Tag: Lightroom Classic

Focus Stacking in Joshua Tree National Park

As part of the Desert Institute class I was teaching in Joshua Tree National Park, we did a sunset at the end of the second day at the trailhead parking log for Ryan Mountain.  Across the road one of the participants found a composition that I liked a lot, so we talked about the possibilities.  He ended up with a nice photograph and moved on.  I spent a little more time on it because I saw that there was a depth of field problem that needed to be resolved.

The foreground was about 20 feet from the camera and the background was a least a quarter of a mile away.  At a focal length of 190 mm there was no way I could get that depth of field even with an aperture of f/32.  So, as you can see below, I did two shots, one focused on the bush in the foreground and the second focused on the outcrops in the background.  The plan was to use focus stacking to get a sharp image throughout.

Photoshop does an excellent job of focus stacking.  To get it started, I selected the two files in Lightroom and clicked Open as Layers in Photoshop… from the Photo menu.

Lightroom converts the DNG files to Tiffs and loads them into Photoshop where they are stacked as two layers, one on top of the other.

In Photoshop, select both layers and in the Edit menu first click Auto-Align Layers… and then Auto-Blend Layers…. It’s that easy.

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Making a Photograph – Taking Flight

Follow all the decisions and resulting adjustments that went into the making of an expressive landscape photograph using Lightroom Classic.

A Desert Scene

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This image was taken in 20 Mule Team Canyon in Death Valley National Park. I was particularly excited about this when I saw it in the field. I was fascinated by the meandering dry stream bead that worked its way across the scene. The ever-present salt in Death Valley stood out white against the soft warm colors of the badlands behind it.

But there were several additional things that excited me. The badlands behind the stream bed also fascinated me and made the experience even richer. It is a concentration of diagonal lines, textures and forms. And the light, while the sun is fairly high in the morning sky, still crosses the badlands at an angle that accentuates its shadows. I intentionally clip_image005overexposed the image 2/3 of a stop to be sure to capture shadow detail and that’s why it looks washed out.

The histogram shows no particular challenges. There is no highlight or shadow clipping. You can see from the thin tail that moves towards the right edge, which was caused by the white salt, doesn’t quite touch it. If I had increased the exposure even a third of a stop more, there would have had highlight clipping on the salt.

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4 Steps to Organize Your Images with Lightroom Classic CC

Lightroom Classic CC hast the tools you need to organize your images. This article gives you an overview of what is possible.

Why Organize?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual photographer, a working professional or somewhere in between, sooner or later you’re going to want to find that picture you took four years ago. The first question is, did you even save it and if so, where?  Did you put it on your old laptop; is it on an external drive that you lost track of?

Lightroom Classic provides four powerful tools for keeping track of your image files.  And at the core of all these tools is the Lightroom catalog.

The Lightroom Catalog

If your image is not in the catalog, it’s not in Lightroom.

If your image is not in Lightroom, Lightroom can’t help you find it.

The only images Lightroom knows about are the ones in the catalog.  The catalog does a lot of things for you but the most fundamental thing is keep track of where all your image files are.

How do image files find their way into the catalog?  The most effective way is with the Lightroom Import feature.  Among other things, you specify where you want Lightroom to put your files, on the internal hard drive, external drive or network attached storage device and Lightroom does the rest for you.

It’s worth mentioning that the hard drive where you choose to store your files should be large enough to hold all the files you want to keep track of, both of photographs you’ve taken in the past and ones you anticipate taking in the future.  In general, external drives or storage devices attached to your network will give you the greatest flexibility.

With this as background, here’s an introduction to the four powerful tools that Lightroom provides. These tools will make it much easier for you to find the images you want.

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