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Posts Tagged ‘Less’

4 Steps to Less Stressful and Easier Photo Editing

31 Jul

Have you ever returned to your computer with a memory card full of photos and become overwhelmed at the idea of going through all of them?

Tree starburst

The thought of sorting and analyzing so many pictures can seem so daunting it’s sometimes hard to even know where to start! Often we find ourselves copying the contents of our cameras to our computers and letting our precious memories collect digital dust, though we promise ourselves we will get around to organizing them – someday. Modern technology has made this task easier, with various software and cloud-based services even promising to find your best photos for you. And while these digital assistants certainly have merit, I like to take a different approach to dealing with all the images I capture.

The following tips will help you streamline your photography workflow and make the task of sifting through your images not only easier, but a lot more enjoyable too. While I work mostly in Adobe Lightroom, these general practices will apply no matter which photo editing software you use.

Step 1: Get rid of bad photos

This is the first thing I do when sorting through pictures, and it’s a tough hurdle to overcome because I have a tendency to want to save everything. But this step will make all the difference in managing your growing photo library, especially if you have never done it before.

Let’s say you went on a summer family trip to a national park, and you returned home with thousands of pictures to deal with. It might be tough, but as you look through them, try to think about what images will matter the most to you a year from now. You might have had a wonderful time at the Grand Canyon during your vacation, but will you really want 50 pictures of your child looking down at the great abyss? What about the ones where he is blinking, out of focus, or looking the other way? It is likely that two or three good pictures are all you need. In this first step, it’s up to you to find the ones that best encapsulate your experience as a whole, and ditch the rest.

Unicycling

I captured close to 100 photos on my brother’s recent visit, but this is one of just a handful I really need to remember the day, and all the things we did.

This approach might seem coldhearted and cruel, but it’s a necessary step in taming the photo-management beast. When you revisit the pictures from your summer trip a couple years from now, you won’t need a thousand of them to help you remember the experience. A tenth of that will probably be perfectly appropriate. If you hang on to every last one you might find that they become an albatross around your neck, weighing you down so much that you don’t even want to look back at your pictures because there are just so many of them.

To put things in another perspective, think about a time when one of your friends wanted to show you photos from his or her family trip. How long did it take you to grow tired of looking at the same types of images over and over? You could have easily gotten the point with just a few pictures, and then spent time visiting with your friends about the events surrounding the photos.

Moth

Of all the photos I took during this nature walk, this was one of only a few that I decided to keep. And in the years since, I haven’t missed the others at all.

One nice advantage of using a photo management program is that you can remove unwanted photos without actually deleting them from your hard drive. In Lightroom, pressing the “X” key on a photo will mark it as rejected, so it will no longer show up in your photo library but will still exist on your computer. This helps soften the initial blow, and then you can go back later and actually delete the rejected photos if you so desire. Alternatively, you can press the “P” key to flag a photo as one of your favorites, or assign star ratings to the images you like best. Then you can instantly sort out your best shots later down the line, and delete the rest when you are ready.

Step 2: Basic Editing

After culling your pictures to find the ones you like most, the next step is to perform basic edits and save the real heavy lifting for later. After removing the duds from my most recent camera import, I typically go through each of the remaining images and apply the simplest of edits such as crop, straighten, and exposure. Not much else is needed at this stage, as you are essentially preparing your photos for any real edits that might need to be done later. These basic adjustments are very quick, and you can churn through your recent batch of vacation, birthday, or hiking photos in a manner of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.

You can also copy and paste adjustments, so if you have a dozen similar photos you can edit one and then apply those adjustments to the rest with a simple keystroke. This is also a good time to do apply some rudimentary organization to your photos as well, using tools like keywords, flags, categories, or star ratings. Be careful not to get caught up in editing any single photo in depth at this stage. The goal of Step 2 is to dig a little deeper into the photos you like, which will help you decide where to concentrate your efforts if you do need to do more intensive edits afterwards.

Husky

I had to crop this photo in order to draw the viewer’s attention to the dog’s eyes.

Step 3: Advanced Editing

By this point you should now have a curated set of photos that you really like, with some mild corrections applied to help them look a little more pleasing. Now it’s time to perform the types of more detailed edits that will help your images truly shine. Advanced adjustments to a photo’s white balance, color saturation, contrast, and other parameters, while also applying localized improvements like dodging and burning can take a long time, but the results are well worth it.

It’s important to do this step last, or else you can easily wind up spending a great deal of time editing a single picture early in the process only to realize there are plenty of better ones that should have had your attention instead.

Family

This family photo turned out fine, but I had to do some color corrections and other enhancements to get it to look how I really wanted. By doing this step last I was able to devote more time to the editing process and not worry about processing hundreds of additional images.

Step 4: Walk Away

This might sound silly, but often the most useful activity you can do when editing your photos is nothing at all. Take a break, get a coffee, head out for a walk, or just go to bed and come back to your pictures the next day with a fresh set of eyes. I’m amazed at how often I stare at a photo performing detailed adjustments trying to get things just right, only to leave my computer and return after a short hiatus and realize the solution was much easier than I realized at first.

As a case study in how all this works, let me share the following example. My brother and I recently I spent an afternoon at the beach trying to get pictures of a rock hitting the water. When I got back to my computer I found that we had over 50 of images to go through, and following the aforementioned workflow strategies helped make things much easier. After importing the images into Lightroom I went through and rejected about 35 right off the bat. That left me with a much more manageable set, so I cropped and applied some basic adjustments to the remainder. This helped me realize that I needed to reject more of them, now that I was looking at the cream of the crop in greater detail, and I ended up with three photos to edit more extensively. When I was finished, I ended up with exactly one photo from the afternoon that I really liked.

Water splash

Not only is this the best photo out of the many I shot that day, but looking at it allows me to remember many other things about the afternoon as well. I don’t need a hundred poorly-composed, out-of-focus pictures to remember a fun afternoon at the beach. Instead I have this one and just a couple others that all serve to bring back some amazing memories.

Following this simple process, and adjusting it to suit your individual needs, can transform photo sorting from a tedious chore into an activity that is enjoyable, relaxing, and fun.

The post 4 Steps to Less Stressful and Easier Photo Editing by Simon Ringsmuth appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Amateur filmmaker builds ‘bullet time’ rig for less than $100

02 Jul

jerem.png

Ever wanted to add a little spice to your video creations, perhaps your next Matrix fan-fiction video, by adding a little slow-motion bullet-time effect? Jeremiah Warren did just that, employing a ceiling fan, a GoPro 3 video camera, and a handful of bits of wood, effectively eliminating thousands of dollars worth of individual cameras and rigging, not to mention computer-controlled timing equipment. Click through for more details and to see the results.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Design A Wedding Dress For Less Than $20 by Angy Chesler

25 Jun

I was looking for a way to make a dress that would hold up in a trash the dress session. This year I got help when I went to Photography workshop by Bambi Cantrell. She taught us how to make an amazing wedding dress out of window screen. All you need is about 30 yards of grey tulle. It has to be grey, white won’t match the screen and 20 yards of window screen and a box of paper clips. At targeted I also bought a slip for the model in skin color, to cover her body and make her more comfortable. I started out with the 30 yard tulle, which I wrapped around her waist twice. It’s important not to wrap it too much around the waist, since you can easily lose any waist line. Once it’s tight around the waist I cross the tulle over her shoulders and keep wrapping it until I create a nice shape.

Hawaii-Wedding

You can get really creative here, it doesn’t have to be symmetrical. I played with different versions, over one shoulder, over both shoulders and also left the shoulder free of tulle. The end of the tulle I tug under the first wrapper around the waist line. Once you are finished with the tulle the fun begins. It’s time to move the window screen. I bought silver metal window screen at Wal-Mart. I wrap it around the waist like a scarf that I would use as a dress. With the help of paper clips I secure it. You have to open the clips to be able to weave it through the screen. Once the first two rounds of screen are wrapped it’s time to form the metal screen. You can just bend it in any directions you want to and secure it with paper clips. Keep going and adding to the design until you use all the screen.

Searching for a background that would reflect the design in shape and color I decided that the beach after sunset would be the best place. !0 minutes after sunset the light was perfect. I put my Canon 5 D Mk 2 on a tripod. I used a slow shutter speed of a 1/6 at ISO 100 and F 2.8 with a 16-35 mm lens. My model stood super still without any movement, so I could blur the waves with the slow shutter speed. I used an off camera Flash with 1 f-stop over from the right to give the model some light and shape.

I studied photography in Europe. Since 2001 I have been working in Hawaii. My work includes U/W photography and videography, Architecture and Weddings
http://www.vip-wedding-hawaii.com

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7 February, 2013 – The Road Less Traveled

07 Feb

Join regular contributor Miles Hecker in reading his February travel essay called A Wise Old Owl – The Road Less Traveled.

         

"Yes I downloaded the videos. THEY ARE AWESOME!!! I learned so much I think my brain is going to explode.

 

Now I need to get the LR4 video to see how much of Lightroom 4 I don’t know". 


The Luminous Landscape – What’s New

 
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12 October, 2012 – The Needles District – The Road Less Travelled

16 Oct

Miles Hecker’s Geotagged travel article for this month is titled The Road Less Traveled – The Needles Distrct. Been there, hope to go back.

Observant Home Page viewers will note that the new front page image was taken with the as-yet unreleased Panasonic Lumix GH3. I have been shooting with a press review sample and will continue for the next ten days or so. This is a pre-production camera, so it has it foibles. But so far I am extreemly impressed with the build, handling, and especially image quality, both stills and video. This may be the best hybrid camera yet.

 

  

 "Every time I go back to a module I had already seen, I learn additional things.  I have never seen tutorials that have the excellent mix of what the features are, 
how to use them, enough of the under-the-hood information 
and concepts so that I can utilize the features creatively and efficiently, 
and just enough humor to keep the motivation
 level high.  Wow!"

 


The Luminous Landscape – What’s New

 
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Microsoft Publisher 2010 – Save AutoRecover Information More or Less Often

28 Sep

If you’re worried about program crashes and power outages, you may want Publisher 2010 to save AutoRecover information more often to reduce the chances of losing work.

By default, Microsoft Publisher 2010 saves AutoRecover information for open publications every 10 minutes. So, if a program / operating system crash or power failure shuts down Publisher before you forget to save your open files, upon restart of the software you may be able to recover some of your editing.

10 minutes may be too long an interval; a theoretical crash 9 minutes and 59 seconds after the latest save or AutoRecover save can cause you to lose a great deal of work. Reducing this interval may cause less work to be lost due to catastrophic failure. On the other hand, you might find it quite annoying that Publisher pauses so often to save the information and decide to increase this interval….

Read more at MalekTips.
New Computer and Technology Help and Tips – MalekTips.Com

 
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