Creating ‘Solarized’ Images in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

Solarization or the Sabatier Effect is a technique that goes back to the 19th century. While it was likely first discovered accidentally, it came to be used for creative purpose. Solarization is a technique of grossly overexposing a negative so that some or all of the image becomes reversed – the brightest become darkest and vice versa. This was sometimes seen even in early Daguerrotypes and was later adapted to printing as well.

Fast forward a couple of centuries, and overexposing your sensor simply gets you a histogram with no highlight detail… not nearly as exciting.

While it’s possible to create this kind of effect in Photoshop using layers and blend modes, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts I like to play around to see what I can create in Lightroom. Now, since Lightroom doesn’t work natively with layers, it’s really impossible to do this with just Lightroom, so I turned to the LR/Enfuse plugin from Timothy Armes instead. Originally created for merging HDR exposures, the LR/Enfuse plugin can be used creatively in other ways as explained here: Using the LR/Enfuse plugin for Lightroom. LR/Enfuse is donationware, and well worth whatever you can afford to pay for it.

Creating this effect in Lightroom is actually quite simple. Essentially one begins with an image, converts it to monochrome (B&W), duplicates it and creates a negative version of that. Then the two are joined together using LR/Enfuse. We’ll go into that in a little more detail. Continue Reading →

Victorious Voices, 2014!

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Hi Folks:

Earlier this month Marcia and I were pleased to attend the 5th Annual High School Slam Poetry contest known as Victorious Voices. Started by Jeremy Loveday, this fifth year had contestants from more schools than ever before, and this is wonderful news!

Slam poetry was founded by Mark Smith (So What!) in the late 1980s. For those new to slam poetry, the competition rules are fairly simple. Each poet (or team) has three minutes to present their poem. Following that is a short grace period, but going over that time results in a time penalty. All poems must be original and poets can read their work, but props and costumes are not permitted. A few poems this year (or rather parts thereof) were sung, something we’ve not seen before.

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Eating Our Way Through Tofino… Again!

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Hi Folks:

Back at the end of March we decided to indulge our fascination for beach walking and combine it with a little winter storm watching by heading across the island to Tofino. We’ve stayed in Tofino three times now; as it happens each time was at a different location. We wanted to wait until after the Whale Festival to avoid the crowds, but we weren’t aware that many B&Bs and the like don’t generally open before April. We ended up staying at the African Beach Cabin, and were very glad we did! Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Angel Wings

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Hi Folks:

It’s been a challenge to select a Photo of the Month for March… partly because together we made over 1500 images in March (admittedly many are for composites), but also because, in addition to Victoria’s colourful beauty this time of year (with the explosions of blossoms all over the city) we also made a trip to Tofino for a little beach walking and storm watching time. The weather while we were there was blessedly cooperative for a pair of photographers! We also made a stop in Coombs at the the Butterfly World and Gardens on our return trip. How to pick one image to represent all that?

Finally decided on this one as it sums up the best of everything from the past month. The beach sand and the shell remind us of our walks on both Chesterman Beach and Tonquin Beach in Tofino and our own Dallas Road shoreline here in Victoria, the shape pulls up memories of the butterflies in Coombs, and the butterfly also brings us to the many wonderful flowers we experience every day in our walks around our Pacific island paradise. Might also be a nod to the invisible ‘angels’ who seem to guide serendipitous events around us… 🙂

Angel Wings

Angel Wings

Original image made by Marcia on her Samsung Galaxy S4, pushed around some in Lightroom. Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

You Are Beautiful

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Hi Folks:

This is very short, and really only a shout out to some other folks. These crossed our path yesterday, and we just had to share them. You are beautiful, no matter who you are.

Click on the images to be taken to the individual posts.

Anything for Love

In February 2014, one of Gerdi McKenna’s friends wrote an email requesting a photoshoot for all her friends as she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few months before … and this is what happened

and

The Light Within

Amy Wilton wants to give everyone a mask, so they can be their true and honest selves. Then she wants them to take the mask off and fearlessly continue to let their true selves shine. This is the light within each person that Amy tries to capture with her camera.

and

Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher: Painted Bodies of Africa

Photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith join forces to explore the art of using skin as a canvas, a practice performed to attract the opposite sex, differentiate oneself from the enemy, and access the spirit world.

We trust you’ll enjoy them as much as we did!

Happy International Happiness Day (+1)!!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Our friend Samantha has a blog post: Beauty Doesn’t Vary – Well worth reading!

The Blue Feather

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Hi Folks:

A number of years ago when I was going through a dark period in my life, it seemed like every time I went outside I’d find a feather on the ground, waiting for me, usually with 10-15 feet of whatever doorway I had just left. To me to it was a quiet nudge from the Universe, a sense of letting me know I was loved and cared for no matter what experience I was choosing in the moment.

Well, last week I was going through a very strange day and on my way home from the grocery store I found this Macaw feather lying on the ground by the sidewalk. Now, some people might have found that strange – it’s not moulting season, after all – but to me it was a reminder of that earlier time, and I smiled.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized it was a blue feather, and I thought, “Couldn’t they have just put up a sign that read, ‘Don Shimoda was here?'”

Blue Feather

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. If you’re looking for a blue feather yourself, you might want to drop by our friend Kristen’s site: Blue Feather

 

Photo of the Month: February Flowers

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Hi Folks:

Well, one of the (many) benefits of living on our Pacific island paradise is that spring comes earlier here than it does to the rest of Canada. As a promise of something yet to come for friends and relatives back east, in February we went out one day with cell phones in hand and captured images of the various flowers we found in bloom in and around our neighbourhood. We then put them into a photo-mosaic using Lightroom’s Print module. We offer it here for you to share in as well!

February Flowers

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

Getting Images Out of Lightroom

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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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Uploading Phone/ Tablet Images to Lightroom

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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:
Continue Reading →

Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies

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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 →