Lightroom Q&A'sLightroom Tips

Lightroom Pro Q&A with Jeff Revell (JRev!)

Hi everyone. Here’s another in a series of mini-interviews with some of the Lightroom pros out there where they’ve answered a short series of questions about how they use and feel about Lightroom:

Today’s Guest: My good friend Jeff Revell (AKA: Tree Shooter – sorry inside joke) 🙂

Bio/Intro: Jeff Revell is a Washington DC based photographer who runs the PhotoWalkPro.com blog. He is also the author of 5 books in the Snapshots to Great Shots camera series from Peachpit Press. In his spare time, Jeff likes to host photowalk events in and around the DC area as well and at Photoshop World.

Q. How many presets do you have in the Develop module?

A. 48 and counting. I love using the Preview Window to quickly scroll through the presets and see the affect on the image. If I like the way it looks in the preview I can then use it as a starting point to refine the look in the other Develop module panels.

Q. What’s your favorite panel besides the Basic panel ( 🙂 Sorry the basic panel is too much of a gimmee)?

A. I would have to say that 80% of my work is done in the Basic Panel. Although I have to admit that I am probably one of the few people that likes using the Histogram to adjust Blacks, Fill Light, Exposure, and Recovery. I really love having those four adjustments in one place. Just click and drag.

Q. What panel/slider/feature do you use the least?

A. My least used Feature is probably the Web Panel. Not that I havenÂ’t used it, itÂ’s just not that often that I find myself needing to create a web gallery.

Q. Do you keyword (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. I keyword everything. Not because I am uploading to a stock agency or anything like that. I just find it easier to locate my images by keyword, especially since I can never remember what date I shot which images.

Q. Do you use Collections (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. I love collections, especially when I am writing a book and trying to identify images to use. I actually create Smart Collections combined with the color labels. When I see an image I want to use I just assign it a color by pressing a number, like 6 for red. IÂ’ll set up my smart collection to add anything with the color label red and bam, all my red images are instantly added to the collection. ItÂ’s such a huge time saver.

Q. Favorite Lightroom Plug-in?

A. Wow, is it all right if I have 3? Nik Software has a couple of great plug-ins that I use all the time. Silver Efex Pro is the only thing I use to make black & white images anymore. It is just amazing. Viveza 2 is my favorite plug-in for finetuning colors, and when I want to get a little gritty, I fire up my Topaz Adjust plug-in from Topaz Labs.

Q. If you could add one feature to Lightroom what would it be?

A. Adobe has done some amazing stuff in the next version of Lightroom 3 Beta 2. A lot of the things that I wanted are now in there. There is one thing I would like to be able to do in Lightroom and that is to have smooth zooming that could be stopped at any zoom level. So I could use the wheel on a mouse or two fingers on my MacBook Pro and zoom in and out, stopping at whatever my desired magnification level. Now that would be SWEET!

Jeff Revell
www.photowalkpro.com

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