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:

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.

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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.

Presentation of images to show you are “not Uncle Fred” can be very important. As in this here example from a recent shoot:

That looks better framed than as “just the image”, no? As in food, presentation counts for a lot.

So how do I get this white frame in a JPG file without the hassle of using Photoshop? I use a quick two-step trick. Saves me time.

STEP ONE: I use the Lightroom print module:

1. After selecting my image, I select the “PRINT” module.
2. In “Page Setup”, via the menu, I make a custom size of, in my case, 175 by 125 mm, portrait mode. (175mm is about 7 inches).
3. In the “Image Settings” sections on the right, I select a stroke border, grey, 0.5 point wide. I also set the Layout settings properly. Like this:

You can create an “Identity plate”, with fonts as per your choice and rotated as needed; and placed where you prefer.

Then I set a print resolution of 240 ppi in the Print Job section; this gives me enough pixels. (240 x 7″ = 1650 pixels; more if I want larger JPGs).

Of course all these settings can be saved as a “User Template”, so once you get this right once, every next time it is just one click.

Having set up my image, I now click on “Print”.

But I do not actually print: instead, I “print” (really, export) to a PDF. I select PDF from the choice menu. The PDF is created on my desktop.

STEP TWO: I now open that PDF, and I select the FILE menu; and within that, select EXPORT. I now select export type JPG, and a resolution of 175 pixels/inch:

That gives me a JPG 1205 pixels wide Just what I needed.

(Why? Well, a “print” 175mm wide is what I selected initially. That is (175/25.4) = 6.89 inch wide. So exporting that to JPG as 175 pixels per inch gives me 6.89 x 175 = 1205 pixels.)

All this sounds complicated, but once you have set it up, it is really just a few clicks every subsequent time. And those clicks are worth it if you want your work to be distinguishable from others’. Here is another example:

Adding a little class to your work’s presentation never hurts.

PS – this works very well printed, too. Print a 4×6 on a 5×7 piece of photo paper, as we have done here in our “virtual print”, and it looks much classier than anything Uncle Fred will ever produce!

Sometimes images need a little TLC.. a little post work, to bring them back to waht you saw. Like this one, a rainy shot in Jamaica last week:

That is what it looked like. But the camera shot, taken in a hurry from a moving bus, was not quite right:

Underexposed, so the colour does not show. So I made some adjustments to bring it back:

A graduated filter at the top; then the “basic” adjustments: Exposure up; then clarity and saturation up. That way, the image looks the way it looked to me. Shoot RAW, and you can do these adjustments without any noticeable quality loss.

It is OK to change an image. “Pixels were born to be punished”, as Frederic Van Johnson says. But in general, I tend to restrict changes to a minimum; and to bring back images to what they looked like.

If you do alter images to create an effect, which I do sometimes too, then I advise you to keep it simple, and to realize that fashion comes and goes, while style stays, so keep the original!