News – HDR, Lightroom Plug-ins, Free Presets, and More

Hey there. Here’s a few news items to check out:

• Don’t forget I’m signing all pre-order copies of my newly updated Photoshop Layers book if you order from Kelby Training. By the way, Amazon has the updated final cover. That always means it’s really close to coming out

• onOne Software has some new (Free) Lightroom presets.

• I’ll be teaching a few sessions on HDR Efex Pro at the Nik Software booth later this week at Photo Plus. You can catch me on Thursday at 2:30 or Friday at 11am. Make sure you stop by and say hi.

• Timothy Armes has a really cool new Lightroom plug-in called the Zip Exporter which let’s you create a zipped folder of any photos you’re exporting.

• Matt from the Turning Gate has announced the upcoming release of TTG Stage CE, a web module plugin for Lightroom

• Scott over at Weekly Photo Tips did a review on my “Mastering HDR in Photoshop CS5″ DVD. Thanks Scott

Video – Lightroom Before and After Travel Photo

Today I’ve got another one of those Before/After videos for you. This time we stay primarily in Lightroom with a tiny bit of Photoshop retouching. It uses one of the new panels in Lightroom 3 – Lens Correction as well as the usual stuff (Exposure, Sharpening, etc…). Thanks and let me know what you think. Enjoy!

Shooting the Albuquerque Balloon Festival with Nikon

The other week I was invited by Nikon to go shoot the Alburquerque Balloon Festival. I figured I’d share some of the photos as well as the experience.

Up at Oh-Dark-Thirty Every Morning
I was prepared to get up early but man, did we get up EARLY. We left the hotel by 4:15 each morning. Do the math and that means you need to be awake by a time that has the number 3 in front of it and that’s just not cool It was well worth it though because we were able to get some of the “glow” shots that make waking up so early worth it. Plus, it gave me the chance to try out Nikon’s new 85 f/1.4 (which I’ve also purchased and just got a few days ago). It’s as tack sharp as the original and came in really handy in those hours before the sun came up.

(Don’t forget to click to see larger versions)

The Mass Ascension
The Mass Ascension is one of the main events of any balloon festival. As a photographer, it’s a crazy time. It’s chaotic. There’s hundreds of cool looking hot air balloons all going up at the same time. You just have to pick a direction and go with it. Knowing that I’d want to shoot everything from wide angle to zoom, I stopped at the Nikon tent and grabbed the new 24-120 f/4 VR lens. See, there’s really several shots you can go for. When a hot air balloon is be prepped for flight, they start by laying the entire balloon out on the ground. Then they take this huge industrial fan and start blowing air into the base of the balloon near the basket. The first photos can be taken at the top of the balloon looking in.

The next shot is at the base of the balloon (one of my personal favorites). If you’re nice, polite, careful and wait for the right moment, the folks holding the balloon base open for the fan will let you peak inside for what I think is one of the coolest shots. It’s even better if you can get a silhouette of a person outside the balloon helping to raise it. The people that actually set up the balloon here had already moved, but a kind woman was nice enough to go pose for me (Come on! You saw how I got the illegal HDR church shot, so this shouldn’t surprise you at all)

Finally, after the balloon gets airborne you can snag some photos looking up. To me, EVERYONE sees a balloon from the ground looking up so I tried to be creative here. I’d try to compose the photos so that other balloons were in the frame and even tried shooting some at f/16 so I could get that sunstar in the photo. That’s where having the 24-120 helped the most and it’s the lens I kept on for most of the morning. I was able to zoom in on airborne balloons as well as catch any wide angle action without switching lenses. Plus that nano coating is the real deal. You’re able to shoot into the sun and minimize lens flare… big time!

And of course, what mass ascension shoot is complete without a shot of the mass ascension. It’s like these balloons just repel each other because there’s hundreds of them but they never seem to run into each other. What a sight though! You really have to see something like this in person to get the full effect.

Shooting from up high
I snagged the new Nikon 28-300 VR lens (full frame lens since I was shooting a D3S) on the second day because I wanted to get some shots from up high in a balloon. I knew I had a lot of photos from the ground, but I wanted something from a different angle. I also knew I wouldn’t have time or space in the basket to change lenses, and would probably need something pretty long (but maybe wide too) to get what I was looking for.

Here’s the catch. My balloon flight fell through and I never got up. But I was lucky enough to find a 20-30′ high media platform so I made the most out of the situation. When you framed the balloons the right way (when they were close to the ground) it gives the appearance that you’re actually up in the air shooting across at them. As for the lens, I did like the 28-300 a lot, but it seemed a little harder to focus than the 24-120. I was shooting the same exact stuff as the day before but there were many times where the lens struggled to find focus. There also seemed to be a little vignetting but not anything that Lightroom could take care of with the click of a button in the Lens Correction panel. All that said, the 28-300mm will probably be my next purchase. The photos were really sharp (even at 300mm) and there’s something to be said about carrying that kind of range around in one lens.

Nice Weather, Nice Balloons = Little Post Processing
I’d love to give you a bunch of Lightroom tips on how I developed these photos. Honestly though, we had great weather. The balloons were colorful and Nikon made sure we were there during the good light. All of that combined equals very little post processing. Mostly I just increased the Vibrance and Blacks sliders a little, maybe some Fill Light, Clarity, and a little sharpening in the Detail panel. Below is a screen capture of the typical edit which was done in about 10 seconds. Gotta love that!

All of the photos were shot with a 32GB SanDisk CF card. I gotta tell ya, it was nice to have a card that big. It holds a whopping 1500 Raw photos which is nice if you can’t download your photos right away and have to get out for another shoot.

Many thanks to everyone at Nikon and the MWW Group for really taking care of us and making sure we had the right camera and right glass when we needed it. And of course, I owe a huge thanks to you for stopping by today. Have a good one!

Sharpening Follow Up and Winners

Thanks for all of the comments the other day about my upcoming sharpening class. I have to say I love the way this community jumps in to help and I honestly appreciate all of your time. I know we don’t have a lot of it, and I’m grateful you spend some of it here. While I always have some general ideas on what I want to teach, it’s questions from you that make sure I cover the stuff people want to know.
First off, I have some thoughts I wanted to mention before moving on and then I’ll let you know the winners.

A few common trends I noticed:
• A large number of you already know A LOT about sharpening. Even if you don’t know it. I can tell in how your questions were formulated. When a question mentions capture sharpening, then creative sharpening, then the various output sharpening methods you can definitely consider yourself in the advanced group. What I took from this is that, while you know a lot about sharpening, there’s confusion because there’s almost too many conflicting reports. Lab sharpening, channel sharpening, Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen… you get the idea. So instead of adding to the confusion, I’m not going to talk about all the of the ways you “could” sharpen – I’ll just stick with my sharpening techniques.

• Lot’s of people wanting to know about Nik’s Sharpener Pro. I wasn’t going to talk about it, but I probably will spend a few minutes on it now.

• Multiple questions on how sharpening interacts with noise reduction. Great topic!

• Lot’s of “How do I know when enough is enough” questions. I’ll definitely make sure I show examples.

• Multiple questions on when to sharpen. Before retouching? After retouching? I’ll make sure I cover that.

• I found a large number of questions on how do you know when you’ve added enough output sharpening for print. That’s always a tough one and something that can’t be solved with soft proofing. I can save you the suspense and tell you that my answer is going to be to do a test print. If you do enough of them you’ll start to figure out what the sweet spot is and eventually you won’t have to do a test print as much.

• There seemed to be an overall feeling of “I must be missing something”. Again, I saw a lot of questions from people that know how to sharpen but still felt like something was missing. I think it all goes back to the multiple sharpening techniques out there. Because there’s so much information on sharpening techniques (and so many places to actually apply sharpening), connecting it all together was the main concern. My overall theme for this class will be to keep it simple. If you start with good photography techniques and capture a sharp photo, sharpening should be a piece of cake. My main goal will be to help you figure out where the best place is to do the sharpening and what the best tools are for the job.

OK, now for the winners. You’ll be getting an email in the next couple of days about your choice for the prize.
• Bob Israel
• John Slaughterbeck
• Scott Prokop
• Dave Duzy
• Miguel Palaviccini

Thanks again for all of the help folks! You feedback truly does help.

Confused About Lightroom/Photoshop Sharpening?

Hey everyone. I’ve been wanting to do a class on sharpening your photos for a while now and I’ve finally got some breathing room to get it done. I hope to record the class later this week but I need your help. Basically, I want to make sure I cover the stuff you want to know. I’ve even got a little reward for your help.

In a nutshell the class will go like this:
1) Tips on capturing sharp photos (very quick though, this stuff isn’t rocket science).
2) How to keep your sharp photos sharp while working in Photoshop (basically what you can and can’t do that will harm or degrade the photo).
3) How to make your sharp photos sharper – I’ll talk about the different types of sharpening (capture, creative, output), the various sharpening tools in both Lightroom, Camera Raw and Photoshop, and some sharpening techniques for different types of photos.

I’d like to get your input though. What kinds of questions do you have? This isn’t going to be the super-techie class. I don’t expect it to be more than an hour or so. I’m not going to talk about a sharpening “workflow” or anything like that because that’s overkill. Sharpening should be simple, and I want to make it simple. But I also want to make sure I cover the things you want to know.

As a reward, just for trying to help, out I’m going to randomly pick 5 comments (only legit comments though) and give you your choice of a 1 month KelbyTraining.com subscription (which is where this course will reside) or a signed copy of my new Layers Book (which should be out next month). Sound good? Thanks in advance for your help.

Free Lightroom Presets – Hawaii Five-O

This week’s preset comes from what has to be the coolest opening credits on TV… Hawaii Five-O. Whether it’s the old show or the new one, which I’ve seen a couple of times, I just can’t get that song out of my head when I hear it. Anyway, they have a cool effect on most of the photos in the intro and I’ve got a few versions of some presets that do a good job of recreating it.

As always, your comments are welcome. Download ‘em and let me know what you think. If you like them, you’ll need to send my family a thank you note, as they’re the ones that have to listen to me humming “bah bah bah-bah bahhhh bahhhh…. dah dah dah dahhh dahhhhhh” (you’ve got to listen to the song to know what I mean). Try it, you’ll be humming it all day

Here’s a few samples. (click to see it larger).

• Click here to download the preset.

To install:
1) Unzip the preset zip file on to your desktop
2) Go to the Develop module. NOTE: YOU MUST BE IN THE DEVELOP MODULE
3) Go to the Presets panel on the left. Right click anywhere in it and choose “Import”.
4) Select the .lrtemplate files you unzipped in Step 1 and click Import NOTE: DO NOT IMPORT THE ZIP FILE

5 Ideas for Using Lightroom’s Smart Collections

A while back I created a video on Smart Collections and one of the ways that I use them. Well, I was working with some new Smart Collections the other day and I thought it’d be cool to give you 5 ways to use them. More importantly though, I’m looking for some comments here on how you use Smart Collections. I figure there’s got to be plenty of cool ideas out there that I’m missing, so please share.

Anyway, here’s 5 of mine:

Smart Collection Idea #1: PSD Files
Any image edited in Photoshop means it was taken to the next level. Since I’ll usually want to get back to those photos quickly I set the File Type to “PSD” so I can quickly find any PSD files.

Smart Collection Idea #2: HDR Images
Any time I work on an HDR photo in Photoshop I make sure I rename it (to include “HDR) when I get back over to Lightroom. That way, I can set up a Smart Collection where the Filename contains “HDR” so all of my HDR images are just a click away.

Smart Collection Idea #3: Panoramas
Along the same lines of the HDR photos, I do something similar for panos. I make sure to rename any panos when I get back to Lightroom and create a Smart Collection where the Filename contains “Pano”.

Smart Collection Idea #4: Copyright Check
I create a Smart Collection to check for any photos where the Copyright metadata field doesn’t contain “Matt Kloskowski” in it. That way, I can keep an eye on any that I forget to copyright.

Smart Collection Idea #5: Recently Edited
Lightroom also has some default Smart Collections. I kinda like the “Recently Modified” one so I can see what photos I’ve recently changed. I double click on it though, to change it from 2 days to 5 days, and that seems to work well for me.

Well that’s it for today. I’m in Albuquerque shooting the Balloon Fiesta and we have to be up and in the lobby by 4:15am (ouch!). See ya!