lightroom

All posts tagged lightroom

A guy’s world of oblivion, Day 43

Posted by Arno on October 30, 2010
Posted in: architecture, black and white, lightroom, object, photography, Photoshop, travel. Tagged: , , , , , , . 2 comments
Laundress Lane

Unedited original, D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/13, Nikkor 50mm

Yeah, I know… There are some pictures that everyone probably has taken. In that sense I’m a tourist like everyone else.
But then… In many ways I’m not just a tourist, so I probably tend to do things from a different angle (pun intended) than most of the people. So here’s the recipe:

  • 1 over-photographed street sign in Cambridge
  • Lightroom
  • appr. 5 cms crop (it doesn’t have to be that exact, but don’t overdo it!)
  • a pinch of exposure correction
  • two cups of fill light
  • 250 gr tone curve adjustments
  • Photoshop
  • a splash of HDR (two instances of the same image, with different highlight settings)
  • 1 tablespoon curves for good contrast
  • 1 teaspoon curves for over-all enlightenment
  • some cloning
  • add noise to taste
  • (and back into Lightroom) add some post-crop vignetting and split toning for seasoning
Laundress Lane

After 20 minutes in the oven...

Anyone who wants can have a piece of the pie. Prints available, prices depending on the size and material.
Inquiries via photos [that funny symbol here] arnoenzerink.com.

Canary Islands (part X)

Posted by Arno on October 14, 2009
Posted in: color, lightroom, photography, Photoshop, shapes, weather. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 1 comment

La Palma

Before we continue to La Palma, I thought I’d let you have a good laugh at me. You know you like it, I know you like it 😉
Here’s a screenshot of my labour in Lightroom (only, so excluding the Photoshop work…). That’s what I’ve been doing for the past weeks.

Lightroom screenshot with all the evidence of cloning out the crap from the sensor

Lightroom screenshot with all the evidence of cloning out the crap from the sensor (probably need to click for enlargement).

Anyway…
See how I managed to make uninteresting Tenerife seem interesting? Took me only nine posts 😉
But now on to La Palma.
We took the boat from Tenerife to La Palma. Funny side note is that the best café con leche I’ve had in the whole Canary Islands was a cheap 1€ cup in the terminal of the harbor in Tenerife.
The boat was late, and we left late. All because of the weather. Apparently there was quite some rough weather out there. The main part of the trip we didn’t really notice much, but when we got close to the harbor in Santa Cruz de La Palma we started to notice. Not personally, but from all the people running with their hands in front of their mouths back and forth to the toilet.
Oh, and of course, when we looked out of the window.
“Hey, there’s La Palma… Huh? I swear I just saw land, seriously! Huh? The moon? Hmm, wait… No, see? There it is, La Palma! Huh? The moon?” 😀
When we disembarked we had to step on this hydraulic gangway which was forcefully moving back and forth and up and down. And just after we stepped off, it snapped loose from the boat.

Yeah, it was quite a storm… But it was fun 😉 At least we thought it was.

Still the next day, when the storm was pretty much gone already, the sea was very rough with high waves.

D200, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/11, Tamron 28-75mm

D200, ISO100, 1/180 sec @ f/11, Tamron 28-75mm

D200, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Tamron 28-75mm, Photoshop

D200, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Tamron 28-75mm, Photoshop

What bugs me in Lightroom (revisited)

Posted by Arno on May 6, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , . 2 comments

I stand corrected. At least partly.

I attended an Adobe seminar a couple of weeks ago and I during the break had the privilege to speak with Adobe guru Julieanne Kost. Where she confirmed the complaint about images not being linked to different catalogs, and the smart catalog things I wrote about, and the identity plate, and some other things, she showed me the simplest way of making the presets accessible throughout all catalogs (should’ve been able to figure that out myself, though).

There’s a setting in the preferences, of which the box is by default checked. This tells Lightroom to save all presets you make with the current catalog.

Lightroom presets

Lightroom presets

If you uncheck this box, all the presets you make after that (restart Lightroom, just to be sure!) are stored in the global presets folder and accessible by all catalogs.

Saves you some ranting 😀

What bugs me in Lightroom (part VI)

Posted by Arno on April 20, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , , , , , , . 1 comment

Along the same lines as in part V (maybe a tad bit less annoying, but still quite up there) is the disappearing of exporting presets.
I use the export function out of Lightroom extensively and I made some custom user presets for exporting files, with or without post-processing actions in Photoshop.

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

And the same thing happens here as it does with the metadata presets.
As soon as you change catalogs the user presets are gone. “Luckily” the last used information is kept in the fields, so you can salvage at least one of your presets, but all the other ones you will have to redo.

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

The ones that are “hard wired” in the system will stay. The post-processing actions for example, they are still there. But those are actual physical files on the hard drive. Apparently these user customized export presets aren’t. They seem to be temporary files attached to the currently opened catalog.

What bugs me in Lightroom (part V)

Posted by Arno on April 17, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

It’s one of the things that’s been bugging me from the beginning (yeah, I know, this should’ve really been part I 😉 ).

You spend all your good time to make presets of your import metadata.
You carefully type down the Creator’s name, address, location, website, copyright, etc. etc. and you save it as a unique preset.
That should save me a good amount of work in the future! Aaahh…

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

But then… I make a new catalog (or want to add images to another catalog). I switch, Lightroom closes, restarts and…

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

What the….??
All my presets are gone?
COMMON!!!
Basically I have to make a new preset for every catalog I make. I’m sorry, Adobe, but what kind of amateurish programming is that? Do you really think that if I buy a piece of software which is supposed to automate and speed up my workflow I want to re-type that kind of IPTC information for every single catalog I’m creating? This is one of the first things that should work cross-catalog, throughout the program, regardless of how many new catalogs I open.

What bugs me in Lightroom (part IV)

Posted by Arno on April 14, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Some time ago I wrote a couple of pieces on things that bug me in Lightroom.
I wasn’t done yet…

Lightroom allows you to change the identity plate.
By default this is set to the Lightroom logo and the text Lightroom.
When you have some images to show to your clients and it shows your own logo there, it of course looks a lot more fancy. So my logo’s up there, instead of the Lightroom logo.

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

Now the annoying thing, though.
Suppose you have photographs of the same client in different catalogs. That would mean you’d have to switch catalogs in order to show your client the other photographs.
What happens? Lightroom closes, restarts, and then shows up with an ugly Cursiva font where your logo previously was. It doesn’t even show the somewhat stylish Lightroom logo, just the text Lightroom in that Cursiva font. Ugh!

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

So what’s up with that?
If you haven’t touched the settings in LR in regards to the identity plate, then LR will default to the standard LR logo when you change catalogs. But if you set your identity plate in one and switch to another catalog the software defaults to an ugly text?

Common guys at Adobe? What were you thinking?

What bugs me in Lightroom… part III

Posted by Arno on January 31, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, photography, Photoshop, software. Tagged: , , , . 5 comments

Lightroom is for archiving photographs. Lightroom is for editing photographs, very much like Photoshop.

There’s one other trivial thing – I think – missing in Lightroom: Support for scanning images.
Photoshop has this nifty little TWAIN support, where you can scan images straight into Photoshop.

Photoshop screenshot

Photoshop screenshot

Suppose… I was a photographer already in the previous century, when there was still that weird thing with that kind of plasticcy material with its light-sensitive layer… dang… what’s it called again… Oh yeah! FILM! You got these funny strips called slides or negatives. And you’ve got a basement full of boxes of these, that need to be digitalized.
Or maybe you’re just one of those true artists who love photographing with old cameras and positive or negative film and do all kinds of old fashioned Ansel-Adamsy stuff with it and want to digitalize it afterwards for the world to see? Or maybe you don’t even have slides or negatives anymore, but boxes full of prints that need to be digitalized…?

Being a photographer using Lightroom, wouldn’t it be just the bestest thing to be able to get the same little screen from the File menu and scan from Lightroom, after which it’s added to the open catalog straight away?
I mean… Instead of opening Photoshop (or whatever other third party software that runs the scanner), scan it, save it somewhere on your hard disk, open Lightroom, search for the location where you saved the scan, and import it into the catalog in Lightroom?
That would save a good amount of time. I’m not a software programmer, but I believe that’s only a matter of copy-pasting some coding from for example Photoshop. And voilà, problem fixed, and another handful of photographers satisfied.

What bugs me in Lightroom… part II

Posted by Arno on January 29, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , , . 1 comment

That one thing wouldn’t be all, of course… 😀
Being the systematically annoying perfectionist I am, there are a couple of other things that bug me.

I mentioned the (smart) collections in the previous post.
I have a couple of projects and ideas that I have compiled in smart collections in my catalogs. I found a “workaround” (too complicated and not half as effective as I would want it to be, but it works for me for now) for the missing Save Catalog As and all my catalogs I have the smart collections of the running projects and ideas.
But here’s the thing:
If the folders in which the images are located that link to the smart collection aren’t stored in the same catalog, they don’t appear in the smart collection. So say that I have a catalog with the name 2008 and I have a catalog with the name 2009, and in both I have the smart collection with the name “Panoramic landscapes”. From the catalog 2008 I have 26 images stored in the smart collection. But when I open the catalog 2009 half of the images in that smart collection are gone, because I haven’t imported the folders in which those images are located into the 2009 catalog.

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

The only way to work around this problem seems to be to duplicate the specific images in a separate folder and (re)import that folder in every catalog. I’ve done that to the smart collection “Some idea”, because I found it highly irritating not to have all the images for that particular idea together.
But really, what’s the use of smart collections then? They’re not so smart after all, it seems, if they can’t locate the links to pictures in the smart collections.

What bugs me in Lightroom… part I

Posted by Arno on January 27, 2009
Posted in: lightroom, software. Tagged: , , , , . 1 comment

I’ve come to love Lightroom. When it was just released I didn’t think I would need it. I figured I could do everything I needed to do in Bridge and Photoshop.
I still do a lot of stuff in Bridge and Photoshop. I do believe that Lightroom isn’t nearly as powerful in some things than Photoshop is, but I’m not sure if I could be without Lightroom anymore. Especially (among others) its archiving and keywording properties are amazing.
But as with all things also Lightroom has some flaws.

With the amount of photography I do (and the systematically annoying perfectionist that I can be), I need to have order in my archives. Thus I would like to create many catalogs.
Yep, you can create a New Catalog and that will clear the slate completely.

Lightroom screenshot

Lightroom screenshot

But suppose (which is often the case with me) that I want to start a new catalog, but leave some of the (smart) collections that I have? Or some of the folders?
I’d delete everything from the present catalog that I don’t want in the new, leave what I need and then go to File – Save Catalog As…
But wait… what the…??? There’s no Save Catalog As…? How can there not be a Save Catalog As? I don’t know one piece of software that doesn’t have a Save As function, so what were the people at Adobe thinking when they left out Save Catalog As?

That would be the first thing I would expect in one of the new versions of Lightroom.

A little enhancement in Lightroom

Posted by Arno on November 12, 2008
Posted in: color, long exposure, shapes, software. Tagged: , , , . Leave a Comment

I’m a Photoshop guy… At least, that’s what I thought.
Over the past years quite a couple of things what I thought have changed.

I thought I was a dog person… Turns out that I love cats equally much.
I thought I was a Photoshop guy, turns out that I love Lightroom equally much.
I thought I was a nature photographer, turns out that I have NO clue what photographer I am…

What am I going to do?

Anyway… Here’s a little before and after, Lightroom work.
Nothing you couldn’t do in Photoshop either, but well… It’s easier in Lightroom, and it saves time not having to open it in Photoshop, and save an extra file in the collection.

D200, ISO100, 10 sec @ f/32

D200, ISO100, 10 sec @ f/32

Lightroom how-to

Lightroom how-to

End result

End result