Category Archives: Digital Darkroom

Lightroom 5

Posted on by
2

Lightroom 5 (formally known as “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5”) has been released. I downloaded the $79 upgrade and converted my catalogs, and here’s my feedback so far.


A reminder: Lightroom is a tool that does asset management, photo editing, book and slideshow creating, printing, and much more: It is the tool for pros and serious amateurs alike.

First, the conversion takes time – much time. The computer seems to be doing nothing but in fact it is working. Just wait – it took me three hours, and might take you many hours more. It’ll get there. Just wait.

New features: lots of little ones; purportedly also many inside (‘better math”).  And some you see.

See a new tool there?

The ones that stand out for me are:

  • The healing tool can now be any shape you like. But note, pressing down COMMAND (or Control or a PC) .
  • The lens correction tool now does auto perspective correction.
  • There is a new “Radial Filter” tool that allows me to apply changes inside (or outside) any oval shape anywhere.
  • Lightroom supports “Smart Previews”, which allow you to edit even while your original images are not connected (e.g. they are on a disconnected hard drive). This is a new option in the IMPORT screen, too. Neat.

There’s no doubt a lot more, but these are enough to justify the upgrade if you rely on Lightroom, as I do, and as many, many amateur and pro photographers do. If you have not yet used Lightroom, please do give it a try.

And use the shortcuts to be really productive!

Like these:

  • Q for healing tool
  • H for hide/ for move sample point
  • Shift after click to hold and view fix
  • F for full screen (and shift-F to getthe “old” behaviour)
  • E loop view toggle
  • S softproof toggle
  • Y before/after toggle
  • R see crop toolo see overlays (from a choice)
  • Z zoom view toggle

…there’s so many more, and the menus tellyou what those are. I recommend you learn these – Lightroom is all about productivity. After all, we all want to be shooting, not editing!

Tomorrow, I feel like some more shooting: we are expecting nice weather here, which means tough but very rewarding shooting.  And that’s what we do, right?

___

The “Pro Flash Manual” is out: have you had a look yet? Flash photography rocks – once you know how it works!

 

 

BOOKS

Posted on by
Reply

Today, a note or two about books. In particular, how useful are they for learning?

The right books are very useful, especially when combined with three essential elements:

  1. Time
  2. Practice
  3. Personal instruction

You need time to grasp and absorb concepts. The “aha-erlebnis” moment does not come immediately. So read, and re-read, and come back to the same spot again, and things will click into place. Especially when you practice, which in digital photography is easy and affordable. And finally, when you combine with personal instruction, which is essential in complex fields. That’s why at university we do all three: read, repeat, practice, and attend lectures, tutorials, and labs.  Just one won’t do it.

Hence my combining all of these, too. My two books:

http://www.michaelwillems.ca/Buy_Book.html

If you have not yet obtained them, I suggest that if the subjects interest you, you purchase and download the books now. But then combine with lots of practice, and if possible, with interaction. See http://cameratraining.ca/Schedule.html – all these are now open (the links will be provided shortly, or you can call or email me).

My books have ISBN numbers. For me as a Canadian, obtaining one is easier than for most. In most countries, getting an ISBN is complicated and needs you to pay. In Canada, it is done online, and is free. And an ISBN is important in books, I think.

But selling books? That’s complicated. The large sellers (Amazon, Apple, Google) need you to jump though hoops. Apple needs you to get an IRS ID and hence, presumably file US taxes for the rest of your life. Amazon imposes a format that is not suitable for most readers. And so on. Plus, all these take a large part of the revenue.

So I have decided to sell my own. It means my market is smaller (people who know of me). But it also means your price is lower (competing authors sell for two, three times more) and I can provide more service. For example, my books are DRM-free – meaning:

  • They have no Digital Rights Management to restrict what you can do. You can copy to any device, no registration needed.  I happen to trust my readers.
  • If after reading, anything is not clear, email me and I shall respond! How many authors can promise this?

Question for you. What subjects would you like me to cover next in book form? Camera basics? Macro? Travel? Portraits? Any number of subjects occur – I am interested in hearing your viewpoint!

In the mean time, I recommend you go buy a photography book now (mine, or anyone’s). And read, re-read, absorb, practice, integrate!

Now off to upgrade Lightroom to version 5, which was just released.

 

Thanks to…

Posted on by
Reply

…Peter McKinnon for pointing out yesterday how beneficial a clean workspace is. As it happens, I was cleaning mine as he sent that:

This by the way is my laptop plugged into a new 27″ Apple Thunderbolt display. The display powers the laptop as well as connecting various devices (it has USB2 and Thunderbolt outputs and more). It also has built-in speakers but those took me a while to figure out – you have to enable them in AUDIO settings in your system preferences.

Anyway: if your workspace is not this clean, go fix that now. You will be inspired to work harder, I promise.

 

Born to be punished

Posted on by
Reply

Pixels, as Frederick Van Johnson says, were born to be punished. While I do not always agree with this, it sometimes makes sense to alter images a little.

Take the rain outside, this past afternoon:

Nothing wrong: that’s what it was like outside my kitchen a few minutes ago.

But I could make it desaturated with extra presence (basically, a one click preset adjustment in my Lightroom), to accurately reflect the mood I felt, “what I felt I saw”. Then it would look like this:

More stark and threatening – and severe thunderstorms do feel like that, don’t they?

Or I could go to town and darken the outside completely. Now it doesn’t reflect what I saw – instead, it becomes something entirely new:

All three have merit in their own way, so let me reiterate my tips:

  • Do it in camera if you can! “Post-work” should not generally be a substitute for good technique.
  • That said, cropping is always OK. So is white balance adjustment, and so are small exposure changes.
  • Modify nothing (other than white balance, exposure adjustments, and cropping) if you are shooting news.
  • Do feel free to modify to get back to “what you saw”.
  • Do feel free to modify to be artistic.
  • That said, try to avoid trendy changes that you know will not be cool anymore in a few years time.
  • Realize that the more modifying you do, the less you are a photographer and the more a graphic artist.

And finally: do not forget to learn basic photography skills. No changes should be a substitute for knowing those skills. But once you know those skills – you can go crazy and edit, or do the minimum.

Now go have some fun. Learn Lightroom!

___

Did you know I can teach you Lightroom? Come to me for a 2-4 hour session and we will fully set up your Lightroom and file storage and backup strategy; and I will answer all your questions. $125 per hour.


Crop, how much?

Posted on by
Reply

“How much can I crop”, I am often asked.

Depends on what you need – look at the remaining pixels after you crop.

Here’s how many pixels you need:

  • A longest dimension of 3,000 pixels is enough for a good 8×10 print or a little larger.
  • 1,200 pixels for a web site
  • That, or perhaps 1,024 pixels, for an email attachment.

So as long as you crop to at least those kinds of sizes, you can crop all you like. This is one big reason for always shooting RAW, or large jPG,  of course: more pixels to play with.

And it is pixels you should worry about, not DPI. (Or DPI x Inches, but why express it in two numbers when one suffices?)

 

Lightroom issue

Posted on by
1

Adobe Lightroom is great – I run my life using it – but now I have run into an issue that appears to be a bit of a showstopper. Let me run it by you: perhaps I am missing something.

It’s the watermark I like to add to each image when I create a JPG. If I use text-based watermarks, this works fine, but I cannot use more than one font type, colour, size, etc.

Since as part of my branding I now want a watermark with several font types and colours, this necessitates using a PNG file that I create in another app. Which indeed I can do, and it works:

Alas – it’s not sharp!

The logo is not scaled properly, so it has jagged edges. And the smaller I make the watermark, the worse the problem gets.

Seems this is a bug, and a whopping great one that is not yet, apparently, fixed even in LR5. A purported “workaround” (essentially, generate a full width logo file) is not a useable workaround, unless you want to generate a logo for every export size you will ever generate…

Kind of a showstopper for me… using another app (like PS)  to put on the watermark would double my workflow. So, back to the boring old “one font only” watermark? Branding is very important to me, and I cannot not brand myself properly because of an Adobe bug. Surely there must be a plugin of some sort. Let’s see of others have found what I have not yet found.

 

Camera Setting II

Posted on by
1

Today, part two of my “always do camera settings.

Many cameras bias their metering toward the focus point when spot metering. Some only allow centre point for metering. And mine allows me to choose. I choose “meter off my focus point”:

I like to see card choices on the bright, large screen:

Now, on all modern Canon cameras, a very important one:

The “joystick” is normally disabled when shooting.

Instead, of course you should allow it to move the focus point! Here;s how:

And one more: set your personalized menu! These are my options:

That’s it – your camera is now set up properly.

You may have different choices. And that is fine. As long as you go through your menus and tune your camera to your specific needs. It makes a big difference, folks!

 

Get your camera settings right.

Posted on by
Reply

Your camera has many standard and custom settings, and getting them right is important. In the next few posts, let me take you through the settings I always make sure are set on my Canon 1Dx and similar cameras. The examples here are for my Canon 1dx, but regardless of brand and model, you will probably have many similar settings.

First, I use cameras that can save each image to multiple cards – and for safety, I always make a large JPG copy to card 2.

Next, I turn OFF any “auto image adjustment” settings that work only on JPG images, and this is important. ALO gets turned off:

(Otherwise, your images will look good in the preview, but in fact may be underexposed.)

Next: I like the orientation linked AF point,so that when I turn the camera, I have a different focus point selected automatically.

Then, I like seeing “the blinkies” warning for possible overexposure, so that goes ON:

Then, anther very important one. I turn the preview rotation off, so that “portrait mode” images are rotated in the file, but they do not show as rotated on the preview. This avoid the letterboxing; instead, my images fill the entire screen when I preview them.

Now, I set my LCD brightness to medium and I disable, if a camera has it, auto preview brightness. Important, or you will misjudge many exposures!

Then, I check that my camera has the latest firmware – and I recheck that a few times per year (Google it). If needed, I upgrade (Google it, again!):

This should get you started.

Tomorrow, the custom settings.

 

That’s correct.

Posted on by
Reply

The new Lightroom has an auto perspective correction function, but the current Lightroom 4 has this too – you just have to do it yourself.

Imagine that you have to shoot a building facade like this, and you happen to not have your tilt-shift lens – or you don’t have a tilt shift lens:

We are aiming both sideways and up, so the lines are distorted, and the distortion is both apparent and annoying. A snapshot!

Enter Lightroom “Lens Corrections”. Go to the DEVELOP module, and in the LENS CORRECTIONS pane, select MANUAL. Now set to taste, and combine this with rotating:

Now with a few seconds’ back and forth, and an extra crop, I see this rather pleasing image:

Building Façade (Photo: Michael Willems Photographer, www.michaelwillems.ca)

Yes, of course you shoot in camera when you can. But when you cannot, then Lightroom and similar tools are the bees’ knees – once you learn to use them.

If you hire a photographer, ensure that he or she knows too: this kind of “post” work is one of the differences between a cheap photographer and one who delivers quality work.

____

Allow me a plug here now: yes, I teach Lightroom, not just photography! And I shoot – and this month I pay the taxes for you… give me a call to hear about learning and about family portraits – perhaps for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day? Contact me today (michael@michaelwillems.ca) to hear the options.

Michael Willems Photographer, www.michaelwillems.ca

 

An old refrain!

Posted on by
2

Backup. Backup. Backup.

As you know, I do make backups, and good thing too. My Lightroom library disappeared, or rather, became corrupted. But no worries, I have good backups at all times. Disaster averted. Plus, my Lightroom writes little XML files, so again, no disaster if it had been lost.

I bought two new 4TB disk drives recently, mail order from Tiger Direct online. One works. One worked for 20 minutes. Not a big deal, but a refund or exchange in store is not possible: now I need to wait for someone to pick up the drive:

Hi Sir,

We do apologize for the inconvenience.
We open a ticket here for Truck Pick up request meaning they will pick up the defective item to your address.
They will schedule the pick up and they will contact you to notify.
This is the best way to expedite the return.

Thank you for understanding.

Anna Ortua
Customer Advocate

Perhaps next time, just buy in the store, or buy from Best Buy, whose store and e-store are more integrated. Just a thought. But whatever you do, always have backups, and multiple backups. I told you, remember that!