Layers for Lightroom

April 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

Lightroom has become a very mature product offering easy and powerful workflow for photographers. I now do much of image processing in Lightroom pushing the image to Photoshop for features that are not available in Lightroom. One of the tools that I often miss in Lightroom is the ability to use layers, blending modes, and masking. Although Lightroom offers some local adjustment tools, like gradient fill and local brush tool, they are no substitutes for layers-based adjustments.

Perfect Layers from onOne SoftwareApparently others missed the same capability that onOne software collaborated with Scott Kelby to develop a tool called Perfect Layers. It is not available yet, but you can download a public preview from onOne software Web site and give that a try, it works with Lightroom or Aperture. I downloaded and experimented with the software. It works as intended, and for many users it may mean less need for Photoshop and money saved from that. As a Photoshop user, I did not see much benefit in Perfect Layers as [Read more...]

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From “Scene” to “Seen”

September 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Digital photography has many more user controllable variables compared to the film. A good understanding of the variables and how to make the critical choices will reward the photographer. I used this slide presentation for a presentation I made at the Photographic Society of Rhode Island on September 21, 2010. It will make more sense to the people who were there to listen to the expanded talking points.

When viewing the presentation, advance by clicking inside the slide. You can maximize the presentation by clicking on the maximize icon, far right on the navigation bar.

Digital Workflow

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Sharpening Workshop

January 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

I ran a workshop on January 3, 2010 for the members of PSRI. The main purpose was to explore the sharpening strategies and methods in Photoshop and Lightroom. In the 4-hour long workshop, the first part was some general background information on what sharpening is and why we need it, followed by an overview of the process. Then, using Photoshop and Lightroom, I presented the application of the ideas presented earlier. Following that, the participants practiced on their own images. Below is the slide show of the Powerpoint presentation I used. It does not cover the actual hands-on part, but should give a general idea about the sharpening.

See the presentation slides

Printable PDF handout

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Better B&W Conversion in Lightroom

July 30, 2008 By 2 Comments

I have been using Adobe Lightroom since it became available as public beta for Windows. It is a great front-end for Photoshop and much of the work can be done in Lightroom. I like that, the interface is more intuitive and controls more visible. One of the steps I started doing in Lightroom when it appeared on my desktop was B&W conversion, but I soon discovered that its built in tool for this purpose was not to my liking. So, I tried to mimic what I had been doing in Photoshop: Use a Hue & Saturation adjustment layer to desaturate and a Selective Color adjustment layer under that to control the values in each of the channels. Of course, this method has some other details that I am skipping here as it is not about doing this in Photoshop. You can find more about this elsewhere in this blog. [Read more...]

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