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!

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a smart collection in Lightroom which will automatically pull JUST the PSD files from a given folder or collection (or any number of things depending on what rules you add to it!)

I think I filmed this one at about 2am and I start coughing at the end and had to make an abrupt exit… not my best video, but I think it gets the job done!

(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!

This is a technique that I use with all of my baby or baby and parents on black. Even though the SOOC looks like this:

It’s just a few quick steps to get that clean pure black look:

Let me know if you have any questions!

I first learned this method of improving local contrast from Damien in a thread he posted on ILP.  If you don’t already know about Damien’s blog, he’s got some really great posts and tutorials about everything from post processing to calibrating your monitor. Definitely worth a look!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!

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!

1) The imminent release  of the LR3 plugin for my Wall Display Guides!!! (more on that soon…)

2) Lightroom 3 is currently on sale at Amazon for a ridiculously low price (you have to click on “other options” on the right to see that low price sold from amazon)- I have no idea how long that will last but I suggest you jump on it if you have any funds left after Black Friday/CyberMonday!

3) I’ve had several requests recently for LR3 to PS workflow tips.

4) I have a copy of LR3 to giveaway to one lucky reader!

The giveaway will go up tomorrow, but I wanted to kick off LR week today (yes, our LR3 week is starting on a Tuesday – I’m late even to my own blog posts!) with a super cool tip/trick that I am offering as a free preset – Black and White rounded corners!

Until I came across this neat little trick posted by Denis Page  in the Lightroom Users ForumI had NO idea LR3 could do this in one click!

Pretty awesome right?

I’m offering both black and white rounded corners as as a free preset,  but because this is Becoming Mom and you know I’m all about tutorials,  I’m going to show you how you achieve this effect in LR and how you can even customize it and make your own preset!

Click HERE to download the free rounded corners presets.

Please post any and all of your LR3 questions here so I know what to address in the coming days.. if I don’t know the answer, I bet I can find someone who will.

Also, if you love this tip and the download, I’d appreciate you spreading the word via facebook or a tweet using the handy little icons you see right below :)

So, here’s my little cowboy – (these look MUCH better big on my photo website!)

I posted these on ILP and someone asked about my processing and if they could see the SOOC, so I thought I’d do a little step by step in case anyone finds it useful.

OK, first the SOOC:

Yucko! You can see that my WB was waaaay off, I probably had it on the “shady” settting which adds a ton of yellow/warmth.

So in LR, I adjusted the tint and temperature sliders and raised the exposure up JUST a tad:

This is a much better starting point and so I opened it up in Photoshop.  The first thing I did was lift the midtones by doing a curves adjustment layer and pulling up the center of the curve so the image then looked like this:

That opened up the image nicely, particularly under his hat you can see his hair much better.  I then ran an action that I run on almost ALL my images to give them a little contrast kick. It’s called AMP Simply B&W, it’s a freebie and I highly recommend it. Up until recently I haven’t been a HUGE fan of actions because I have a major DIY complex, but lately I’ve been using them more and more to speedup my workflow. I don’t recommend that beginners to photoshop get too caught up in actions because then they don’t learn how to DIY, but once you know what each action is doing and even how to recreate it yourself, that’s a whole other story.

The reason I use this particular action so often is that it does three basic things for me:  1) It adds a contrast pop via a levels adjustment. That adjustment is just bringing the black slider in from the left to the right and the middle slider over to brighten the midtones a bit  like this:

I find that this kick is all the contrast I usually need/want in my images.  2) It has a B&W via gradient layer that I just turn off for color images, but it’s convenient to have it there for a one-click conversion.  3) It has a layer called “eye lift” which is just like the midtones curve adjustment we did in the second step. I often paint this layer on with a soft white brush at a very low opacity around the eyes (which is what it is meant for) and also ANYWHERE else in my image that needs a bit of lightening.  It also has a “darker darks” layer for images that need more blacks and an “oops too bright” layer in case that contrast layer brightened up the image too much. I don’t use these most of the time, but they are convenient to have. So this is my image after I ran the APM Simply B&W action and clicked OFF the b&w layer:

Notice that the background particularly got a nice pop.  At this point, I will often take my sponge tool set to “saturate” at about 5% and go over any areas that I want to give a color pop.  I will also use the burn tool to go around the edges of the image to give it a slight vignette. I don’t do that on all my images, but I thought it fit well with the western theme.

Then, I resized and sharpened for web using an USM set to 500% and radius at .2 and added my watermark. And,  the final version:

From this:

to this:

You’ll notice that the original looks god awful, which is MOSTLY due to the incorrect WB. That one fix alone is huge. B ut also it looks almost blurry which is partly because I exported it straight out of LR and it only has LR sharpening applied to it.  I LOVE LR but the web sharpening sucks – you just can’t get that same crispness that you can with photoshop USM -which is really unfortunate because it means I have to open every image in PS at some point.  Hopefully this is something they will address in future versions.

Anyway, hope that was useful!