Lightroom 4

Adobe Creative Cloud Fail

May

2013

May 7, 2013

By now you have probably heard about Adobe’s decision to stop development of Adobe Creative Suite (which includes such software as Photoshop and Illustrator) and move to a completely different subscription-only model. In short, Adobe does not want to sell packaged versions of its software anymore and wants you to instead pay for select software packages or the whole Creative Suite on a monthly basis. For example, today you can purchase Adobe Photoshop CS6 for $599 and own the license, which means that you can install it on your computer and use it whenever you want without limitations. With the new Adobe pricing strategy, you will no longer be able to purchase Photoshop that way – you will have to get a $20 per month subscription for using Photoshop alone (or $50 for the whole Creative Suite). There will be no other option. Software will be delivered over the Internet and once you get it installed, it will make occasional requests over the Internet to Adobe.com to verify your subscription level. Creative Cloud will work the same way that CS6 works today, except it will require an active subscription. When traveling without any Internet connectivity, the software will work for a limited amount of time (something like 30 days) before ceasing to work and requiring you to connect to the Internet.

Adobe Creative Cloud Fail

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Filed Under: Photography News Tagged With: Adobe, Creative Cloud, Lightroom 4, Photoshop

Wedding Photography Tips: Synchronize Your Cameras

Apr

2013

April 9, 2013

By Nasim Mansurov 19 Comments

Due to popular demand, we are starting our new series of articles on commercial wedding photography. Since I have been helping out my wife with her wedding business, being a second shooter during weddings and engagement sessions, I have been writing down some helpful tips, which I am planning to provide on Photography Life. These tips range from very basic things like preparing for the wedding day, to complex setups involving specific situations, like setting up flashes indoors. Our first wedding photography tip is about properly synchronizing time on cameras when working with second shooters and assistants. If you have been commercially photographing weddings, you might have already been frustrated to see photographs from multiple cameras get mixed up when you import them to an Aperture or Lightroom catalog. It is not pleasant to see ceremony images mixed with images from the dance floor and it is certainly not fun to try to go through hundreds, if not thousands of photos and sort through them one by one. Gladly, there are workarounds to situations where it had already happened, which I will share with you in this article. First things first, let’s talk about the proper way to synchronize time between multiple cameras.

How to Properly Synchronize Time Between Multiple Cameras

The easiest method that works every time for us and many others, is to have each person hold his/her camera, get into the camera menu and set specific time. On Nikon DSLRs, for example, time can be changed via “Setup Menu”->”Time Zone and Date” or “Setup Menu”->”World Time”->”Date and Time”. Once time is set to an exact hour, minute and second, everyone in the party must press the “OK” button at the same time. This will make sure that the timer starts at that exact time on every camera. If you use two cameras yourself, just set the time on each camera, then press the OK button simultaneously. The idea is to have the time set exactly the same, second to second, across all cameras, so that shots appear in proper order later. The set time does not have to match real time. As long as all cameras have the same clock time, your images will appear in correct order when post-processing them later.

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Filed Under: Photography Tutorials Tagged With: ACDSee Pro, Lightroom 4, Lightroom Tutorial, Wedding Photography

Lightroom 4.4 and Camera RAW 7.4 Update

Apr

2013

April 3, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 12 Comments

A while ago Adobe announced Release Candidates of Lightroom 4.4 and Camera RAW 7.4. These versions were close to being finished, but may have contained some bugs. Today, Adobe has made the full versions of their updates available. The main goal of these updates is to add support for recently announced cameras (25 of them, actually), but there’s a number of important improvements, too. This is quite a big update. First and foremost, Adobe claims better handling of Fuji’s X-Trans sensor RAW files.

Camera and Lens Support

Here is the (rather extensive) list of newly supported camera models:

Canon EOS 1D C
Canon ESO 100D (Digital Rebel SL1 / EOS Kiss Digital X7)
Canon EOS 700D (Digital Rebel T5i / EOS Kiss Digital X7i)
Casio Exilim EX-ZR700
Casio Exilim EX-ZR710
Casio Exilim EX-ZR750
Fujifilm FinePix F900EXR
Fujifilm FinePix HS50EXR
Fujifilm FinePix SL1000
Fujifilm X100s
Fujifilm X20
Hasselblad H5D-40
Hasselblad H5D-50
Hasselblad Lunar
LEICA M (Typ 240)
Nikon 1 J3
Nikon 1 S1
Nikon D7100
Nikon Coolpix A
Nikon Coolpix P330 (preliminary support)
Olympus XZ-10
Pentax MX-1
Samsung NX300
Sony Alpha NEX-3N
Sony Alpha SLT-A58

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Filed Under: Photography News Tagged With: Adobe, Camera RAW, Lightroom 4, Photoshop CS6

Mastering Lightroom: Post-Processing Portraits

Mar

2013

March 9, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 19 Comments

Many of our previous Mastering Lightroom series articles focused on specific Lightroom 4 features and tools, as well as ways of using them in your everyday workflow. I’ve explained how to use the Basic Panel and talked about the Tone Curve in great detail. We’ve also learned how to use External Editors, Spot Removal Tool and Virtual Copies. However, simply learning what each feature does is not our goal with these articles. After all, theory makes sense only when put to practice. In the end, we want to teach you how to actually edit your images, start to finish, no matter the subject or scene or desired result. We want you to be able to use what Lightroom has to offer without thinking about it, just as we should use our cameras and lenses. Learning what each tool does individually is essential, but what matters in the end is how we make them work in conjunction with one another. Perhaps then it is time to shift away from features and theory for a while and move towards editing images to achieve desired look in practice? There are many aspects of Lightroom we haven’t covered so far. Many tools, options, modules and tabs yet await our attention. But this time, instead of explaining specific settings, we will do some simple portrait post-processing focusing most of all on color and tones.

Mastering Lightroom Basic Portrait Post-Processing

Adobe Lightroom 4.4 and Camera RAW 7.4 Release Candidates Available

Feb

2013

February 26, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 10 Comments

Adobe has made their almost-finished versions of Lightroom 4.4 and Camera RAW 7.4 available for download. These Release Candidates (RC) have been thoroughly tested, but are subject to improvement over the next few months before final versions are available. So far, Lightroom 4.4 RC is a free download for all current Lightroom 4 customers and will expire by 31st of May. Adobe Camera RAW 7.4 RC will expire on 30th of April. Why are these RC updates important? Well, first of all because of the added support for newest camera models:

Canon EOS-1D C
Casio Exilim EX-ZR700
Fujifilm X100S
Fujifilm X20
Hasselblad Lunar
Leica M
Nikon 1 J3
Nikon 1 S1
Pentax MX1

Now, you may notice the rather peculiar addition of Hasselblad Lunar mirrorless camera which is said to be based on NEX-7, but with a full-frame sensor. There is a reason why I chose words “said to be”, because the camera is yet unfinished and thus unavailable. A rare feat making software support available before the actual camera is even officially announced.

New lens profiles are also present:

Canon 24-70 f/4L IS
Sigma 18-250mm F3.5-6.3 DC MACRO HSM for Sony and Pentax
Sigma APO MACRO 180mm F2.8 EX DG OS HSM for Sony
Sigma 35mm F1.4 DG HSM for Canon, Sigma and Nikon
Sigma 17-70mm F2.8-4 DC MACRO OS HSM for Canon and Sigma

There is a possibility that new cameras and lenses in addition to the ones mentioned above will be supported when final versions are released.

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Filed Under: Photography News Tagged With: Adobe, Camera RAW, Fujifilm, Lightroom 4, Software

Mastering Lightroom: How to Use External Editors

Feb

2013

February 7, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 13 Comments

In every Mastering Lightroom series article, I mention certain strengths of this, in my opinion, superb piece of software. Only every now and then do I find something small to complain about, as I have in my “How to Manage Presets” article. I strongly believe Lightroom offers more or less everything needed to process a well captured image and offers plenty of powerful yet simple photographic tools. However, as our readers have wisely noticed in the comments section of my “How to Use the Spot Removal Tool” article, on rare occasions these tools may not be powerful enough. Here comes another strength of my favorite photo processing application – flexibility. You can use other programs to do what Lightroom can’t, and then go back with the processed image to its familiar and simple environment. In this Mastering Lightroom series article, I will show you how to use external editors with examples provided using the most popular and capable you can buy – Adobe’s own Photoshop.

1) What Software can be Used with Lightroom 4?

A good question, this. As of late, I’ve found my photography changed in such a way I rarely, if ever, need to use something other than Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4, but if such an occasion does present itself, I know I have enough choice. First and foremost, Lightroom supports the all-powerful Photoshop, which itself is likely enough to satisfy your every need when editing images. If Photoshop alone is not enough, remember the huge library of amazing specialized plug-ins you can find for it, including Google’s very capable Nik Software and the (rightly) popular Topaz Labs products (which we have plans to review). In other words, you may use Photoshop and, through it, all the plug-ins you can find and purchase or download as freeware.

Mastering Lightroom: How to Add Film Grain

Feb

2013

February 6, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 12 Comments

With mainstream days of film long gone, one would expect all the disadvantages it had on offer to be rid of for all times, as well. Digital is all about clean, high quality images now. Contrary to such an assumption, however, film has not left our everyday lives without a trace. A trace that is even more noticeable now that photographers got used to the differences between the two “religions”. Now, I say “got used to”, but the truth is plenty of photographers got bored of the sterile digital look and thus would seek ways of livening it up (instagramed anything lately?). One notable featured of photographic film has always been grain. Although, like high ISO noise in digital world, it was a result of increased light sensitivity and as such, an undesirable degradation of image quality, film grain was loved even during the past era of photography. Reasons behind it would make a fine discussion – in short I would say that grain was simply organic and beautiful – but one to be had with a pint of beer in hand and complimented by laughter and warm fire light. Instead, we will concentrate on actually applying film grain, or what is closest to it, with digital photographs. In this Mastering Lightroom series article, I will explain how to add film grain to your images. You will learn how to increase the size of grain, make it rougher or smoother and also hide high ISO noise (or make it more appealing) with it without the need of applying noise reduction.

1) What is Film Grain?

In essence, it is the chemical equivalent of digital high ISO noise, or, rather, the other way around. As film sensitivity went up, the amount and character of grain increased, just as ISO noise levels increase as you push sensor sensitivity to light up. Noticeably, film grain became visible at much lower sensitivities than current digital noise. Certain film of 400 ASA/ISO would already show visible graininess, and producing fine-grain film of 400 value was no small feat. Understandably, there weren’t any ISO 12800 equivalent films. One of the most sensitive films, the wonderful B&W Ilford Delta 3200, rendered so much grain, it would be thought quite unusable by some all-modern, technical quality junkies of digital era who have never been familiar with film aesthetics. Some prefer to see Delta 3200 as 1600 film pushed one stop during development. Think underexposing an image and correcting exposure by one stop in Lightroom with Exposure slider.

Mastering Lightroom: How to Tether Your Camera

Feb

2013

February 5, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 12 Comments

Lightroom is a very flexible image management and processing software, but apart from powerful tools and settings to enhance your photographs, it also offers features that help you during the actual process of photographing. Have you ever felt that, even with the constant resolution and physical size growth, camera LCD screens just aren’t big enough for comfortable image viewing in the field? Luckily, Lightroom offers a way to import photographs and review them as you shoot. This function, called Tethered Capture, is especially useful for studio photographers who don’t tend to move about too much. It can be equally useful for landscape photographers, too. In this Mastering Lightroom series article, I will explain how to tether your camera. This allows you to import images directly into the Lightroom 4 environment for quick and comfortable revision as you photograph.

1) When Should I Use It?

The best time to use Tethered Capture is when working in a less active environment. For example, studio and landscape photographers, who tend to bring their laptop computers along on a shoot, will find it to be very simple and fuss-less. However, wedding photographers, who tend to move all the time and change their shooting position, would find Tethered Capture to be annoying at the very least. Who’d want to photograph a wedding with a USB cable strapped to the camera constantly, and through it, a laptop? You’d need an assistant just to have that laptop lugged around behind you! In many other situations, Tethered Capture can make reviewing images that much more pleasant.

Mastering Lightroom: How to Use Virtual Copies

Jan

2013

January 18, 2013

By Romanas Naryškin 20 Comments

As all previous versions of Adobe’s popular photography management and post-processing software, Lightroom 4 offers catalog system. Such a choice has both positives and negatives. One of the positives is non-destructive editing, which basically means the original image file remains intact no matter what you do to it within Lightroom environment (you can, however, delete the file entirely if you wish so). A side result is a very useful feature called Virtual Copies. In this Mastering Lightroom series article, I will explain how to use Virtual Copies. By the end of the tutorial you will learn how to copy, delete and compare them, as well as see different situations when creating a Virtual Copy can be very useful.

1) What are Virtual Copies and Why Should I Use Them?

As the name suggests, Virtual Copies are copies of an image file created virtually. In other words, they are copies created within Lightroom environment only. Creating a Virtual Copy does not copy the source file physically. Lightroom only stores editing information within its catalog. Among other things, such an approach also saves disk space (you only need to store information about the adjustments, not both that and a copy of the RAW file itself).

Lightroom 4.3 and Camera RAW 7.3 Update

Dec

2012

December 12, 2012

By Nasim Mansurov 18 Comments

If you happened to launch Lightroom today, you might have been notified that a new version of Lightroom 4 is available. Today, Adobe released the final production version of Lightroom 4.3. As usual, plenty of bugs have been fixed and a lot more cameras and lenses have been added to the release. Full RAW support for Nikon D600 has now been finalized and new cameras like Canon EOS 6D, Nikon 1 V2 and Sony RX-1 have been added to the database. Lots of expensive Leica lenses, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L II and other third party lenses have also been added to the Lightroom Lens Correction module.

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Filed Under: Post Processing Tagged With: Camera RAW, Lightroom 4, Photoshop CS6

Adobe Creative Cloud Fail

Wedding Photography Tips: Synchronize Your Cameras

How to Properly Synchronize Time Between Multiple Cameras