Skunk Lighting

I'm testing out some new lighting techniques so no Lightroom or Photoshop tips here, apart from standard sharpening in Photoshop.

Don't be too hard on yourself

This image was made with two exposures and auto aligned in Photoshop CS3. This feature is fantastic and allows you to blend images without a tripod. All you need to do is bring both images into Photoshop CS3, drag one image to the other image, then select both layers. Go Edit>Auto-Align Layers... use the default mode in the dialog box that comes up. Once the layers have been auto aligned, the last step is to create a mask on the top layer and use a black or white brush to blend in the layer below.

Lightroom's new Painter Tool

The Painter tool is new in Lightroom 1.1

When viewing a collection or folder and you're in grid view in the Library Module a spray can icon appears in the grid tool bar. The spray can has a vertical tag icon and the tooltip says "Painter". On rollover we see some dots emerge from the cans nozzle. So you select the spray can and it comes off the tool bar (there is a darker circle showing where it belongs). Clicking on the circle puts it back. But you find yourself wondering what the hell does it paint. With the tool selected a partial answer is evident because you now see "Paint : Keywords" with a text field next to the Painters circle. It turns out you can type keywords in the text field and then "paint" them onto multiple images. In fact successive paints will toggle the keyword (i.e if the keyword already exist it is removed. Nice :o)

But wait there's more! Keywords is one option of many. You could also choose to "Paint" a :

Label
Flag
Rating
Metadata
Settings
Rotation

Settings is pretty interesting as it lets you paint on one of the presets (i.e Sepia tone, Grayscale, sharpen) or your own user defined settings. Rotation is sort of fun as you watch a whole row of images rotate clockwise.

It still feels sort of odd to be "painting" on keywords or a rotation. But ignoring the metaphor it's a very useful tool if you use any of these attributes. I use keywords to order my collections and I use ratings when working out image preferences. The keywords I use in bulk. Though ratings I tend to use on one image at a time. But I'm sure we all have very different workflows so this will suit different users in different ways. Give it a go. I'll be posting a video on the Painter soon.

Two shots in the top 0.1% of images on flickr.com

Flickr has a very interesting stream called "Explore," in which they give a shout out to what they think are really cool photos.


The rankings in Explore for all dates change all the time even for dates in the past. Photos are uploaded to Flickr at a rate of around 400/minute and are constantly being viewed, faved, and commented by millions of members. Interestingness rankings are recalculated for all photos many times per day. Photos uploaded a day, a week, even a year ago, are still receiving activity in the form of views, comments, favorites, etc. And all of that activity affects each photo's Interestingness ranking, even for photos that were uploaded years ago. Explore is very dynamic. When you browse through Explore on any date, you are viewing what the Interestingness algorithm has selected as the highest ranked photos at that moment.

So to get your images on this selection you are competing with 500,000 additional images every 24hrs.

Lucky for me I have a ranking of 67 and 120 for these two images. Rankings change very quickly so you can be dropped at anytime.