Photography: What’s real, what’s not and does it matter?

I got some flack on Facebook about a past post on my blog . I received a comment from a reader or two stating they felt that what they saw in the produced images was not real. Meaning, after running through my workflow in Lightroom the images no longer represented reality. I have gotten this kind of feedback many times in the past. I think people are rather shocked at seeing a photo “undressed”. It’s a bit like seeing a high-fashion model on the streets without any makeup, it can be scary.

3-part Secret to Perfect Family Portraits

Whether you’re going for just a quick holiday card picture or an extraordinary 4x6 foot wall portrait, you can’t afford to spend huge amounts of time in postproduction. That’s where everybody loses their profit.

Restoring Portraits from “Cookies”

These portraits, she recounted, were exchanged between bride and groom sometime near the turn of the 20th century. I’ve never seen this framing shown in any photo history book. But I do know that because tintypes were made with very thin plates, they were creatively cut to fit the covers of albums, or inset into lockets, broches or fans. The “cookie” part looks like plastic, but is actually a precursor to plastic called Bakelite, (pronounced Bay Ka Lite) a material just invented about the time these portraits were made.

Combined Photo Mechanic & Lightroom Workflow Video

I’ve posted a detailed video about what makes Photo Mechanic a must have program for many journalists and sports photographers before. But many people also like the easy adjustment tools of Adobe Lightroom. This video walks you through how to setup a workflow that incorporates the best of both of these programs.

Adobe Launches Lightroom 4 Public Beta

Adobe has opened up a free public beta for Lightroom 4.  Once downloaded, users will be able to use LR4 for free until March 31st.  For users of Lightroom 3 it looks to be a fairly gentle upgrade so far, though Adobe have been known to keep back some killer features until launch time.  The biggest feature, that I guess we were all expecting, is the ability to make simple adjustments to videos.  Exposure, tone, contrast and white balance can all be adjusted and the files can be trimmed.

Eliminating Fear of Retouch Outsourcing

Creating a firm relationship with a retouch outsource removes the fear of placing your image files in unknown hands. Strangers no longer! Art professions are traditionally perceived as hands-on, hand made, raw materials to finished art work. Digital photo and video just changed the tools and expanded the options - otherwise art is still art.

Will A 2011 Macbook Air Work For The Traveling Photographer ?

Apple released newer, faster versions of the 11” and 13” Macbook Air in he summer of 2011 and I was curious to see whether the spec bump put them in a position where they could be used as an on-the-road solution for a photographer.

The Economic Advantage of Outsourcing Photo Retouch Services

Photographers both make money and save money by paying someone else to do a significant part of their image retouching and enhancement needs. Second in a series of conversations with Neale Narang of ReadyRetouch.com.

Video Tutorial: Photo Mechanic - Ingesting, Variables and Code Replacement

Photo Mechanic is a program designed to speed up the process of ingesting photos from memory cards, captioning them with IPTC data then rating and sorting them.  A longtime Lightroom user myself, I was curious why so many sports photographer swear by this software and why some wire services insist on it’s use.  After using it on my first sporting event I’ve been impressed with a number of features and the best way to describe them is with this tutorial video that walks through a sample card ingest and shows you some of the tricks that PM has up it’s sleeve.

Lightroom Tutorial: Managing Catalogs On The Road

I’m going to start a series of Adobe Lightroom tips and tutorials because it has become such an integral part of my workflow these days.  The first one I want to tackle is a common scenario for those of us who travel to shoot photos somewhere. 

Approaches to Light Painting

In simple terms, “light painting” involves taking long-exposure photos in nominally dark environments, where you artfully set up or move a light source to either reveal an otherwise-hidden object, or draw in space using pure photons. Assuming you yourself are either generating or reflecting relatively little light, and/or are moving during the exposure, you become invisible to the film or camera’s sensor, leaving just the light behind.

I recently went on a light painting shoot along with other members of the New Mexico Outdoor Photography Meetup group, dragging along a Canon 5D mkII, a Pixel RW-221 wireless remote control (so I could trigger the camera from larger distances, and without line-of-sight), and a Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 carbon fiber tripod (the lighter weight was appreciated while bumbling around in pitch dark in a open space full of prickly pear cactus). Although I started out with the requisite flashlight and blink toys as light sources, I quickly went off-script and started using an iPad as a light source, plus spent a bit of time in Photoshop and Camera Raw afterward. Here’s what I tried, and what I learned.

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic Aberration is the culprit behind colored fringing - often cyan or red, and vertical in direction - appearing on high-contrast edges. Technically, it results from the failure of a lens to converge all colors from the same source at the same destination point. It is most likely to occur with lower-quality lenses and shorter focal lengths.

As I tend to use higher quality lenses and longer focal lengths, I bravely assumed I could pretty much ignore it. Until it slapped me in the face. Here’s how to identify it, and correct it in Adobe Photoshop.

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