Tips

Compositional Overlays

2008-06-09T06:47:17-04:00

In a previous post I wrote about the Rule of Thirds as a way to compose your images. When you crop your photos in Lightroom you are conveniently provided with an overlay for the Rule of Thirds.

But Lightroom offers a few more overlays for other compositional guidelines. I don't believe it's a documented feature (or at least not very well documented!). When you are in the crop tool press the O key (that's the letter O) and the overlay will change! Here are the other overlays:

A Diamond overly:

A Basic Grid:

There are three overlays based on the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is one of those naturally occurring numbers like pi. It is basically the ratio between numbers in a Fibonacci series where each successive number is the sum of the preceding two numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.). That can be used in the following three overlays available in Lightroom:

The Golden Mean version of the Rule of Thirds:

The Golden Triangle:

The Golden Spiral:

Another slick feature with the last two overlays is the ability to change their starting point. By pressing SHIFT-O when one of them is on the screen the layout will change. If the first Golden Triangle doesn't look right press SHIFT-O and see if the new one is right.

The Golden Spiral offers eight variations. Here are three:

Next time you are looking for other ways to compose your images try these overlays out. You may go down some creative roads you haven't travelled yet and discover a whole new world of composition!

Selecting Images Not in a Collection

2008-01-06T22:32:47-05:00

One of Lightroom's great features is the ability to put images into collections. An image can appear in several collections so you can build groups of images that make sense to you. If you click on a collection name you can see and select all the images in that collection and create a web gallery or prints.

But what do you do if you have a large number of images and you need to find out which ones are not in a collection? Here is a step-by-step way to select all your non-collected images.

While in the Library module, open your Collections panel on the left.

Now click on the first collections in the list to highlight it.

While holding down the shift key click on the last collection in the list. You should now have all your collections selected and all the images in them appear in the grid.

To select all these images either press Control-A (Command-A on the Mac) or go up to the Edit menu and click Select All.

What's that you say? You're right! Now you have all your collected images selected. Here's how we get to our goal of select all images not in a collection.

Go to the Library panel and click on All Photographs.

Now the grid shows all your images with the collected ones selected. To finish off got to the edit menu and click Invert selection.

Viola! Now the grid shows a selection of all your images that are not in any collection!

301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers

2007-11-22T22:32:46-05:00

Do You PUX?

2007-09-27T16:21:03-04:00

Wait! Wait! I'm not being rude! Really! PUXing is another way to rate your images after a shoot.

Whether you come back with 300 images from a landscape shoot or 3,000 from a wedding you still have the inevitable task ahead of you of going through the images and deciding what stays and what goes. There are many ways to approach this. Some people will rate images with stars; 5 stars are OUTSTANDING and 0 stars go to the cyber trashbin. Others use the color coding method; RED for great shots, BLUE for the trash. Still others will do a combination of stars and colors.

I don't know about you, but for me, with very few exceptions, I have three categories of images:

Keepers
Losers
Hmmm...I don't know yet

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom provides an excellent system for me in the form of the Pick and Reject flags. Here's what I do when I'm ready to start my review process.

After I've imported the images into Lightroom I go down to the filter bar in Library grid view and filter for unflagged images. Then I close all of the panels with SHIFT+TAB which leaves me with a screen full of thumbnails. I tend to make my thumbnail previews fairly large so I can see some detail. You can even do this in loupe view.

Now I'm ready. Looking at the first image I either hit the P key or the X key. P is for Pick and X is for Reject. (We'll get to U in a minute). Once I do that the image disappears from my view! It's not gone it's just that the image is no longer unflagged so the filter removes it from the view.

If I'm undecided then I move on to the next image and leave the previous one alone. As I progress through my shoot the only thumbnails I can see are the unrated ones. When all the images are gone I know I've made a decision on all of them.

I can now change the filter to show me Rejected files only. I take a quick run through of these and if I've changed my mind I hit the U key to unflag the image and remove it from the rejects. It's a simple matter at this point to create a directory and drag the rejects to it for holding. I like to keep the rejects around but sequestered until I'm sure I really don't want any of them.

Turn off the filter and now your picks and unflagged are there. Now is the time to bestow the honor of 5 stars on those marvelous few images.

This has been a real time saver for me. No longer do I hover over an image stuck in the unanswerable quandry "is this a 3 star or a 4 star? 4...no wait it's not tack sharp so 3...but the composition is stunning so 4...and so on and so on...." So if you haven't PUXed yourimages give it a try. You'll like it!

Sharpening Your Images

2007-09-01T12:59:16-04:00

Perhaps the biggest complaint I hear when photographers first venture from the comfortable world of JPEG shooting into the unknown territory of RAW is "my pictures just aren't as sharp as when I shot in JPEG! I thought RAW was suppossed to be better?" Better is a moving target. What is better depends greatly upon the circumstances surrounding your shoot. But, if you really want to capture the maximum information your camera can give you and YOU want to make the processing decisions about that information then RAW is the ONLY way to shoot.

The first of such decisions centers around sharpening your images. Yes, RAW images do look "fuzzier" than their JPEG cousins. That's because when you shoot JPEG your camera is making those sharpening decisions for you before it serves up the already baked image. With RAW you now get to decide what gets sharpened and how it gets sharpened.

There are three main sharpening stages:

Input or Capture Sharpening
Creative Sharpening
Output Sharpening

In the simplest of terms sharpening looks to find those areas where light and dark edges meet and enhance that contrast without generating edge artifacts (such as halos). Capture sharpening will adjust the image as it comes in from the camera to a point where you think the image should be. Capture sharpening should be applied as a first stage before you do anything else to your image. Once you have the sharpness you desire on input you can make better decisions about where to go from there.

Both Lightroom and Camera Raw offers excellent capture sharpening functionality. Make sure you've upgraded to the latest versions - Lightroom 1.1 and Camera raw 4.1 . If your workflow starts in Photoshop you can also achieve excellent capture sharpening. There are many third party plugin applications out there to make your Photoshop sharpening tasks easier but by far the best is Photokit Sharpener from the folks over at Pixel Genius . This plugin covers all three sharpening stages excellently.

Capture sharpening is arguably the easiest of the three stages but a necessary step in the creative process if you are cosidering output of any significant size. We'll talk more in future articles about creative and output sharpening.

For you Lightroom users, I've included a zip file of four capture sharpening presets that mimic the capture sharpening from Photokit Sharpener. Just unzip the file and place in your Lightroom presets directory.