Greeting Cards

Hi Folks:

As often happens with our posts, this one begins with a seemingly unrelated mish-mash of ideas that will hopefully find some confluence by the time I’m finished writing (and Marcia’s had a a chance to proofread it).  We’ll see!

To start with, today is Marcia’s Dad’s birthday.  He’s 90 years young today, and although he may not be quite as spry as he was in 1933 for example, he’s still quite vivacious and certainly not done with life!

The next thread in this post is our friend Bob.  Bob is an photographer.  An analog photographer.  Yes, that means he uses film.  He’s not adverse to digital and he does scan his work when required, but he’s in love with printing, with the feel of a photographic print.  While 99% or more of images today are seen on some form of electronic device, Bob maintains that there’s there’s something lacking in not being able to hold a print in your hands, feel the texture of the paper, to hold something ‘real’.  I don’t print much of my work, but I agree with him.  I read a post recently about another photographer, David Duchemin, who makes prints of some of his recent work and then leaves them for others to find.  He leaves them in coffee shops, on benches, wherever, and he has no knowledge or control of what happens to them after he walks away.  That, however, is the whole point, and I like the idea so much I’ve been giving serious thought to adopting it. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month: Triptychs Revisited

Hi Folks:

For this month’s Photo of the Month’ post I thought I’d combine a Lightroom tutorial as well.  In the past we’d done blog posts on making diptychs and triptychs in Lightroom and on creating mirror images in Lightroom; this post combines both of those ideas.  So, we’ll start with the final image and then go back to the beginning:

Nature's Sonograph

Nature’s Sonograph

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Adobe DNG Converter

Hi Folks:

This was planned as a fairly short blog post (for me), but it didn’t work out that way.  It describes an experiment that I thought would work, and it does.  Before we get started we need to iron out a few terms.  A ‘RAW’ file in the world of digital photography is essentially the raw data from the camera sensor.  In order to be able to see that raw file as an image, it needs to be run through some software called a raw converter.  Don’t worry, we’re not going to be throwing around terms like linear demosaicing here – suffice it to say that the raw converter takes the original image data and massages it into an RGB image that looks like a photograph.  Now, one of the challenges for people that make raw converter software (ACDSee, Adobe Camera Raw/ Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Bibble, Capture One from Phase One, etc) is that camera companies regularly put out new camera models and these same companies seem to take great delight in creating new, proprietary raw formats for each camera they release.  In response, the software companies need to regularly release updates to their software that include these new camera profiles.  Going from Lightroom 3.x to Lightroom 4.x for example is a software upgrade and includes a number of new features.  Going from Lightroom 4.3 to 4.4 includes some bug fixes and updates, but it also includes profiles for two dozen new cameras.

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Using Lightroom’s Filter Bar

Hi Folks:

Last month we did a series of posts on “The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets“, but there is one other area in Lightroom where you can create presets that we set aside because it deserves its own space.  That’s the Filter Bar.  As seen below, you’ll find the filter bar in the Library module at the top of the screen.  If you can’t see the filter bar, press the backspace ( \ ) key to reveal it.  One aspect of the filter bar connects to the Library module’s toolbar options; if you don’t see the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, press the ‘T’ key.  Together they look like this:

Filter Bar and Toolbar

Filter Bar and Toolbar

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Photo of the Month – February

Hi Folks:

Here we are, with the first week of March come and gone already and we have yet to do a ‘Photo of the Month’ post for February!  Egads!!  I do have something to share with you, but it has less to do with a particular photograph and more to do with the way it was processed.  The image below is one I captured using my cell phone camera – nothing new there – but it was also processed in the phone using ‘Photoshop Touch‘ software for Android phones.  There are iPhone/iPad versions of the software as well as a version for Android tablets, but since my Samsung phone is what I have and use, I figured it was worth the $5 to give it a try. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Export Module

Hi Folks:

This is part 5 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets. The segments are:

Export Module

Well, we’ve come full circle. Your images have been imported, selected, keyworded, marked, processed, output, etc. and none of them have been touched by Lightroom (except if you specifically instructed to delete images from the hard drive). The most common way of showing your images – whether in an online gallery like Flickr, Smugmug or 500px, on a site like Google+ or Facebook or simply on a flash drive or by e-mail is to export them from Lightroom. When you choose to export an image, Lightroom takes the initial information from the image file, applies the Develop settings and other changes you’ve made and creates a copy of each image that is then exported to an external plugin, a publish service, website, hard drive or e-mail location. While Photoshop has a facility to export multiple sizes of an image or image simultaneously, Lightroom does not. Lightroom does however allow you to create presets with various export options. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Slideshow, Print and Web Modules

Hi Folks:

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets. The segments are:

Slideshow/Print/Web Modules

The Slideshow, Print and Web modules all use presets in a similar manner, although the outputs of each are quite different. In these modules the presets are called Templates, and in each module Lightroom ships with a certain set of standard templates. One can also create user templates based on the sliders in the right panel, and/or download presets online. Templates for each module are available for free and in some cases for sale. In each module one can also create a ‘Saved’ output – i.e. a Saved Slideshow, a Saved Print or a Saved Web Gallery, and in doing so Lightroom will create a speciall Collection that combines the settings for that output module with the image(s) associated with it. As with the Book module, these Collections are merely collections of images and more can be added or images removed. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Map and Book Modules

UPDATE: December 12, 2018:

As of November 30, if you have any version of Lr older than Lr 8 CC, the Maps module will no longer work. As I understand it, Google updated their API key and Adobe had already claimed it would no longer support older versions. So, if you’re renting Lr via subscription, run the updater and it should be all good. If you have a standalone version of Lr, all is not lost. Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin for Lr that enables geolocation support and is much more powerful than the Lr Map module was anyway. More here:

Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

This is part 3 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets.  The segments are:

Map Module

The Map module doesn’t use presets in the way that the previous modules have, but there is one facility for presets in the Map module called ‘Saved Locations’. If you’re familiar with the Map module (if you’re not, you may want to read our Lightroom, Geolocation and .GPX files post) you know that there are several ways to add geolocation data to your images and associate them with Lightroom. One of these is to select known areas and to mark them as ‘Saved Locations’. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Develop Module

Hi Folks:

This is part 2 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets.  The segments are:

Develop Module

As mentioned in the previous post, there are a number of sites devoted to Develop presets, some of which are free and some of which are for sale. There are actually two (three) different presets in the Develop module. One set of presets is for the sliders in the right panel of the Develop module and the other (two) are for the sliders in the Adjustment Brush Tool and the Graduated Filter tool (although these both share the same presets).
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The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules

Hi Folks:

If you mention the words ‘Lightroom’ and ‘preset’ in the same sentence, odds are pretty good that the person is referring to Lightroom’s ‘Develop presets’.  There are a number of sites devoted to sharing and/or selling Develop presets; ‘Lightroom Queen’ Victoria Brampton has an excellent list of such sites here and you can also check out the list of over 200 website links in our ‘Lightroom Links‘ post.  For those who haven’t used them, presets are ways of assigning a series of steps or actions to a one-click movement.  I have a number of Develop presets installed on my computer and I sometimes use them for inspiration when I’m stuck on an image that I’m not sure what to do with, but I rarely use them without tweaking them a bit.  We’ll get to Develop presets in their own time, but there are many, many other presets in Lightroom that can make your workflow smoother and more efficient and I thought I’d highlight a few of them based on each of Lightroom’s modules.  I wrote this originally as one post, but since it’s over 3500 words I thought I’d break it up into segments.  They are:

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