Tag Archives: Lightroom

Photo of the Month – Spring Flowers

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Hi Folks:

At the end of every month I create a post with my favourite image of those I’ve taken in the past month. However, since this site belongs to both Marcia and me, this month I’m going to break with tradition and post one of Marcia’s images instead.   For some strange reason she doesn’t have the same fascination with shutter speeds, f/stops and depth of field tables that I do, but she has a good eye.  This image was made yesterday, using Marcia’s new cell phone camera, while we were walking around the Rockland district of Victoria. I admit I did push it around in Lightroom a little bit, but she nailed the lighting and composition to start with and all I did was accent it. It’s an image of a group of hellebores, or ‘winter roses’ as they’re sometimes called. These were growing in one of the gardens on the Lieutenant Governor’s grounds.Winter RosesSpring flowers. January. I’ll get used to it eventually…

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Photographing Moving Water – Revisited

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Hi Folks:

Last month I did a blog post on a technique I’ve been playing with for ‘Photographing Moving Water‘. I’m not going to reiterate that technique here so if you’d like to read that other post first, I’ll wait…

…welcome back!

Now, I’ve used this idea on several photos and it generally works pretty well, but I’d only used it on wave action down at the shore of the ocean. I’d been wondering how well it would work on a stream, waterfall or other moving water, so I went out yesterday to make some more images. This is my second ‘winter’ here on the island and I’m still not quite used to the idea of using ‘January’ and ‘spring’ in the same sentence, but the skunk cabbage leaves were already starting to unfurl when I was out… Anyway, I digress. Continue Reading →

Making Rounded Corners in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

This has been covered on other photography sites, but since it popped up on Twitter again yesterday I thought I’d do a short post on it.  The question is, “Can I add rounded corners to an image in Lightroom?  The answer is yes, and it’s pretty easy to do, using the Post-Crop Vignetting Tool in the Develop module.  That tool is in the right panel near the bottom and is mostly used to add a vignette for creative effect or to remove the vignetting sometimes caused by wide-angle lenses.  To create an image with rounded corners, use the following settings:

Amount: +/-100 – depending on whether you want a white border or a black border.
Midpoint: Start at around 25 and adjust from there.
Roundness: -100
Feather: 0

Rounded Corners

That’s it!  You can play with the numbers a bit, but once you’ve set them you can also create a Develop preset using the ‘Uncheck All’ then selecting only the ‘Post-Crop Vignetting’ checkbox.  Here, you can even use this one: Rounded Corners preset.

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Why Use HDR?

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Hi Folks:

I was at an informal gathering of photographers recently where we were sharing and discussing our work.  I displayed a sunset image that I had made (this one)

Seeing the Light

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Winter Storm

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Hi Folks:

Today is the last day of December, and that means it’s time for the ‘Photo of the Month’ post. Being December 31, it’s also the last day of 2010. There’s an old story about spring coming in like a lamb or a lion, and if that also applies to winter, this one could be interesting!

I was walking back from the grocery store on December 20, and when I got to Dallas Road the wind was just howling and the waves were crashing into the beach. Despite this, the sun was still shining. I later discovered this is known as a ‘King Tide‘ event, a biannual event caused by the alignment of the sun and moon that creates extremely high tides. All I knew at the time was, “I’ve got to shoot this!” Continue Reading →

2011 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.

As one year closes and another begins, a popular present this time of year is a calendar for the coming year.  One of the things on my ‘to do’ list this year was to create a set of background calendar templates that I could use with Lightroom to create a 2011 calendar.  Before I could get to them, however, John Murray was kind enough to create a set of .png files of his own and to make them available for download: 2011 calendar templates.  Thanks, John!  On his website, John suggests using the .png files with Lightroom’s ‘watermark’ feature in the Print module; I’ve always used them as a graphical identity plate, but either way works.

That done, I got to thinking about people who don’t have (gasp!) Lightroom or Photoshop or another equivalent software package, and that got me thinking about Microsoft Word.  I started with a letter-sized (8½” x 11″) page and set the margins to ½”, then created a table with 10 rows and 8 columns and added in the dates, like this (the outlines are there only to show the borders in this example):

Word table Continue Reading →

Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…?

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Hi Folks:

One question I see a lot on Twitter is, “Should I get Lightroom or Photoshop?”  It seems to me that people who ask that question aren’t familiar with the limits, features or capabilities of either program so I thought I’d do a quick post on that.  Now, there are entire libraries of books, tutorials and instructional videos available on using these programs, so this blog post couldn’t hope to compete with them.  This post is not intended to be a series of instructions on how to use these programs, but an introduction to a few of the ways in which they differ and how they can be used together. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:

In our last ‘He Says, She Says…‘ post I mentioned that we’re currently house sitting for a friend, and that our new (if temporary) home is only six houses away from the ocean. Therefore, it only seemed fitting to make November’s ‘Photo of the Month’ an image of the mountains in Washington across the Juan de Fuca Strait. I was walking by there yesterday and the light was so incredible I had to stop and make a few images. This one is combined from 7 images using Autopano Pro, and finished in Lightroom.

Juan de Fuca Strait

I think this image turned out pretty well. I’ll definitely be back.

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Mirror Images in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

Let me preface this by saying that yes, the following can be done easier and faster in Photoshop.  However, I wanted to try it in Lightroom for two reasons.  The first is that not everyone owns, understands or can afford Photoshop, and the second is that I’m always interested in pushing to see what I can accomplish with a given piece of software, so sometimes on weekends I like to play around in Lightroom, experiment a little.  Sometimes those experiments work out, and sometimes they don’t, but it’s nothing too serious either way. Continue Reading →