Lightroom Courses Half Full

The Lightroom courses are half full (or empty) so if you are interested and not sure if you should make the jump, do it anyway. It's only $90 and you'll learn a heap! We have a number of people who have a preferred day. I may ask some to change days if that's okay, but the right is always yours.

Lightroom Course 9-10 Feb 2008

Hello all. For those showing interest in my Lightroom courses, I've decided to take the two one day courses 9th, 10th Feb 2008. I was hoping to take the courses earlier but I'm heading to Melbourne for an advanced studio lighting course on the previous weekend.

I have nine starters that will be contacted first thing in the new year. We have the use of a large room in Kyber Pass (Auckland City). Course time: 9am-4pm.

If others are interested, please contact me as soon as you can.

Merry Christmas - My Little Girl

I managed to shoot a few pics of my little girl on Christmas morning. Here's Cait playing with her new guitar.

Film Noir Look

This image was uploaded to Lightroom. 90% of the post processing was done in this, my favourite program. The image had a blue cast to it initially, it was made with my Nikon D80 IR camera and the white balance came out wrong. No bother as I started with a Raw image allowing me to correct it, however no need to go down this route as I wanted a B&W. I applied a B&W High Contrast preset. After this I used the Lens Vignetting sliders setting them to Amount: -66 and Midpoint: 0. Now I needed to send the image to Photoshop for a bit of skin fixing and image reduction followed by sharpening for the web. Job done. How long did it take me... 10min.

Hell better get to bed. Christmas tomorrow and it'll be a big day. Happy Christmas and New Year to all.

Nikon D80 IR D300 D3

This image was made in Rotorua with my dedicated Nikon D80 IR camera. The standard hotmirror was removed and replaced with an Infrared hotmirror. The camera only accepts light from around 700-1200 nanometers which is near the infrared spectrum. The image was initially processed in Lightroom with a high key black and white preset and then exported to Photoshop as two exposures so I could maintain detail above and below the horizon.


I'm using this camera more and more. Partly because my Nikon D200 popped on me a while ago. I'm now looking at the D300 or D3 as a replacement. A friend Kevin Raine, owns the new Nikon D300. We decided to try its merit at high ISO. This image was taken in my bathroom with Kevins camera a 1/50 f2.8 and ISO 6400!!! I must admit that I have used Noise Ninja (a photoshop plugin) to remove noise and photokit sharpener (another photoshop plugin) to sharpen the image. You make your own judgement on how the D300 performs. The D3 is even better, if that's possible.

Lightroom Basics Course Venue

I haven't finalised a date for the two one day courses in Lightroom. (mid Jan, early Feb) But I can tell you we have the use of a great location, a large room in Kyber Pass (Auckland City). We have approximately six students for both the Saturday and Sunday courses. I'm limiting the number to ten per day so we can have more one on one time.

For info, I'm now spending most of my time editing in Lightroom and only export an image to Photoshop if I need to do pixel based editing. You'll find that the whole process will speed up ten fold if you work mainly in LR and go to PS as required. It all starts with the import process. Get this right in LR and you'll be able to find any image, anytime at a moments notice.

Light Meter Sekonic L-758DR 2 of 3

Part two has been a long time coming. I've now got to the point that I more often than not, use my Light Meter, that's partly because I'm a gear geek, but it's mainly because I can nail my camera exposure every time without shooting dark or overexposing an image. I now shoot manual 99/100 times. Sure you can use Program mode and often it'll give you a decent result, but until you attempt full control over your camera, you can't fully understand how much control the camera has over the process. Occasionally I'll pop back to AP Aperture Priority, or SP Shutter Priority if I need control over just my aperture or shutter speed.


Anyway back to my Light Meter. I did a shoot the other day with a man who is starting a consultancy business. He's a good looking chap, so the shoot was easy, but it was made easier by me having the equipment to shoot confidently. We did this shoot in a board room with an umbrella camera left and a reflector camera right, I aimed the shoot through umbrella at the reflector which allowed the strobe to fire across the subject, rather than at him. The idea behind this is that part of the light will hit the subject, and part of the light will hit the reflector which bounces into the camera right side of his face. This set up allows me to not have to worry about having my shadows too dark.

I had a chat with my subject Esteban to warm him up a little and then asked him to take a seat. All I had to do was set my meter to wireless, aim the meter at my key light from Esteban's right cheek and pushed the go button on the meter. The important thing here is that I had the dome of the meter exposed. The meter gave me f8 which I set in my camera. The problem many people face is that they aim the meter at the camera and fire the strobe. This works but doesn't give you the true tone I am looking for on Esteban's right cheek, that method will only give you an average value. It then becomes the photographers choice on how he lights the shadows.

Anyway, post processing was a breeze, I only tweaked the brightness in Lightroom and didn't need to touch the exposure slider. Job done.

Lightroom 1.3 update

Lightroom 1.3 update is now available. If you have problems downloading the update. Get it here.

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/lightroom/win/1.x/LTRM_WWEFG_win_1_3.exe

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/lightroom/mac/1.x/LTRM_WWEFG_mac_1_3.dmg

Canon online Competition

Bret gets a 4th out of 105 entries in the lastest Canon online competition. I'm looking forward to putting my final image in for this year's comp and hope I can get another top 10 finish.

Light from above

A shot like this needs attention to the skin. I wanted it silky smooth, so used PhotoKit Sharpener to do the dirty work. The beauty about this Photoshop plugin is that you can selectively smooth or sharpen various parts of the image. Here I kept some of the facial features sharp, while smoothing out the skin.

Control of specular highlights

I should be posting the second part of using a light meter but I decided to tackle another specular hightlight issue. The spoon in the above image caused me all sorts of problems. I wanted to show the shape and texture of the spoon. The shape of the spoon causes problems because from its point of view it sees a large majority of the room. To solve the problem I placed a huge diffuser over the spoon. This wasn't enough to show the curvature of the spoon, so I placed a gobo on the diffuser which resulted in the dark shape in the spoon. Now we have texture and curvature detail. Job done.

With a little help from the Sekonic L-758DR

This image was created with a heap of help from my light meter. Without it I would not have had full control over the Contre-Jour effect I was seeking. I needed to expose the background by one stop over my working f stop of f/10 to take the background to 255/255/255, pure white. But I also wanted to get a little bit of wrap around effect through the diffuse material out back. I ended up with f/22 on the background which gave me a high key effect plus a bit of wrap around light around the subjects face, body and limbs. The background ended up being 2 stops over the working f stop of f/10.

The beauty about the gear (light meter) I used for this shoot is that I had total control over the process.

I will be going through the process of how I used the incident metering option in my next post.

Light Meter Sekonic L-758DR 1 of 3

I seem to be spending more and more time away from the computer with camera in hand. Lightroom has certainly changed things for me.

Last week I got myself a Sekonic L-758DR Light Meter and it's fantastic! Why does anyone need a light meter? Most cameras these days have very capable in built reflective light meters that do a superb job. Hang on did I say REFLECTIVE light meter. Yup, that's where the problem starts.

We have two types of light metering available to us (assuming you have the hardware), Reflective and Incident. If you have a digital camera, you have reflective metering on tap. So how does this work?

The inbuilt light meter measures the brightess or luminance of the light reflected from the subject. Unless the overall tonality of what's in your viewfinder is 18% grey the light meter will give you less than optimal results. Lucky for us most mixes of light reflected in a scene results in about 18% grey and we will end up with a property exposed image.

The problems start if we have a scene that is not 18% grey. To further explain this, let's say we want to snap away at a scene made up of mainly snow, maybe we have a few people in the scene, but snow dominates! If you let the camera do its thing by metering the scene for you, it will produce an image that is underexposed. Why? Well, the camera exposure sensor is pre programmed and assumes that your scene is 18% grey (mid grey). The snow will therefore be underexposed and you will end up with a dark mid grey scene. These sensors aren't very smart. Not yet anyway. On the other hand, let's say we are shooting a bunch of very dark people working in a coal mine. Not likely, I know, but go with me on this one. The sensor will again assume an 18% grey scene. You take the shot and end up with a lot of grey people working in a grey coalmine.

Many photographers know the limits of the camera when in this situation and either expose brighter in the snow scene by either leaving the shutter open longer or opening up the aperture, or a bit of both. Or if in aperture priority more (AP mode) increase the EV (exposure valuation) by 1.5 to 2 stops. Bottom line is shoot around 2 stops over the "proper exposure" when shooting a very bright scene. If shooting a very dark scene and you want the result to replicate the actual scene underexpose the scene by 1.5 to 2 stops.

Part Two to follow next post.

Ring Light Image

I love the catch lights in the eyes. I deem the ring light project a success! Think I'll be using it in future.

As usual click on the image to make it bigger.

Ring Light

Apologies for not putting out a tutorial for a while. I've been busy building this 1500 watt ring light. Images to follow. Made with a rubbish bin lid, 10x 150 watt bulbs and a few screws.

Specular Highlights

This image has had all sharpening done in Lightroom to create specular highlights in the skin. Settings are Amount 54 Radius 1.2 Detail 63 Masking 33.

If I was applying sharpening to female skin I would increase the masking to smooth out the skin. Settings of 25 1.0 25 and 70 respectively would have acheived a better look on womens skin. Click on the image to see the specular highlights.

Open Your Eyes

This was a tough one. My Portrait Photographer Maree Turner asked me to open the little girl's eyes. At first I thought this would be a breeze as Maree had given me two similar images of this shot, one with the little girl's eyes closed and one open. I initially thought that the new feature in Photoshop CS3 would solve all my problems. The idea here is to drag one image into the other and use the auto-align function by going Edit>Auto Align Layers... unfortunately this function didn't solve my problem as the eyes of the little girl in each image were to far apart to work. In the end I had to do the whole thing manually by dragging one image into the other. I then used the warp function to match the eyes. To help with the process I reduced the opacity on the top layer and then matched the eyes. Then I applied a layer mask to the top layer and painted in the open eyes. Job done!

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.