Photography Tip #97 – Digital developing in Lightroom
You don’t want to spend a lot of time working on developing your photos. This is how I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to quickly develop a photo and make it ready to show the client.
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Transportable Lightroom Adjustments
I love Lightroom. I can do 95% of my photo adjustments in it. But the one thing I’ve had issue with is transportability of the adjustments. I don’t always want to open Lightroom to quickly look through photos or to export a jpg from one of my RAW files. Bridge is great for that sort of thing and I don’t have to keep a massive library of all of my photos. But there’s one trick (setting) you have to do in Lightroom to make you adjustments visible to external applications like Bridge.
Go to your Catalog Settings under the Metadata section and turn on “Automatically write changes to XMP.” This will write any adjustments you make to the .xmp sidecar file but more importantly if you convert your RAW files to .dng, it’ll write that data to the actual file. This way Bridge will see all of those adjustments with out having to Open Lightroom. I’m amazed that this setting isn’t on by default, it doesn’t take hardly any extra time and it ensures that any adjustment I make stays with the file, even if I want to open a file I adjusted on the desktop from the laptop.
Sitting Still Life
Is it HDR, fancy photography or Photoshop? The answer is never that simple. Especially if you look at the subject matter, can you imagine getting a young boy to sit long enough for just just one image?
See into the shadows with HDR
My last post was about selecting which images to use for your HDR… and this is no different, but there’s a bit of a twist on this one. In this case I have a set of images from the same basic location, but there are a lot of shadows of varying degrees. Here is the set of images.
Nine exposures taken with a polarizing filter to cut down on the glare of the windows.
In this case I’m more interested in the extremes. I want to make sure the window frames aren’t too bright. I also really like the deep sky. I could take all of the center exposures, but I’ll only opt for 1/50 since it covers the midtones the best. That should be the case for your photos as long as you properly expose the photo.
Selecting four of the extreme images, but the midtone can make or break the image.
The final tonemapped image allows you to see into the lamps, what’s on the other side of the windows as well as maintain the shadows of the umbrellas, without making them overbearing all while having that beautiful blue sky. Now it’s ready for any enhancements to bring out selected details.
Good range of shadows covered.
Nine to Five HDR
When photographing for HDR images, it’s good to capture nine exposures at on stop apart like the following set of images from the Yadkin Arts Center.
Nine images captured at one stop increments.
Most people would just jump right on in and merge them all. But I’ve almost never found a need to use all nine exposures. Generally I haven’t had a need to use more than five exposures. It’s not a case where it’ll always be the same set of exposures. One would think you would always want the darkest and the lightest, but the reality is that you only use them in extreme cases, because these often inject the bulk of the noise in the image. Below is my choices for this image.
The 5 selected images used to merge the HDR.
I do start to see which image gives me the best highlights and best shadows, but you have to look across the images to see which ones show detail in various parts of the image. I’ve circled the areas that most interested me. Every major section of the image has to be taken into consideration. I want to make sure I have enough detail when looking through the glass as well as the light fixtures under the roof. The final merged photo has the best attributes of the sequence.
Final tonemapped image. The image is ready for any stylistic additions.
The Photography Tip of the Week #087
Munchie Bag Flash
087 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
Ok, here’s the scenario: It’s after twilight and you with a bunch of friends are sitting around a campfire. You want to take a few photos to remember the occasion, but you have to use the flash since there’s barely enough light to focus. The first image you take is great, you freeze the action and you have no motion blur, but the flash makes everything look strange. You don’t have the nice warm glow from a campfire since the flash made everyone look like surprised ghosts. You adjust your flash power, but no matter how you change your settings either you get a flood of unnatural white light, or really blurry people. So what do you do to balance so you can get the best of both worlds.
Surprised by the white light of the flash. There are hard shadows and the glow of the campfire is barely noticable.
In order to make the photos you want, you have to color your flash. There are many ways to do this, some rather expensive and some not. Before you go out and buy color corrected gels for your flash, try what I call the munchie bag gel. Many bags that have snack foods are translucent and quite capable of coloring the light of your flash. This is inexpensive, available in abundant colors and a way of using those bags. They will even work for point and shoot cameras, because all you have to do is cut enough of a bag to cover your flash.
Cut part of the munchie bag and put it in your difuser or if you don't ahve a difuser use some gaffers tape or blue painters tape to tape it over the flash.
It takes some fiddling to get the look you want. The translucent material is a filter after all and you will need more power to get the light through. It may not be the most professional looking way to color the light from your flash, but it does get the job done on a budget and can yield some surprising results. Here’s a photo from that same campfire using a bag of Chester’s Puffcorn.
A nice natural look with only some minor color correction, there's no need to use Photoshop to colorize the image.
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