Lightroom 2

Hi Everyone, just putting this post up as I've been playing with the new version of adobe's lightroom, first impressions are that it's pretty impressive. There are plenty of review sites and tutorials about all the new features, I like to have a bit of a play round instead of reading the manual. There are loads of additions to the develop panel, one that caught my eye is the graduated filter. It used to be that if you wanted to say darken the sky slightly you had to open your RAW files in CS3 then add a gradient layer and change your blend mode but now you can do it all in LR. This picture is an example of a coloured grad I added to an old photo I never got round to processing. There are plenty of other features to streamline your workflow, that sounds so much like managerial bull***t, but it's true. There are some performance issues being talked about, I have noticed on my fairly old computer it does slow down but never locks up or crashes, people fortunate to have quadcore, watercooled computers say it all works fine so it looks like I may have to get a few upgrades!

Photoshop Actions

I've recently been using a lot of actions in photoshop and came across this site called PanosFX. He has loads of free photoshop actions to try, I used an action called 'the big picture' on a photo I took of a poppy field a while back. It takes a few moments to run the action as it needs to cut out bits and create drop shadows and that sort of thing but once it's done it gives quite a nice effect. There are other actions to try but I thought I'd post this as it is one of my favs.

Contrast

Contrast is the dissimilarity or difference between things, acording to wiki.

I'm adding this because I submitted it to a contest on my favorite photo forum, talkphotography.co.uk. It has contests every month and I sometimes have a punt, this months subject was contrast, quite a tough one really, a lot of black and white images as you might suspect, heres my take on it.
A simple flash setup with lighting coming from a single 580EXII to the left the black polo was changed in CS3, not as easily as I first suspected. First I applied a layer mask (cutting out the polo using the pen tool) and just added an inverted adjustment layer, the problem with it is it turns the black shadows white which isn't what I wanted. I went back to the layer mask and used a levels adjustment to just bring down the levels of white and grey to black.

Pet Photography

I don't get to do a lot of pet photography which is a shame because I love animals, my old man was a vet so I grew up with all sorts of different animals running around the place. The only problem with pets is they do just that, run everywhere! With pet photography it's just a case of getting the owner to keep them entertained out of shot, and avoid getting your lens licked! As with any portrait the thing that sets them apart is emotion, I liked how the dog was anticipating another biscuit. I wasn't going to turn it monotone but failed once again! This one was done in my studio, ISO100, f11, 1/100 at 70mm.

Another Portrait

Hey folks, I thought I'd put this one up of one of my nieces who was over recently, I did a bunch of photos of her and her brother in the studio, both were very photogenic. I liked this image because of her eyes.
I've been experimenting with some photoshop actions as I find them a little more effective that lightroom presets, I can't quite put my finger on why. Actions, like presets, are recorded steps you can apply to several images very quickly and they are a great labour saving method. There are plenty available on the web, some are free and some are, well...not.

Weddings

Hi Everyone. Seems like ages since my last post, I've been a bit busy with wedditing (Weddings followed by editing) I could do with getting up to the lakes, the weather has been really changeable but it makes for some great landscapes, as long as you don't get soaked to the skin! Anyway this was from a recent wedding, I decided to do a little HDR on the dress with a black and white conversion which I thought looked quite cool. I used Dynamic Photo for the HDR and then CS3 for the BW conversion. I really liked the sky in the mono conversion.