Lightroom 2

Hi Everyone, just putting this post up as I've been playing with the new version of adobe's lightroom, first impressions are that it's pretty impressive. There are plenty of review sites and tutorials about all the new features, I like to have a bit of a play round instead of reading the manual. There are loads of additions to the develop panel, one that caught my eye is the graduated filter. It used to be that if you wanted to say darken the sky slightly you had to open your RAW files in CS3 then add a gradient layer and change your blend mode but now you can do it all in LR. This picture is an example of a coloured grad I added to an old photo I never got round to processing. There are plenty of other features to streamline your workflow, that sounds so much like managerial bull***t, but it's true. There are some performance issues being talked about, I have noticed on my fairly old computer it does slow down but never locks up or crashes, people fortunate to have quadcore, watercooled computers say it all works fine so it looks like I may have to get a few upgrades!

Aged, distressed look

I have been working on aging or distressing some photos recently and thought I would post this example. There are some good presets in lightroom for an antique look but these rely on usually lowering the saturation of a photo, adding a brownish tone and a vignette. It is a reasonable effect but to take it a step further you need texture. This image has 3 textures layered in various blend modes to give a decent aged effect. I also reduced the saturation with a Hue/Sat adjustment layer. The textures can be anything from old brickwork, woods or metals. The texture used in this one was from an old wall with decaying plaster.

Confetti

This was one from a recent wedding that I quite liked, sometimes the autofocus can lock on to the confetti but as long as you max out the frames per second for a while you usually get one or two. You can always try a different composition for the confetti shots as the couple and the guests are usually more than willing to do it again if you suggest it, the vicars normally line you up in the cross hairs from the bell tower though!
This one was done at ISO200 f/3.5 1/2000 sec at 27mm, processed in Lightroom to add the sepia tone, the vignette and the 3D effect.

Astro Photography

I haven't done a great deal of astro photography, largely due to a lack in focal length but as it was a relatively clear evening I decided to slap on the 100-400 and a 1.4x tele extender and see what I got. The tele extenders increase your focal length by either 1.4x or 2x, but you loose a stop of light with the 1.4 and 2 stops with the 2x, with this type of photo I wasn't too worried as I wanted to be at about f11 to start with. You also have to manually focus with the TX's, again shooting a moon this isn't too much of a problem. A tripod is essential as is either a cable release or using the cameras 10 second timer and I've just remembered mirror lock up, in this example I forgot about mirror lock up but if you have it under your custom functions use it as it reduces shake further. I started to appreciate that the moon is traveling at over 2000 mph and it soon moves from your viewfinder so you need to keep adjusting. When it comes to processing I found the histogram to be quite narrow so you need to stretch it a little either using levels in CS3 or the blacks and exposure sliders in Lightroom (or the tone curve) this results in more contrast. I also had to crop in quite a bit, this can be solved by attaching you camera to a telescope ;-) I took this around sunset so the sky was still quite blue but I converted to mono and dropped the blues right down. The info for this was f/11, ISO100, 560mm, 1/200sec.

Lifestyle Portraits

We did some outdoor shots at the weekend as the sun was out (occasionally) and the oil seed rape was in full bloom, excellent when one of your subjects suffers from hay fever (I only found this out after). We did some posed shots in the studio but the outdoor ones were all pretty much off the cuff, I really liked this one, I thought the pose combined with the balloons was great.

I went for another '300' style processing effect in lightroom with the heavy vignette. This was my first outing with the 70-200 f/2.8 lense and I loved it. It was taken at f/4, 140mm, 1/1250 sec at ISO100. The large aperture and the long focal length made gave great background blur and I think the low angle (basically lying on the road) finished off the effect. It's always good when you don't get shot at by irate farmers!

Icy Puddle

Two post in two days, I do have these fits and starts when it comes to posting photos. This was another from our ascent up to high street in the eastern fells of the lake district. This was looking back at the crag featured in the previous photo, I think this is called eagle crag (but could be wrong) apparently the last surviving golden eagle in England resides around here, very sad indeed. Anyway I've burnt the clouds a little to add a bit of drama and dodged the snow to make it slightly whiter. In retrospect I think it might be a bit too central but if I crop it I get rid of the dark cloud to the top left of the shot and I really wanted to keep him in.

On a completely unrelated point, I downloaded some free lightroom presets for any lightroom users, it is from a site called protography.com the link for the presets is here. They are pretty good if you need a bit of direction on how to process your shots.

More Mono Mayhem

I was out shooting with a photo buddy yesterday in the peak district national park. The weather was glorious and I tried to pump up the colours further by pretty much using my polariser on every shot and trying to shoot perpendicular to the sun. I knew I would be converting the majority of my shots to mono as I thought the bright sunlight wasn't moody enough for my landscapes.

There hasn't been a great deal of processing with these 2 images, I converted them in Lightroom, took them into CS3 where I added an unsharp mask for contrast (settings: Amount 35, Radius 200 & Threshold 1) and a Black & White adjustment layer. I think mono images are quite striking and you don't need to shoot during the golden hours.

Warm Sky

I took this earlier today as I was out expecting a good sunset but in the end it was just windy and a little too much cloud. I used a 3 stop ND grad, to balance the exposure, which I set to manual, 1/5sec f/16 24mm at ISO 100. I couldn't find much in the way of foreground interest but I wanted to make the clouds the focal point. I processed the RAW file in Lightroom and added a warm up filter in CS3.

Photo Restoration

I was given a CD with a bunch of super old slides that had been scanned, by super old I mean sort of 1900's. Anyway they were in a fairly poor condition and they were still negative images. I will post before and after images. I opened them in Lightroom but this can be done in Camera RAW (photoshops RAW processor) even though the images were jpegs they can still be processed to a certain extent using RAW converters. Anyway the first step was to remove any colour as this was due to age, the photos will have been in Black and White or sepia. Then, in Lightroom, I dragged directly on the histogram to make the tonal width as wide as possible this meant dragging the exposure to the right and the Blacks to the left (It's a strange system but this boosts both the blacks and the exposure) as I did this the picture started to come out, I then increased the clarity (boosting midtones) and added a little more contrast.

The image was then opened in photoshop and a simple invert adjustment layer was added, this converted the negative image and then I added a B&W layer and tinted it sepia. It was really interesting to see some of these old images as a lot of them were composed really well, I guess it was because you only had a camera then if you knew how to use it! Surprisingly there wasn't a great deal of metadata attached to the image, I doubt the glass was as high tech by today's standards and I imagine the camera was moved by crane!

300

I'm just putting a storybook album together for a recent golden wedding celebration I covered when I decided to post this shot we took just before the guests arrived, I say we as this shot was actually the work of my assistant, I take credit for telling her the settings she needed but the actual composition was all hers.
I edited the shot in lightroom to give an effect similar to those typical of the film "300" which is high contrast and heavy use of vignetting, I think it's a great shot for an introduction for the album.

A split toning RAW conversion

I seem to be putting a lot of tree shots up at the moment, no real reason other than they are a subject I enjoy shooting so here's another. The sunset was great last night but my location selection wasn't the best but as it was getting a bit late I didn't want to move. You really don't want to be driving along looking for locations whilst the sun is setting, especially on windy country roads hunched over the wheel, marvelling at the sunset, very dangerous. I wasn't overly happy with the shots I got so I really experimented with my RAW conversion until I found an effect I quite liked. If you do shoot in RAW I would recommend getting adobe lightroom (here). It's just full of options for getting the most out of your photos and there are loads of tutorials on the web about the program, such as lightroomkillertips.com. Anyway the main effect I used here is called split toning, this is where you can pick the colour and saturation for the highlights and the shadows independently, I pretty much used yellow for both but you can use complimentary colours. It can be a bit hit and miss but that's the beauty of shooting digitally.
The info on this shot is as follows: f16 (to maximise DOF) for 1/2 second (so using a tripod) at about 34mm (shot in aperture priority). I did shoot with an exposure compensation of -2 this means the shot was underexposed (for the sky), I was originally going to merge 2 shots, one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the land but in the end I left the land as a silhouette because I liked the impact of the sky. Hopefully going to get some shots in the peak district tomorrow, where my foreground interest will be rocks instead of trees!