I was again honored and humbled to learn that I have been named an Adobe Community Professional for 2010. Thank you, Adobe!
Several of my digital cohorts have also been named as Adobe Community Professionals. Congratulations to Sean McCormack (Lightroom), Geoff Walker (Lightroom), A.J. Wood (InDesign), Chris Tarantino (Photoshop), and J Schuh (After Effects)! Well deserved my friends!!!
Can you believe it? 2009 is nearly over! Where does the time go? Are you satisfied with your photography this year? Do you have photographic plans for 2010?
Lightroom is an excellent program but it still needs you to feed it images. If you find yourself in a creative slump or the shooting doldrums don’t despair! Leave all that in 2009 and look to the new year with fresh eyes!
Here are ten suggestions to help you rekindle that passion for photography! You may have seen some (or all) of these elsewhere but it never hurts to see them again.
Lightroom has many many features but there are still things it cannot do out of the box. Luckily, Adobe anticipated this and provided an SDK (Software Developer Kit) to allow third party developers to create plugins that can enhance Lightroom’s feature set. If you’ve ever come across the need for a third party plugin then changes are you already know Jeffrey Friedl.
Jeffrey is on a very very short list of people whose names come to mind when you say Lightroom Plugin. He is one of the most prolific plugin developers for Lightroom. An excellent photographer in his own right, Jeffrey develops Lightroom plugins as a hobby! And the Lightroom community is certainly grateful for it!
Digital photography has come a long way in the last few years. Few today would argue that digital cannot stand as film’s equal. In many cases the technology now surpasses film. Not only do we have a digital substitute for film, we also have digital substitutes for most physical filters. Between the built in tools in Lightroom and the many sets of plugins available there are really only two physical filters needed today.
The effects of a polarizing filter cannot be reproduced digitally. Yes, there are a few digital polarizing effects which attempt to approximate some aspects of a polarizer. But only a physical polarizer present between the subject and the sensor can remove reflections and deepen the sky’s shade of blue. You can get close with digital effects but it’s much more work that just putting that filter on the lens.
Tucked away in the tool strip of the Develop module is the graduated filter tool. The graduated filter tool is another non-destructive local adjustment tool that made its debut with Lightroom 2.0 and contributes to Lightroom’s power and flexibility.
The most obvious use of the graduated filter tool is to recreate the effect of an on lens graduated neutral density filter. The purpose of this type of filter is to allow the photographer to compensate for the tonal differences in different areas of a scene. For example, when shooting a landscape you may be faced with deciding to expose for the bright sky, thereby under-exposing the foreground detail. Or, you can expose for the foreground and wind up blowing out the sky detail. A graduated neutral density will block more light on one part of the filter and gradually let more light through as you progress across the filter. This allows you to expose the scene without blowing out the sky.
To access the graduated filter tool switch to the Develop module and click the icon in the tool strip on the right (just under the histogram) or press the letter M.
One of the key factors in organizing and tracking your images is metadata. There are many types of metadata that Lightroom handles well. The two main groups of metadata are EXIF and IPTC.
EXIF stands for EXchangeable Information File and contains the details about the image supplied by the camera. Generally, the EXIF information should not be edited after capture. However, date and time corrections are usually allowed.
IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) is where we enter most of our descriptive information that does not relate to the technical capture aspects of the image. Things like descriptions, keywords, creator, copyright data, etc.
Ever wonder if your workflow is sound and efficient? Are you following best practices in dealing with your valuable images? Nervous about keeping those files safe and backed up? Well, as Douglas Adams once told us, Don’t Panic! The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) with funding from the Library of Congress has launched dpBestFlow.org.
The best way to introduce you to this site is with their video tour. Take a look.
This is one rich and still growing repository of knowledge! You can spend hours here learning everything you need to know about how to handle your digital images.
The first time you installed Lightroom you were presented with The Five Rules. They were there in Lightroom 1, are still there in Lightroom 2, and can even be seen in the help menu of Lightroom 3 Beta. If you remember anything you should remember Rule 5.
What is Rule 5? The simple and elegant reminder to ENJOY. That’s right! Enjoy. We spend a lot of time practicing our art. Reading blogs and books to learn more about how to hone that craft. Laboring over our images. Striving for artistic perfection. And on and on and on…
Sometimes we lose sight of why we started down this path. Our passion can turn into drudgery if we’re not careful. Hence, the ever present reminder of Rule 5. Enjoy. So to that end I suggest you create what I call a play catalog.
Each week Brandon Oelling and the X=blog staff offer up oodles of information to help you streamline your digital image workflow, strengthen your business, tackle technology, and turn great images into memorable ones.
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One of the key factors in organizing and tracking your images is metadata. There are many types of metadata that Lightroom handles well. The two main groups of metadata are EXIF and IPTC.
The first time you installed Lightroom you were presented with The Five Rules. They were there in Lightroom 1, are still there in Lightroom 2, and can even be seen in the help menu of Lightroom 3 Beta. If you remember anything you should remember Rule 5.
