Tag: Lightroom

Color Saturation in Lightroom

On three techniques for saturating color in Lightroom.

Last night we had a beautiful sunset.  The sky was baby blue, the clouds were pink and the horizon was golden.  I couldn’t resist.  So I grabbed my Canon PowerShot G11 and walked over to the neighbor’s front yard where the view is just a bit better.  I composed what I thought was an interesting image and snapped a few.

This morning I uploaded them and got to wondering about color saturation in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  I have a technique I’ve used for years to enhance colors but there are a couple of other techniques I thought I’d like to understand better.  The three Lightroom controls are:

  • Saturation
  • Vibrance
  • HSL (the control I use the most)

So, for starters, here’s the original unadjusted image.

sunset_original As you can see, the colors are really quite nice.  But my recollection of the sunset was that they were a little more saturated, more intense.

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HDR Tip #2

The second in a series of tips on how to process HDR images.

These HDR tips resulted from a conversation with my good friend Andreas Waldeck, an HDR expert who happens to work with HDRSoft, the publisher of the premier HDR software Photomatix Pro.

In Tip #1 we talked about the correct way to capture multiple images HDR images in the field.  See HDR Tip #1.

Now I want to start discussing the processing of these image files.  The software tools we’ll discuss are Lightroom, Photomatix and, to a much lesser extent, Photoshop.  So let’s get started.

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HDR Tip #1

Announcing 2010 photography workshops

I shoot a lot of HDR.  That’s where you take multiple images at different exposures so that you capture the full dynamic range of the scene in front of you.  Many people consider HDR to be unnatural and you can definitely get a surreal effect.  But HDR is the only way you can capture certain challenging scenes and make the results look like what you see, not what your camera sees.

I had a talk with my good friend Andreas Waldeck who works for HDRsoft, the creators of Photomatix.  This is the premier software for doing HDR.  Andreas shared some things with me that were real eye-openers and I’d like to pass them along to you in a series of HDR Tips.  So let’s get started with the first tip.

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Musings on Personal Style #1

Ever since I attended my first workshop two years ago I’ve been pondering personal style.  At first I had no clue as to what my personal style was.  But as time has gone by and I become more aware of the kind of work I produce, the idea of a personal style is starting to become clearer.  So, I plan to write a number of posts on personal style and my journey of self discovery.

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Wandering in the Fog

I worked on two photographs tonight that have been giving me trouble for the last week or so.  Both were shot in Zion NP.  The one I’ve been working the longest on was what I finished up on tonight.  Hopefully I have it.  We’ll know tomorrow morning.

My point in this post is I often get the feeling I’m wandering in the fog.  You can’t see where you’re going very well and you just stumble around.  You take a step, look around and decide where to go from there.  It’s a slow process.  I make a print.  It takes several minutes for it to come off the printer.  Then I look at it.  Often times it’s very disappointing, especially tonight.  Think about what’s wrong with it for a while, make the changes in PS and make another print.  It’s disappointing so think some more, fiddle in PS some more and make another print.  Hours go by.

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DxO Impressions 1

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using DxO now.  I was introduced to the product in November at the Digital Summit workshop in Zion National Park.  It looked pretty interesting and besides I got a deal I couldn’t refuse.  I waited for the release of DxO Optics Pro 5 before jumping in.  There were a lot of improvements made to version 5 that corrected some of the more serious shortcomings of version 4.

First of all, DxO works with RAW images.  And given the sorts of corrections it applies, it makes sense to use DxO before any other RAW converter like LR, ACR or Capture One.  So that’s where it comes in my workflow.  Actually, I generally import RAW images into LR first, review and rank them in LR.  When I determine the images I want to work on I then bring them into DxO and work on them there before returning to LR.

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