Today Adobe has made Lightroom 4 Beta available for free, until it is officially released March 31, to anyone who wants to try it out. Two of the many new features look very promising.
- New slides in the Basic Panel for better highlight and shadow recovery
- Being able to paint White Balance with local adjustment brush
And remember, even if you don’t use Lightroom, these new features will, at some time in the future, be a part of Camera Raw. So Camera Raw uses my want to take a look at all the new features. Very exciting stuff—local noise reduction, better Clarity, soft proofing, adjust the individual R, G and B channels with curves (just like in Photoshop) and more! Check them out.
This all means that even fewer on my images will ever see Photoshop and that means less time spent at the computer working images. And hopefully that means more time of other stuff like shooting more images.
Just Google Lightroom 4 or go the the Adobe Labs Lightroom 4 Beta site to learn more and download the ap.
As with all Beta software you should not use it for production work. In the case of this beta you should not use LR4 to manage your image files. Continue to use LR3 for that. Use and play with LR4 on a “dummy” catalog.
At the end of the month I’m starting a four week workshop on Lightroom. This is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to get up to speed using Lightroom as your primary workflow tool. Lightroom is used to both manage and edit/enhance your images.
The first two session of the workshop will focus on using the Library Module to manage you images. The last two sessions dives into the Develop Module to easily and quickly bring dull raw captures to life.
If you are new to Lightroom and are still struggling to use this tool efficiently then the course will help you get over the hump and allow you to work more efficiently.
Here is link for more information on the IAATLT web site.
A few days ago I posted a shot of the lighthouse on Tybee Island. Shooting Tybee Light was simply filling time. The real reason for being on Tybee Island was to shoot sunrise. Here are some images shot earlier that same morning.
Even though the surf seams calm all the sea foam is an indication that the wind had been blowing hard for some time. The wind also made it feel pretty cool although you can’t tell from the images, especially with the warm colors of sunrise.
In both of these images I placed the horizon line pretty much in the center. Many times this results in a somewhat boring composition. Here it works because there is interesting color and texture in both the sky and the foreground.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a quick Lightroom tip that might speed up our Exports.
Lightroom is multi-threaded. This means you can start multiple Lightroom Exports and Lightroom will process them simultaneously, not sequentially. So why would you want to do this? To speed up the time it take to process a large number of exports.
Suppose you had 100 raw files that you wanted to export as small jpgs to give to a client. If you split the job up into four Exports of 25 images each, it will complete much faster that a single Export of 100 images. It won’t be four times as fast but pretty close. Most of the time I’m only exporting only one or two images so I don’t use this very often. But I do use it when I do a commissioned shoot and want to send a bunch of proofs to the client.
This is something that you will not use everyday. But do keep it in mind because sometime in the future you may have to export a lot of images quickly and this tip may save you behind.
Let’s just cut the chase–There’s no foolproof way to prevent people from taking your online images. So if you are the paranoid type, just don’t put you images on-line. Once a user of your web site down loads one of your web pages, there is a copy of all your content, including your images, in internet cache on that users computer. Any above average computer geek can get at them. And then there is Print Screen and W7’s Snipping Tool. 
Ok, enough of the doom and gloom. There are some things that you can do to keep everyone, except someone who really wants to steal you image, from doing so. And there are some things you can do to make it easier to find and prosecute offenders.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m often asked about when is it better to use ACR or Photoshop to make edits to images. Since both can do similar things when is it better to use one or the other. (And of course the same question question applies to ACR’s twin, Lightroom’s Develop Module. What should be done in Develop and what should be left for Photoshop?) Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday I posted some pix from the Saturday 1/2 day Compositional Workshop. Today I’d like to share a few shots from Sunday’s workshop at Oakbourne Park. Here are some links for background information on the park:
- Friends of Oakbourne
- OakbournePark.org
- Township site with rental info
The mansion being bathed in the warm colored light of a fall morning. The mansion was built in the late 1800 as a summer home for wealthy Philadelphia businessman.
Read the rest of this entry »
Alternative Presentations
Here is another composition from my short trip to Ricketts Glen State Park. (The other composition.) And I want to take the opportunity to say a little about the possibility of showing more than one interpretation of a digital shot (capture).
A while back I did a post titled Digital Has Changed the Way We Shoot. In it are links to a few of Brooks Jensen’s audio podcasts. These particular podcasts were about the differences in how he used to shoot with film and how he now shoots with digital capture. In part, he talks about when he shot with film needing to capture the tonal values the way he wanted them to show in the final output (print). But with digital he wants to capture, not necessarily the best looking image, but rather a file that contains the most data for future post processing. Read the rest of this entry »
