Tag Archives: tutorial

Creating ‘Solarized’ Images in Lightroom

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

Solarization or the Sabatier Effect is a technique that goes back to the 19th century. While it was likely first discovered accidentally, it came to be used for creative purpose. Solarization is a technique of grossly overexposing a negative so that some or all of the image becomes reversed – the brightest become darkest and vice versa. This was sometimes seen even in early Daguerrotypes and was later adapted to printing as well.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and overexposing your sensor simply gets you a histogram with no highlight detail… not nearly as exciting.

While it’s possible to create this kind of effect in Photoshop using layers and blend modes, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts I like to play around to see what I can create in Lightroom. Now, since Lightroom doesn’t work natively with layers, it’s really impossible to do this with just Lightroom, so I turned to the LR/Enfuse plugin from Timothy Armes instead. Originally created for merging HDR exposures, the LR/Enfuse plugin can be used creatively in other ways as explained here: Using the LR/Enfuse plugin for Lightroom. LR/Enfuse is donationware, and well worth whatever you can afford to pay for it.

Creating this effect in Lightroom is actually quite simple. Essentially one begins with an image, converts it to monochrome (B&W), duplicates it and creates a negative version of that. Then the two are joined together using LR/Enfuse. We’ll go into that in a little more detail. Continue Reading →

Getting Images Out of Lightroom

Posted on by — 3 Comments ↓

Hi Folks: This post also started life as a response to a question asked by a friend, and when it got to a couple of thousand characters I thought I should add some images and post it here.  This topic has been covered before by others and to some extent by us.  As a prerequisite to this, if you don’t understand what parametric editing is I encourage you to read this first: Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies. The basic Lightroom workflow is to import images (associate the image file locations with Lightroom), change the images (by adding metadata, raw conversion, post processing, etc.) and then export the images.  Exporting can be done via prints (either to paper or to print as jpg), books, slideshows, web galleries, uploading to publish services (Flickr, Smugmug and the like) or by saving the image(s) as new files.  Each of those is worth a blog post in itself; this one is focused on exporting images from Lightroom as files using the Export window. One of the advantages of Lightroom is that multiple images can be exported in one batch, although if one is exporting a lot of images it’s best to break the export process into two halves; this uses Lightroom’s memory allocation more efficiently.
Continue Reading →

Uploading Phone/ Tablet Images to Lightroom

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

This post arose out of an answer I tapped out on my phone this morning in response to a question from another Twitter user.  When I got to 2800 characters I thought maybe I should post it here as well.  The question was, “What’s the easiest/simplest way to upload images from my phone to Lightroom?”  I should start by saying I have an Android phone and a Windows computer, but I’m reasonably certain Macs work about the same way.

I’ve found the easiest way to move images from my phone to Lightroom is to use a cloud service.  There are several, but the two with which I’m familiar are Copy and Dropbox.  I mostly use Copy; Marcia uses Dropbox.  What you do is this:
Continue Reading →

Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

I was thinking I should subtitle this post, “Where is the Save button in Lightroom?” because I see that question pop up on social media from time to time and that’s really the basis for this post.  The short answer is: There isn’t one.  A slightly longer answer is: There isn’t one because Lightroom doesn’t need one.  Basically, when you open a file in most computer programs – whether it be MS Word, Photoshop or TurboTax for your income tax – and you make a change, you’re altering the file you have open.  In order to keep those changes, you need to save the file by either overwriting the original file or creating a second copy (Save As…)  Now Lightroom is essentially a database program, so when you import an image into Lightroom what you’re doing is referencing wherever the image is stored on your hard drive or other device.  Lightroom creates a line in its database that says, “This image is located here.”  From that reference Lightroom creates its own preview images and works with those previews.  When you export an image from Lightroom what it does is to take the information from the originally referenced image file, optimize and add in the changes that you’ve made in Lightroom and create a new image file based on the original image, the changes you’ve made and the export parameters you’ve set.  If you’re working with a rendered image file (.jpg, .tif, .psd, etc.) technically you can export an image to the same folder as the original referenced image and tell Lightroom to overwrite the original image, but that’s rather missing the point of the entire ‘non-destructive’ pipeline.  There are pros and cons to both pixel editing and parametric (non-destructive) editing and a place for each, but this isn’t the place for that discussion. Continue Reading →

2014 Photo Calendars

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Update: If you’re looking for our 2016 calendar templates, please click here!

Hi Folks:

This is the fourth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with last year, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software.  I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is at the bottom of this post.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:
Continue Reading →

Correcting Portrait ‘Shine’ in Lightroom

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

I’m primarily a landscape photographer, and as such I don’t often shoot images of people. However, I’ve seen this question come up a few times and thought I’d take a minute or two to address it.

In any form of photography the best time to get the exposure correct is at the moment of image capture.  However, for varying reasons sometimes that isn’t possible.  The image below is a case in point: Continue Reading →

Batch Processing in Lightroom

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

I wrote this out the other day in answer to a question on Twitter (thank you, Twitlonger!) and since my answer was over 3000 characters I thought I’d add it in here as well.

Batch processing in Lightroom can be done in a few different ways:

1) In the Library module you can use Quick Develop to make basic adjustments to one or multiple images. It’s important to understand one difference between Quick Develop and the Develop module, which is that Quick Develop makes relative adjustments and Develop makes absolute adjustments. What does that mean? Let’s say you forgot that you had set your camera’s light meter EV reading to -1, and made a series of images that are all one stop underexposed. What you want to do is increase the exposure of each image by one stop – no matter what the exposure was for each image – rather than setting the exposure for all of the images to a value of +1 EV. To make a relative adjustment like this you would use Quick Develop.

Quick Develop

In Contrast, if you made multiple exposures of the same scene at different exposures and you want to give them all approximately the same exposure values, you would select the images you want, go to the Develop module and go to Settings/ Match Total Exposures. For more on that, see our Match Total Exposures in Lightroom post.

Continue Reading →

Making Sharp Images

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

I was out with a group of people on a photo walk the other day and one of those present – relatively new to digital photography – asked me what exposure settings to use for the location where we were standing. I gave a too short and relatively useless reply, so I thought to follow it up with an e-mail. When the e-mail reached 2000 words I thought maybe I should post it here instead:

Continue Reading →

Basic File/Folder Structure in Lightroom

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

I originally wrote this for something else, but thought I’d add it in here as well.  As with many of our tutorial posts, this one’s targeted toward beginners but I thought it might be of use to some…

Part of the challenge of Lightroom file management is understanding that Lightroom is working with your operating system folder structure, so basically Lightroom is showing you a subset of the folders you have on your hard drive – those that you have associated with Lightroom.  Now, Lightroom serves many purposes but it is essentially a database program, and a database is an ‘organized system of information’.  If you have an address book with people’s names, addresses and phone numbers in it on your desk or in your pocket, that’s a database.  So is a phone book, a postal code directory or a library coding system for books. 

The term ‘folder’ goes back to the days of filing cabinets where we had physical cabinets and each cabinet had drawers and each drawer had file folders, and each file folder held various pieces of paper.  You would think of the folder as being within the drawer and the drawer as being within the cabinet, so if you were to write those out with some sort of hierarchy it might look like this: Continue Reading →

Essentials of Digital Photography

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

A little while back I was asked to give a talk to our local Photography Meetup Group on Lightroom, and so before the talk I asked people to submit questions.  My thought was that I could just stand up there for an hour or so and answer questions from people.  However, the only question I was asked (by several people) was, “What is Lightroom and why would I want to use it, anyway?”  So much for that idea…  Since it seemed I was going to have to create an actual presentation, my next thought was that before I could talk about Lightroom I needed to cover some of the basics of digital photography just so everyone was in the same place.  I created the presentation using PowerPoint, and today I created what amounts to a video version of that presentation.  Clicking on the image below will take you to the video.  It’s about 1/2 hour long, but if you’re a photographer I trust you’ll gain something from it.  This post is complementary to but different from our ‘Photography and Colour Management‘ post.

 

Essentials of Digital Photography

Essentials of Digital Photography

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. There’s some debate about the truth of ‘ETTR’ or Expose to the Right in digital photography. On one side we have people like George Jardine, Michael Reichmann (Optimize Exposure) and Bob DiNatale (The Optimum Digital Exposure) and on the other side is Michael L. Baird (Histogram Myth explicated). These people know much more than I do, so I’ll leave you to decide. For me, I expose as much to the right as possible, without clipping the highlights and work out the rest in Lightroom. Michael Reichmann’s first ETTR post was written in 2003, and camera technology has changed a lot since then. Whereas with film we could get maybe 5 or stops of dynamic range, with some digital cameras we now get 12-15 stops. This also begs questions surrounding the need for HDR, but that’s another issue.

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.