Q&A Day

Today is kind of a mixed Q&A day. First off, a huge thank you for all of the kind words from the Moab photos I posted the other day. I got a lot of questions about those photos, so I’m answering those at the top of the list here. Then I’ve got some Lightroom-only Q&A’s toward the bottom of the list. Enjoy!

Q. Come on Matt. Was it really that cold there or are you just a wimp?
A. Yes and Yes. It was that cold there and yes I am I wimp. I moved to Florida from the northeast US about 18 years ago and my blood has thinned. I get cold and wear a sweatshirt when it goes below 80 degrees, so you can guess what it’s like when I’m in 25-30 degree weather with a gusty wind that won’t quit

Q. Did you use any filters for these photos?
A. Although I use filters all the time, I didn’t use them much in Utah. I carry a polarizer at all times. That is one filter that cannot be reproduced (easily and with good results) in Lightroom or Photoshop. However, it didn’t help much with these photos. A few folks asked if I use a graduated neutral density filter and the answer is no. I’ve battled with this for a while now. I used to use one often, and always found that my horizons never had a perfectly straight line through them and something always got a bit darker then I wanted. I still keep it with me but I’ve had better luck exposing on the brighter side to capture the detail and using the Graduated Filter to tone down the sky later. Oh yeah, I also tried a warming filter on one of them and liked the effect. I borrowed it from some one and I believe it had some magenta in it too. I know you can do this in Lightroom but it was kind of nice to have it done in camera and not have to mess around with it in post.
(disclaimer: this is just my personal preference, so please don’t write mean comments that I’m doing it wrong. If you feel I’m wrong then continue to do it your way and ignore me – sorry, but the way some folks have been with comments these days means that everything needs a disclaimer)

Q. Did you try converting any of these photos to black and white?
A. I tried (hence the presets from last week). I have to be honest with you though. I know I create B&W presets, but I do it mainly because I know a lot of folks out there like them. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of black and white. Every once in a while I find myself going to B&W but it’s not that often. I don’t know what it is. I just like color. Even as a kid, I was given the chance to use B&W film and I never liked it. I don’t like grain and I’ve never missed that “old B&W feel” that many do. I guess it’s a personal preference. That said, I did try a black and white on the image below and was pretty happy with the way it came out. You’ll see there’s a little bit of a tint to it as well. I’m not sure I’ll print it, but I’m still working on a few others too so we’ll see.

Q. What technique did you use to capture the sun star-burst-like rays (see image below)?
A. Great question! I set the aperture of the lens to f/16. I usually recommend people use a minimum of f/16 to capture them and preferably something like f/22 or higher. But I was able to get those sun star-burst rays at f/16. I also noticed that the star-burst effect looked awesome – one of the best I’ve seen. It’s lead to a theory that I really haven’t officially tested out yet so don’t hold me to it. See, I borrowed Scott’s Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 lens. It was the first time I used it. I compared this up against other similar star-burst photos (with different lenses) and it not only produced those rays at f/16 (when I usually need to be at f/22 with the others) but the rays looked so much better.

Q. What lenses did you take besides the 3 mentioned?
A. I took my 17-55mm (f/2.8), the 70-200mm (f/2.8), the 14-24mm (2.8) and my 18-200mm (3.5-5.6). All were Nikon lenses. The 17-55mm never came out of the bag. Basically, I wanted something long and something extremely wide most of the time. I did bring the 18-200mm VR lens as a “walking around” lens. I used the 18-200 a lot. The lack of 2.8 aperture wasn’t an issue on it since I was on a tripod and shooting landscapes. Very rarely was I wide open at f/2.8 anyway and it was pretty convenient not to change lenses. That said, I loved the 14-24mm lens. That thing is sharp and I may end up stealing (I mean borrowing) it from Scott if he’s not using it.

Q. How about posting some before/afters of these photos and the settings you used for them?
A. Great idea! I’ve actually got a video planned for this week where I go through from start to finish what I did so you can see my raw file and the finished product.

That’s it for the Moab photo Q&A’s. Here’s a few Lightroom-related Q&A’s to wrap up with.

Q. Based on your Batch Cropping video, which module is better to export your images to a JPEG? The Library (using File > Export) module or Print?
A. From a quality perspective, there is no difference. See, JPEG is a compression format that is standardized. So whether you’re creating one from the Library module (File > Export) or from the Print module, the settings you get are the same. If you’re exporting JPEGs bound for a computer screen only, you do get an option in the File > Export dialog that let’s you sharpen for the Screen instead of for Print. Personally, I’ve tried it out and the difference is barely noticeable but if the computer screen is your final output you’re probably better off with File > Export. The main reason to use the Print module for creating JPEGs is when you’ve cropped to a specific print size or created a layout or picture package of some sort. You won’t be able to save that layout as a JPEG anywhere else.

Q. Is there any soft-proofing in Lightroom?
A. Nope. If you wanted to soft-proof you’d have to Edit in Photoshop. Lightroom won’t make a copy automatically so you can feasibly go into Photoshop, soft-proof and then just close the photo with no harm (or extra files) done.

Q. Is there a way to transfer my presets from my laptop to a desktop (or from a Mac to a PC)?
A. Yep. Actually the Mac/PC thing doesn’t matter. Presets are compatible with both. I wrote a tip a while back that describes how to save and move your presets. Here’s the link.

My Moab/Arches National Park Trip

First off, don’t forget to scroll down for today’s Lightroom tip. As for this post, I’ve had a few requests to see some photos from the Moab, Utah workshop I taught at last week. First off I have to say thanks to everyone who attended. It was an awesome workshop! I was fortunate to have an incredible group of photographers and, as always with these workshops, some of the nicest people I could hope for. I always go home with new friends that I keep in touch with for years after, and this workshop was no exception. Weather was great (but cold) for the most part and we all walked away with some breath-taking photos. Anyway, here’s some shots.

First off, click each photo to see it larger. Next each photo was taken with my Nikon D300 on the Really Right Stuff BH-55 ballhead mounted on a Gitzo tripod. All were processed with Lightroom, Photoshop, and sharpened with Nik’s Sharpener Pro 3. HDR (Photomatix Pro) was used in one of them as well. I’ve got a big space on my wall at home so I’m trying to decide which one to print large. I’d really appreciate a comment to let me know which one is your favorite.

Where? At Mesa Arch in Arches National Park
When? Sunrise
Lens? Nikon 70-200 mm VR
Settings? f/16
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color saturation, and vignetting. Photoshop for some minor retouching. Photomatix to create HDR photo since there was no way to capture this in one photo.
How early did you get up? 3:35am and we left the hotel at 4am.

Where? At Mesa Arch in Arches National Park
When? Sunrise
Settings? f/16 and 1/60 second.
Lens? Nikon 14-24mm
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color, exposure, vignetting. Photoshop for minor retouching and removing small distractions.
How cold was it? Very cold and very windy. No matter how many layers anyone had on it seemed we were all shivering. But well worth it.

Where? Dead Horse State Park
When? Sunrise
Settings? f/16 and 1/60 second.
Lens? Nikon 14-24mm
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color, exposure, vignetting. Photoshop for minor retouching and removing small distractions. Nik Viveza to make the tree pop a little more.
Why did you shoot the tree and not all the other vast scenery out there? Basically, the sun had already come up. I had often shot so many photos of the same exact thing at sunrise, and end up with only one photo for the morning. So I forced myself to shoot sunrise for about 5 minutes and then switch spots as soon as the light changed. This is where I ended up.

Where? Delicate Arch in Arches National Park
When? Sunset
Settings? f/16 at 1/180 second.
Lens? Nikon 18-200mm VR (I got tired of changing lenses so I went for versatile over expensive)
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color, exposure and vignetting. Photoshop for minor retouching and removing small distractions.
How long was the hike to this Arch? A little over an hour if you walked at a fairly brisk pace. But it was a lot of fun and well worth the result.

Where? Dead Horse State Park
When? Sunrise
Lens? Nikon 70-200 mm VR
Settings? f/11 at 1/45 second.
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color, exposure and vignetting.
How did you end up getting this photo at Dead Horse as well as the other one above? They’re very different huh? Actually, I just turned around. Seriously, I was shooting in one direction when the sun was coming up. I turned around and this is what I saw. So I quickly changed lenses from wide to telephoto and got this shot.

Where? At Mesa Arch in Arches National Park
When? Sunrise
Lens? Nikon 14-24mm
Settings? f/16 at 1/60
Processing? Lightroom for white balance, color saturation, exposure, and vignetting. Photoshop for some minor retouching.
Did you really get up at 3:30 for this photo? Yep. If you don’t get there early it supposedly gets incredibly crowded. It didn’t for us because it was snowing that morning and the weather forecast was abysmal. But everything changed and we got some incredible photos.

Thanks for checking them out folks. Please let me know which ones you like best.

Tip – Picking Colors from Anywhere

Happy Friday fellow color pickers Today’s tip works in the Develop, Print, Web, and Slideshow modules. Basically, it works in any module that has a color picker in it. For example, let’s say you’re in the Web module and you go to the Color Palette panel. You’ll see a few color swatches listed there. Each one of these controls the color in your web gallery. Well the tip is that if you click on one of those swatches it opens a color picker. Sure you can select the color you want right in the color picker but that’s not the tip. You can also select a color from anywhere on your desktop or other open windows. The trick is to click first in the color picker then drag anywhere on your computer to select a different color. Once you click in the color picker though, don’t let the mouse button go. Keep it pressed as you drag around and you’ll see the color changes to whatever your cursor is over regardless of what window or area of the screen you hover over. Here’s a quick list (but probably not complete) of most of the areas that have a color picker:

• Develop (Split Toning Panel)
• Slideshow (Stroke, ID Plate, Text Overlays, Backdrop panel, Titles panel)
• Web (Color Palette panel and Appearance panel)
• Print (Stroke Border setting and Overlays panel)

Thanks everyone and have a great weekend!

Presets – Better Black and Whites

Hey there. I’m back for another preset day. I wanted to share some new black and white ideas I’ve been working on in Lightroom. As you can imagine, there’s a few different ways to do black and whites (remember, they’re NOT called grayscale photos) in Lightroom. But, I’ve been honing in on what I think is the best since some methods tend to deteriorate the photo too much (or produce too much noise). This week, I’m releasing some that I’ve created recently that are specifically for landscape photos. They’ve been very dramatic for the photos I’ve run them on and I think they really give that high-contrast Black and white look to a photo. There’s a preset for some general landscape scenes but, of course, feel free to try them on anything, as each photo is different and may respond to my settings in a different way then I intended. I hope you enjoy and please let me know what you think of them in the comments. Have a great day!

• See the Before/After view of the presets here
• Download the presets here.
• Click here to see a video on how to install presets .

Video – Batch Cropping and More

Hey there! Today’s the first day of my Arches National Park photo workshop in Moab, Utah. Over the next few days I’ll be up at the crack of dawn (starting at 4am today) with my class shooting some of the prettiest landscapes in the country. Then we’ll hit the classroom to process the photos and go through the whole workflow. I’ll try to post some photos as we go along.

OK, video time… I recorded a video on cropping before I left so I’d have it ready to go today. It’s another one of those videos that came from one of the comments I received here on the site. It has to do with batch cropping or applying some sort of crop to a bunch of photos. There’s actually a little more to it then I thought which is why this one turned into a video. Enjoy!

Click here to download the Video

Random Q&A Day

Hi folks. Time for another one of those random Q&A days.

Q. Is it true that Bogen is giving a free Webinar called “Fashionable Wedding Photography: Roundtable with Claudio Basso” on Friday April 17th between 2pm-3pm EDT?
A. Actually, yes, it is indeed true Sorry, my friends over at Bogen asked if we’d spread the word about the webinar and this was the only way I could think to get it in here without creating a separate post. If you want to attend you can register here. I promise the rest of the questions are really questions.

Q. Is there a way to include Crop information (like 5×7) into a preset?
A. You know, if I hadn’t researched this question I would have instinctively just said yes. But after trying it I realized there is no way to include your favorite crop info into the preset. You can always set one photo to the crop preset you want and then synchronize a bunch of them but there’s no way to embed the Crop info into the actual preset.

Q. I’ve seen you mention onOne and Nik Software’s plug-ins a few times lately. Am I better off using the Lightroom version of the plug-in or the Photoshop version?
A. It really depends. The one big difference between the Lightroom version of the plug-ins and the Photoshop version is that you get layers with Photoshop. So if you find yourself applying the effect of the plug-in on to a separate layer and using masks to blend the two together then you may want to go into Photoshop to run the plug-in. In cases like Silver Efex Pro, I rarely want to put the black and white on a separate layer. I either want color or black and white so I’m cool with just the Lightroom version. Really, when it comes to plug-ins, I always suggest people just download the free trials from the plug-in company’s website. They’re usually fully functional and you can truly test out whether (and how) you’d use them.

Q. Why doesn’t my Graduated Filter have those little horizontal guides that I’ve always seen when dragging one on to my photo?
A. I get this question a lot more then you’d think. I’ll also get asked “Where’d my Adjustment Brush pins go?” a lot too. Basically, this usually happens when you’ve accidentally hidden them by pressing the H key. Most of the time it’s inadvertent. Or, if you’re like me, you heard a tip somewhere about pressing H, so you did. But then you forgot to press H again to show the Graduated filter guides or pins. Then, if you’re really like me, the problem becomes compounded because you forget the tip (please tell me this happens to you too)
Anyway, to sum up, just press the H key if the guides or pins are gone. It’ll bring them back.

Q. How do I move my Lightroom catalog to a different computer (laptop, desktop)?
A. I’ve got a video that goes into moving a catalog between laptop and desktop. I recorded it a while ago but it still applies the same today.

Video – Adjustment Brush Adjustments

This week I started to write my tip in a blog post and quickly realized it was going to take me a while to explain it the right way. With the wonderful world of video being so easy, I figured it would be so much easier to explain the tip if you could watch what I was doing. Hence the Friday video tip today. It deals with a little-known feature of the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom 2. It’s pretty neat so make sure you check it out.

Have a great weekend. All my best to you if you’re celebrating a holiday this time of year. I’ll be celebrating Easter with my kids (and the Easter bunny of course) and we’ll be eating lots of chocolate (I love those dark chocolate peanut M&Ms). Take care folks!

Click here to download the Video

The Truth about Backups Follow Up

First, don’t forget to scroll down for today’s “Worth-a-click” post. Next, Tuesday’s “Truth about LR Backups” post generated a lot of comments. I’m not going to do a long follow up because there’s just so many differing opinions. After it’s all said and done, I still stand by my backup strategy. However many disagreed and I think it’s worth reading through the comments to see what folks have to say. I read a lot of good comments on how other people backup and even learned a few things (and I absolutely knew I would when I wrote that post). What I did want to do is at least mention all the various backup software that was talked about in the comments, so you didn’t have to dig through to find it. So here goes:

• Acronis True Image (probably the most popular of all of them)
• DriveImage XML
• Personal Backup X5
• CarbonCopyCloner
• ChronoSync
• SyncBack
• Carbonite
• GoodSync
• Microsofts Windows LiveSync

Weekly Worth-a-click

Here’s a few things that I found worth a quick visit this week.

• Nik Software has been busy. Seems like their Color Efex Pro Lightroom plug-in just came out and now Silver Efex Pro has been released as a Lightroom plug-in too. Silver Efex has become, by far, my favorite way to convert to black and white (oops sorry, grayscale).

• Speaking of Silver Efex Pro. I actually did a quick demo of a comparison to Photoshop’s B&W adjustment in episode 179 of Photoshop TV. The comparison touches on something that I’ve noticed for years about creating black and whites in Photoshop. It’s at the 22:30 mark and it’s worth viewing if you’re really into black and whites.

• The coolest web plug-in for Lightroom, Slideshow Pro, has been updated to 1.4.3. If you already own it then make sure you grab the update. If not, check it out over at their website.

• This isn’t too Lightroom-related but for those of you that are into scripting, I noticed Jeff Tranberry (scripting guro from Adobe) has a resource page from a some scripting classes he did at Photoshop World. It’s definitely worth looking at, even if you didn’t make it to the conference.

• Again, not Lightroom related but it is photo-related (and Dave’s just a good friend of mine). Dave Cross has launched a neat addition to his blog called “The Fix It Challenge”. People download a photo, fix it, and then upload to Flickr. It’s very cool to see what other people would do to a photo.

• Don’t forget that each Thursday a new episode of DTown TV (our Nikon show) goes up. It just so happens that today is Thursday so hop over and check it out at DTownTV.com.

• HoudahGeo 2.2 Geocoding Software for Mac OS X now supports Lightroom collections and folders.

• And finally some inspiration. Check out the photography of Jon Paul Douglass. He’s got a very unique style along with some really cool post-processing techniques.

Enjoy your Wednesday everyone!

The Truth About Lightroom Backups

I’ve had these “truths” ideas floating around in my head for a while. Basically, there’s lots of information out there about various topics and I wanted to share some of the truths behind them (truths in my opinion of course) with you.

In case you didn’t know, Lightroom will automatically back up it’s catalog as often as you tell it to. You can set or change these catalog backup preferences in your Catalog Settings (Lightroom menu on Mac, Edit menu on a PC). The idea is that you set Lightroom to automatically backup the catalog, and if something ever gets corrupt (or your computer crashes), you’ll have a backup of the catalog to rely on. But I’d like to give you the truth behind the backup and suggest that you never use it.

Before I move on, let’s get one thing out of the way first. The Lightroom catalog backup (and my suggestion to you) doesn’t back up your photos. That’s up to you. I backup mine to a separate external drive upon import. The catalog is merely all of the stuff, changes, edits, metadata about your photos.

OK, back to backing up the catalog and why I suggest setting Lightroom’s backup preference to “Never”. By default, Lightroom will back up your catalog to the local hard drive in the Lightroom folder. But if your hard drive crashes then your backup is gone right? Right!

But, when the backup dialog opens Lightroom will let you set another location. You could always just choose an external hard drive and you’d be safe, since it would be stored somewhere else. But that starts to get too complicated for me. Now you’ve got photos somewhere, catalogs somewhere, and (hopefully) a backup of your computer’s hard drive (for emails, personal files, work files, etc…) somewhere else. These are potentially all in different places which gets messy.

So I suggest setting the preference to Never. Yep, don’t ever back up Lightroom. Instead, why not be vigilant about backing up your computer’s hard drive every day. By backing up your computer, you’ll be automatically backing up your catalog every day (I’m assuming you store the catalog on your local hard drive which is the default place). Here’s a few options:

Mac option #1: TIme Machine – This one is free. Time Machine comes with the latest version of the Mac OS (Leopard). It continually backs up your computer through out the day to some external drive you select. There used to be some concerns that Time Machine wouldn’t back up your catalog correctly but I haven’t seen any issues with this. I’ve tested it out and restoring the catalog works just fine.

Mac option #2: Super Duper – If you’re paranoid (and I am) you may want to use option 2 AND option 1 (I do). Super Duper is a program that creates an image of your computer’s hard drive. I plug my computer into an external drive every night and it automatically updates the image with whatever changed that day. So if my computer crashes, I have a backup.

The advantage Super Duper has for me is that it’s bootable. If I’m traveling and the hard drive crashes, I can plug my external Super Duper backup in, boot from it, and start working immediately until I get a new drive. This comes in really handy as I teach a lot and can’t afford to ask people to wait on class until I get a new drive to load my stuff on to.

PC Option #1: SyncBackSE – PCs don’t really have a built-in Time Machine equivalent. There is a program called SyncBackSE that does something similar. It costs about $30 but there’s a free trial to give it a test run.

PC Option #2: Norton Ghost – this is similar to Super Duper. it makes a full system backup of your computer hard drive. If something goes wrong and your drive crashes, you can use that image to restore your system to the point it was at when you made the last backup. It runs about $70.

So the truth about Lightroom backups is that you don’t need ‘em. Backup your computer every day and you’ll automatically take care of backing up Lightroom.

Before I go let me get a few things out there. First off, this is the truth about backing up Lightroom as seen by me. If you don’t like it then simply don’t use it. Don’t get angry and post a mean comment. It’s OK to post a comment that disagrees but be nice about it. Also, some folks out there have their own way of doing things when it comes to catalogs. Some store the catalog with the photos, some store it on another drive. I totally recognize this but realize one thing – you’re in the minority (the majority store catalogs right where LR installs them on the computer). If you fall into this category and you have your reasons then go for it. I personally don’t do it that way and honestly, I don’t have a good reason for it other then this is the way it makes sense to me. Cool? Cool!

Thanks for reading and let us know your thoughts in the comments.