Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Hi folks! Getting ready for a long 4th of July weekend here and I thought I’d leave you with a video for the long weekend. There’s always lots of questions around color spaces and color profiles in Lightroom and how they relate to what we do in Photoshop. So I thought I’d cover some of the general best practices when moving your photos between Lightroom and Photoshop. Obviously, there’s a few choices - ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB (1998), or sRGB. Luckily, there’s pretty much 2 main options to choose and I’ll cover when to use each one in the video. Oh yeah, make sure you leave any comments if you know of any good articles or websites on the topic. Take care!

Click here to watch the video. (17MB)

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If your first thought was “Edge Lightening?”, you’re not alone. Lately, the hip, cool, trendy, rad (insert your hip, cool, or trendy-like word here) is darkening the edges of your photos. Normally, I think it’s a great addition when used sparingly. Well, I started experimenting with the reverse - lightening the edges and the effect started looking really cool on some photos. Usually, darkening the edges brings focus on the center of the photo (usually the subject). However, lightening them does close to the same thing but in a different way. I found it gives the photo a really “bright” feel to it. So I’ve come up with a few presets here that go from lightening the edges a little to a lot. There’s also 2 flavors - narrow and wide. You’ll see the difference when you try ‘em out. They work great on portraits, wedding photos, and even some landscapes I tried them out on. Have fun!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Edge Lightening Presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

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Happy Friday folks. It’s one of those Friday’s where I was in the mood to make a video tip instead of writing one so here goes. The tip is on making Develop presets. Presets are probably one of the most popular aspects of my blog site here and I see lots of people ask questions as to how to make presets. Sure, the process of making them is simple - just click the little + icon in the Develop module under the Preset panel and you’ve got a preset. But what about the settings behind the preset? Do you include Exposure and tone-based settings in the preset? What about White Balance settings? I’ll go over my thought process in this video but I’d love to hear what you guys think as well. How useful are they to you? Do you download them and never use them or do you use them every day? Let us know in the comment area. Well, that wraps up another week. Have a great weekend!

Click here to watch the video. (13MB)

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First off, thanks to everyone who stopped over at scottkelby.com to see my guest blog post. It seemed very well received and I appreciate all the comments. Now on to some Lightroom, photography and industry odds and ends.

• Sean McCormack over at Lightroom News has a really neat post on time lapse photography and how he’s using it. I’ve never really tried it but after reading I think I may have a go at it.

• Syl over at PixSylated (I love that name!) has a good post about Firefox 3 and color management in the browser. This is big actually. The more browsers that start reading color profiles the better off we’ll all be when it comes to displaying our photography on the web.

• NAPP members get $75 off the Epson R1900 until tomorrow (my new favorite glossy printer). I did a couple videos on the R1900 when it comes to getting started with printing as well as printing from Lightroom over at the NAPP site. You can see the videos as well as get the discount code by clicking here.

• One of our own Lightroom blog readers, Peter, has a great photography (and related) blog over at www.camerasview.com. You’ll find lots of tidbits there and even some neat tips on Lightroom.

• Finally, check out the Camera Toss blog. I had absolutely no idea there was a website dedicated to this and I totally stumbled upon it yesterday. It’s gutsy to try out but I may have to take an old camera and give it a whirl

Have a great day!

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I have the honor of being a guest blogger today on Scott Kelby’s blog so make sure you check it out and leave a comment for me. (let ‘em all know you’re a Lightroom Killer Tips visitor!) Yep, he asked me a few weeks ago and I’ve since been laboring over what I was going to write. Then, about a week ago it came to me, and about 2 days ago I began writing it. I have to say it took WAY longer then I thought it would (I’m afraid to even tell you as my boss my be reading this) but I had such a good time with it. Basically, I’ve taken a concept that we talk about in the office every once in a while and made it into a post. See, we always toss around ideas about small design changes we’d make to dialogs, palettes or the Photoshop interface. Sometimes we even come up with our own new ideas for dialogs. Well, I decided to actually create them. If you’ve never designed a dialog before, let me tell ya… it ain’t easy. I have a totally new respect for those folks because all I had to do was make mine in Photoshop and it took forever - I don’t even have to make them work Anyway, head on over to Scott’s blog to check my post out and leave a comment for me as well. It’s even got some homework for you where you can download a PSD file and make your own. Regular blogging will resume here for the rest of the week. Thanks!

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