Video: Upgrading Lightroom 3 Presets to Lightroom 4

I’ve heard a lot of talk about what happens to presets that were created in Lightroom 3 (or LR2) and now used in Lightroom 4. I know a lot of people have presets that they absolutely loved in Lightroom 3 and they simply don’t seem to look the same in Lightroom 4. That’s because of the differences in sliders in the Basic panel. Sliders that were in Lightroom 3 simply don’t exist in Lightroom 4. So Lightroom does it’s best to “guess” what the should look like but you’ll see it’s not always right on the money. So today’s video goes over a few options you have if you had a preset in Lightroom 3 that you want to use in Lightroom 4. As always, leave your thoughts below. I’d be interested to hear if you’re having any “they don’t look the same” issues with your older presets and if you find yourself converting them over to Lightroom 4, or just tweaking the preset each time you apply it. Thanks!

News: Lightroom 4 Is On the Mac Store

Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, announced that Lightroom is now available on the Apple Mac Store (for North America only). I think overall it’s a good move for Lightroom. For new Lightroom users out there who are on the Mac store and may never have otherwise heard of Lightroom, this is just another way to get it into their hands. However, there area few, caveats, shall we say

1) It’s for Mac only (duh!). This probably doesn’t seem bad if you only own Macs. However, I can tell you from being on the road teaching Lightroom over the last few weeks, there’s LOTS of people out there that have both a Windows and Mac machine. The boxed version and download version of Lightroom can be installed on both Mac and PC.

2) Updates will take place through the Mac store. From personal experience of being the managing editor of a digital magazine (Light It magazine) that’s delivered through the Mac App Store, that (sometimes) approvals can be a pain in the neck. So, when Adobe feels an update is ready they’ll release it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be immediately available on the App store though, as it may take a few days.

3) There’s no upgrade pricing. So basically, if you have LR1, 2 or 3, you can can’t get the upgrade price to 4 (only $79) on the App store. Instead, you’ll pay $149. And there’s no guarantee that when 5 comes out, and you bought LR4 on the App store, that you’d be able to upgrade as well.

My Take: I kinda wonder if I’m alone in doing what I do. But, I have a Mac and when I see software I want to buy that’s on the App store, the first thing I do is go to the software makers website to see if I can buy it direct from them. For me at least, I prefer to buy a copy of the software straight from them. I may be crazy, paranoid, whatever… but that’s just the way I do it. That said, if I can’t buy it directly from the developer, then I have no problem buying something through the App store. It’s just not my first choice. And remember, Adobe’s just trying to create another channel for which to buy Lightroom (if you owned a product you’d make sure you’d get it out there in as many stores as you could right?). They can’t control the App store policies when it comes to upgrades and updates. Anyway, just thought I’d let you guys know what the deal is. Hope you have a great weekend.

Video: A Quick Make-Your-Photo-Better Setting in Lightroom

After the last few stops in my Lightroom 4 Live Tour I realize there was a lot of questions on the Camera Calibration settings that basically, let you make your photo better with just one click. So I thought I’d take a minute to, not only go over the settings but also show you a couple of ways that you can have Lightroom automatically apply those settings to your photos so that you’re not left doing it manually each time. Also, here’s the link to the Lightroom seminar page that I mentioned in the beginning of the video. If you’re in Washington DC, Lansing, Richmond or San Francisco, I’d love to see you out at one of the seminars next month. Thanks!

Presets – Spring Color, Flare & Haze

This week, Laura (from Pretty Presets) was kind enough to donate some more free presets for me to give away. The images below show the before/after samples of the 2 presets included in the download below (from the Spring Color, Flare & Haze Collection). If you like ‘em, she’s got plenty more available over at at Lightroompresets.com so make sure you stop by and pay her a visit.

The Spring Color, Flare & Haze Collection was designed to add a sun-kissed touch to your natural light images. They’ll work best on your RAW images and were designed for both Lightroom 3 and 4, as you’ll see in the download below.
(Special thanks to Spanki Mills and Jen Carver for the beautiful examples provided)

You can find out more about the presets and the entire collection over at her website (www.lightroompresets.com) or facebook page (www.facebook.com/PrettyPresets)

$#x2022; Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 4.
$#x2022; Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 3.
$#x2022; Here’s a video that’ll help you install and organize your presets.
$#x2022; Here’s a couple before/after examples (click to see larger).

Lightroom News and Stuff

• A new date was just added to my Lightroom 4 Live tour. We’ll be in Lansing MI on June 12th. It also looks like we’ll be in Washing DC that same week and probably San Francisco the week after but I’ll keep you posted.
• Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate 2 is on the Adobe Labs website. If you had any problems with Lightroom 4, it’s definitely worth downloading.

Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty, has a great write up about some of the new Color Fringe Correction features in Lightroom 4

• Moose Peterson’s BT Journal is now available on the iPad.
• Don’t forget about the Student Discount for the Google Plus Photographers Conference. It’s just $99 for students with the code… wait for it… GPLUSSTUD. Gotta love that promo code huh?
• I’ve been getting a TON of questions on the difference between Photoshop (and Bridge) and Lightroom. If you’re still wondering if Lightroom is for you then check out the videos that Scott and I did called 100 Ways that Lightroom Kick’s The Bridge’s Ass for Photographers.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Lightroom 4 Presets: Summer Haze

It’s May 1st and summer is rapidly approaching (we’ve already got summer-like weather in Florida so we’re close enough in my book). I was looking through some of my old Lightroom 3 presets and deciding which ones to update to Lightroom 4, and the Summer Haze preset seemed like a good choice. Overall, I was trying to get across that summery, warm, hazy feeling and this is what came out of it. The preset adjusts the white balance, Vibrance, Saturation, negative Clarity (for some softness) and Split Toning sliders. I even tossed in a bit of a Tone Curve adjustment on it in the Shadows since the other settings seemed to muddy the photo up a bit, and I thought it needed some more blacks to bring back the contrast. It works great on outdoor photos and even makes a pretty nifty wedding effect. Hope you and enjoy!

The Presets:

• Click here to download the presets.
• Here’s a video that’ll help you install and organize your presets.
• Here’s a before/after examples (click to see it larger).

If You Use Lightroom, Do You Need Photoshop CS6?

I’m in sunny (sorry, cloudy and maybe rainy) LA today teaching my Lightroom seminar, but I wanted to do a quick post about some questions I got the other day in my Minneapolis seminar. I had a few people ask me what was new for Photographers in Photoshop CS6 and was it worth it or not to upgrade since they use Lightroom mostly. So, I thought I’d compile a quick list of what I thought was important (as a photographer in CS6) and some honest commentary about whether or not you really “need” the feature. By the way… if you want to see videos on any of this stuff NAPP’s did a full Photoshop CS6 Launch Site and it has all of the features covered.

1. Camera Raw: Camera Raw is now up to par with Lightroom 4 so they’re basically the same thing (comparing to the Develop module of course). Sure, I use Lightroom most of the time, but I still use ACR too. When some one hands me a file to work on, I don’t import it into my Lightroom library and all that. I usually just open it up in ACR. If you find yourself editing random photos here and there, then you’ll want to consider upgrading.

2. Content Aware Improvements: To me, this is a must have. There’s a new Content Aware Move tool that let’s you move part of one photo to another and attempts to fill in the gap that you leave behind. With the right image, it works great. Wrong image… eh… But throw that in with the content-aware option added to the Patch tool and I think it’ makes a pretty compelling feature to consider for retouching.

3. New Adaptive Wide Angle Filter: This one is pretty cool. Lightroom has the Lens Correction panel which works great. But I have to admit, I’ve been jumping to Photoshop to use the new Wide Angle filter more often now if I’m trying to fix perspective problems from wide angle shots.

4. Background and Auto-Save: If you’re working with large images (especially when you consider the file size of images from, say, a camera like the new Nikon D800), you wind up spending a lot of time saving your images and waiting. With Background Save, you can continue to work while it saves in the background. It’s the kinda thing that you have to experience. If you’re not working with really large files, it’s probably not an issue. But if you are, you’ll probably upgrade in a heartbeat once you see this in action.

5. Blur Filters: The new blur filters are a little more gimmicky in my opinion. It’s not a huge selling point for me personally, but if you’re creative and like to mess around with pseudo-blur techniques, then it’s something you’ll at least want to check out.

6. Crop Tool: For Lightroom users, this one isn’t too overwhelming. We’ve had great cropping since Lightroom 1 so now Photoshop is catching up. Still, I crop in Photoshop a lot too, so it’s nice to have a similar experience now

7. The Dark Interface: It’s definitely not a huge selling point, but it does sweeten the pot. Especially for Lightroom users. Face it – our photos just look better against a dark interface right?

8. Video: If you’re shooting a lot of DSLR video, I think you’ll find that Photoshop may just be the tool that actually gets you editing video. My co-Photoshop Guy RC Concepcion said it best, when he explained that now we can edit video in a program that we’re used to working in, rather than learning an entirely new program to do it. I still haven’t caught the video “bug” yet, but I do have to say the upgrades Adobe has done with video have been catching the eye of even the video pros that are out there.

9. Skin-Tone Selection: If you’re adjusting skin tones, then the new feature in the Select > Color Range dialog can come in handy. For example, if you’re trying to remove the red from some one’s face, you can quickly select their skin tone and use Hue/Saturation to reduce the red (rather than manually brushing and masking). This one is a hard call for me. I totally think it’s a cool feature, it’s just not something I’ve used much yet so the jury is still out. I guess you have to think to yourself how many times you try to select some one’s skin. If that’s a lot, then you’ll definitely get your money’s worth out of this feature.

10. Overall speed improvements: Speed is always a tough sell. Once you use something that’s faster for about a day or two, it becomes second nature and it doesn’t “feel” faster anymore. So, to me at least, speed didn’t seem like anything great. But after using CS6 for a few weeks and going back to CS5 to do some videos a while back, I can say that the speed improvements are the real deal. I mean, I use Liquify all the time for retouching and that tool alone is 1000% faster than it ever was. Overall though, the whole program just feels zippier (I can’t believe my spellcheck didn’t come up on zippier!)

10.5. Some old tools return: They also added Lighting Effects and Contact Sheet back in. I guess you can call them features for photographers “technically”. Lighting Effects is definitely cool if you’re looking to add some mood to your photos. And if you’re creating Contact Sheets (which is back in CS6) that’s not a bad tool either, but if you’re a Lightroom user then we can just do contact sheets in the Print module.

If I had to choose, I’d say that Content Aware enhancements, the Adaptive Wide Angle Filter, Background and Auto-save, and the Camera Raw enhancements make the upgrade worth it for photographers. Throw in the speed improvements and I think any Lightroom user who uses Photoshop would be happy with their $169 (after NAPP member discount) upgrade cost. Hope this helps a little.

Join Me for a Free Photoshop CS6 for Photographers Webcast Today

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who came out to my Lightroom 4 Live seminar in Minneapolis yesterday. There were almost 350 photographers there. We had a great crowd, lots of laughs and everyone I spoke to seemed to learn a lot throughout the day (in spite of my poor drinking habits – sorry inside joke… you had to be there – and no, it has nothing to do with alcohol)
If you’re in LA or Chicago, you can still sign up for seminars this week (Thursday in LA and Monday in Chicago).

In other news, Adobe officially announced CS6 yesterday. In celebration of the announcement, the Photoshop Guys over at NAPP are doing some free live webcasts called 6 Days of CS6. It started yesterday and continues throughout the week (schedule is below). I’ll be on today with a free webcast that goes over Photoshop CS6′s new features for photographers. I’m traveling the rest of the week doing more Lightroom seminars, but you can catch the guys doing webcasts all week. Here’s the schedule and I hope you’ll be able to join us.

Video: Soft Proofing and Print Brightness in Lightroom 4

Soft proofing has been a feature request that I’ve heard quite a bit over the years so you’ll be happy to know it’s included in Lightroom 4. This week we’ll take a quick look at the Soft Proof feature, as well as one of my favorite new features for printing that solves the “my print is too dark” problem that I (and plenty of other people I know) have.

10 Reasons to Go to the Google+ Photographers Conference

I’ll be teaching at the Google+ Photographers Conference next Month in San Francisco. It’s definitely going to be an event that’s the first of it’s kind and I hope you’ll be able to join me (along with lots of other great instructors) there. In case you’re not sure what it’s all about, here’s 10 Reasons why I think you should go.

1. Live Shooting Lounge: You’ll be able to put your newly acquired photography and lighting skills to the test at our Live Shooting Lounge. In this perfectly lit space, you’ll have the opportunity to shoot a variety of themed scenes featuring live models.

2. Photowalks: Get out there with your camera. That’s one of the main attractions to this conference… you’re supposed to bring your camera. There’s a bunch of smaller more intimate photowalks with the instructors so you can get some small group learning time with them as well as the new people you’ll meet there.

3. One-on-one portfolio reviews: There’s no better way to improve your photography then getting your work reviewed by a pro. It’s one of the things that’s helped me the most in my career and I think you’ll find it one of the most valuable experiences out there.

4. Google will be there: Who better to learn about the ins and outs of getting seen and heard on Google+, than Google themselves. Bradley Horowitz, Mike Wiacek, and Brian Rose (some top names from Google) will all be there and I’m sure we’ll see plenty of other Google folks make an appearance too.

5. Google is poised to become the social network of the future. I attended WPPI this past February and all you heard the photographers talk about was leveraging social media for your photography. Well, if you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve, then G+ is the best place.

6. Photoshoots Galor!: This place is built for shooting. Bring your camera. Trust me, they’ll make sure you have something to shoot.

7. Guy Kawasaki will be there: This is the person that literally wrote the book on G+ and plenty of other best-selling books. Personally, I’m really excited about meeting him.

8. Learn from some of the hottest photographers out there: One of the things I’m happiest about is the line-up of photographers I’ll be teaching with. Scott Kelby, Trey Ratcliff, Jeremy Cowart, Alex Koloskov,
Catherine Hall, Peter Hurley, RC Concepcion, Brian Matiash, Erik Valind, Lindsay Adler, and Colby Brown. That’s one killer list of talent all in one place.

9. Panel Discussions: I love classes where the attendees get involved. There’s panel sessions throughout the two days, and they’re the perfect place for that. Not only do you get to see several instructors get together to share their thoughts, but panels typically turn into a two-way street – where the class asks questions and gets to hear the views from several people at once.

10. There’s nothing like being there – I know it’s going to be broadcast on the internet. But there’s a reason that many conferences, seminars and shows are posting some of their biggest numbers ever. It’s because people still like to get out and interact. There’s a networking and level of learning that you get from being there that you simply don’t get when you watch something online.

And if you can’t actually make it to the conference, there’s going to be plenty of live streaming classes and events from it so stay tuned over at gpluspc.com. I hope to see you there.