Layers for Lightroom?

What’s probably the most-used feature in Photoshop? Layers right? Something that’s layer-related is probably the main reason I ever leave Lightroom in the first place. Well, onOne Software has come out with a brand new plug-in that brings the features of layers to Lightroom. Yep, layers, stacking, blend modes, and even layer masks. In the scheme of how we work with our photos, this could really change things and I’m excited to see where it goes. I mean, think about all the times you go from Lightroom to Photoshop to simply add one layer or change a blend mode and use a mask. You’ve basically made that entire move to Photoshop (which has thousands of features) for just one thing.

Here’s an example from a video I did for onOne, where I started with a texture image and a photo I took in Paris (both in Lightroom). In a few seconds I was able to combine the two with the Overlay blend mode – something that you’d never be able to do in Lightroom. (Click to see it larger)

You can download it now for free, have a chance to try it out, and share your feedback with onOne’s development team. Congrats to onOne for seeing a huge need in how we work with our photography and coming out with Perfect Layers to help solve it.

Webcast with Scott Kelby (Take 2)

We had a few technical problems last week so the webcast didn’t happen. So, if you’re around at 3pm EDT today then stop by to check out a live webcast I’ll be doing with Scott Kelby (and give us another chance to make it up to you). Scott’s brand new book, Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop, is tearing up the charts. To celebrate it’s release, he’s doing a live webcast with lots of retouching tips and tricks. Since Scott get’s most of his retouching techniques from me, he asked me to join him (TOTALLY just kidding! ) – Seriously though, I’ll be there to co-host so if you have any questions for him about retouching then feel free to comment here on the blog, or tweet me here. Here’s the website to sign up (it’s free!). I hope you’ll join us today at 3pm. See you then.

Lightroom 3 ACE Exam Aid Now Available

The folks over at Examaids.com have announced their Lightroom 3 Exam Aid. Now, if you’re thinking “Hey, it’s about time – Lightroom 3 has been out for about 10 months now”, just know that Adobe doesn’t typically release the ACE exam for it’s products until 6-12 months after the product release. I can’t recommend the Exam Aids enough. If you’re serious about prepping for the test, the time and energy that this saves you is huge.

Also, whenever I talk about any new exam prep material being released it’s usually about this time that people come on and comment about how exams are useless and your real-world knowledge is all that counts. Some people also write in and are just genuinely curious how much an ACE exam really matters out there (but that’s typically after they read some one say that the ACE exam is useless ). So here’s my thoughts:

First, the only people that comment about how the exams are useless are those that haven’t taken it (and usually can’t pass it). The way I see an ACE exam (or most industry proficiency exams for that matter) are that they can’t ever hurt you. Will they always help? Nope. But if it’s you and another person up for a job, your resumes are similar, this could be the thing that differentiates you. And that’s what it’s all about. Differentiation. I absolutely believe the quality of your work should be your first point of differentiation. Your work needs to grab attention. But once you’ve grabbed that attention, I’ll take anything else I can to help keep it and hopefully turn it into a job. We’re hiring a new Photoshop Guy right now. I didn’t discard any resumes because they didn’t have an ACE certification on them. But the ones that did kind of jumped out at me because I know from experience, it’s not an easy test. It means this person went that one extra step to prove their proficiency in Photoshop. Backed up by a good portfolio of work, it definitely helps.

Think of it this way. It’s kinda like getting a good GPA in college. Will that land you a job for sure? Nope. Will it help set you apart from the other masses of people looking for a job? Definitely. And, by the way, the only classmates that tell other classmates that GPA’s don’t matter, are the ones with a lower GPA.

So who’s the exam really for? Mostly for people looking to get work in the photography business. If you’re just a passionate hobbyist, then passing the exam won’t do anything for you other than making you feel good about your knowledge. It’s not automatically going to turn you into a sought-after photographer that everybody wants to have. Think of it as the icing on the cake.

So if you are looking to pass the ACE exam do two things: 1) Ignore the people that tell you it’s worthless and, 2) Check out the prep exams from ExamAids.com. They are simply the best out there and will shave hours (if not days) off of your exam prep time.

Some Free Webinars, a Lightroom Tip (and stuff)

Just wanted to give you a quick free webinar update:

• The webcast with Scott and I ran into some technical glitches yesterday. We’ve rescheduled for next Thursday April 21 at 3pm EDT.
• Datacolor (makers of the Spyder calibration system) is hosting a free webinar called “How to Capture Color”
• Don’t forget to follow me over at Facebook and Twitter for random updates during the week. (PS: Make sure you click “Like” on Facebook and not a friend request – I actually don’t do anything with my personal page anymore so you won’t see the updates if you “Friend” it)
• Today is the last day to participate in Westcott’s Photoshop World Shootout Contest. If you went to the show and have any photos from the Westcott booth, make sure you upload them.
• And finally, a quick Lightroom Tip… In Lightroom 3, when you import your photos (File > Import Photos), you’ll see the large dialog that opens. Of course it’s got a ton of options in it, most of which you don’t need on a daily basis when importing. If you’re like me (God help you!), you pretty much just choose a different folder destination, but everything else usually remains the same. If that’s the case, you can minimize the dialog to just show you the essentials by clicking that minimize button (downfacing arrow) in the bottom left corner of the dialog.

Have a great weekend!

News – Webcast with Scott Kelby

If you’re around at 3pm EDT today then stop by to check out a live webcast I’ll be doing with Scott Kelby. Scott’s brand new book, Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop, is tearing up the charts. To celebrate it’s release, he’s doing a live webcast with lots of retouching tips and tricks. Since Scott get’s most of his retouching techniques from me, he asked me to join him (TOTALLY just kidding! ) – Seriously though, I’ll be there to co-host so if you have any questions for him about retouching then feel free to comment here on the blog, or tweet me here. Here’s the website to sign up (it’s free!). I hope you’ll join us today at 3pm. See you then.

New Lightroom Plug-in (Rays) From Digital Film Tools

Hey everyone. Digital Film Tools released a new Lightroom (and Photoshop) plug-in called Rays. It’s actually pretty cool. You can create realistic light rays that look like they’re coming through a window or clouds. You can find out more at their website here. I guess my question to you is, would you use something like this? Lightroom being a tool for photographers, what’s your feelings about artificially adding light? Artificially adding anything is more of a designer/compositor kind of thing, or some one creating movie posters or very specialized images. Anyone on the purist side of the fence would absolutely say no. But what about you? Me, I think it’s kinda cool. I have some photos of churches that I think it would work great for. Thanks?

The Paris Trip / HDR Q&A

Lot’s of great questions came from my post last week. First I just wanted to say thank you for all of the kind words about the photos. Next, I figured I’d compile your questions so that everyone can benefit from some answers. Thanks again!

Q. Great shots Matt. Do you tend to use Photoshop CS5 for HDR processing, HDR Efex Pro from Nik, or Photomatix?
A. After many trials, switching and testing I’ve settled on Photomatix for my HDR photos. It’s hard to explain exactly why. Personally, I’m just able to get the look that I want with it. It’s fast and, well, it just works for me.

Q. Pretty awesome HDR shots.. One question though, I have been to Paris but I could never get any of these shots without people in it. How did you manage to do it? Photoshop? Or another trick?

A. First off, thanks For most of the photos I was just patient and waited. For some of the Louvre photos (which were HDR photos), the people were there, but they were ghosted because of the long exposures. Once I had the photo in Photoshop, I used the Clone Stamp tool or Content Aware Healing in CS5 to get rid of them. For the ones taken at sunrise, well, there’s your answer. It was cold and Serge and I were the only ones silly enough to be up that early

Q. Which traveling tripod did you take with you?
A. I use the Gitzo traveler 1550T along with a BH-40 Really Right Stuff ballhead. On this trip I borrowed my buddy’s BH-40 because it’s so much lighter than the BH-55 I own. In fact, if anyone wants to buy a used BH-55 (but very well taken care of) let me know. I just don’t use the lenses big enough to warrant that size bullhead and will probably wind up selling it to buy a BH-40.

Q. Paris + Bad weather = Black and White. Why no black and white photos?
A. I’m just not a fan of B&W. I’ll convert 1 out of every 100 photos to black and white. Don’t know why really. I just personally like color.

Q. I usually don’t like HDR, but I like these photos (This comment came up a number of times)
A. OK, this was more of a comment instead of a question. But I thought it was a good topic because it came up a lot. I really don’t do any naturalistic or realistic HDR photos any more. I’d rather just overlay two bracketed photos in Photoshop and use masking to get the best results from the two. So, when I create an HDR photo I’m purely going for more of a surrealistic over-the-top look. To me, that’s where HDR fits in best. I think we tend to say we don’t like HDR when we see it used poorly on poor subjects. But when you go for the surreal style of HDR on subjects that tend to have a surreal look/feel to them I think it works. That’s my take anyway.

Q. I don’t know if you’re aware, but you were very lucky with your Eiffel Tower shot – if (like most people) you’d waited to see the ‘flashes’ (on the hour for several minutes) on the Tower, you’d have been in copyright violation.
A. Good point. For those that don’t know, the Eiffel Tower has flashing/blinking lights on it that go off for about 5 minutes on the top of every hour. When those lights were installed, it’s said to have significantly changed the appearance of the Eiffel Tower enough so that any photos with the blinking lights on are copyrighted by the company that owns them and any use is forbidden. I did take a photo with all the lights blinking but I just thought it looked bad in a photo (very cool to see in person). It took away from the beauty of the tower for me. That said, I did some research and from what I could find, I’d still be OK if I posted the photo. Its only if I tried to use the photo commercially that I’d have a problem. Think about it. There were probably 1000 other people taking photos with me. You know those photos end up all over Facebook, twitter, blogs, wherever. I don’t think they’d be successful in forbidding people to post the photos. From what I read, you just can’t use them for commercial purposes. That said, I’m sure there’s some one out there that’ll tell me I’m wrong and I’m a law breaker due to my lack of respect for churches and monuments world wide and how I do the photography community a disservice bla bla bla… But I’m pretty sure those comments won’t make it through

Q. Great pictures from Paris, but did you also shoot some pictures in Amsterdam? It may be a smaller city, but it’s at least as beautiful.
A. I agree totally. Beautiful city! Honestly, I was working most of the time in the Netherlands. I had my evenings free and after the long days I had (and some jetlag), I just felt like hanging out and enjoying at a nice dinner and drinks (and admittedly some people watching) with my wife.

Q. Love your story of shooting the model in the Netherlands and forgetting to put your card in the camera. Why don’t you enable the feature that won’t let you shoot without a card in the camera?
A. I always enable that feature on my own cameras. I was using some one elses camera for the shoot though, and it wasn’t turned on (and I never checked).

Q. How did you get the starburst effect on the shot with the two street lamps in front?
A. I shoot my night HDRs at f/16. With the Nano coating on the newer Nikon lenses you can get a nice starburst without going all the way to f/22. Sometimes I even get them at f/11.

Q. Hey Matt! I do really like HDR. Could you share approximately how many images you took and the range of bracketing?
A. I set my Nikon D3 to shoot 5 frames most of the time. They’re each 1 stop apart and I discard the +1 and -1 photo so I’m just left with -2, metered, +2. For most photos that does the trick. Once in a while, I’ll have to change the settings to get a longer/shorter exposure depending if there’s a bright window or really dark shadowy area in the frame.

Professional Imaging 2011 Recap

Right before Photoshop World, Adobe invited me to be a keynote speaker at Professional Imaging 2011 in the Netherlands. When my wife heard about the invite, she immediately accepted (She LOVES Europe!). So we decided to make a work/play trip out of it.

I’m Amazed!
First, we stayed in Amsterdam while I spoke at Professional Imaging in the Netherlands. What a cool conference! They had about 7000 people attend in 3 days. It’s mostly geared toward the pro market but I even met some college students as well. I did a live compositing and selections class (and a little Lightroom) for the opening keynote on all 3 days for Adobe. Then later in the day, I did a layers class where I covered all kinds of things for retouching portraits. Scott told me this last year but I didn’t realize how into this stuff the Dutch are. For 3 straight days they made me feel like a total rock star (don’t worry, I didn’t let it go to my head… yet ).

Anyway, they were just so welcoming. and every one I met came up and said they watch every episode of Photoshop User TV, D-Town TV, or the Grid. I got to do some Layers book signings (the publisher had a booth too) and even stopped in to watch some presentations from photography and lighting wizard Frank Doorhof.

A Funny, Yet Slightly Embarrassing Moment
For the most part all of the classes went over great. There was one funny, yet embarrassing moment. See, I did some live shoots during my compositing class so I could show the composite from start to finish. Well, while testing the lighting before the class I put my card into my card reader. Then class started and I did the live shoot. Can you guess what happened from here? Yup, I did the whole shoot with no card in the camera (oops). Luckily, the crowd was very forgiving (they only threw small pieces of fruit at me) and we even got some laughs out of it. Some people said they liked it because they were glad to know it doesn’t just happen to them – I think they were just being nice

Anyway, it ate up some time so I had to quickly composite the image but (again luckily) it turned out great. Here’s the final composite (with original overlayed on top of it). The model in the composite was shot on a white seamless background and I dropped her into the crowd along with some Photoshop special effects and lighting to help pull it off.

Off to Paris (and a new friend)
After Pro Imaging was done, my wife and I headed to Paris. It was forecast to be sunny and not-so-cold. But as the day got closer the weather changed and we basically had 3 days of blah-gray skies and cold windy weather. It made being creative nearly impossible. But a friend-of-the-blog, Serge Ramelli, was kind enough to meet me for sunrise on 2 mornings and show me around. Here’s some photos and info:

WARNING: You’re about to see a lot of HDR photos. I’d love to have had some great weather with some beautiful light so I didn’t have to process the living daylights out of everything I shot, but that just wasn’t in the cards for this trip. So I made the best of it and bracketed most of my photos. I think that dramatic architecture along with some night photos make great candidates for HDR, so that’s most of what I ended up liking from the trip. So if HDR infuriates you or causes you any undue stress I encourage you to stop reading here and go try to view a Flash website on your iPad

OK, my first morning with Serge. He brought me to one of his favorite spots (this was the only time I saw the sun peak through). This is an HDR tonemapped with Photomatix and finished with some vignetting and white balance adjustments (warming) in Lightroom. It’s actually not a pano, just cropped that way.

(CLICK TO SEE ANY PHOTO LARGER)

A couple more from the same bridge. Same process as above.

I tried not to take the typical Eiffel Tower photo. I thought this one turned out pretty cool. Another HDR tonemapped in Photomatix. There was lots of flare too, so I spent a decent amount of time with the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop.

Here’s a few from the Louvre. You’ll notice most of these are HDR. I just felt that a place like this has a surreal feel to it and HDR was the only way to bring that feeling out.

Another HDR from Notre Dame. I found out afterward that I wasn’t supposed to use a tripod. You can read more about this one here.

Here’s a few from Serge’s secret photo spots in Montmartre. I think the rain really helped here.

Most of my photos were taken with a Nikon D3 and my Nikon 28-300mm lens. The Eiffel Tower and Louvre photos were taken with the Nikon 14-24mm lens. The last two were taken with Serge’s Canon and 24-70mm lens (my battery ran out and I didn’t have an extra with me – and no, my hands did not burn when I touched a Canon). Serge was even kind enough to find a model for me to shoot some lifestyle portraits at the Eiffel Tower which is another post in itself.

All in all, I had a great trip. I expected that teaching in the Netherlands was going to be a blast, but it exceeded my expectations by far. And for all of it’s cold weather, Paris was awesome as well. I’m incredibly grateful for meeting Serge. Not only is he a great photographer but we had a really nice time just hanging out. I’ve been to Paris before (in June) so I know it can be warm too. Now I’ll just have to make another trip there when the weather is a bit nicer