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!

For those of you who don’t know, This week is WPPI NYC and Photoplus Expo week in NYC.  Despite the fact that it’s in my own backyard, I had never attended this show, but two things made me decide to go this year, first that my friend David from H&H was going to be there and also that Adobe had invited me to a press lunch and a VIP party to announce and celebrate the release of Adobe Carousel.

Being neither technically “press” and most certainly not a “VIP” (at least not in my mind!) I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived at  lunch on Wednesday.  Happily, I walked into a room filled with friendly faces because Anne and Cari who organized the Adobe Girl’s Getaway in SF last winter were there, as well as Julieanne Kost!

I love all three of these women and hadn’t  been sure I’d ever see any of them again, so it was a pleasure to catch up with them. In fact, Anne and Cari were my muses during our SF trip – we were supposed to be shooting sights in the city, but being a portrait photographer I only wanted to take pictures of PEOPLE and would make them pose for me every time the light looked pretty:

Cari

Anne

I looked at the name tags of the other invited guests with interest. These were DEFINITELY press people..real press people. People from BIG tech websites and magazines and let’s just say I was kind of well – amazed – to be sitting at the same table with them with my little “Becoming Mom” name tag!

And then came the fun part, Chris (the marketing manager for Carousel) demoed Carousel for all of us and after the demo was over they announced that it was becoming available the next morning.

So, if you are anything like I was before this week, you probably have heard that Adobe had a new product coming out but aren’t exactly sure what it is.. so I’m going to share my experience of what it is, though you would probably also be well served to visit the official Carousel website for more information!

Carousel is a new subscription based service from Adobe (free right now for up to 30 days) whereby you can share and EDIT your images on all of your devices (mobile phones, tablets,mac computer.) The editing interface is similar to ACR and LR so you can make adjustments to contrast, WB, tint, temperature, exposure, crop etc just like LR/ACR and the changes will instantaneously and automatically synch to all your devices!

At the beginning of the demo, I wasn’t even sure who the audience was for this product, but it became very clear that it’s no way aimed (yet?) at professional photographers, this is really a consumer product whereby you can share (and edit) your photos across devices and WITH UP TO 5 OTHER PEOPLE.  So with your one subscription, you are actually giving up to 5 other people carousel if you choose to invite them.. so for example I can share my pics of Jasper with Jeff, my mom, dad, aunt etc so they can always have the ones that I add to carousel available at any time!

It’s actually very VERY cool.

The only downside for me right now is that being a PC person, I can’t add images from my computer unless I somehow get them onto my iPad or iPhone camera roll first. But happily they will be releasing a PC version in early 2012.

Of course my mind is spinning with the possibilities it could offer to pro photographers (someday with a pro subscription maybe?) of inviting clients to view their session on their own iPad for example, and then would “disappear” after a predefined “viewing window.”

That is not where this product is going now though – for example you can’t turn off editing for the people you share it with (I do think it would be a nice feature to have a “read only” share) but the other possibilities are pretty awesome.

For families with young kids, I see this as an amazing way to keep all your important pictures at your fingertips and at the fingertips of your close family at all times.

For example, my dad just got a new (well, my OLD) iPhone.  I’m not sure he even knows how to use any apps, but I can install carousel for him and he can have instant access to up-to-date pictures of Jasper just by pressing the carousel icon on his phone!

If you want to check it out, it’s available at the  iTunes App Store and Mac App Store and you can sign up for free for 30 days so you can give it a whirl. Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comments, If I can’t answer for you I can probably get an answer for you  from the nice folks at Adobe.

After the Carousel demo, Julieanne (LOVE HER!) demoed a new product Adobe is working on called Photoshop Touch. It’s a Photoshop mobile app that can do some pretty cool things.. I will blog about that more once I get my hands on a copy to play with!

After the demos I had a chance to meet and chat with a bunch of super nice Adobe employees  including Tom Hogarty. I was  like “Tom Hogarty.. Tom Hogarty.. have we met before? I know I know your name..Um yeah, because his name is on the LR splash screen Doh!

I wonder if he gets that all the time?  Of course I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to harass him for the features that I would like to see in LR4, and that I’m sure he DOES get all the time! :)

After lunch I headed back over to the show and took a seminar about Family Portraiture by Michelle Celentino. I just have to let it be known that if you ever have the chance to see her speak, DO IT! She’s hysterical, like stand-up comedienne funny and she actually gave me a lot to think about in terms of classic posing.

The next day (yesterday) I had lunch with David from H&H who is not only an one of my favorite “business contacts” but also one of my favorite people. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with him and I think I successfully convinced him that H&H should carry more of my wall guides groupings as clusters (yay!) and that we should partner on a cool new product next year..

Finally, I had some time to walk the show… which was..well,  kinda boring. It’s a very techy show, not at all like PPA or what I expect WPPI vegas will be.  But I did get to see Tamara Lackey speak, which was cool but it was a small audience so she fielded questions pretty much the whole time. You know how that can go when you get one or two people asking annoying questions the whole time?? Grrr.

After that I went to pick up my camera gear that I had dropped off at the CPS lounge – yep, they were doing free clean & checks for gold & platinum members (yet another perk with membership!) and waited with a group of Adobe invitees to head over to their poolside party at the Gansevoort hotel where there were delicious appetizers and drinks and so many REAL photography VIPS.

I got to meet some more incredibly nice Adobe employees and say hi to some others I’d met at before.. it was a very nice event, the kind that I just don’t get to go to much anymore, a fact that was brought home all to clearly by the text I received at 8pm from Jeff:

“Do you have Bear? I NEED BEAR!”

At which point I had to leave the lovely cocktails and conversation and rush home to get my little boy his bear before bedtime.

If that doesn’t perfectly capture the dual life of  a mommy/blogger/photographer/entrepreneur I don’t know what does!

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!

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 :)

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’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.

As soon as I saw it, I knew that one of the sample shapes I picked up at Imaging would make the PERFECT Valentine’s Day card -  the 5×5 scalloped shape and Miller’s Luxe and WHCC boutique cards now have them. I had big plans to design the cards but was worried that like many of my big plans I would never get around to it… but fate intervened in the form of an email blast from WHCC saying their boutique cards are on winter sale until Feb 7th (that’s today!) at midnight. (It’s amazing how a sale manages to motivate, no matter how much or little is actually being saved :)

So I sat down and designed something cute and retro that would work well for the cookie baking images and came up with this:

Here it is closer up:

back (yes, I did change the name before printing LOL!)

front

As you can see, I designed it so it can also be used as a 5×5 plain edge card from pretty much any lab (double check with yours though to ensure compatibility!)  I also tried to keep the color scheme gender neutral, so I think it works equally well for girls and boys and with color OR black and white:

The design template is available in my online store for $12 if you are interested.  Or, if you have time and inclination to create your own design you can download the blank templates from WHCC here.   Don’t forget that the winter sale ends tonight at midnight..I ordered one pack of 25 with the pearl finish and it came to about $25 instead of the $30 it would be regularly.  Not bad for $1 a card.  I plan on putting them in Jasper’s daycare classmate’s cubbies.  It’s perfect because he IS such a little Romeo.. he has crushes on all the older girls in his new preschool class! Growing up way too fast….

Speaking of which, stay tuned tomorrow for the incredible story of how we managed to prey on Jasper’s neurosis and got him to ditch his Paci with a simple gesture..(how’s THAT for a cliffhanger???)

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!

First of all, in case you missed yesterday’s post, Amazon still has LR3 at an insanely low price – a great time to take the plunge and treat yourself a bit early this Holiday season.

Secondly, for a MUCH better overview than I could possibly give about what’s new in LR3, you should probably refer to Julianne Kosts video here on Adobe TV.

What I wanted to share with you in this little video are just the features that I personally use every day that have made the most improvement in my workflow.  Later this week I will do a complete workflow video showing my process from LR into PS and what steps I do where, but this is just an overview of why I love LR3 and why I think it’s worth every penny of the upgrade price!

In the video I go over the print module capabilities VERY briefly and abstractly, for a much better idea of what makes the new “custom package” options so cool, please see the video demonstrating how the Wall Display Guides plugin works – that drag and drop functionality can be applied to ALL sorts of products such as album and card templates, storyboards – the possibilities are endless!

I also refer in the video to the blog post I wrote about the slideshow module and how I use it to do in person ordering.  I wanted to just link that here because I only touch on it briefly in the video but it’s one of the MAJOR improvements that facilitates in person ordering sessions. It also makes it super easy to create a video of the clients images set to music that you can sell as an add on or as in incentive to order!

Now, on to the part that you’ve been waiting for.. how to enter the giveaway!

Entries will be taken until midnight PST Sunday December 5th and the winner will chosen via radom.org and will be announced on Monday December 6th.

MANDATORY entry:

Post a comment saying which feature you are most excited about using in Lightroom 3 (or your favorite feature if you have LR3 and are entering for a friend!)

Additional Entries: Do any or all of the following to gain an additional entry and then come back and post 1 comment for each:

1) “like” the Becoming-mom Facebook page

2) “like” the Photographer’s Wall Display Guide’s Facebook Page

3) Follow Becoming-mom on Twitter

4) Tweet or post a FB status update about the giveaway (the quickest and easiest way to do that is to use the little icons just below this post – they will insert the link for you and everything!)

Good luck!

PS: If you are just coming here you might want to check out yesterday’s post with rounded corners preset & tutorial!