I was lucky enough to get to take a peak at it pre-release and here are my top five highlights that I took away from that quick look:

1 ) Major changes to the develop module including a complete rethink of the local adjustments in the way highlights and shadows are handled. The adjustments are much easier to make independently of one another and there is no more confusion as to what is the difference between increasing exposure vs brightness etc.

There is also the ability now to do LOCAL noise reduction!

2) Support for light video editing and playback! This includes jpg capturing, trimming (thank god), exposure, WB controls and more! Here is a little list of what develop adjustments you can make to video clips:

Unfortunately, much to my disappointment the ability to add video to the slideshow module is NOT included in this release.

3) A LOT of geotagging functionality so that organizing your photos by place taken is a snap. Tagging can be done after the fact via an easy to use drag and drop interface in the new “MAP” module.

4) A NEW “ALBUM” MODULE! Yep, a whole module devoted to creating albums with text, images, tons of different layouts and the ability to save them by project! Yipee!  There is also an automatic send to blurb functionality for those of you who are blurb fans.

5) Soft proofing. WE will actually be able to see what our images look like in sRGB BEFORE opening them up in Photoshop – no more nasty blown red channel surprises :) There are other uses for softproofing, that was just the one that jumped out at me as most useful for pro photogs.

But don’t just take my word for it, go get yourself a free copy: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

I’ll be back too in the coming days with more thoughts once I’ve had a chance to download and play for a bit!

I took this as a bit of a challenge because I consider(ed) myself pretty knowledgeable in Lightroom, so I set about trying to edit an image from a recent session only in Lightroom. I did so by trying to use the adjustment brush to “brush in” contrast, saturation and darkness around my subject. In the end, I found it took even MORE time than my usual photoshop edits and posted back in the thread for advice. What was posted in return was that I was going about it backwards, which was her point to begin with! In LR, it’s easier/more effective to darken/saturate the whole image and then brush back in brightness just on the subject. Total lightbulb moment!

So I tried on this recent session to edit ALL the images only in Lightroom. Once I figured it out and edited one image to my liking, it was very easy to apply the edits across the whole session and it did save a huge amount of time. More importantly, the results were super consistent. I did have to retouch a bit of a rash on the older child’s face and I really cannot live without portraiture, so I did run it on several of the images so you might say that these were edited 99% in LR and 1% in photoshop. Just for full disclosure :)

I recorded a video showing my editing steps, it will take us from this SOOC:

to this:

Before I post a link to the video, I have to apologize for the audio.. I should have checked my mic levels but alas I did not, so there is a bit of annoying distortion!

Leave a comment if you have any questions!

If you don’t have it already, this would be a great time to snag yourself a copy! :)

I am so behind on blogging!! It has been a crazy week and I know the birthday party recap is going to take a bit of time to write.. in the meantime, here is my annual “Jasper’s Year in pictures” video.

And the ONLY reason that I had time to get this done is that Lightroom 3 makes it  SO easy to create slideshows like this! This was created completely within lightroom, no need to export any images anywhere.

I’ll just tell you how I made it easy on myself..

I created a “smart collection” that contained ONLY the images I’d edited since Jasper’s last birthday. Sure, I would still have to go through and pick out the ones that are of Jasper vs. clients or other things (keywording also really helps here!), but this gets me a LOT closer and gives me a much more reasonable number of images to sift through.

The reason I can distinguish between edited and non edited is that I edit ALL my files in Lightroom and then in Photoshop, so my edited files all are PSD files vs the unfinished RAW files.   Lightroom makes it very easy for you to pull ONLY the images that are PSD files into a smart collection and you can put a custom date range in there too!

Here’s how you make a smart collection like mine:

1) Click on the + sign next to collections and choose “smart collection” from the options.

2) Set up your filters, in my case I chose “file type” PSD

3) Click on the + sign to add more filters. I added a “captured after” date and set it to his birthday in 2010 and then another “captured before” date and set it to his birthday this year.

Here’s what my smart collection filter screen looked like:

Then I went to my new smart collection and added the images of Jasper I wanted to use to a quick collection by hitting the “B” key  and then selected all and created a new collection called “Jasper’s Third year”.

To create the slideshow:

Once I had the images, I switched over to the slideshow module where I added a soundtrack (music from triplescoop.com) and the titles. I set the transition speed to .5 seconds and selected “fit to music” so it autocalculated the slide duration so everything would be time correctly and that’s it!  Choose export to video from the slideshow menu and choose your resolution.

Hope that helps someone – it’s so simple to do in LR that even the busiest mom/photographer can find the time to create at least ONE slideshow a year right? :)

(Forgive the terrible product shot!)

Self mount just means that you order the prints from your own lab and then mount them in the album via peel and stick.  The album is 8×8 and square, and you don’t want people to have to turn the album to see the vertical vs landscape images, so the simplest way to accomplish that is to do create and order from your lab an 8×8 print with a 5×7 image on it.  For those of you having a hard time visualizing, here is what it sort of looks like:

To create these 8×8 prints I used to use photoshop and run an action, but I recently realized how EASY it is to do this right in Lightroom! Here’s how:

I also am making available for download the album print templates for the LR print module that I showed you on the video. You can download them from here:

http://www.arianafalerni.com/Album-Prints.zip

How to install

Unzip the folder.

Go to the print module in Lightroom and from the Template Browser on the left click the little plus sign and create a new template (name it anything you want, you can delete it later). Right click on your new template and choose “Show in Explorer” (Win) or “Show in Finder” (Mac) which will give you the correct folder to drop the UNZIPPED Album Prints folder into.  DO NOT drop the zipped folder, you must unzip and drop that folder in the correct directory.

Mac users that folder should be somewhere like here: user/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Print Templates

Win users: C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Print Templates\Album Prints

IMPORTANT: You must close and restart lightroom for the new print templates to appear (they should now be in a folder called “Album Prints” in your template browser!)

Enjoy!

First, the lenses. After debating a bit, I decided to only bring my Tamron 28-75 2.8 and my 50 1.4.  If you look in the “In my Camera Bag” sidebar to the right, you’ll see that I also have the Canon 24-70L 2.8 (and my beloved 70-200 2.8 II!) but I just couldn’t see myself schlepping around those super heavy lenses to Disney or the Beach. That’s where the Tamron is great. The optics are ALMOST as good as the Canon L.. at least close up. Full body shots seem to be a bit clearer with the L, the the Tamron is just such a great lightweight walk around lens. And if something happened to it (theft, sand, water etc) it wouldn’t be as much as a financial setback.

I will say however that I DID miss a shot or two due to missed focus which I almost NEVER do with my L lenses, so my plan wasn’t totally flawless, but given the tradeoff I’m very happy with my decision to go lighter and I think my back and shoulders are too!

I brought the 50 1.4 because I wanted to have a fast lens with a wider app for taking any pictures inside of rides in low light. Many rides/performances you can’ t use flash, so a wide aperture lens is a necessity in those situations.  The 50 is a light lens, it didn’t add much weight to carry it around for those occasions.  However, I DID find myself wishing I had a wider angle than the 50. A 35 would have been perfect!

In fact, for the first time I found myself really loving the wide 28mm side of my Tamron for some of my beach shots. I am normally such a long focal length junkie (the 200mm end of my 70-200 is my favorite place to be!) but I found myself really appreciating the “fun” ness of the wider shots.

I think a wide angle might be my next purchase.. fisheye would be awesome, but maybe something more versatile.. any recommendations?

No onto the tutorial part of the program.

After I posted some of my beach pictures, I had some questions about how I got such great color and clarity. Clarity is really just a matter of nailing focus, using good gear and sharpening for web (I use the USM set to about .2 radius and 500% for web sized images).   for the saturation, I used the targeted adjustment tool in LR to saturate the blues and greens of my beach images on images like these:

Here’s the tutorial. Note that I completely blanked on the name of the tool during the video, but you still will the idea :)

I really don’t understand why you would need an application like this when you already have the ability to do this exact thing in Photoshop! (Unless of course you don’t have photoshop, in which case I believe you could do the same thing in elements which costs $99 and has a lot more functionality. Unfortunately, I don’t have elements so I can’t verify that this can be done in Elements, but perhaps one of you elements users can leave a comment letting us know?)

In any event, I created a tutorial on how to achieve this exact same thing in Photoshop because I used this method on all of the beach pictures I like this one I  took on our Florida trip:

it’s almost impossible to expose properly for both skin and sky in camera (if you aren’t using fill flash that is!) and so this method is the best way to compensate.

Enjoy!

I’ve been reading your tutorials about LR and PSE and I’ve found them so helpful!  I have a question about the Camera Calibration Profile in LR.  When I choose Camera Neutral and make changes to the histogram in LR it appears that no highlights are blown.  My problem is that when I bring the same image into PSE thereafter the hisogram shows blown highlights.  Do you have any idea why that would happen?  Thanks for  any advice or info you may have in advance.  I’ve been working with PSE for about 1 1/2 years but I’ve only recently begun to work with LR so I’m a bit confused.
Thanks,

Kacey

Kacey has hit on something that drives many of us who are used to working with the RGB 0-255 scale a bit bonkers in LR. There is no way to switch the read out from %s to actual numbers.  Additionally, even though the LR histogram doesn’t LOOK like the red channel is getting clipped, but  it is if you consider the definition of red channel clipping is anything over 240 in the red channel for print purposes (Anything over 240 is not considered “safe”, some people even define that as low as 230, but personally use 240 with my lab and haven’t had any problems. Those results will vary lab to lab though, so you’ll want to test those values for yourself.)

For example, check out the LR histogram in this image of Jasper:

The curve doesn’t even touch all the way to the right end of the histogram.. and yet, when we bring this image into photoshop and inspect  the cheek on camera right with the info palette, we see that the reading in the red channel is 251, ie. clipped.

So, what can we do in LR to remedy this?

A couple of things.. first of all, you can switch the calibration from “Adobe Standard” to “Camera Neutral” which often sucks out enough red out to tame the red channel into submission. If that is still not enough, you can either use the recovery slider or decrease exposure overall and just keep in mind that your histogram generally cannot touch all the way to the right in LR and NOT clip the red channel.

Here is my histogram in LR after I decreased exposure a tad and also moved the recovery slider from 0 to 6:

Notice the extra space to the right side of the histogram. Also, take a look at the R %… it reads 93.3. You can’t see it on the screen shot, but I was hovering in the same cheek area that I sampled in Photoshop.  If you compare this percentage with the percentage of R before I upped the recovery slider and brought the exposure down, you can see that it went down from 97ish% to 93ish %. I have found that you can use this as a general rule of thumb that any R% that approaches the mid to upper 90s is going to be clipped in PS. Keep it around the low 90s (always checking of course!) and you should be OK. Here is what it now reads in Photoshop:

One more word about the recovery slider: I prefer to use it sparingly and favor lowering overall exposure because overuse tends to suck all the “life” out of the image and also shifts the colors in a way that I don’t love.

This is a slightly oversimplified explanation, because there are also some colorspace issues that contribute to the problem, but I have found that the red channel numbers don’t change more than 1-2 points on the 0-255 scale depending on which colorspace you are working in (sRGB vs Adobe RGB for example) so I didn’t want to complicate my answer with that issue. But if you are interested in reading more about it, Damien has an excellent post about it here.

I'ts only been 12 hours and I miss this little face so much!

I know, I know, I meant to blog about it ahead of time, but the paci post and the Valentine shoot etc I just didn’t have time.   But I’m here, at a “girl’s getaway”  sponsored by Adobe Lightroom for shooting and instruction with Julianne Kost (the Lightroom evangelist!)

So tomorrow we go walk around SF shooting all day (landscapes I guess- um, I have NO idea how to shoot anything but people LOL!) and Friday we have a traning with Julianne in the morning. Except I just realized that I brought my camera, and my laptop, but no way to transfer the images from my camera TO my laptop. Oops. I guess I will have to hope someone else was a better packer than I was and I can borrow their camera cord!

Anyhow, so far the trip has been nice and less eventful than to San Antonio – no trips to the ER for Jasper so far!

Hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow with some nice shots of SF, if I can find a camera cord that is :)

Oh, and if you have any LR questions for Julianne, let me know!

I refer to a few things in the video that I want to link to:

1) This is the digital grey kard that I use but I’ve heard good things about the Robin Myers ones too (RMI). Just don’t use the exposure target grey cards that claim to also work for White Balace. I’ve heard from many pros that I respect that the grey is NOT the same for both purposes.

2) Here is my detailed blog post about how I use the Slideshow module during my in person ordering sessions. I touch on it very briefly here because I already blogged about it so extensively.

3) Here is a link to Portraiture. I recommend the Photoshop plugin, not the Lightroom one because I like having the control of erasing back too smooth areas in the layer in photoshop.

4) Here is a link to the Lightroom 3 plugin for my Wall Display Guides which I go over very quickly because it’s part of the process that I use during the ordering session.

5) Here is a post I did recently with some more post processing tips including a link to the action that I use in this video.

Don’t forget to enter the Lightroom 3 Giveaway, you have until Midnight Sunday Dec 5th to enter to win this amazing prize!

If you like this or any of the other content I’ve blogged about during my “Lightroom week” please use the little icons below to share via twitter, FB etc.

Have a great weekend and good luck on the giveaway if you entered!