I’ll be in my light room

I must admit I much prefer shooting the images to processing them. For one thing, when I shoot them I am out in nature and loving it. When I post process, as much creative fun as that is, I am still inside staring at a screen. I was able to process some of my images along the way on my 6 months on the road, but I am now digging into 3,500 raw images from the 2 months in USA. Can get a bit overwhelming. All images to be revealed in good time, but here’s a tiny glimpse (sticky beak for you Aussies) into what I am working on:

I process such a large number of images using a recursive approach. I close Firefox (too distracting), put on headphones and fire up some tunes and enjoy a brew (coffee). I run through all images in Adobe Lightroom picking my ‘picks’ and dividing picks into groups using stars, 5, 4 ,3 etc. I repeat, honing the selection. I do some quick processing along the way to try out things. This is where Lightroom shines, I quickly play with many creative variations of an image. I do 80% of my work in Lightroom as it is so intuitive and much more fun and geared towards photographers than Photoshop. Photoshop is for my pixel level editing, selective editing using masks and sharpening etc. When I have the ‘hero’ shots narrowed down I develop them using an iterative ‘juggling many things at a time’ process. Not necessarily the most efficient way but this being my brain works. I cannot work on just one image, for me it is more like sculpturing. I work on an image some, feel I get stuck, switch to another image, sculpt that for a while and then onto the third and then perhaps back again to the first as a new idea strikes me. This repeats itself until I feel the image is good enough, for some images 5 minutes, some 5 days. I then mark this image ‘done’ in Lightroom with colour label green to tell my brain ‘It is done…stop tinkering!". Panos are then stitched in PTgui, editing is finished in Photoshop.

A small look into my light room. Not terribly exciting. I will persevere to write something better next time, I promise. Follow me on Twitter for more image previews as I get them developed.

What is your preferred tools and work method?

Two Toned World Strikes Back

Previously I have blogged about A Two Toned World and Return of the Toned World so I messed up the sequence a bit, but this is the 3rd of my tutorials on black and white and can now only be called: Two Toned World Strikes Back!

Following in the footsteps of all the classic and contemporary black and white landscape photographers; I show you how to and create stunning black and whites from your digital images – click ‘Keep reading’ link.

Improved colours in Lightroom and Camera Raw

Colour profiles is one area where I always felt Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw could be improved a lot. Rawshooter Premium had the brilliant ColorEngine plug-in with colour profiles from colour wizard Magne Nilsen. I was never able to quite repeat these colours in Lightroom or ACR.

Until now. Fortunately Adobe Labs have come to the rescue with their much improved color rendering package. Have a look at this comparison of my Hawk Dreaming landscape, the top photo is the new Adobe Standard beta profile, the bottom photo is the standard Lightroom ACR4.4 profile.

The rendering of red and orange hues is much improved in the new profiles so if you’re a Lightroom 2.0 or Camera Raw (you need to get at least version 4.5) user waste no time, download the profiles and follow the instructions from the Adobe Labs page and enjoy much improved colours! I recommend using the "’Adobe Standard beta’ profile in the package but try them all and see what you like best.