onOne Software: Plug-in Suite 6 "II"

This evening, I spent a little more time testing out the latest offering from onOne Software.  I know that I praised it highly in my last post, and I was curious to see if I would still come away with the same impression.  Well, the short version is that I did.  In fact I only spent a few minutes working on the photo below.  Time is money, and I look forward to using these tools on my next project.  The fact that you can finish off some pretty amazing edits quickly almost makes you feel guilty.  OnOne’s entire goal is to get you back to shooting, and in this they succeed.

While the suite can be used from start to finish on an image, I would make the following recommendations on how to fit it into your workflow.

Still perform your general/basic edits (eg. white balance/cropping) in your editor of choice.  Use this part of the process to start coming up with ideas about what you would like to do with the image.  This is important as the “basic edits” that you are doing will directly affect the outcome of how the effects and other tools apply.  As much as the process here is meant to be creative, there is a very logical and stepwise method to approaching the editing.  Most of the time, these types of process are second nature, and I would assert that most people won’t realize that they are doing it.

Well for now, here is this evening’s photo.  I hope that you enjoy it.

Mediocre Photos

I was running through my mental list of things to write about as a journal entry this evening, and one thing stood out:  What to do with a photo that was composed well, but looks uninspiring upon review.  I’m sure I’m not the only photographer that this has happened to, and in talking to others recently, I know I’m not.  This can be a side effect of the time of year or perhaps a lull in someone’s creative flow.

So what do you do with that photo or group of photos.  Some people that I know would simply reject the images and move on.  In some cases this is a really, REALLY good idea as cleaning up your digital clutter is never a bad thing.  That being said, I often find that I spend a fair bit of time searching through old pictures during this time of year.  It’s not that there aren’t things to take pictures of, but in my area the weather is turning cold, the amount of foliage is minimized, and it can be a challenge to even get motivated to go out and find something interesting to shoot.

It is at these times that I like to start doing a more in depth review of the multitude of images that I already have.  Sometimes I may find a hidden gem of an image that I had forgotten about, but most of the time it is reviewing an assortment of mediocre images.  So here is what I’ve started to do and will recommend to you:  Get creative with your editing, and step outside the box!

Quite simply, the photo that may have been composed well may look far better as a high or low contrast black and white image, cross-processed or a colour accented image.  Perhaps the colour and tone of the photo is great but the composition doesn’t feel right; crop it into a different perspective.

This is where Adobe Lightroom and its non-destructive environment really performs.  Create virtual copies of your image after cropping and apply different colour treatments to them.  If you don’t like what you are seeing, go back in the history or simply reset back to original.  It’s really that simple!  Lightroom provides a creative environment that allows you to quickly and easily explore the possibilities of your image.  

What’s the end result?  Was it really all that mediocre?

First Comments on Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

As some, or most of you who read my journal may already know.  Adobe released Lightroom 3 Beta (referred to as LR3B) a few days ago.  I excitedly downloaded installed and started testing after watching the videos released by Julieanne Kost on the Adobe Labs site.  Now that I’ve spent some time with it, I would definitely encourage you to download and try it out.  As well, watch the videos, as Julieanne Kost, does an excellent explaining and demonstrating the new features.  

What I do want to mention are a couple of the things that I really like.  The first thing is the performance increase; overall the performance of LR3B is noticeably faster than LR2.  Enumerating thumbnails is one of those performance items, and I was delighted to see the thumbnails almost fly into existence as I was performing mass imports of large DNG files.  What’s the big deal?  The big deal is that I was able to start reviewing and processing images while the import of 3000+ photos was in progress.

The next item is the improvements to the sharpening module and algorithm.  You no longer have to zoom into 100% in order to view the sharpening effect. This also falls into the praise of performance above, as the sharpening changes happen extremely fast and you can see the changes in the full view.  In fact, it was seeing this while working on a photo this evening.  The photo was mostly consisting of wild grass growing on a sand dune close to the ocean.  After working on the tone curves, I moved to the sharpening and was blown away when I saw how good the sharpening was now in LR3B.  

To sum things up right now, the changes that have been made in LR3B are so impressive that it makes me want to re-evaluate the photos that I’ve been working on recently. Over the next little while, I’ll continue to post opinions, comments and concerns surrounding LRB3.  For now, download it, and start working with it.  If you have any comments, please feel free to leave a comment on the post or you can send me a message by using the contact form.

As always, thanks for reading and happy photographizing! 

Heading Home

Well, it is late on the last night of this vacation.  I have just completed my last round of Lightroom imports and am currently syncing my files over to my external hard drive one last time.  I have to be up in a few hours to drive back to Portland to catch a plane, but I thought that I would note a couple of things before I hit the sack.  

This vacation has been fantastic on several levels, and getting back to the daily grind will be a bit of a kick in the teeth.  Above all, the last twelve days has been a fantastic adventure in pushing my photographic comfort zones.  One example of this was the constant grey weather and bright overcast skies.  The couple of times that we did actually see sun, we were almost perplexed as to what to do with ourselves.  In the coming weeks, there will be some journal entries about some of the challenges that I came across as well as some of the techniques I employed to still walk away with some decent shots.

Durning this time, I have also taken the opportunity to work on some different ideas as to how the site web galleries should be organized.  So don’t be surprised if you come by to check out the photos and they have been moved around or grouped differently.  As per usual I’ll be giving the heads up via email, Twitter and Facebook when these changes take place.  

For now, I had better shut it down as it has quickly turned into a late night with an early morning.  As always, thanks for reading, and keep photographizing!

Challenging Highlights

The last couple of days I’ve run into a couple of difficult lighting situations, first to shoot and then to correct later on.  As I’ve been using Lightroom as my primary editing tool while on vacation, I have been taking the opportunity to try to learn better methods of editing in order to compensate for blown out skies, waterfalls and my balding head.  So far I’ve only used Photoshop CS4 once to edit an image and that was to remove some garish orange pylons from the front of Pittock Mansion.

So what have I been doing?  Well I’ve been experimenting and using a combination of tools found in the “Develop” panel in Lightroom.  Before I go any further, I want to point out that what I’m describing here isn’t going to bring back any lost detail in truly blown out highlights.  What the purpose here is to decrease the burnt, damaged effect so that the image is viewable and possibly printable.

Larger Areas

For larger areas in an image I’ve had great success using the Graduated Filter.  Slightly decreasing the brightness and exposure can go a long way here.  Couple this with “Recovery” and a decrease in the Tone Curve Highlights and a lot of issues can be resolved.

Smaller Areas

In some of the smaller areas, I have found the Adjustment Brush to be incredibly useful.  Using some of the similar settings that you would have used with the Graduated Filter, set up the brush and paint the changes in to a smaller area.  If you are working in different areas of the image or would like better control over multiple locations where the adjustment is being made, be sure to use a “New” brush between those locations.  By selecting new, the previous settings will be used but the locations will not be connected.  This is very helpful when tweaking the adjusted areas, by selecting the adjustment pin/point and moving left or right to increase or decrease the painted effect.

Vignettes 

A slight darkened, soft feathered, vignette can be very effective in drawing the viewer into the subject, but it can also be used to help darken that obnoxious bland, bright, grey sky.  This isn’t going to “fix” the sky, but it may provide a more appealing look.  

Really, in the end some of these tools may help to save some of the images that you thought were lost.  In my case I made things that little be easier by shooting RAW.  I would encourage you to shoot RAW if your camera supports it as the control that you’ll have over your image file will be that much better than starting with a compressed JPG.

Thanks for reading; let’s see what tomorrow brings.