Photo of the Month

Hi Folks:

Well, since yesterday was the last day of the month this post may be considered an ‘April Fool’s’ joke, but the only fool in this case is me. Besides, yesterday was Wednesday and Marcia’s ‘Poetry Corner‘ post and I didn’t want to compete! Yeah, like that’ll work. Oh well… 😉

So. March has been a busy month, photographically speaking. I made close to 2000 images this month, and while there are those who will shoot that and more in a day, I come from a world of 36 and even 12-exposure rolls of film so I’m still not used to the scattergun approach when it comes to imaging. Of those 2000 or so images, many were used as the basis for panoramas, or more specifically stitched images, since not all stitched images are panoramas, nor need be. Continue Reading →

Playing With Clarity in Lightroom

Hi Folks:

This is just a quick idea I came up with last month as I was playing around inside Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. The Clarity Slider is part of the Basic panel in the Develop module, and normally it’s used to increase mid-tone contrast in an image. In Lightroom 2.0 Adobe provided the option to use ‘negative’ clarity as well, which can be used to give all or part of the image a dream-like effect. I used negative clarity in my image titled ‘Do Bicycles Dream?’

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3160/2716654561_26b3e657d7_o.jpg

It’s a tool, and like any tool, it can be used or abused. Anyway, this is my first spring here in in the city of flowers, and being a true Canadian I was both surprised and delighted to see crocuses and snowdrops peeking their heads out of the ground at the beginning of February. Up north February is synonymous with ‘mid-winter’. Not too far from where we’re living right now, one of our neighbours had their entire lawn erupt in crocuses and other flowers:

Crocus Panorama

Now, to extend the dyamic range of my hdr images I tend to use Timothy Armes’ LR/Enfuse plugin to combine the images I’ve made at different exposures. Thinking about how it works though, got me thinking about combining other sorts of images. I took a close-up image of my neighbour’s crocuses and processed as I would normally in Lightroom’s Develop module, then created a Virtual Copy of that image and turned the Clarity slider all the way down to -100. I then used the LR/Enfuse plugin to combine both images together. The result is below.

Blended Crocuses

At first glance it appears as though the image has simply had negative clarity applied to it, but there’s detail in it as well, especially if you zoom in on it. It would be possible to create something similar in Photoshop using layers and Gaussian Blur, but not exactly. Anyway, it’s just something to play with.

Have a great day,
Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Photography Links – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Hi There:

April 12, 2019

This post has been sadly neglected for some time, and when we went from http: to https:, WordPress would no longer load it properly (at least on Windows). I’ve gone through and fixed the code so that the links work, but one must keep in mind that this page was originally created in 2010 and much has changed since then. I still have and use Lightroom 6.14, which is the last standalone version of Lightroom. Adobe and I parted ways when they went completely to Lightroom CC (now Lightroom Classic or something like that). The software itself is still good and has some new features, but having lived through the entire debacle from the beginning, I admit I lost all faith in Adobe as a company and have moved on. I’m currently working on a blog post on developing a hybrid workflow (Lightroom, Capture One and Affinity Photo); that will get published when I get to it! In the meantime, at least some of the links below still work but as before you take full responsibility for checking them out for yourself. If you find a dead link or you want to add a new one to the list, feel free to leave a comment below or fill out our Contact Form. There are some hundred tutorials on our site related to photography and software like Lightroom; we trust you’ll find something of interest to you!

Always remember Rule #5 (have fun).

Mike.

Continue Reading →