Posts Tagged ‘Tutorial’
Raw Processing Concentrate is described as “A real-world guide to creating stunning images with Adobe Lightroom.” The creators of this tutorial, Rob and Lauren Lim of Photography Concentrate, are two photographers based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. They bring their experience and passion for the art of photography to these lessons.
This is not the usual module by module introduction to Lightroom. Rather it is a way to approach the processing of your raw images using Lightroom as your tool. Rob and Lauren were kind enough to give me a copy of the tutorials for review and I have to say I did enjoy them. There are over 5 hours of video tutorials. A small portion of the time is spent covering the Library module and Lightroom’s export features. The majority is spent examining the techniques available to you in the Develop module.
The techniques presented in the videos are sound and can be quite useful when you are faced with how to address an image and what road to take it down from an artistic perspective. If you are struggling with how to process your images or just a bit overwhelmed by all of the options Lightroom affords you, then this tutorial is for you.
Read the rest of this story »
If you have been using Lightroom and involved with the Lightroom community for any length of time then one of the names that is sure to be familiar to you is George Jardine. George was involved with Lightroom from its beginning and was a Lightroom Evangelist at Adobe until he left in 2008 to explore new creative ventures.
George Jardine started as a professional photographer. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Better Homes and Gardens, Interior Design magazine, and many other national publications. George first joined Adobe Systems in 1993, and in 2003, he began work on the Lightroom project. George currently teaches workshops, consults for digital photographers, and is a freelance video producer.
If you are looking for a great set of tutorials to get you up and running in Lightroom look no further than George’s new Lightroom 3 tutorials. These 15 tutorials focus on catalog management and workflow.
Read the rest of this story »
We all know that Lightroom is not yet a net-workable application. While we can point our catalog to images on a network accessible drive we cannot put our catalog on a network drive. This presents a problem to those of who like to work on a laptop and a desktop.
There are techniques that we can use to work on two computers with a single catalog. Some include importing and exporting catalogs or parts of catalogs to keep everything in sync. All of that can lead to mistakenly overwriting good data with old. Or, perhaps, it gets too confusing to keep track. With a very large catalog this is our only recourse at present. However, for a smaller catalog here is a technique that leverages the cloud.
All you need is a Dropbox account! What? You don’t have one? Well before you read any further click here and get your FREE 2Gb account. Even if you don’t use it for this technique it is a very handy thing to have. The magic of dropbox is how it works so seamlessly. Each computer you install it on gets a local dropbox folder. Everything that happens in that folder is duplicated to your dropbox account in the cloud and then down to every other computer you’ve installed dropbox on. A recent addition allows dropbox to keep the folders in sync over your network for a quicker response.
Read the rest of this story »
Aside from Halloween shots those glowing red eyes in images don’t belong. Of course, the best way to deal with red-eye is to avoid it altogether. So how does it happen?
When the light from your flash enters your subject’s eyes it bounces back from the retina. The retina is rich with blood vessels and colors the returning light red. If your flash is close to the lens (as are many on camera flashes) that light bounces right back into the lens and the eyes appear red. The farther away from the lens you move your flash the more you decrease the chance of red-eye. So the best way to fix red-eye is to get your flash off of your camera. I think more people are beginning to realize this.
Read the rest of this story »
The start of a new year is always a time to think about change and improvement. One common resolution is to get more organized. In this age of digital media it is even more critical that we keep track of our digital assets. Lightroom has many features to help you organize your images.
Organization can come in many forms and at many levels. You can organize your images at the drive level (by using a system of folders, subfolders, and file naming conventions) and/or at the metadata level in Lightroom. You must first decide what organizational workflow fits for you. There are many websites and books devoted to this topic. You should do a little research before embarking on this adventure.
The best website I can recommend to you to delve deeply into industry standard organization practice is dpBestFlow.org from the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the Library of Congress. The site is full of suggestions and videos. Get ready to spend some time there!
Read the rest of this story »
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.
Read the rest of this story »
How do you handle rejection? Rejected images, that is. When you import new images into Lightroom you are faced with the initial task of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. If you haven’t had a chance to read my previous article on using the flags, Do You PUX?, I recommend you jump over there and read that first.
Welcome back. So now how do we handle these images marked with the Reject flag? Personally, I don’t like to delete images right away. I prefer to keep them around a little while and revisit my decision. Of course, if the shot is totally useless (too much blur, out of focus, really bad exposure, etc.) I just toss them.
Read the rest of this story »
You know that sinking feeling you get when you go to open a file and it’s not there or the entire hard drive just won’t mount? Your mind races. You wonder where you put that backup. Wait! Did you back that up?
It is usually an event like this that finally makes all those articles about backing up make so much sense. Well, if you haven’t paid heed thus far perhaps this article will finally give you that extra push. At least as far as Lightroom is concerned. That’s it. Start small and build up to full backups!
Before we look at what Lightroom provides for backing up we should touch on the general need for backing up your data overall. The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), with funding from the Library of Congress, has put together an amazing site that every digital photographer should visit regularly, dpBestFlow.org. For our purposes you should take a look at the backup sections for a complete discussion of backup philosophy. Develop the mindset that no file exists until it exists in three places (and one of those needs to be offsite!).
Read the rest of this story »
Sharpening your images is another step from capture to output. Just like exposure, clarity, cropping, and other adjustments, sharpening plays an important role in the creative process. But when should you apply sharpening? How much should you sharpen? What does sharpening do? Let’s take a look at sharpening and how Lightroom handles the process.
Even if you have the best glass and your focusing system is top of the line you cannot avoid the introduction of some softness during the digital imaging process. To start, the sensor converts analog light to digital information when you press the shutter release. That conversion introduces a degree of softness to the RAW file. You won’t see this in a JPEG since the camera will sharpen the image while cooking the JPEG. More softness will get introduced when printing the image. Even though modern ink jet printers have very high resolutions, we are still spraying ink onto some medium. So there are several parts of the process that impact the sharpness of the image.
Read the rest of this story »
