Post Processing Category Archive - Page 9

Advanced Post-Processing Tips: Three-Step Sharpening

Sharpening remains a particularly confusing topic among photographers, especially given the tremendous number of post-processing options available. Some post-processing software has so many options that it is hard to know where to start; others do not let you use optimal methods in the first place. If you are trying to...

Google’s Nik Software is now FREE!

The title of the article deserves three exclamation marks, because this is one of the best news I have seen in photographic history! Google has just announced that it has made the best plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom, bundled into a single "Google's Nik Collection" absolutely free (it was priced...

How to Avoid Duplicate File Names

Your earliest photographic habits naturally will build over time, including the ways that you name and organize your images. What seems like a small issue at first – say, keeping your camera's default file names – could spiral out of control when you have tens of thousands of images. It can be...

Four Hidden Lightroom Features

Adobe Lightroom is a complex piece of software, and it includes countless features that are buried beneath the surface. In this article, I will cover four useful Develop options that aren’t obvious at first glance, ranging from precision cropping to local color adjustments. If you are a Lightroom guru, you...

How to Split-Tone Photos in Lightroom

One of Lightroom’s simplest, most useful post-processing options is the humble split-toning panel. Buried between the HSL and Detail sidebars, split-toning isn’t exactly a go-to tool for most photographers. And why should it be? From tint to saturation, Lightroom already offers several ways to change the colors of an image;...

Where Are My Mid-tones?

We've gotten several emails, the most recent and the best phrased one from a reader of Photography Life, with questions along the following lines: What happened to my mid-tones? I set the exposure using exposure meter, opened the shot in Adobe Lr (or Adobe Camera Raw, or some other converter)...

JPEG Compression Levels in Photoshop and Lightroom

Determining the ideal JPEG quality setting in both Photoshop and Lightroom can be challenging, because we often see two different values to choose from. Photoshop gives us compression levels from 0 to 12 when saving JPEG images through the "Save" or "Save As" dialog, while Lightroom only allows us to...

Adobe’s Poor Handling of RAW Files

With Adobe Lightroom being the most popular post-processing tool on the market, one might wonder how good the software really is in processing RAW images. After-all, that's what we use Lightroom primarily for - to post-process our images and get the best out of them. Having been using Lightroom since...

Why I No Longer Convert RAW Files to DNG

For a number of years I have been recommending our readers to convert RAW files from their cameras to Adobe's DNG format. In my DNG vs RAW article from 2010, I pointed out the reasons why using DNG over RAW made sense - it simplified file management, resulted in smaller...