Tag Archives: tutorial

Panoramic Photography and Stitching “Errors”

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

In a previous post I rambled on a bit about panoramic photography – basically a system where one combines several images into one using software designed for that purpose. One can also take several images of the same scene at different exposures and combine them into one HDR image using the same software. Mostly I use Autopano Pro for stitching, although I’ve also used Hugin, and since I work extensively in Lightroom I’ve been playing a bit with Photoshop CS5‘s HDR Pro and panorama tools as well. To create a stitched image the software looks for the same points in two or more images and assigns them as ‘control points’. The combined image is then mapped around those control points. Usually this works very well, but in my previous post I talked a bit about parallax errors and things like that, and sometimes these images don’t get mapped together perfectly. This can create situations like this: Continue Reading →

Deleting Old Lightroom Backups

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

I still remember a computer teacher of mine from… let’s just say more than twenty years ago… telling us of a project where he gave everyone in the class several pages of text to type in, set them to it and waited until they were about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way done, then turned off the power to the computer system.  Amid the groans of everyone who was sitting in front a terminal he said, “Let’s talk about backups.” Continue Reading →

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Playing with Presets

Posted on by — 7 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

Update, April 16, 2015: The comment below reminded me of this post. I had forgotten about it because I subsequently wrote a series of five blog posts on the different ways to use presets in the nine Lr modules. If you’re interested, you can find the first one here: The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules.

This is going to be a relatively short post – for me anyway.  One of the (many) wonderful things about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the ability to use presets to speed up your workflow.  There are presets for everything from importing to exporting, for slideshows, prints and web galleries (although those are called templates), but for most people, I imagine presets refer to the Develop module presets.  Even in the Develop module there are presets for the sliders in the right-side panel and there are separate presets for the adjustment brush/ graduated filter, presets for the Crop tool (specific dimensions) and also for the Camera Calibration tools. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

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

Posted on by — 4 Comments ↓

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.

Photo of the Month – Making Small Creative Edits in Lightroom

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks: I usually dedicate the last day of the month to my favourite image made that month, but this month I’m going to do something a little different and dedicate it to an idea. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (I currently have both LR 2.6 and 3 Beta installed) to do all of my file management, tagging, and pretty much all of my editing, etc. One of the biggest changes between LR 2 and LR1 before it was the ability to make selective rather than global changes to an image; I have no doubt that this will be expanded upon in LR 3 when it comes out, but we’ll have to wait and see. Now Photoshop is THE pixel editing program, and there is so much that can be done in Photoshop that can’t be done in Lightroom, so we’ll get that argument out of the way right up front. However, rather than be stymied by limitations, I always like to know how far I can take something – in this case Lightroom’s selective edit commands: the brush tool and the gradiant tool. I find mostly what I use them for is making very small adjustments. By small adjustments I’m talking generally ½ a stop or less. Still I think small corrections can make a big difference. I’m no Lightroom guru, but in all of the various Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos I’ve seen I’ve yet to see anyone cover this so I thought I’d give it a shot. Further creative effects may be achieved by changing the saturation, clarity, brush colour, etc. but this tutorial focuses solely on exposure adjustments. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

It’s been a busy month of writing and blogging and other things, but I have managed to sneak out with my camera for a time or two!  This month I thought I’d make the focus (pun intended) of my ‘photo of the month’ page an HDR image.  The image below is a combination of nine photographs made at different exposures.  Now most photographers today are at least somewhat similar with HDR, but in my experience most people associate it with the grungy, grainy look that HDR is most famous for.  It has its place, but in my experience it’s overused.  Besides, HDR stands simply for ‘High Dynamic Range’ and is quite useful as a technique for expanding the dyanic range (the number of tones, from white to black) in an image where the tonal range of the scene is beyond the camera’s ability to capture it.  There’s an excellent article on HDR by Alexandre Buisse here.

That’s certainly the case with this image.  It was made in a local park called ‘Christmas Hill‘, and it’s one of my favourite places in this area to make photographs.  Capturing the detail in the shadow areas without blowing out the highlights where the sun strikes the moss was beyond the camera’s sensor.  I uploaded the images into Lightroom, and then used Timothy Armes’ LR/Enfuse plugin to combine them into one blended image.  Post processing included the usual (white balance, black point, white point, etc.) as well as some graduated filters to highlight the sun spot.

Click on image to see a larger version

So, that’s it for now.  Go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S.  I came across this great tutorial yesterday by R.C. Concepcion on using Shadowbox JS to integrate a Lightroom web gallery into a WordPress blog.  Maybe next month…

P.S. II, the Sequel: 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.

Becoming a Better Photographer

Posted on by — 8 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

I actually wrote and posted this yesterday, but I’ve felt compelled to come back and add an introduction to it (perhaps solely for my own edification) as to why I wrote it in the first place.  In a way it began when I read a comment on a photography forum by someone who said s/he could never use ‘Camera A’ because it doesn’t have ‘Live View’.  Now s/he has a valid point in how s/he sees photography and how it works for him/her, but it got me thinking… if you went back in time 10 years and said to the people at any of the major camera manufacturers that you wouldn’t buy their camera because it doesn’t have live view, they’d look at you funny and ask, “Live what?”  Now live view certainly has value and I’m not trying to demean it by any means, but it brings back to the surface the question of, “Is is the camera or the photographer that matters?”  Asking that question among any group of photographers will cause either discussion or riots depending on the group, and I’m not going to pick one side or the other because I think they’re both important.  On one hand, one can’t expect to make the same images with a Holga as with a Hasselblad.  That’s not to say that one can or cannot make good pictures with either a Holga or a Hasselbad, only that the type of images made with each will be quite different.  A photographer is not bound by his or her tools.  At the same time, if someone starting out were to drop $50K on camera equipment with no understanding of photography, s/he’d probably find it a frustrating experience getting the images s/he imagined making with this equipment.  Continue Reading →

Photography Links – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Posted on by — 70 Comments ↓

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 →

Photography Links

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:  There are about a bazillion websites on photography today… I’d hate to hazard a guess on how many of them I have bookmarked, so I won’t try.  However there are some that I visit daily or at least regularly, so I thought I’d add them in here (in no particular order):

  • Luminous Landscape: This site is run by Toronto photographer Michael Reichmann.  News, reviews, product updates and assessments, and a forum with probably the largest collection of amateur and professional photographers from around the world.  Michael’s store has a number of downloadable videos for sale – well worth checking out!
  • The Online Photographer: A daily blog by Mike Johnston.  Lots of useful (and sometimes fun 🙂 ) information here.
  • National Geographic Shot of the Day: ’nuff said.
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day (from NASA).
  • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips: Matt Koslowki’s site, with presets, tips, videos and more about Lightroom.
  • Joe McNally’s Blog: One of my favourite photographers.  I haven’t met him (yet) but he seems like such a down to earth guy.
  • John Paul Caponigro’s Blog: Another of my favourite photographers.  There are hundreds of pages of free .pdf files available through his site.
  • Light Diary: Craig Tanner’s photo blog.
  • PhotoWalkPro: Jeff Revell’s photo blog.
  • Digital Photo Experience: Rick Sammon, Juan Pons and friends provide tips and information on digital photography.
  • Alltop Lightroom News: A collection of the latest blog posts related to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
  • Alltop Photography News: A collection of the latest blog posts related to photography and photographers.
  • Analog Photography User’s Group:  Remember film?  I shot it for a lot of years.  Kodachrome was my favourite.  This is a user forum for those not digitally-inclined.
  • Canon Digital Learning Center: Tips, techniques and information related to all things Canon, although some of it can be applied to those with other camera systems.
  • TrekEarth: Phototographs, critiques, discussions…
  • David Farkas Photography Blog: David’s most recent posts have been about his experiences with the Leica S2.
  • Camera’s View:  Not a very active blog, but there is a set of calendar templates there for Lightroom and some other useful information.
  • Focus on Singh-Ray Filters:  Because you can’t fix everything in Photoshop.
  • The Mindful Eye:  Tutorials, critiques and other useful tidbits by Craig Tanner and friends.
  • The DAM Forum:  For every time you’ve asked yourself, “Where did I put those DAM-images on my hard drive?”
  • Leica User Forum:  The place for all things Leica.
  • Lightroom-Blog: Sean McCormack runs this site as well as Lightroom-News and provides great Lightroom information.
  • Lightroom-News: see above.
  • Hasselblad Forum: User information for both analog and digital Hasselblad cameras, lenses, etc.
  • Rangefinder magazine:  Do rangefinder cameras have a place in the world of auto-everything?  I think so.
  • Tao of Photography: Andy Ilachinski’s blog.  A unique combination of photography and philosophy
  • Flickr:  our Flickr site… couldn’t resist!

Mike.

P.S.  Someday I’ll add these and some other links to the main page.  Someday… I promise.

P.S. II, the Sequel: 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.