Photoshop

Lightroom 4 DVD complete!!!!!

 

 
The marathon is over!! I have been working 15 hour days since the release of Lightroom 4 to complete my training DVD and I am now finished!
 
The new “Photographer’s Toolbox for Lightroom” is now complete with over seven hours of video training on all aspects of the program including the new features found in the Develop, Map and Book modules. Learn how to set up your preferences, create a Develop Preset, Import, Export, keyword, search, map, build a book, create a slideshow, build a custom print layout, and create a custom web gallery and much more!
 
I am having an introductory sale from now through March 31st. Get 20% off with the coupon code LR4INTRO (Case sensitive) on my website. Click here to order.
 
Enjoy,
 


 

Creating a watermark with an Action


I had a request from someone to create a video on how I make my transparent watermarks, so I created the video and also show how to make the process an Action so you can just hit a button and make it happen!
 
Here is the video. I recommend you click on the words YouTube in the lower right to view this on YouTube



and when on YouTube click on the middle icon to make it larger





and when on YouTube also click on the Change Quality setting go to 720p.











 
 
 
 
 
I hope you enjoy the video and remember to go to: http://www.lewiskemper.com/content/training and check out all my training options!
 
Happy Holidays,



 

Random Challenge 12/15/11

 

I have put a new twist on my Random Challenges! I have made them a video tutorial so you can watch and learn from how I process my images.
 
In today’s challenge I take this image of a Tibetan dancer
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And turn it into this image
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Enjoy the tutorial and let me know what you think of the new format.


When watching the video click on the YouTube icon in lower right and on YouTube click the Large Player option  (the middle of the 3 screen sizes in bottom right)

 

 

 Take care,

 

 

 

Random Challenge #2

 

 

 

 

 

 

              
 
 
(click on image to see larger view)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Before                                                                           After
 
 
I guess some Random Challenges are going to be easier than others. This one turned out to be fairly easy. I spun through my Lightroom library and ended up in Tibet 2010! Interesting enough it was a group of images that I hadn’t done much with before. So I picked this image of a man plowing a field with his horse. It was pleasant enough but I wanted to add a bit more impact. So the first step taken was to crop the image and remove the distracting rock wall behind the horse. Then I enabled the lens profile, which corrected for a bit of distortion (not sure why that didn’t happen automatically since it is in my Develop Preset). The next step was to use a little Luminance Noise reduction since it was shot at 1000 ISO. The next step was to go into the HSL panel and add a little saturation to the Yellows and Greens and some luminance to the Yellows. This helped a lot with the color. My last step was to use the adjustment brush to lighten up the horse a bit and to darken the foreground dirt and add a bit of a vignette to the image. And that’s all there was to that image!
 
Have a great Thanksgiving,
 
 


 

Working on Panoramas!

 

I have been working on several panoramas, getting ready for a show in January. It has been fun picking images and reworking some of the older ones. I have settled on 9 images ranging from 20” x 109” to 20” x 41”
 
I’ll be ready to start printing tomorrow!
 
Here is an older one that I have improved upon. Click on the image to see a larger version and when you get to the web page click on the picture and you will see an even larger image. Come to the show in January and you can see it almost 6 feet long!
 
 
The image is made of 10 verticals taken with a 24-105mm L lens at 105mm on a Canon 1Ds Mark 2 camera.
 
Don’t forget I’m teaching “Getting the Most Out of your Digital SLR Camera” this weekend at Viewpoint Gallery in Sacramento. For more info click here.
 
And I still have a few spaces to photograph the bears at Lake Clark National Park in Alaska. For more info click here.
 
My Lightroom and Photoshop classes Nov 9th at Betterphoto.com for more info click here.
 
 
Take care,
 
 


 

23 foot long pano!

 

 
 
 
 
This is the biggest pano I have ever attempted! It is made of 31 vertical images taken with my Canon 1D Mark 4 (16MP) camera with a 100-400mm L lens at 250mm. The camera was set to manual at f/8 and .3 sec at ISO 100. I leveled the camera with my Feisol 3372 tripod with the leveling base and then leveled my Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head with a bubble level mounted on the camera.
 
I did not do a great job of overlapping the images so Photoshop refused to stitch them together in Photomerge, therefore I need to put them together manually! I used a combination of layer masks and auto-blending to merge the images once I aligned them. The whole process took about 10 hours! The completed file is almost 1.63GB in size and will print at 24 x 281.816 inches, that is 2 feet x 23 feet long! I do have a show coming up in January and I may include this image but the longest wall at the gallery will only allow me to print it to 16.5 feet long! Now I have to decide if it’s worth it!

 

Enjoy,

Stars over the Sierra Panoramic

I have taken several star images in my life but I never have created a panorama of star images before. The light for this sunrise over the Sierra mountains was perfect for such an attempt! The exposures were fairly short, 10 seconds at f/4 at 2500 ISO so getting consistent exposures was easy. The worst part was it was 26 degrees outside and I was cold! In fact too cold to think straight and I did not do a good job of leveling my Canon 1D Mark 4 camera with the 17mm TS lens. This caused a real problem when I tried to stitch these images together in Photomerge within Photoshop. The program just couldn’t do it! The perspective was way off and everything was distorted. But I really wanted this pano so I had to resort to the old fashioned way and put it all together manually with layers, layer masks and adjustment layers to get the parts to blend because for some reason Auto-Blend would not work when I created the layers. It was a bit labor intensive, but I am glad I took the time! Notice the constellation Orion just left of center! I was so amazed how much detail the camera was able to pick up on the mountains, because my eyes could not see that at the time. It was worth every finger-numbing minute!

 

Enjoy,

 

New Kid on the Block

What an exciting time to be a photographer! There is another entry into the Black and White conversion software mix with the introduction of Topaz B&W Effects.  (for coupon codes on Topaz and Nik software click here). I know there are already some really good conversion packages available particularly Silver Effects Pro from Nik, but I think the new entry from Topaz is well worth the look! BTW it won't be released until Aug 30 or so.

 
Here are some of the unique features in the Topaz software:
 
True Grain Filter & Grain Creation - Choose from your favorite films or create your own grain.
 
Adaptive Exposure -  The power of Topaz Adjust is infused with B&W Effects to help create dynamic detail and exposure.
 
Quad Tone - Allows for 4 different tones to be selected and applied to different tonal regions within an image.
 
Creative Effects -  Includes popular Topaz effects to creatively enhance images.
 
Finishing Touches - Includes effects to give your image the perfect final touch.
 
I played with it for about 1½ hours yesterday and here are some of the images I came up with. All the effects were done within the program, including tinting, vignettes, diffusion and more.
 
Click on any image to go to a page of larger examples.
 
Enjoy,
 


 

 

Click on an image to see page of bigger images and more examples

    

Original                                                                    Converted and diffused to give "Lens Baby" look

 

     

Original                                                                     Converted, tinted and diffused

 

 

                   

Original                                                                     Fairly straight conversion

 

     

Original                                                                      Converted, vignette and allowed some of original color to show

Customizing Bridge

 Even though I am an avid Lightroom user there are still some tasks I preform in Bridge. But the default workspace Adobe assigns Bridge is very busy, cumbersome and does not work well with my workflow. Fortunately you can customize the Bridge workspace to something that suits your needs!

 
  - Adobe default of Essentials workspace
 
In fact I have several different workspaces that I use depending on my editing tasks. My basic space is one I call LK1, where I place the Content tab on the right side of the screen with 4 thumbnails per row and have my Preview tab in the middle, my Favorites and Folders tabs in the upper right and all my other tabs (Filter, Metadata, Keywords, Collections, etc) in the lower left. This way when I look in a folder of images I can see 20 images at time and quickly look at a group of images or scroll through a folder. When I select on of the thumbnails I get a very big preview of the image in the center and I can quickly judge the quality of the image. 
 
  -LK1 workspace
 
Another workspace I have created is the one I call Quick Edit. It is similar to the one above but the preview space is even larger and I only see one thumbnail on the right hand side. I use this when I want to go through a folder of new images to quickly rate and review them. Since there is only one thumbnail, I can quickly just type the down arrow key and go through the whole folder seeing a very large preview. If I like an image I can pause and add a star rating to that image. With this method I can quickly go through any folder with very little effort.
 
  - Quick Edit
 
Once you create a workspace to your liking don’t forget to save it! Go to the disclosure triangle (see screen shot) in the upper right next to the Workspace listings in the menu bar and select New Workspace and give your workspace a name that will mean something to you. It’s that easy to make Bridge much more useful for your customized workflow! 
 
- Saving your workspace

 

HDR Panoramics

 

Last month I took a family vacation to the United Kingdom, we visited England and Scotland. It was a lot of fun and we saw lots of good things but for most of the trip we were on a tour (a Harry Potter fan trip!), which meant I could not do the serious photography I would have liked. But I did manage to get a few good images. We stayed at a nice hotel in a beautiful location on Loch Leven. Fortunately we were here for 3 nights so I got up early each morning and took images while the rest of the group was still in bed.
 
 
 
 
For this trip I borrowed a 5D from Canon because I didn’t want to carry my big 1Ds camera around on the tour. The good thing was it was lighter, the bad thing was I restricted with the number of shots I could automatically bracket and all the buttons were in the wrong place! So instead of my normal one stop sequence of bracketing for my HDR images, I had to bracket in two stops and was limited to 3 images. 
 
Here is an HDR panorama I did taking 9 vertical images using my 24-105 L lens and stitching them together. I shot 3 frames of each of the nine segments, making 27 images to create the image. I used PhotomatixPro HDR software, which I accessed with the Lightroom plug-in, thus allowing me all the great raw processing controls of Lightroom and the HDR capabilities of PhotomatixPro. I processed each HDR segment first and then did the pano stitching in Photoshop to merge the final image. Instead of cropping the image after the stitching I used Content Aware Fill to fill in the gaps that occurred from me not being totally level.
 
Those three mornings made me glad I lugged my Feisol 3372 tripod across the Atlantic!

 

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