July 31, 2008
The true stars of Lighroom 2 are the localized adjustment tools. For the first time, photographers can now edit their raw files using the adjustment brush and gradient filter tools. These allow you to apply all kinds of adjustments such as: darkening, lightening, coloring or sharpening an image. The following extract is taken from my new book in which I show how to work with the adjustment brush and auto-masking feature.
June 24, 2008
Michael Clark has an excellent article on Film Scans in Lightroom, over at O’Reilly’s Inside Lightroom blog. He discusses everything from film choice for scanning to scanner setup, to final tweaks in Lightroom. It’s a well balanced article that should be encouraging to any film buff looking to start using Lightroom with their slide or negative collection.
May 21, 2008
If you’ve been following either my own personal blog, or that of Jeffrey Friedl, you might have noticed us talking about Lightroom, time lapse and scripts. Now that Jeffrey has posted his script for modifying Lightroom crop metadata, I’m going to show you how I’ve been using the script.
The background to the script is that I’ve been interested in time lapse photography for a while. I’d not consider myself a videographer, or have much interest in it, but I do really love time lapse. So I’ve shot lots of sequences. But ultimately the static nature of the shot made me wish for something a little more interesting. Searching the web I came across sites that had panning in their timelapses, ‘very cool’ I thought. Then a guy called Chris Tierney showed up locally, with a bunch of cool timelapses. He’d been using After Effects to do his panning. I wondered if it could be done with some addons to Lightroom.
My pondering didn’t last long when Jeffrey came up with a Perl script that would do what I needed. Jeffrey explains the mechanics in detail in his post.
Sometimes though a video can help. So I put one together, it’s slightly rough because I’m using new software and doing it with a USB mic on my Macbook Pro, rather than the iMac I normally use. That’s because all my recent work for timelapse is there!
One or 2 quick points to note: Work with BACKUP files. While I’ve done 20 or more videos with no issues, that doesn’t mean that something won’t get corrupted. Jeffrey says the script is delicate and that means he’s not kidding. Also it may not be obvious in the video, but when I move the final crop, the aspect ratio is fixed. In fact it makes no difference if the size changes, because that will zoom the image, BUT the aspect ratio HAS to stay the same. Otherwise your video will be wonky..
Enjoy!
If you do create anything from this, be sure to post a link in the comments.
PS, Jeffrey tells me his website is pronounced reg-ex from Regular Expressions, his book, not the ‘rej-ex’ way I pronounced it.. Opps. Sorry Jeffrey!
April 18, 2008
With the changes to detail in the new Beta, some people are uncertain about what can be done with the small preview window in the Detail pane of Develop. Here’s another quick movie (again MP4, I’m trying to keep the movie at a veiwable size), detailing this preview window (pardon the pun).
April 17, 2008
Here’s a short video on making a bunch of photos have a similar exposure, despite being from different cameras, with different settings. This feature is in V1 also, in case folk think it’s a new V2 feature! Video is in MP4 format, so you may need to right click and download.
April 11, 2008
Here is a quick tutorial about one of the subtle new features in the Lightroom 2.0 Develop module.
A less obvious innovation in Lightroom 2.0 is the ability to apply a negative Clarity adjustment. But now that it is implemented, one can foresee quite a few creative possibilities. Negative Clarity does the opposite of a normal Clarity adjustment as it softens the midtones, and the way that it does this produces an effect that is not too dissimilar to a traditional darkroom diffusion printing technique. The net result is that you can create some quite beautiful diffuse soft focus image effects which are particularly suited to black and white photography. It’s a bit like being able to add a cloudy sky lighting effect. Here’s how it works…
April 2, 2008
One of the key new features in Lightroom 2.0 is the Filter bar, which is accessible in the Content area whenever you are in the Library Grid view mode. The Filter bar combines Find panel and Metadata Browser features into one, along with the search functionality of the Keyword Tags panel. Basically we have a new, more streamlined approach to the Library module panels layout where one can broadly say that the left panels contain the catalog source locations such as Folders and Collections and the right hand panel contains the catalog edit controls, such as the Quick Develop and Keywording panel. The Filter bar is now the main place to go for making refined filter selections of photos in the catalog (although you can still use the Filmstrip controls for filtering by rating and labels).
February 25, 2008
Source: George Jardine on Lightroom and Digital Photography
Author: George Jardine
Photograph © 2003 George A. Jardine
George Jardine has posted a podcast video tutorial on the basics of color correction, using Adobe Lightroom.
“In this tutorial I outline the basics of color correction, in a situation where the color and density of the photograph are wide open to interpretation. Make sure you start with a calibrated and profiled monitor, and then learn to trust your eyes to bring out the very best in your photographs, using the Adobe Lightroom Develop Module.”
Duration: 6:04
February 25, 2008
Source: George Jardine on Lightroom and Digital Photography
Author: George Jardine
Photograph © George A. Jardine
George Jardine has posted a podcast video tutorial on working with RGB files using the Edit in Photoshop command.
“In this tutorial I outline the basics of using Lightroom’s Edit in Photoshop command, specifically as it pertains to RGB files. You’ll learn what your three basic options are, and how they are best used to begin taking advantage of the incredible variety of workflows available, when using Lightroom and Photoshop together.”
Duration: 9:28
February 7, 2008
The excitement of getting hold of a new camera can often be tempered by the frustrations encountered when having to learn how to work with a new piece of kit. First off I must say that I have so far been delighted with the EOS 1Ds MkIII camera in terms of the camera’s design and image quality. Canon have made a number of significant improvements that are very welcome. Although there have been some teething problems, the good news is that I have managed to overcome most of these. The main one though has been trying to get the Canon camera to work smoothly with the new Intel 24″ iMac that I bought at the same time as the camera, which has also proved difficult to set up in the studio, but more of that later.