this area. Sliding the slider to the left causes the edges of the image to darken, sliding right causes it to lighten. In this beta release, they’ve added another slider, Contrast, to the Post-Crop Vignetting sliders. This allows you to adjust the contrast of the vignetted area to give it a less contrasty, softer or harder look. This is different than the Feather slider, which controls the rate of change between vignetted and non-vignetted parts of the image, or gradation. The Contrast slider affects only the vignetted area’s contrast.

Slideshows
I like the use of images and music together. I use SoundSlides when I want to put together such a display. LR 3 Beta allows you export a video slideshow with music. This is a fantastic feature, but can be limiting, depending on what you want to do. With SoundSlides I can choreograph the sound and the images, that is, I can make an image fade on a certain part of the music, or stay a bit longer, etc, a dance if you will. With LR 3, you click on the duration of the music, and LR will figure out how long each image will need to be displayed and display your slideshow accordingly. You can adjust the fade or display duration, but not for an individual slide. The adjustment is for all slides. If you have no need or desire to choreograph, then this works perfectly! The video export offers several different flavors of video to choose from. Here is a good video explaining the export, as well as other features. It’s right at the beginning of the video and lasts only a couple of minutes.
PDL_20100228_0968.jpg

Grain
Since I also shoot film, I am aware of grain. Each film has its own characteristic grain pattern and size. This can be further ‘enhanced’ or downplayed, depending upon developer chosen and method of development. To be sure, different films certainly look different in the grain department. I was curious about the new grain slider. I thought back to the fact that when digital recordings first came out that they sounded clean and sterile. Later, a bit of ambient noise was added to give warmth to the music. No digital vs. film flames here, please. :-) Anyway, I’m not against grain. The grain slider works pretty nicely, allowing you to add grain to a photo as well as allowing you to choose the amount, size, and roughness of the grain. You can get some pretty grainy photographs, simulating some type of film. In the above image, I’ve added quite a bit of grain, but it’s kind of hard to see at this size.

Watermark
If you watermark your image with copyright information, one of the annoying things about Lightroom, at least for me, was that you couldn’t control placement of the watermark or the opacity of it very well. In the new version, you can control the opacity, placement, orientation (horizontal, or vertical), and whether it is text or image. This is a nice feature. If you look at the image at the top, you can see that I placed a slight, vertical watermark at the right side of the image. It’s rather unobtrusive and was easy to do with the new LR.

Those were the only items that I tried out. I liked what I saw and, more than likely, would upgrade to Lightroom 3 when it comes out, depending on what Adobe wants for an upgrade price.

Lightroom: Smart Collections

Posted by Paul on May 2, 2009
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , .


Red headed woodpecker

There are probably a number of articles about smart collections to be found on the web so I won’t go into that here, save to say that I’ll be using them to manage my SoFoBoMo images. Right now, my smart collection picks up the following images:

keywords contain sofobomo09 AND
flag is not rejected AND
aspect ratio is landscape AND
rating >=2

This may, at the beginning, be a bit too rigid, or not. Initially, i want to work with all horizontal photos, but this could change. Also, I want to give them a quick rating. If it is out of focus or doesn’t appeal to me at all, it will get rejected. If I like it and think that I ‘might’ include it, I’ll rank it a 2. On the first morning, Friday, I took 50 pictures, of which about 28 made the first cut. I just rated everything a 2, but will go back and really have a better look to see which I might want to include. I took a lot of vertical pictures, too, which may or may not be used.

Later, if I want to include verticals, all that I need to do is remove that criterion and the pictures will magically appear, then rank them. Last year, smart collections weren’t there. Just another tool to try to make life a bit easier and the pictures more manageable.

Adobe PS CS4 cross-platform upgrade

Posted by Paul on April 21, 2009
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , , , .


A friend from across the street

I’ve heard negative comments about Adobe’s support before, but on this, I’ll have to give them kudos. I just got the Mac version of Photoshop CS4 yesterday (Monday). Adobe were very responsive. I called on Thursday, asked for the cross platform upgrade, they gave me a link to the Letter of Software Destruction (LOD), told me to sign it, add my case number, and e-mail, fax, or mail it back to them. They went ahead and charged my card but were sure to tell me that they would NOT send the software until they had received my LOD.

As I don’t have a printer or scanner here in South Carolina, I waited until I got home on Saturday to send them the LOD via e-mail. On Monday, when I got back to my house in the evening, there was a UPS box on the front porch. No way could that be my CS4, I thought. I didn’t send them the LOD until Saturday morning. But, lo and behold, it was right there. Inside, the packaging slip said that they had sent it on Friday, the day after I talked to them. It shipped from Georgia, so they must have sent it out right away. They had even asked if I wanted express shipping, for and extra $15. I told them no. I’m glad that I didn’t! It couldn’t have gotten there any faster!

Anyway, now I have CS4.

Are there any tips that you’d like to share with me, as far as new features that I’ve just “got” to learn?
I know that there is some new black & white layer thingamajig, but I’m actually getting quite used to Lightroom’s tools.

Forgotten skills

Posted by Paul on April 18, 2009
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , , .


Final touches
All this talk of old school film and cameras reminded me of a skill that I once had and took for granted. I just remembered after downloading the Lightroom film presets and playing around with them. Ove asked if I had solarized a particular photo.

Well, no. I didn’t. While in Lightroom I remembered what I used to do to black and white film to get dramatic skies. In my bag I always carried about 2 red filters, a Wratten 25 and Wratten 29, if I remember correctly. These filters were very deep red blocked out blue and cyan light, for the most part. Even back then, I shot most of my stuff on a tripod, so the extra stop or two that I needed for the filters was not an issue. What these filters did was to give dramatic skies. Since it would block all of the cyan light attempting to come through, it would render the skies black, as in the photo on yesterday’s post.

Now, I can do this post process by using the sliders in Lightroom under Grayscale mix. Simply pulling the blue slider all the way to the left makes my sky become very dark and dramatic. I used to carry a green filter as well. If I saw a scene where I wanted the grass to become light, with respect to the other colors, I applied the green filter. It blocked other colors and allowed green light through. Again, all I have to do now is move the green slider to the right to get more green, left for less (darker).

I don’t use color filters anymore because there is no need to. They don’t work well on digital cameras anyway, but I’m glad that that is still there in LR. It just gives me a way continue to experiment with my black and white photos in the digital realm.

For the above shot I pulled back the green sliders a bit to make the grass a little bit darker. When I saw this shot, again from my little field across the street, I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish. A little bit of slider movement, burning here, dodging there, all in Lightroom, and I had what I wanted.