Lightroom 5 Beta Resources Roundup

April 17, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Lightroom 5 Beta is now available! Download it here.

Useful LR5 resources are posted by Adobe, NAPP, and Photoshop Café.

Here’s a list of and links to those resources.

Photoshop.com

LR5 Advanced Healing Brush
LR5 Radial Filter
LR5 Upright

LR5 – Terry White’s Top 5 Features

NAPP Lightroom 5 Launch Center

LR5 Smart Filters
LR5 Cloning Healing
LR5 Spot
LR5 The Radial
LR5 Upright
LR5 Book Changes
LR5 Slideshow
LR5 Tips

Plus, check out this free NAPP PDF and Lightroom eMagazine.

Photoshop Café Lightroom 5 Training Center

LR5 Colin Smith’s Top 10 New Features
LR5 Advanced Healing Brush
LR5 Radial Filter
LR5 Upright Image Correction
LR5 Video Slideshows

Using LR5 is a great way to get familiar with the latest new features. Remember, this free early beta version will expire after the final release. It does not upgrade previous versions. Many changes made with LR5 will not be backwardly compatible. (Word has it that there are issues with Drobo systems, so if you use one exercise caution.)

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: adobe, Lightroom, lightroom 5, napp, new features, photoshop cafe

Controlling Selective Color Changes In Lightroom – Julianne Kost

March 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment

“In this episode of The Complete Picture, Julieanne demonstrates how to use Hue, Saturation, Luminance and the Adjustment Brush to selectively control color in Lighrroom Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.”

View more Photoshop videos here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Lightroom
Tags: adobe, color adjustment, julianne kost, Lightroom, selective color

Exporting Images From Lightroom 4 – Julianne Kost

December 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment

“In this Episode of The Complete Picture, Julieanne demonstrates the advantage of setting up presets in Lightroom to simultaneously export images to multiple file types, sizes, compression settings etc. You might find even find this method more powerful than Photoshop’s Image Processor!”

View more Photoshop videos here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Lightroom
Tags: adobe, exporting, julianne kost, Lightroom

Why Does The Photograph’s Preview Change In Lightroom & Bridge? – Julianne Kost

November 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment

” Julieanne Kost explains one of the great mysteries of Lightroom and Bridge – why Lightroom (or Bridge) displays a photograph one way and then changes the way it looks a moment later. It will all become clear with just a little information about how digital camera files are captured and displayed by different applications.”

View more Photoshop videos here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Lightroom, Video - Photoshop
Tags: adobe, julianne kost, Lightroom, Photoshop, previews, Video

Converting Images to Black and White in Lightroom 4 – Julianne Kost

October 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment

“In this episode of The Complete Picture Julieanne demonstrates the best way to convert images to Black and White in Lightroom as well as how to save presets to increase your productivity. Click here to download the presets discussed in the video. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.”

Beyond ETTR & HDR Tonemapping – 32 Bit In Lightroom

October 24, 2012 | 3 Comments

Image by Ragnar th Sigurdsson.

To one degree or another, we’ve all been underexposing our digital photographs, even if we’ve been exposing to the right (ETTR). Imagine a day when every ƒ-stop had as much data as the lightest ƒ-stop. It’s here now. Here’s how.

Make a series of bracketed exposures where each ƒ-stop in a scene is placed in the far right of the histogram or recorded with half the data in a single digital file. Combine all the exposures into a single 32-bit file using either the Merge To HDR Pro feature in Adobe Bridge/Photoshop or Lightroom. Save or import this 32-bit file into Lightroom (4 or higher) and apply adjustments with its Develop module to avoid many common tone-mapping artifacts.

You may be surprised to find that you’ll benefit from using this technique even for images with significantly more restrained dynamic ranges.

Quick Tip – The Painter Tool in Lightroom 4 – Julianne Kost

August 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment

In this Quick Tip, Julieanne will show you a few of her favorite uses for the little-known Painter tool in Lightroom 4.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Lightroom
Tags: adobe, julianne kost, Lightroom, painter tool, Video

Output Sharpening

March 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Image source, frequency of detail, subject, personal preference, output device, substrate or presentation device, and presentation size all play a role in sharpening. The art of sharpening gives you precise control over various image characteristics—contrast, saturation, contour (halo and line), texture and noise. It’s best applied in three stages: capture, creative and output.

While there’s an art to sharpening, which provides extraordinary creative freedoms, some aspects of sharpening are best automated, such as output sharpening.

Output sharpening is used to compensate for the softening of detail that a specific device produces. Ink on paper, whether applied with an offset press or an inkjet printer, is notably susceptible to this. When drops of ink hit paper, they deform on impact and spread more or less based on the absorption characteristics of the substrate. This is called dot gain; the dots gain size. Dot gain varies with the type of printer, ink and substrate used. It also can be impacted by environmental factors such as humidity. Output sharpening typically also factors in file resolution and the scale of the final product, which is used to determine an ideal viewing distance—though the actual viewing distance is usually variable.

Output sharpening primarily benefits printed images. Projected images also can benefit somewhat. Images displayed on monitors rarely need to be sharpened for output, as they’ve already been sharpened based on the display device, during capture and creative sharpening.

There’s always a mismatch between the quality of image detail when displayed on a monitor and when printed. Comparatively low-resolution monitors can’t precisely preview what a print will look like on a high-resolution output device, much less precisely preview detail on many different output devices, with varying resolutions or on a variety of substrates with varying amounts of dot gain. So, the image on screen only can approximate, but not precisely display, the sharpness of the printed piece. (In the future, we expect algorithms to be devised to simulate this on screen.) In the end, you make the image on screen look too sharp, knowing it will soften when printed. How sharp do you make it? It depends on your printed proofs. You have to test various sharpening settings, make test prints and compare the results to determine optimum sharpening routines for a given printer and substrate combination. In addition, you should factor in the scale of the final printed piece.

Once determined, the settings used to achieve optimum results in a representative image or selection of images then can be used for all images printed with the same output conditions. You can write an Action to perform an optimum sharpening routine repeatedly. In short, after some initial testing, output sharpening can be automated.

Output sharpening can be complex and tedious. Most photographers would do well to enlist help from the experts to get the job done. There are many competing solutions for output sharpening; automate it in Lightroom or automate it in Photoshop with plug-ins like Nik Sharpener Pro or PixelGenius PhotoKit Sharpener or your own Actions. Using a preexisting solution reduces the testing necessary to create your own settings and brings to bear the considerable knowledge of experts in the field to your prints. Though each of these solutions requires a little testing before implementing, any one of them delivers better results than not performing output sharpening.

Pixel Genius’ PhotoKit Sharpener

NIK’s Sharpener Pro

Lightroom 4 Print Module

Until there’s a truly objective way of determining output sharpening, you’ll have to do a little testing yourself, but the amount of testing you’ll need to do will be minimal when you use automated solutions. Why do automated solutions require a little testing? Because individuals, no matter how objective they try to be, have preferences for image sharpening characteristics, which may or may not mirror your own preferences. They have to make judgment calls and so will you. But when testing their solutions, your task is much easier. You simply raise or lower the opacity of the sharpening layers their routines create, make test prints, determine your preferred opacity, and use that setting for all of your prints. (In Lightroom, you test the four settings: None, Low, Medium and High.)

Output sharpening is the second to last thing you do to enhance an image file before printing it. As a final step, you’ll probably want to carefully inspect an image at 100% magnification to make sure sharpening hasn’t accentuated any minor flaws. If it has, retouch them. And print.

Almost all images can benefit from output sharpening. (Notable exceptions are images with extremely smooth or low-frequency detail, such as minimalist soft-focus fields.) With a little testing, you can determine optimum output sharpening routines for your images and taste, and automate the process, saving you time and delivering better and more consistent results.

What do I use for output sharpening most often? Lightroom.

You can find the do-it-yourself output sharpening routine I recommend on Digital Photo Pro.

Find more sharpening resources here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Sharpening
Tags: dot gain, Lightroom, Nik Sharpener Pro, output sharpening, Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener