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.
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Category Archives: Photography
Uploading Phone/ Tablet Images to Lightroom
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:
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Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies
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 →
My Favourite Image of the Year
Hi Folks:
At the end of every year it’s become more and more common for photographers to go back through the images they made over that year and choose what they feel is their best work. This can be an immensely challenging and yet creative project, because what one feels is one’s best work is often not the work most popular with others. Marcia and I do something similar, choosing one image from each month to use in our annual photo calendar.
However, I know without hesitation what will be my favourite image of the year, and I don’t have to wait to find it – it’s made on New Year’s Day. Every New Year we head to Government House to participate in the Lieutenant Governor’s levée … we have the opportunity to meet the Lieutenant Governor in office (and his or her spouse), share in some coffee and treats, listen to the speech and the bagpipes, and at some point we wander out to the balcony at the back. There’s a great view of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains in Washington from there, and I use my cell phone to capture an image (okay, several) of Marcia at the rail. Being New Year’s Day it gives me an opportunity to marvel at all that this amazing woman gives to me every day, and an opportunity to look forward to another year of adventure with her. Without a doubt, it’s my favourite image of the year.
Marcia on New Year’s Day, 2014
From Marcia and me, we wish you a new year filled with as much happiness, health, prosperity, excitement, love, peace and adventure as you can handle!
Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. Santa Claus brought us both new cell phone (cameras) this year. Who knows where that may lead!
2014 Photo Calendars
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:
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Correcting Portrait ‘Shine’ in Lightroom
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
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.
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.
Making Sharp Images
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:
Basic File/Folder Structure in Lightroom
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.Â
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 →
Photo of the Month… August
Hi Folks:
In a fit of madness a couple of weeks ago, Marcia and I made a last minute decision to run away to Tofino for the weekend. We wrote more about that journey here: Eating Our Way Through… Tofino! We had a lovely, relaxing weekend with a lot of walking and more than a few images. I haven’t yet looked at all of the images I made that weekend, but Marcia and I narrowed the ones I had processed down to six, then three. Of those, I selected this one because it sums up most completely the feeling we had of being there, walking the beaches, rising and ebbing with the tides… This is a 3-image HDR composite, joined together using Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and finished off in Lightroom 5.
Chesterman Beach, Bull Kelp
Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M