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How to Use Lightroom Star Ratings to Improve Your Editing Workflow

12 Mar

The post How to Use Lightroom Star Ratings to Improve Your Editing Workflow appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

Editing photos is time-consuming! The rule of thumb that it takes an hour of editing for every hour of shooting is not an exaggeration. You may find that sorting and grading your photos right after a shoot is one of the most tedious parts of your entire workflow – I know I do. Whether you are coming in from a long weekend of shooting wildlife or a busy day shooting a wedding, it is no small task to determine which photos to keep, edit, and store for later from a batch of a 1000 or more. Adobe Lightroom has several tools allowing you to sort, grade, and attribute your work to help you efficiently edit and store a photo. I will walk you through how I use the star-rating system to sort images for my editing workflow and long term archival storage.

My basic workflow is to import my images, use stars to curate the collection, edit the collection based on their ratings, keyword the collection, and then archive it.

Hot key stars

If you are thinking of stars as those little icons you click under an image to set the rating, let me change your world! Each star rating of 1-5 you can assign directly from your keypad! These “hot keys” are what makes the star rating system so convenient.

Your first assignment:

Open up Lightroom and select an image in your catalog. Now hit the “1” key on your keyboard. Lightroom tells you the image has now been assigned a rating of 1. With values ranging from 1-5, you can assign each value to an image for different things. Below, I’ll provide examples of how you may use these different values.

As a side note, Lightroom has hotkeys for everything. Learning them speeds up your workflow significantly; no matter which set of tools you are using to develop or print.

Lightroom has a star rating system which can be accessed under the thumbnail of each image in Grid View (G hotkey) in your Lightrom Library. Each image can be assigned a star rating of 1-5 by simply pressing the corresponding number on your keyboard. Using hotkeys will help improve your speed and make editing large photo shoots easier and faster!

Sorting files for deletion and advancing images to editing

Whether you are shooting wildlife, weddings, sports, or portraits the most important question you have after your import is: what photos do I keep? When shooting wildlife, you may have dozens of the same subject in slightly different settings or poses. At a wedding, you have many of the dance, but only a select few are going to make the cut to show your client, friends, or family.

You can use the star rating system to assign images for deletion. Why I prefer this over the “rejection” flag system is you can simultaneously start choosing what files to edit and which to delete using the range of values from 1-5 rather than the binary “yes” and “no” of the flag system.

There’s a lot going on during a wedding. When the day is all said and done you need to import the photos and then choose which you’ll keep, which you’ll develop, and which you’ll delete. Lightroom Stars can help you there.

Using Lightroom Stars to sort your work is easy and efficient.

Here’s a hypothetical situation: you import your photos and determine that a value of “0” (i.e., no rating) as photos to delete. You then decide that images assigned “1” are saved, but are a low priority for editing – perhaps these are b-roll images for applying general presets. You determine images set to “2” are developed immediately and images set to “4” are your best images. This multiple tier system ensures you only have to go through the images once and ideally not more than twice. That’s a huge time saver when dealing with large quantities of images!

I would recommend you avoid using “5” in your workflow. Reserve this for only your very highest quality images (more on that in the “Archiving content/ creating smart collections” section below.)

Once you’ve assigned ratings to all of the images, you can filter the image using the “attributes” filter while in grid view. Filter for all images = 0 stars to delete the images you no longer want and filter all images = 2 to start developing your shots.

Once you’ve chosen which photos to keep (rating 4) you can filter for them using the attributes filter in the Lightroom Library. Simply click “Attribute” and then set the rating to the image set you’d like to view.

Separating image content for keywording

If you are a wildlife photographer, and in particular if you are a bird photographer, it is very typical to change subjects (species) throughout the day. This may occur as much as every other shot. Once you’ve imported those images, it can be daunting to go about keywording your work so you can find them later. The star rating system can help you sort through them quickly!

Assign each star to a species and use your hotkeys to assign the star rating to that species. Once you’ve finished coding the species with stars, filter them using the attributes filter in Grid View and complete your keywording. You can then remove the star rating by highlighting the images and pressing the “0” key. There are many photography scenarios where you can apply this!

The diversity of birds creates a diversity of shots. It is critical to keyword your collection if you ever hope to find the images again. I used the star ratings assigned to different species to help sort them and keyword them.

Once a star rating has been set for a species filter for it to see all images with that rating. In this case, Marbled Godwit were given a temporary rating of 4, keyworded, and then the stars were reset for the image.

Archiving Content / Creating Smart Collections

Undoubtedly, you will create images you are proud of and want to save for future reference, printing, or portfolio work. As I eluded to above, these images should be assigned a value of 5 in your collection. Only a small percentage of your shots should achieve a rating of 5.

You can compile a portfolio of your best shots by establishing a smart collection in Lightroom. The smart collection automatically compiles all images in your catalog with a given attribute.

To create a smart collection right click on “Smart Collections” in Lightroom. Select create a new smart collection and then add the criteria for your collection. You can create a collection set from any attribute you can assign in Lightroom (e.g., stars, flags, keywords, etc.). As you go through the years, your 5-star collection set will continue to grow and document your progress and story.

You can create a smart collection to house your best work for printing or display by giving only your best images a rating of 5.

To create a smart collection you need to right click on Smart Collections and select create a new smart collection. Assign the attribute to the collection that you’d like it to contain. Simple as that!

That is it! I hope you see the value in using Lightroom’s star rating system in your workflow.

I’ll end by saying these steps are what work for me, but what works for you? Leave your thoughts on workflows in the comments below so we can learn together.

As I always say, “pixels are cheap!”. Be sure to make lots of them and then sort through them using Lightroom Stars.

The post How to Use Lightroom Star Ratings to Improve Your Editing Workflow appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

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Open source image editing program digiKam now has video support, new export tools and more

22 Feb

digiKam is an open-source photo management application that runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS platforms and comes with tools for importing, managing, editing, and sharing photos and raw files.

Now version 6.0.0 of digiKam has been released after a 2-year development phase and comes with a heap of new features and improvements.

The biggest news is that the software can now also handle video files, offering many of the importing, sharing and editing functions that are also available for still image. Videos can also be played back without the need for an external player.

In addition import/export web-service tools are now available across all modules in digiKam – LightTable, Image editor and Showfoto. The same is true for other tools, such as metadata and geolocation editors, allowing for a more seamless user experience.

There are also new tools to export your images directly to Pinterest as well as the Microsoft OneDrive and Box cloud storage services, and the Raw engine has been updated to process images from a long list of new cameras and smartphone.

In addition to the new features the digiKam team says it has been able to clean the applications code in order to simplify application compilation, packaging and maintenance for the future.

For a full list of new features and supported cameras, download links and more detail about the work that has gone into the update, head over to the digiKam website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Enhance Your Images with Creative Photo Editing

17 Feb

The post Enhance Your Images with Creative Photo Editing appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Stacey Hill.

Much effort goes into creating an image; you have to buy the camera gear, learn how to use it, and then get out there and take interesting photos. However, once they are taken and downloaded on our computers, many images never see daylight. Perhaps we take too many shots and can’t choose the best ones? Maybe our editing skills are not where we would like them, and we are frustrated? It could be that we find editing boring?

While there is a school of thought that minimal or no editing is a preferred choice, the other end of the scale is all about luminosity masks, HDR and Photoshop layers by the dozen. In between, there is a middle ground where many of us fall.

Here, we’d like to edit our images better but don’t necessarily understand the capabilities within the software we have. We may be uncertain how much editing is too much (or conversely, not enough). Perhaps we don’t know what all the tools and sliders do and get confused and frustrated as a result.

One of the most powerful things that had a positive impact on my editing was choosing to play and experiment freely – to go in completely different directions. Many of the outcomes were unexpected and gave me results that I really liked.

Note for this article I work with Lightroom and Photoshop.

Beyond the basics

Let us assume you’ve completed the following steps with your image editing:

– you’ve uploaded your image to your computer
– its loaded into your software program of choice
– you’ve completed basic edits – exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, etc
– you have applied any cropping, lens corrections, and other adjustments

So what is left? You have a nice shot, that is well composed. The exposure etc is all right. However, it may still feel lacking in some way? Perhaps you feel you could do more to the image if only you knew how?

Let’s look at what else makes up your image and how you can work further with that to achieve a stronger picture.

Colour

Most likely your image is in color, and color has a significant impact on people’s brains. A lot of the way we process and relate to color is instinctive and emotional. Our culture, society and personal experiences also contribute to how we relate to color. Color psychology is a fascinating area to research.

As an example, in the Western world, white is the color of purity and innocence. However, in Eastern cultures, it is the color of mourning.

All colors have different emotional contexts associated with them, and people react differently as a result. So the people viewing your images, (especially online around the world), may relate differently to the color in your work. How often do you consciously think about the color in your image from this point of view?

Contrast

Contrast can be several different things within your image. It can relate most directly to the tonal range, i.e. the contrast between the light and the dark areas. However, it can also relate the different colors and how they interact together. How your subject matter relates to the rest of the image can be part of the contrast too. Does your subject stand out in a particular way?

Can you somehow use these different contrast ideas to process your image in an alternative way?

For example, using a spot of color in a black and white scene can provide a point of interest and color contrast and change the way the viewer sees the image.

Tonal Range

While the tonal range of the scene is part of the image as you shoot it, with some careful editing you can change it. How can this be impactful? Visualize very high-key fashion or wedding photography images where its all white and bright, and the tonal range can be quite restrained. Professional images may be purposefully lit and shot that way, but we can still achieve a similar look via editing on the right image too. This can completely change the mood of your image as well.

Texture

Adding textures to images has become relatively popular, especially in still life and flower photography. Its also being used with portraits and landscapes. Imagine if you had a beautiful subject with a great pose and an awful background? What if you could remove the background and make it awesome instead?

Alternatively, add some extra depth and interest, elevating your image above the average approach?

Cropping

Sometimes a hard crop is called for to bring out the best in an image. Alternatively, an abstract approach could make a big difference.

Some before and after examples

Color

For me, color is the most versatile and flexible option to work with. By changing the color, you can instantly change the whole mood and feel of your image.

BEFORE – This image had basic edits done and a black and white process – this was originally shot to be a black and white image. Nice depth of field, a bit of tweaking on the vignette to bring focus to the center, but it feels cold and unwelcoming.

AFTER – the addition of a sepia tone makes the skin tones more inviting and adds warmth to the image. Sepia invokes a feeling of nostalgia. Perhaps a reminder of careless childhood days where adventures were had?

Contrast

There are two types of contrast used in this image. There is much contrast between the bright background and the heavy dark marble of the headstone. Also, the pale stone behind the words offers tonal contrast as well.

This image was originally shot to be a black and white image, and as such, it looks quite good. However, when I read the words on the headstone, I saw that a whole family was buried here over 200 years ago. Still, there was a bunch of flowers carefully poked into the corner of the headstone base. Who left the flowers and why?

BEFORE – unedited RAW

AFTER – I wanted to bring attention to the flowers, so I brought the color back into the final black and white image. The flowers were only a small part of the overall image, yet enough to catch the eye. My intention here was to ensure the flowers were part of the overall story.

Tonal range

Radically altering the tonal range is one of the tools that offer the most excitement in my editing process. Being brave and going way up or down the histogram has resulted in some very creative and exciting results.

BEFORE – this is shot with my Lensbaby Velvet 56 which gives much softness when it is wide open. This shows the unedited RAW file.

AFTER – This histogram has been pushed way to the right. Doing this overexposed the image. It removed most of the blacks and shadows, giving it more of a high-key tonality. The mood of this image now comes across as light, airy, floral, delicate and fragile. The original image was heavy and spiky and didn’t feel like a flower at all.

Texture

BEFORE – I spent ages taking shots while this gorgeous steam train puffed up. The dark coal smoke against the white clouds of steam was very atmospheric. The background is pretty awful and doesn’t do it any justice at all. So time to get creative!

AFTER – this one went through a range of edits. First, I played a bit with color. I did a straight black and white treatment. Secondly, I added a sepia tone with an old vintage newspaper frame to add more of that vintage feel to the image. This is a side by side image for comparison.

AFTER continued – the background was annoying me, so I very carefully extracted the train and all the smoke from the background and then had some fun playing. This one had a Scribble Action along with a replacement background added.

AFTER continued – still wasn’t happy, so I put a new replacement background on the image. However, it was quite heavily textured and didn’t fit, so I ran a Topaz Impression over the whole lot to apply a painterly effect. I also added a subtle framing texture. Doing so, finally provided the outcome I wanted.

Cropping

Sometimes a hard crop is what an image needs to bring the focus in or to tell the story that you want. People often seem afraid of a hard crop. I let the image tell me its story and work from there. If it is only ever going to be a digital format, i.e. not printed, then a hard crop has little long term effect.

BEFORE – original unedited RAW file. The flowers are pretty, and the focus is good, but the background ones are distracting.

AFTER a hard crop and a soft edit. Now the focus is on the delicate veins in the petals, the water droplets and even the pollen grains on the anthers.

Conclusion

There are many things you can do in post-processing that can further enhance your images. Any good RAW conversion program has reasonable editing capability included. What you choose to do with it is really up to you.

Maybe one day you take a handful of images, forget the rules and play and see what you get?

I find presets are a great source of creative inspiration – where someone else has made up a recipe of settings. However, it can be a random lottery to what the outcome is. Still, you can quickly click and get a very different result, cancel it and move on to the next one. It might surprise you what you end up with.

What about the deliberate considerations you make when editing? Do you shoot with a specific outcome (like black and white) in mind? Do you edit and then wonder what other possibilities there are and then dabble a bit until you find something you like? Alternatively, maybe you have a definite outcome in mind and work hard to get there?

It is allowed and encouraged for you to color outside the lines! Be brave! Experiment! No one ever needs to see it, but you might be surprised at what you can achieve, what you might learn and how much fun you can have.

Share your images with us in the comments below.

The post Enhance Your Images with Creative Photo Editing appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Stacey Hill.

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Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

09 Feb

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

A new photography project called ‘Selfie Harm‘ from British photographer Rankin tasked 15 teenagers with editing portraits of themselves until they believed the images were ‘social media ready,’ highlighting their internal ideas of ‘perfection.’ The image editing and filtering was performed with a readily available photo app, one of thousands of similar products offered through popular app stores.

‘Today, more so than ever, people are mimicking their idols, making their eyes bigger, their nose smaller and their skin brighter,’Rankin explained, ‘and all for social media likes.’

Rankin points toward the media and advertising industries’ heavy use of image editing tools, something Rankin has both been involved with as part of his job and has criticized with projects like ‘Flawless Girls’ and ‘Ageless Beauty.’

Though these industries have shifted their editing practices in light of public discussions and backlash, the average person has more access than ever to tools for transforming their own digital appearance. The technology is, among other things, ‘encouraging a disturbing culture of homogeneity,’ the photographer notes.

Speaking about these apps, Rankin said:

They are free, accessible, easy to use, game-like and (I think) much more dangerous. When doing research for this project, I played with these apps a lot to understand the appeal. They’re addictive, very impressive and you can have a lot of fun warping, changing and reimagining your appearance. But it’s when people are making an alternative or ‘better’ social media identity that this becomes a mental health problem.

Rankin has called for public discussion over the growing trend of using the apps to alter one’s appearance for social media:

Instead of simply telling people to stop, we need to accept that this is a complex issue; the technology is here and it’s here to stay. But we need to challenge the way image manipulation is being used and abused in the wider world. Selfie Harm is my attempt to get people to talk about the issues threatening mental health today.

Photographs by Rankin used with permission. You can find more of Rankin’s work on the social media platforms below:

Twitter: @rankinphoto
Facebook: @RankinPhotographyLtd
Instagram: @rankinarchive
Vero: @rankin

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Photography project ‘Selfie Harm’ tasked teens with editing their portraits for social media

Photographs by Rankin used with permission.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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8 Lightroom Controls for Aurora Editing

02 Feb

The post 8 Lightroom Controls for Aurora Editing appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

One of the most amazing phenomena of the night sky is the Aurora Borealis (or, “the Northern Lights”). For as long as humans have existed the dancing, brilliant curtains of light have dazzled the viewers below. For some, the opportunity to see the Aurora is a bucket list item, and the opportunity to view and photograph the Northern Lights draws thousands of people to polar regions every year.

Aurora, Editing, Lightroom, Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights

In the images above, I minimally edited the Aurora and was sure not to over-enhance it. Understanding how the Lightroom slider controls impact your Aurora shots can help you achieve natural and beautiful edits of the Aurora Borealis.

Advancement of digital cameras and photo editing software has created an incredible opportunity to edit your shots after a night out under the stars and Lights. The advent of post-processing technology has, in my opinion, resulted in many Aurora photographs which are over-processed to bring out rich saturation and contrast that did not exist in the original scene. Because many of the middle tones (colors) of the Aurora are so pure and contrast so highly with the sky, it is easy to eject the equivalence of pixel-steroids into your image giving them a false look.

It is my goal when editing Aurora shots to enhance but not over-enhance. Understanding how each of the basic Lightroom editing tools impacts an Aurora image can help you tell the story of your night out by making your image look like they did when you saw them.

Lightroom basic sliders

To illustrate how the Lightroom basic sliders (contrast, clarity, dehaze, tint, saturation, vibrance, shadows, highlights) affect an Aurora image it is easiest to look at how extreme values for each setting impact the image. For each slider type, I will walk you through how the slider impacts any image (i.e., the definition of the slider). I will apply it at extremes to the same Aurora image to show a before (no edits) and after (extreme applied) comparison.

1. Contrast

Contrast is a very useful slider and a fundamental one for editing. By definition, the contrast tool darkens the darkest mid-tones in the image and lightens the lightest mid-tones. In an Aurora image, many of your mid-tones are going to be in the Aurora itself. So, you can see as you slide the contrast to 100% that the colors in the Aurora darken giving the image a more saturated look.

Extending the contrast to +100 increased the saturation in the Aurora and the foreground shadows became much deeper. Boosting contrast and adding saturation or vibrancy can have a compounding effect and lead to an image that appears over-processed.

2. Clarity

The clarity slide adds contrast in the mid-tones without adding much noise. The tool is often used to bring out texture and details. Again, Aurora colors fall into the mid-tones of your image, so a clarity boost impacts them strongly. Boosting clarity to +100 creates definition in the banding of this Aurora shot because there are vertical dark lines of the sky in the Aurora. You may like the clarity slider for Aurora shots because it doesn’t add as much contrast as the contrast slider does and can make stars in the image pop and seem crisper.

Adding +100 clarity increases the banding in the Aurora and you can see the stars stand out more. It did not add any saturation or other artifacts to the image.

3. Dehazing

Similar to clarity, the Dehaze slider increases midrange contrast and shadows giving the images a slightly dark and more saturated look. However, the Dehaze slider was built to remove fog from a scene. When you apply its technology to an Aurora shot, it adds a lot of contrast and saturation to the image. This is a slider to use gently (if at all) for Aurora image editing.

In comparison to Clarity, the Dehaze slider adds a lot of contrast and saturation to the Aurora image if it is boosted to +100. The Dehaze slider can be useful but use it sparingly (if at all) for editing your Aurora images.

4. Saturation

The saturation slider globally (for the whole image) deepens, intensifies, and brightens the color. In an Aurora image, you will find it is very, very easy to overdo the Saturation of an image. So, use Saturation sparingly. When slid to +100, it turns the Aurora to an almost neon appearance. At -100, it strips all color from the image. There are times when bringing the saturation out of your Aurora image by -5 or -10 can help improve the appearance of the image and make it easier for the eye to comprehend.

Bringing all of the saturation out of an image renders it to black and white

Over-saturating your Aurora image gives it a fake, neon look

5. Vibrance

Vibrance is the “less aggressive” form of saturation. It’s a smart tool that increases saturation and tones in more muted colors. In Aurora shots, the Vibrancy slider focuses on the Aurora and provides a more realistic enhancement of the colors. You can see in the examples below there is still danger in over-using it. A vibrancy value of +100 creates neon colors similar to overusing saturation. However, at -100 you can see there is a distinct difference from -100 Saturation. The -100 Vibrance does not remove all color from the Aurora. You may find it a powerful technique to decrease your saturation slightly before increasing vibrance.

You may find Vibrance to be the most useful for natural Aurora image editing. However, boosting it too much will still result in a highly over-processed image

In contrast to Saturation, you can remove all of the vibrancy and still have some color left in the image

6. Shadows

The Shadow slider increases luminosity in the darkest parts of the image. With a picture of the Aurora, you have a distinct advantage in that the Lightroom program interprets almost any part of the image that is not Aurora to be a shadow. So, you have the power to lift or darken your foreground very easily. You can see in the +100 shadow example below, details were brought out of the shadows in the silhouettes of the trees.

There is a very clear definition in an Aurora image between the highlights and the shadows. Increasing the Shadows will raise the luminosity of any part of the image not covered in Aurora

7. Highlights

The Highlights slider increases luminosity of the brightest parts of the image. As I describe above, Lightroom interprets any part of the image with the Aurora to be a highlight. That means an increase in the highlights to +100 effectively increases the exposure of the Aurora. If you over-expose an Aurora image in the field, decreasing the highlights can help you reclaim lost detail.

There is a very clear delineation between shadows and highlights in an Aurora image. Increasing the highlights to +100 only impacts the brightness of the Aurora. In this image, it gives the Aurora an overexposed feeling

8. Tint

The Tint slider is a meant to be used for color correction in correspondence with the temperature slider. You can use the tint slider to neutralize the snow which tends to turn green during intense Aurora outbursts. Use a Graduated Filter, coupled with increased pink tints and decreased saturation, to return your snow closer to white. Often, this helps your eye focus on the Aurora and can restore balance to the shot.

Using tint to do color control on an Aurora image is a bit more advanced, but you will find that you can control the color of the snow by combining the Tint and Saturation slider controls

Putting it all together for a final edit

Now that you know how each slider impacts your overall image, its time to combine each in moderation to achieve a final edit. In the edit below I wanted to make sure the banding in the Aurora was enhanced along with the purples of the “sun-kissed” Aurora. My final edit brings out features of the image without over-enhancing it.

Using the controls described in this article, I edited the Aurora image to give it a natural look and enhance the features I liked most about it such as the purple colors and banding

I want you to experiment with editing aurora images. Please feel free to download and edit this high resolution image of the Northern Lights. If you can, share your edit so I can see! Like I always say, “Pixels are cheap” so I hope you make lots of pixels making Aurora images and have fun editing them!

The post 8 Lightroom Controls for Aurora Editing appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ian Johnson.

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Photo Editing: When Does it Get to be too Much?

24 Jan

The post Photo Editing: When Does it Get to be too Much? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Peter West Carey.

Editing photographs in itself is an art. It is what has made so many great photographers legendary. The ability to take the limits of a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world, exact it onto a type of film or digital sensor, then, and only then, to craft the image into one’s liking.

Indeed, it is an art, which raises the question – where is the line drawn for too much editing?

Like art and how to define it, that answer is not straightforward. We each have our interpretation, but let’s take a look at some parameters. There are three questions you may want to ask yourself the next time you dive in to edit your images.

What is my intent?

In the days of film, you had to have intent. Even if your intention was “to mess around and learn some things,” you realized there was a direct cost to that learning. That cost was film, paper, chemical solutions and time — moreover, money.

Now, experimenting is so dang easy, any kid with an iPhone can do it. I think that’s a good thing. Experimenting is a vital part of artistic expression and is especially true with photo editing.

Having intent is important when coupled with experimenting if you hope to learn, grow and progress.

Intent lets you know when your experimentation goes too far, and your edits are too much. The intent is a wonderful guide, with plenty of latitude if you bestow it.

My suggestion here is to have intent with your editing experimentation. Know what you hope to gain from experimenting and have a general direction.

Have I stayed true to my vision?

Vision is where your intent takes you. Having artistic vision helps place boundaries on your work that is often needed, lest everything turns to chaos.

Maybe a portrait photographer’s vision is to portray each subject in a subdued manner with soft lighting and harsh details. They want to show that side of each subject, and that leads to their intent, over and over again. It is repeatable.

This is one edit the author now admits was too much editing, even if it was fun at the time.

Alternatively, perhaps you’re a landscape photographer who envisions your work being a truthful depiction of what you experienced, not some fanciful ‘perfect world.’ You put effort into recreating the scene when back at your computer and employ tools to your end vision.

Without having a vision of what you want to produce, it’s easy to be swayed by the siren song of really cool editing tools that pull you toward the rocks of editing ruin.

Is this sustainable?

I don’t mean to say all art, all forms of editing you choose, need to last forever. We all go through phases. This struck me most profoundly on a trip to Barcelona recently and a review of Goya’s work through the decades he painted.

Firstly, there were Goya’s early career phases where he exacted reproduction in a French and Italian style. These were the most important. Beautiful portraits!

Then, later, he had a more simplistic style. Filled with easy colors and a looser interpretation of the world around him with all its players.

In one of the last room were exhibits of Goya’s “Black period.” Charcoal and dark tones, and dire scenes of hardship. Nothing like what he had been producing before.

Most of us move through periods. That does not instantly disqualify any one of them as art (in an editing sense), but it does give us a good mirror.

We are our own harshest critic, and we alone can look back at work we did one, five, or twenty years ago and deem it art or not. If we see a style, a thread that runs through all our works, it’s easy to say we have crafted art. However, if we find through the benefit of time and distance, that something we thought was the bee’s knees is now, to our more experienced eyes, rubbish, we can cast it aside.

The HDR craze as an example

Some years ago, as digital photography was catching on with the masses, came the HDR craze. It was a time when anyone could use a particular technique to achieve what is known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) images.

For some, it was a fun departure from their normal routine. Others saw it as a chance to show everything in a scene; maybe not the same as their eyes saw, but better than the alternative.

Some of us had our stomachs turn every time we saw one of those photos.

It was new, and it was novel. Moreover, it didn’t fit into many photographers’ visions. Today, it’s hard to find any examples of those early attempts still being reproduced. It wasn’t sustainable.

Although, it was fun for a while. Particularly for those who enjoyed the departure from reality.

I would profess that it was a case of too much editing and that it met its likely demise because of it.

Conclusion

While deciding what dictates too much editing is subjective to the viewer and their experience, I hope the questions I posed above help guide you in future endeavors.

I’m not here to judge your work or to say you might be wrong. That voice, and what your art means to you, needs to come from inside you.

Develop your vision. Stay true to it. Focus your intent toward it. Then you will scarcely have to worry if you’ve gone too far in your editing work.

The post Photo Editing: When Does it Get to be too Much? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Peter West Carey.

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Loupedeck adds Photoshop CC 2019 support to its latest editing console

15 Dec

Loupedeck has announced its Loupedeck+ editing console now supports Photoshop CC 2019. The new support is the result of feedback from Loupedeck customers, according to the company, and joins the Adobe Premiere Pro CC compatibility released in September. With this new support, Photoshop CC 2019 users can edit their images using the software and Loupedeck+ console.

The updated Loupedeck+ editing console was launched in June, adding support for Capture One and Aurora HDR in addition to hardware improvements. With this latest compatibility update, Loupedeck+ can be used with multiple Adobe Creative Suite products, including Lightroom Classic CC, Premiere Pro CC, and Photoshop CC 2019.

The new Photoshop support provides editors with direct access to the photo software’s tools and functions, as well as layer control, configurable buttons for custom actions, smart filter access, and more. Loupedeck+’s hardware controls include buttons, dials, and wheels.

Loupedeck+ is available now for $ 249 USD.

Loupedeck+ Announces First Integration with Adobe Photoshop

The photo & video editing console continues to evolve based on community feedback, now even more adaptable to photographers’ needs

HELSINKI, Finland – December 14, 2018 – Loupedeck, the custom photo & video editing console built with an intuitive design that makes editing faster and more creative, has announced its first integration with Adobe Photoshop CC 2019. This compatibility further expands the product’s utility for editing in several Adobe Creative Suite applications, including: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

After this year’s launch of the Loupedeck+, the decision to integrate with Photoshop is exclusively based on feedback from Loupedeck’s invested community, many of whom utilize the imaging and graphic design software in their editing workflow. The Loupedeck+ will permit more intuitive and faster editing, providing more accuracy on controlling Photoshop’s functions.

New Adobe Photoshop editing functionalities of the Loupedeck+ include:

Total flexibility with Photoshop CC, allowing image editors to configure Loupedeck+ to match their personal workflow
Intuitive features that make editing faster: swap between current and previous tools, reset blending or to fit image on screen by just a press of a button
Ability to focus on the image instead of navigating: minimize mouse pointing, list scrolling and target practicing with tiny icons
More direct access to tools, functions, layers and other Photoshop options to save time
Excellent layer control by moving, grouping, merging, adjusting opacity, fill, visibility or masking
Ability to run smart filter with Loupedeck+’s configurable buttons
Custom mode that gives even more possibilities for mapping different Photoshop functions on Loupedeck+
Ability to create your own actions and run them with Loupedeck+’s configurable buttons

“In our ongoing mission to make the editing processes of both professional and amateur photographers more intuitive and efficient, we continually work to integrate Loupedeck+ with the editing suites they utilize and cherish most in their workflows,” said Mikko Kesti, Founder and CEO of Loupedeck.

“Members of our dedicated user community emphasized their eagerness to use the console to edit with Photoshop and we listened. Following Loupedeck’s original integration with Adobe Lightroom and recent foray into video editing by way of Adobe Premiere Pro, this next stage of our partnership will continue to support photographers worldwide.”

In addition to its Adobe integrations, Loupedeck+ is compatible with Skylum Aurora HDR while future integrations with Skylum’s other products, including Skylum Luminar, are expected as well.

The device is available for purchase in the Loupedeck Online Store, B&H Photo and Amazon.com for $ 249. For more information visit www.loupedeck.com.

About Loupedeck

Loupedeck, the company behind the Loupedeck+, is the only editing console custom-built to improve the Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, and Skylum Aurora HDR experience, with an intuitive design that makes editing faster and more creative. It allows both professional and amateur photographers to improve the ergonomics of editing, comfortably increasing output. Loupedeck’s hands-on and highly intuitive console minimizes the use the mouse and keyboard, and it works seamlessly with Apple and PC operating systems.

Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Loupedeck was founded in 2016 with a highly successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that exceeded its original target by 488 percent. For more information, visit www.loupedeck.com.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Palette update brings its physical editing interface to Capture One on MacOS

14 Dec

Palette, a modular collection of buttons, dials and sliders designed to give photo editing a more tactile experience, has received an update making it compatible with Capture One 11 and 12 on MacOS computers.

The new support, which comes in the form of a software update to the proprietary PaletteApp, gives ‘access to hundreds of Capture One function items.’ Like their Adobe counterparts, Capture One users can now use the modular sliders, dials and buttons to adjust nearly every detail of an image with a more tactile approach.

On its FAQ page, Palette Gear addresses the lack of Windows support saying, ‘Simply put, the macOS release of Capture One offers developer tools that the Windows release does not. Our aim is full Capture One support on both platforms; we don’t play favourites. After careful consideration, we made the decision to offer Capture One support for macOS users while continuing to advocate for Windows support.’

Palette Gear also points out that while Palette does has ‘limited support’ on Capture One 9.3 and 10, it recommends using Capture One 11 or 12 for the best possible experience. Below is a list of Capture One functions Palette includes ‘comprehensive support’ for as well as the hundreds of other functions:

• Tonal adjustments: exposure, white balance, levels, high dynamic range, and more
• Detail adjustments: clarity, sharpening & noise reduction, grain, and more
• Tagging and rating: Assign a specific tag or rating with a single button press; Increment ratings and cycle through color tags
• Universal control: Use a single Palette dial to adjust any C1 slider, simply by hovering over it
• Slider module support: Palette sliders can now be assigned to C1 functions; Set custom range for each slider
• Multi-function dial support: Press and turn for coarse control, press to reset

In addition to a software update to bring Capture One compatibility to older Palette kits, Palette Gear has also created a new Capture One Kit that includes one core with a color screen, four buttons, four dials, and two sliders. Like other kits, it’s entirely plug-and-play via Micro USB. It’s currently priced at $ 349.99 and will eventually get bumped hip to $ 409.96, according to Palette Gear’s product page.

For more information on the update, head over to Palette Gear’s dedicated Capture One product page.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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10 Key Tools for Editing Portraits Using Adobe Lightroom Mobile

29 Nov

Photo: Jye B

As humans, we relate to and love to capture photos of other people. Be it family, friends, strangers in street photography or professionally in a portrait studio.

Model/Actor: Patrick Walsh, Jr.

However, we don’t always have time to sit in front of a computer at home or in an office to edit our work. With the fantastic creation of Adobe Creative Cloud, you can now sync your Lightroom library to all your devices. You can create and edit images directly on your mobile phone or edit images created in any fashion, including in a studio. You can edit them in Lightroom Mobile on the go via laptop, tablet or smartphone.

While editing portraits, Lightroom Mobile, like its desktop counterpart, has many tools available to help take a snapshot of a great portrait. While it is helpful to explore every tool in the toolbox, here are ten key tools for editing portraits using Adobe Lightroom Mobile.

1. The Exposure Tool

Whether it’s midday outdoors and your image is a little overexposed or its a bit overcast and your image is a little underexposed, the exposure tool in the Lightroom Mobile app is a quick fix to brighten or darken a photo to your liking arbitrarily. In the image below, the mirror image of my subject was a little bit dark, so I bumped up the exposure just a little. Doing so lightened some of the shadows in the subjects sunglasses so that you could see his eyes better. It also helped to show more detail in the black coat.

In this case, bumping up the exposure helped bring out details.

2. The Contrast Tool

Adding contrast to an image creates more emphasis between light and dark colors in an image. However, sometimes contrast needs to be subtracted because too much can make similar tones can blend and lose definition. In the image below, I lowered the contrast to enhance the detail in my subject’s coat. Adding exposure in the first step brightened the subject as well as the mirror image. Although, it brightened the subject a little too much. I also dropped the highlights to put less focus on the brightest parts of the subject’s face.

Taking away contrast can show more detail. Taking away highlights can lessen the glare.

3. The Shadows Tool

You can utilize the ‘Shadows’ tool when sculpting to a face or body is required, or you can remove them to show more detail. In the image below, while I did bump up the exposure a little bit, I also took away shadow to show more of my subject’s eyes through the sunglasses. You can now see the irises and catchlights in the eyes. It has also lightened some of the lines on the face too.

Removing shadow can sometimes reveal more detail.

4. The Healing Tool

One of the most amazing Lightroom Mobile tools recently introduced is the ‘Healing’ tool. This tool allows you to correct things on portraits such as blemishes. In the image below, I tried to preserve the model’s natural moles and birthmarks while only removing unwanted blemishes using the Healing brush.

Before and after images using the Healing Brush in Lightroom Mobile.

5. The White Balance Tool

Sometimes you may capture an image where the white balance is a bit off. It could be too warm or too cold. The ‘Temperature’ slider under the ‘Color’ tab for ‘White Balance’ allows you to cool or warm an image. The below-left image was too cold, and the skin appeared gray. So, I boosted the warmth using the Color Temperature slider from 4400K to 4768K, giving a more natural color to the skin.

You can cool or warm an image using the ‘Temperature’ slider for ‘White Balance’ under the ‘Color’ tab.

6. The Clarity Tool

The ‘Clarity’ tool has a very magical effect when it comes to editing portraits – especially of women. If you have a portrait with harsh shine on the skin or the pores are extremely visible, softening the ‘Clarity’ helps to blur out some of those imperfections subtly. It can make skin appear smoother, as in the image below.

Softening Clarity can subtly blur out some imperfections and make skin appear smoother.

7. The Sharpening Tool

In portraiture, a sharp image is key. An essential portrait element to be sharp is the eyes, or at least the eye closest to the camera. Sometimes you may need to sharpen your image in Lightroom Mobile to achieve this.

Sometimes sharpening is necessary to get key features, like the eyes, crisper.

8. The Noise Reduction Tool

After sharpening, zoom in to check for unwanted noise in your image. If there is unwanted noise, Lightroom Mobile has an entire ‘Noise Reduction’ section under the ‘Effects’ tab that you can use to minimize noise in your portraits. The Noise Reduction tool is also helpful in smoothing out any highlighted rough skin.

The Noise Reduction tab helps get rid of noise and smooth out the rough skin under highlights.

9. The Presets Tool

The ‘Presets’ tab is a fun tab. There are several sub-menus under Presets with a variety of readymade one-click settings you can quickly apply to your portraits. As examples, I chose two from the ‘Creative’ sub-menu under Presets to apply to the original image below-left.

Left to right: Original image, Soft Mist, Aged Photo.

10. The Crop Tool

The last tool you may find you need while editing on-the-go is the ‘Crop’ tool. Sometimes we have too much in an image, whether by accident or on purpose, knowing we can edit it later. Lightroom Mobile allows you to select the area of an image you wish to keep. Using your fingers, you can drag the borders to where you want them placed, as per the image below.

Using Lightroom Mobile, drag borders with your fingers and click the checkmark to finished when cropping images.

Tying It All Together

Lightroom Mobile grants photographers many tools to edit on-the-go. You can take a regular capture and make it an extraordinary image. Take a few images, use the various tools of Lightroom Mobile, and learn how they can be adjusted more toward your vision. You’ll find the convenience of Lightroom Mobile second-to-none, with results being similar to those of a desktop computer.

Have you used Adobe Lightroom Mobile? What are your experiences with it? Let us know in the comments below.

The post 10 Key Tools for Editing Portraits Using Adobe Lightroom Mobile appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Top Tips for Editing Music Photography

21 Nov

So in my last article, we looked at how you can get to shoot live music. Hopefully, some of you will have used that article as the motivation to actually get out there and shoot. Great! If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

This time, I want to write based on a comment I received about how to edit music photography, with some top tips to get your music editing to rock god standard. There is no right or wrong way to edit photos. You have your style of editing, and I have mine, so when looking at this if you think ‘I prefer more contrast’ then simply add more contrast.

I use Capture One Pro editing software. I know a huge percentage of you use Lightroom, but in reality, things are very similar. The buttons are in different places, but they do the same thing. What I want to do with this article is give you some pointers, rather than an exact step-by-step guide. Like all good recipes, you need to adjust for your oven and how spicy you like your food. With that said, let’s get cooking.

Speed

The thrill of a gig fades, for the fans, for the bands and for the publications that put the images out there. While speed is not super important when editing for small bands, I would always advise you to get your editing done as soon as possible. That way if you are delivering images to the band, they will still be hyped about the show and seeing your amazing photos will make them even more excited.

When I am editing for a publication, the idea is to get the images out as soon as possible. Therefore my editing technique is designed with speed as a factor. For portfolio images, or ones you love, by all means, go into Photoshop and remove things, touch up the skin, etc., But in general, this is not required.

This tight deadline means you have to sometimes decide against removing the distracting lights or fire exit sign. It is much quicker to do now that Capture One, Lightroom, et al. have these features built-in. However, be warned, you can still easily get caught up in this process.

Many of you may be starting out, so you can spend time finessing the details a little more. There are many great tutorials on DPS about Photoshop and more advanced editing techniques, so make sure you read up on them if this is something you want to do.

Editing Starts in Camera When Shooting

I can’t stress this enough. The tendency to overshoot is strong! In a digital age, we can shoot and delete so quickly that we get carried away. The thrill of being at an event shooting live music can add to this, as you want to get THE shot. However, try to restrain yourself a bit. Every image you shoot is something you have to go back to and edit, so bear this in mind. That said, I have been guilty and when a singer is bursting around the stage, shooting at the camera’s max FPS is something that can help you get that great shot.

Metadata (AKA the Boring Habit That is Good to Get Into Early)

Metadata is the information that is attached to your file. It includes camera settings etc., but when you shoot for organizations or stock agencies, you need to include metadata within your images. It is best to get into this habit early.

Make your contact information into a preset, so it can be added easily on import to save time. The first data you need to add is the content field, which contains the following sections:

Headline

Description

Culling Images

You now need to narrow it down to a reasonable set of images to edit. I recommend around 10 to 15 max. You have to be ruthless in this selection process! When choosing shots, you may need to focus on minute details (and sometimes even perceived differences) to narrow it down. The key here is to be ruthless. Just like a holiday slideshow from your relatives – no matter how fantastic you think they are, nobody wants to see all 128 shots of a band that are in focus and well exposed. You want a small set of images that capture the intensity of being there. That way, they have much more impact. You will wow people rather than have them thinking ‘isn’t this shot just the same as the last one?’

This is what a typical image out-of-camera will look like. The color is out, there are some exposure issues, but this is a great starting point.

White Balance / Color Correction

White Balance and Color correction are the hardest part. You find so many variations of color at a concert that getting a realistic skin tone may be impossible. In this case, you can either embrace the colors or go to black and white. It comes down to your eye, and you may have to compromise.

As the screenshots show below, in mixed light, this can be quite extreme because your cameras’ white balance can miss by quite a way. Regarding camera setting, I leave the white balance on auto. Lighting changes so much in a concert situation, that even guessing what mode to set it to is not practical. Leave it in auto. Let the camera do its best, and then (and I hate to use this term) fix it in post.

This is where you choose if you want it in black and white. Sometimes you have a great shot, but the color is beyond fixing (red light is killer, and for some reason, lighting guys love red!). So the only option is black and white. Now as I said in my last article when doing this for media outlets, black and white is generally a no-go, but for personal work (and even portfolio) there is nothing wrong with black and white. I love the look.

The other option is to go with the color and let it be part of the atmosphere of the photo. I have a shot of Ian Brown from the Stone Roses (whom I idolized as a youngster) looking through his tambourine and straight down the lens. The lighting meant that I would never be able to get natural skin tones, so I embraced the color and edited it with that in mind.

Alex Luciano of the New York band Diet Cig

Colour balance makes this image much better, but there is still work to do.

Exposure

Once you have your color set, you can begin to work on exposure. Similar to any other editing you do, but the main difference is how much you use the ‘recover highlights’ and ‘shadows sliders.’ Concert lighting is usually high contrast, especially if you have the background lights in the shot. Using the recovery sliders can help here. Background lights are generally the only time I do a bit of retouching. If I have a fantastic photo with a distracting background light, I quickly remove it. This is the beauty of only having ten images to edit rather than 75. You can spend a little more time with each image, even when you are on a tight turnaround. Another tip here is to lower the saturation to help take the edge of hard colors. You can also work with individual colors too, which helps.

For the image we are working with here, I reduced exposure by just under 1-stop and recovered the highlights. I also added a little clarity & contrast to the image for more punch.

Levels/Curves

For my final tweaks, I use ‘curves.’ You can also use ‘levels,’ but this is down your preference. Whichever you use, it is a case of working with each color channel to create a more balanced final color. Tweak the contrast until you are happy.

With the image we are using here, I tweaked the ‘mid-tones’ a little. I adjusted each of the red and green channels, making subtle changes (subtlety is key here) to get a better balance of color in the image.

Crop

If needed, you can crop the image. I’m not going to bore you with how to, but it is just something to keep in mind. Remember, a little crop can remove things like fire exit signs a lot quicker than Photoshopping them out.

Final Tweak

I always like to add a small vignette to my images. Usually very subtle, but I just like the way it draws attention to the subject. I think sometimes it is more a force of habit rather than necessary. Again, this is up to you.

Last Check

Walk away from your monitor for a couple of minutes. Grab a drink, or go to the bathroom. The key is to get away from the screen for a couple of minutes. You can easily push things like contrast too far without realizing. So take 2-minutes away then come back and check if you are happy.

The final image that went to the publication.

Copy, Paste, Tweak, Repeat.

When editing more images from the same show, the starting point is always copying and pasting the settings form the image you already edited. Generally, this gives you a great starting point. However, the lighting for the first song and the third song are not always the same, so you may have to start from scratch. As with anything, the more you do, the easier it becomes.

Black and White

The color version of this show just wasn’t working for me, but I loved the energy, so decided to go black and white.

Finally, let’s go through black and white. I always follow the same process as for color photos as above. It helps me to know if a photo works best in black and white or color. With this image, I couldn’t get the color right. To me, it lacked something, but I loved the energy. So, I decided to try black and white instead.

When converting to black and white, I always start with a preset because I find ‘Capture One’ has some great ones. The preset is used to get the image close to what I want and then I tweak to my taste. Using black and white is a savior for when the light is mostly red. Red can make for some amazing black and white photos. However, when you know you have to deliver in color, it’s great that the sound of the music drowns out your swearing at the lighting technicians!

Black & White made this image pop, and a quick crop removed the distracting photographer to create this final image.

I hope you found this article helpful. Unfortunately, there is no preset or magic bullet to offer, as all lighting situations are different. However, I hope you found this article helpful for editing music photography images of your own.

As always, pop any comments below and I will do my best to answer.

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