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This post may fall in the category of what you might call ‘mundane.’ It doesn’t have the creative thrill of a new and exciting photograph. It’s more under the category of ‘Things-I-Should-Do-But-Haven’t-Gotten-Around-To-Them-Yet.” Actually, this is really under the category of “Making-My-Life-Easier.” So, what is this all about?
This post may fall in the category of what you might call ‘mundane.’ It doesn’t have the creative thrill of a new and exciting photograph. It’s more under the category of ‘Things-I-Should-Do-But-Haven’t-Gotten-Around-To-Them-Yet.” Actually, this is really under the category of “Making-My-Life-Easier.” So, what is this all about?
Continue reading “Mastering Lightroom – When You Get Back Home”
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Expose to the right is a powerful technique for capturing the most information in your raw files. But processing these images can be a bit daunting at first.
The post I wrote on Expose to the Right about a year ago is one of the most popular on this blog. I wrote it after a workshop when I suggested this technique and one of the participants complained the photographs looked horrible. I still use this technique but my workflow in Lightroom continues to evolve.
Recall that Expose to the Right means to overexpose your image so that the histogram shifts toward the right edge. It is important not to overexpose so much that you introduce highlight clipping. I like to have a histogram that is positioned a little to the right of center as seen here. When you expose to the right you can end up with an image that is overexposed by anywhere from 1/3 to a stop or two, depending on the situation.
In the first post I suggested that you can ‘normalize’ the exposure in Lightroom with the Exposure adjustment. If you overexposed by a stop you can start by decreasing Exposure adjustment in Lightroom by one stop. This will have the effect of moving the histogram back toward the center or even to the left of center. This gives you an exposure closer to what the camera’s light meter selected.
From there you can continue with your regular workflow. Here’s an example of some additional adjustments: Blacks to set a black point, Contrast to add interest (contrast is always more interesting than flat) and Brightness to liven it up a little. There are many adjustments you might perform but these few simple ones serve to illustrate the point.
But another technique would be to take the opposite approach. Instead of normalizing the exposure, start by setting the black point with the Blacks adjustment. This has a different effect on the histogram. Instead of the entire histogram sliding towards the left, the shadow tail is extended without much change in the mid-tones or highlights. This technique expands the dynamic range of the photograph.
You can further expand the dynamic range by adding contrast. With both shadow and highlight areas to work on the Contrast adjustment both brightens and further darkens the image.
In practice you can try both techniques. Just create two virtual images from the original file and apply one technique to one and the other technique to the other. Often the first few adjustments you make on an image have an influence on the finished photograph. So compare the two and decide which one you want to continue with.
This is not about whether one technique is better than the other but rather to give you more options when working with the photographs that you have exposed to the right.
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Follow along as I show you how to turn an overexposed mistake into a pretty decent sunset photograph.
Last night I ran across an example of why we shoot in RAW (not in the RAW – puhleeeze).
Digital SLR cameras and a few point and shoot camera support the RAW file format for our images. RAW is essentially what the sensor captured – unprocessed, uncompressed, unadulterated. It takes a bit to get used to but once you do you’ll not go back to JPEG, the other file format.
One of the benefits of RAW is it gives you a lot more flexibility including recovering from poorly exposed images, especially over exposed. Now, if you’ve read any of my histogram posts (search this blog for Histograms to find them), you know that the single most important thing to avoid as far as exposure is concerned is highlight clipping. But with RAW you have a chance to recover an overexposed image and turn it into something very acceptable. It doesn’t always work but sometimes it does.
OK, so I was scanning images in Lightroom last night and ran across this one. It’s washed out except for the foreground and there is a tremendous amount of highlight clipping in the upper right hand corner. (I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped reading hear and said, “There’s no way he can do anything with that image. It’s a mess.” Which it is. But humor me and read on.)
By the way, you can click on the images to see them in a larger format.
Continue reading “Lightroom Tutorial – Shooting RAW”
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Follow along in the making of a photograph as we go from kneeling in the mud to the final print on paper.
It all started with kneeling in the mud.
I was with David Muench, Jerry Dodrill and twelve other eager photographers on a Mountain Light Gallery workshop in May. We lined up along the bank of the pond just outside Bishop, California and aimed our cameras at magnificent Mt Tom, the dominant peak in the Eastern Sierra crest in this area.
I’d like to take you through the process of making a photograph from the images I captured that morning.
Continue reading “The Making of a Photograph – Pond, Owens Valley 2011”
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Read about the exciting experience of setting up a new computer.
A little over a week ago my new Dell Inspiron 580 arrived at my doorstep. My wife and daughter finally convinced me to buy a new one. I think they were getting tired of me storming around the house all grumpy and such when the old on acted up. Disclaimer: Computers act up after years of use not because they wear out but because of all the junk you load on them as time goes by that literally clogs the operating system. So, with a little persuasion from my girls I gave Dell a call.
If your one of those that gets into these things, here’s what I ended up with:
So that’s the starting point. And from here on it gets more interesting – not exactly the Chinese curse interesting but kinda-sorta. I got a good deal on the Dell but it as it turns out I wasn’t even close to being done spending money.
Continue reading “Computer Upgrade”
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Learn more about histograms. We explore the histogram that results from low contrast scenes – how to capture it and what can be done with it in post processing.
In this series of articles we’ve been exploring the histogram. In the first two articles we discussed what it is. Now we’re looking at different types of histograms and exploring how to work with them both in the field and during the post processing. If you want to review or catch up, here are the links to the preceding three posts.
Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 1: Introduction
Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 2: A Closer Look
Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 3: The Rocky Mountain Histogram
In this article I want to discuss my favorite histogram, the Mole Hill histogram. I like this one because so much can be done with it in the post processing. Subtle colors and tonalities can be revealed in soft radiant light. It lends itself to some of the most creative and expressive images.
Read on and we’ll look at what it is, the conditions in which it occurs, how to photograph it and how to work with it in the post processing to reveal the scene in all of its hidden glory.
Continue reading “Mastering Exposure–Histograms Part 4”
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An example of how to process a difficult capture.
I was working on a photograph last night that turned out rather well. It was taken during a recent photography workshop in Zion National Park in Utah. I took the group to the famous bridge to photograph the Virgin River and the Watchman Tower at sunset. It’s a must photograph. It seems every photographer in Zion with a tripod is there. But we also returned for sunrise and had the bridge to ourselves.
There is a time of day when exposure becomes very tricky. This is during twilight when the sun is a little below the horizon so the earth is dark but the sky is very bright. You end up with what I call the “Grand Canyon” histogram – there’s a huge spike at the shadow end and a similar spike at the highlight end with a large gap in between. This is a challenging situation that, if you master, can provide some spectacular images. In this blog I’d like to walk you through the process.
Continue reading “The Making of a Photograph–Watchman Tower”
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Sometimes I create a post just to document and remember a learning process I’ve just gone through. This is such a time.
I just spent an hour or so recalibrating my laptop monitor. I calibrated it recently and it didn’t seem to come out right so I decided to recalibrate it again this morning.
Calibrating your monitor is a critical first step in the whole color management process (an area of study that hundreds of pages have been written on and that I won’t go into here – maybe later).
There are two settings you need to set in the calibration software – gamma and color temperature. I made some guesses as to what these were and guessed wrong. That’s why things like colors and tonalities didn’t look right. A little digging into Lightroom help provided the answer (when all else fails, read the documentation – yea, I know). So here it is. Hopefully it will save you some time in the future.
Gamma: 2.2
Color Temperature: 6500K
Good luck.
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I’m a landscape photographer who likes to do it all himself. I don’t want my camera making decisions for me. That’s one reason why I shoot RAW. And I don’t want Lightroom doing it either. Lightroom has default presets that it applies to your photographs when you import them.
To make things interesting, I shoot with two cameras (three if you count my iPhone). My main camera is a Canon 1Ds Mark III and my don’t-leave-home-without-it camera is a Canon G11. These cameras have widely different characteristics to say the least. Lightroom applies the same default preset to files from both cameras when they are imported.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could set up separate presets for each camera and set them up the way you like them. Well, that’s exactly what you can do. In fact, you can go a step farther than just undoing the Lightroom defaults. If there’s something you always do to every file you can create presets specific to each of your cameras and apply all the adjustments you want.
Continue reading “Lightroom Tutorial – Camera Specific Presets”
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Lightroom 3 came in the mail yesterday (along with CS5) so today I’m trying it out. There’s not a lot of new functionality like there was when LR2 introduced local adjustments. But there are some new things I’m really excited about.
Continue reading “Lightroom Tutorial – LR 3”
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