This is a bit of a quickie, but I only just learned it myself. It’s two tips in one. If you don’t already know, there’s a way to visualize the dust spots on your image when using the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom. Not surprisingly, it’s called Visualize Spots and you can click the little box in the lower left …
New LR Develop Presets Released
This Adobe Lightroom Develop preset package includes 42 of Nicole S. Young’s most-used presets and a 16-page PDF manual, which includes installation instructions and complete before/after catalog of photographs of each preset to give you a sense of what to expect. Presets are extremely helpful in making one’s workflow more efficient. They also give us new ideas about expression, and, …
Visualizing Spots in LR5
If there’s one feature I love in the newest version of Adobe’s Lightroom, it’s the Visualize Spots tool. There wasn’t much fanfare about it, it kind of snuck under the radar a little, but for me this is huge. Lord knows I try to keep my sensor clean but it’s a losing battle. My usual workflow involves a pretty paranoid …
Printing Hokkaido
After narrowing down my Hokkaido work through my edit process, I’m now left with a collection of images to print. Here’s my rough process. 1. Image Prep. I take each image through a final pass in Lightroom’s Develop module. Here are the questions I’m asking myself as I go through the panels. Is my monitor recently calibrated? Am I completely …
Editing Hokkaido
Coming home from Hokkaido with 8000 images to edit should seem intimidating, but it isn’t. I got a couple requests from people to share my editing process, which hadn’t even occurred to me until I got them, because I’m pretty much done already. So then I went and told Twitter and Facebook I’d show people how I do this painlessly …
Ongeli Elders
On my last day on the field in Northern Kenya, I returned to the village that adopted me two years ago. I brought a bull camel, bags of rice, and assorted goods, and we had a fantastic feast. While the camel was cooking, the elders gathered around me and, with a lot of hand gestures, they re-told the story of …
The Created Image: Turkana Fisherman
I was swimming in Lake Turkana, just outside of the town of Loiyangalani, Kenya, when I saw this fisherman on the shore mending nets. Lake Turkana, I am told, has the highest concentration of crocodiles in the world, so while the swimming was lovely, this was as good a reason as any to get out. Kura, my Kenyan friend, went …
Back It Up!
Here’s your New Year’s reminder: back your stuff up. Do it redundantly, with extreme paranoia, and do it now. If it helps, I’ll even say “Pretty please.” You put so much time into your work, and harddrives fail all the time. So really, this is not paranoia. It’s wisdom. My preference is that every file, including my Lightroom catalog files, …
Another Look at the B&W Mix in Lightroom
It seems like I get more and more people telling me they’re frustrated with their black & white conversions. It’s a topic all it’s own and this short post won’t do it justice, but the most important aspect of a black and white image is the control over tonal contrasts. You can do this in a number of ways, but …
LR4: Graduated Filter + Colour Temp
Near Tofino, BC. 4 Different Skies. The key to great black and white images (and by this I mean the B+W part, obviously light, lines, and moments still come first) is tonal contrasts. Those contrasts will occur within the scene, of course, but the way we chose to render them in Lightroom (or PS, ACR, etc) has a strong impact …