If You Use Lightroom, Do You Need Photoshop CS6?

I’m in sunny (sorry, cloudy and maybe rainy) LA today teaching my Lightroom seminar, but I wanted to do a quick post about some questions I got the other day in my Minneapolis seminar. I had a few people ask me what was new for Photographers in Photoshop CS6 and was it worth it or not to upgrade since they use Lightroom mostly. So, I thought I’d compile a quick list of what I thought was important (as a photographer in CS6) and some honest commentary about whether or not you really “need” the feature. By the way… if you want to see videos on any of this stuff NAPP’s did a full Photoshop CS6 Launch Site and it has all of the features covered.

1. Camera Raw: Camera Raw is now up to par with Lightroom 4 so they’re basically the same thing (comparing to the Develop module of course). Sure, I use Lightroom most of the time, but I still use ACR too. When some one hands me a file to work on, I don’t import it into my Lightroom library and all that. I usually just open it up in ACR. If you find yourself editing random photos here and there, then you’ll want to consider upgrading.

2. Content Aware Improvements: To me, this is a must have. There’s a new Content Aware Move tool that let’s you move part of one photo to another and attempts to fill in the gap that you leave behind. With the right image, it works great. Wrong image… eh… But throw that in with the content-aware option added to the Patch tool and I think it’ makes a pretty compelling feature to consider for retouching.

3. New Adaptive Wide Angle Filter: This one is pretty cool. Lightroom has the Lens Correction panel which works great. But I have to admit, I’ve been jumping to Photoshop to use the new Wide Angle filter more often now if I’m trying to fix perspective problems from wide angle shots.

4. Background and Auto-Save: If you’re working with large images (especially when you consider the file size of images from, say, a camera like the new Nikon D800), you wind up spending a lot of time saving your images and waiting. With Background Save, you can continue to work while it saves in the background. It’s the kinda thing that you have to experience. If you’re not working with really large files, it’s probably not an issue. But if you are, you’ll probably upgrade in a heartbeat once you see this in action.

5. Blur Filters: The new blur filters are a little more gimmicky in my opinion. It’s not a huge selling point for me personally, but if you’re creative and like to mess around with pseudo-blur techniques, then it’s something you’ll at least want to check out.

6. Crop Tool: For Lightroom users, this one isn’t too overwhelming. We’ve had great cropping since Lightroom 1 so now Photoshop is catching up. Still, I crop in Photoshop a lot too, so it’s nice to have a similar experience now

7. The Dark Interface: It’s definitely not a huge selling point, but it does sweeten the pot. Especially for Lightroom users. Face it – our photos just look better against a dark interface right?

8. Video: If you’re shooting a lot of DSLR video, I think you’ll find that Photoshop may just be the tool that actually gets you editing video. My co-Photoshop Guy RC Concepcion said it best, when he explained that now we can edit video in a program that we’re used to working in, rather than learning an entirely new program to do it. I still haven’t caught the video “bug” yet, but I do have to say the upgrades Adobe has done with video have been catching the eye of even the video pros that are out there.

9. Skin-Tone Selection: If you’re adjusting skin tones, then the new feature in the Select > Color Range dialog can come in handy. For example, if you’re trying to remove the red from some one’s face, you can quickly select their skin tone and use Hue/Saturation to reduce the red (rather than manually brushing and masking). This one is a hard call for me. I totally think it’s a cool feature, it’s just not something I’ve used much yet so the jury is still out. I guess you have to think to yourself how many times you try to select some one’s skin. If that’s a lot, then you’ll definitely get your money’s worth out of this feature.

10. Overall speed improvements: Speed is always a tough sell. Once you use something that’s faster for about a day or two, it becomes second nature and it doesn’t “feel” faster anymore. So, to me at least, speed didn’t seem like anything great. But after using CS6 for a few weeks and going back to CS5 to do some videos a while back, I can say that the speed improvements are the real deal. I mean, I use Liquify all the time for retouching and that tool alone is 1000% faster than it ever was. Overall though, the whole program just feels zippier (I can’t believe my spellcheck didn’t come up on zippier!)

10.5. Some old tools return: They also added Lighting Effects and Contact Sheet back in. I guess you can call them features for photographers “technically”. Lighting Effects is definitely cool if you’re looking to add some mood to your photos. And if you’re creating Contact Sheets (which is back in CS6) that’s not a bad tool either, but if you’re a Lightroom user then we can just do contact sheets in the Print module.

If I had to choose, I’d say that Content Aware enhancements, the Adaptive Wide Angle Filter, Background and Auto-save, and the Camera Raw enhancements make the upgrade worth it for photographers. Throw in the speed improvements and I think any Lightroom user who uses Photoshop would be happy with their $169 (after NAPP member discount) upgrade cost. Hope this helps a little.

Lightroom Tip and Seminar Contest Winners

Happy Friday everyone. I’m in Portland, Oregon right now getting ready to head up to Seattle. I’ll probably be shooting at Olympic National Park this weekend so if you’ve got any great photo spots, I’d sure appreciate it. Anyway, I figured I’d close up the week with a tip as well as post the winners who got a free ticket to my Kelby Training Lightroom 4 Live seminar later this month.

Okay, first… the tip. This one is for spot removal and making it more efficient in Lightroom. Instead of zooming in and dragging your cursor around looking for spots in your photo, you can help Lightroom search section by section to make sure you don’t miss any areas. First, zoom in to your photo to 100%. Then go to the Navigator panel (top left of Lightroom) and place the square in the top left of your photo (like you see below).

Now…ready for the cool part? Just press your page-down key. Lightroom will automatically move your little zoomed-in square to the next section below so you can check that area for spots. Press it again and it keeps going down. When it hits the bottom of the photo it’ll automatically shoot right up to the top of the next section of your photo and keep going. You gotta give it a try to see it in action but it works great.

Next, the winners for my Lightroom 4 Seminar. Don’t forget that if you didn’t win, you can still go Here’s the link on the Kelby Training Live website to find out more about the dates and outline for the day.

• Minneapolis: Gregg Jaehning
• Los Angeles: Jerry W.
Ronda Morris, you almost won but you called me Scott (just kidding, that didn’t keep you from winning – I just got a kick out of it)
• Chicago: Philip Merritt
• Lansing: Rich Wyllis

Lightroom Tip: The Super Awesome Resetting-Multiple-Sliders Tip

Happy Easter weekend to everyone. I don’t know about you but I’m getting the heck out of work today as early as possible to go eat fish. Okay, maybe not to eat fish (I don’t like fish) but I’m still getting out of here ASAP!. Anyway, on to the tip. So, you may or may not know that if you double click a slider in Lightroom it resets that slider to 0 (it’s default setting, but that’s not the tip). But here’s two non-slider places in Lightroom that double-clicking helps out a lot, because it resets a few sliders to 0, rather than just one.

1) I change white balance settings all the time and then want to revert back to the default. Well, to reset both the Temperature and Tint White Balance sliders to their original “As Shot” settings, just double-click directly on the letters WB in the Basic panel.

2) Adjustment Brush or Graduated Filter (I guess that’s technically 3 huh?): There’s a bunch of settings under each one of these. I’ll often change a few of them. But then, later, when I want to get back to zero for all of them you’d think you have to reset each one right? Nope! Just double-click the word “Effect” at the top of the panel and it resets all sliders to zero.

Cool huh? Hope you enjoy and have a great

My First Air-to-Air Photo Workshop with Moose Peterson

Let me just start out by saying do not attend one of these workshops. If you do, you will absolutely get hooked. I know I just did … I’m kidding of course. This past weekend was one of the best times I’ve ever had shooting. Moose Peterson invited me out to spend the day at one of his Air-to-Air photo workshops. My wife tells me that I’ve had an ear-to-ear smile on my face ever since.

I arrived early Saturday morning at Stallion 51. I was immediately greated by Moose, his wife Sharon and KT (The coordinator at Stallion 51 – make sure you ask for her if you ever go by). I got there before sunrise to photograph the planes on the ground (statics). We had some ground fog and were even able to get up higher and shoot down. It was a great way to get warmed up and shoot some beautiful planes before everything kicked in.

(Click to see larger versions of any of the photos)

After that a few people had mentioned that Lee Lauderback (the owner and chief pilot at Stallion 51) was bringing his falcon out. Well, not wanting to sound dumb (I don’t know much about planes), I never really asked too much about it and just nodded my head figuring that he had a plane that was a “falcon” and that we’d be photographing it. I was wrong. It literally was a falcon that Lee owns

Then we all grabbed some breakfast together. I got to sit down with Moose, his lovely wife Sharon, Richard VanderMeulen, and Scott (pilot) and enjoyed a short stack of pancakes. We got to talk about planes, cameras, social media, more planes, more cameras, and well, you know… the normal breakfast conversation I even got to spend some time chatting with the other guys in the workshop and (as usually happens in these workshops), everyone instantly becomes great friends. After that we went back to Stallion 51 for some classroom time. World renown aviation photographer, Richard VanderMeulen gave us a nice presentation on air-to-air photography. I learned a ton from this. From safety, to what planes are best to shoot from, all the way to composition and how to get a great photo. We took a small break and then geared up for our briefing for what was to come later in the afternoon. Lee stepped in with the other pilots and briefed them (and us) on exactly what was going to happen… right down to the minute. They had everything planned perfectly. As you sat there, you knew you were in good hands.

Next is when the butterflies really start building. We all headed outside and put on our harnesses. These guys mean business when they talk safety. You have a full harness (you’ll see why you need it in in a minute) that gets strapped in to the photo ship (that’s the plane the photographers ride in) in two places. Then during a short walk to the plane you start realizing that this is REALLY happening. Our ride that day was a Skyvan which typically has sky divers as it’s passengers. Here’s a photo of the tunnel-like opening that we shoot out of in the back (thanks to Tony Granata for the photo). That out-of-focus stuff in the foreground is actually other people shooting. Yes, that’s how close we were to the edge.

Here’s a photo of Moose getting ready. You can see the yellow harness that he had on was similar to the ones we all wore as well. Although… I think Moose gave me the one that had some faulty hooks on it. But I switched with this guy Tony from New Jersey when he wasn’t looking, so I’m pretty sure I had the safe one again (totally kidding!!!)

I walked up to the Skyvan not knowing really what to expect. I knew we’d be looking out the back of an open plane, but I never really knew that I’d actually be sitting on the edge of the platform with nothing but air between me and the ground 6000 feet below. Seriously, the edge you see me sitting on is it! Don’t get me wrong though. I love heights, I love adventure, adrenaline and doing crazy things. That doesn’t mean that I don’t get a little nervous when I’m getting ready. Oh and I wonder who the goofball is with his lens cap still on

Right on schedule (even a little bit ahead of time), we taxied out to the runway and were in the air in just a matter of minutes. Our subjects this evening were a yellow T-6 Texan, 2 Silver/Blue P-51D Mustangs, and (my personal favorite) a L-39 Albatross Jet.

Within about 2-3 minutes of being airborne we had our first plane to shoot. Just one plane at this point and it was a great time to get accustomed to shooting up there. The biggest trick to shooting these planes was the shutter speed. For most of the shoot, there was plenty of light so you could easily get shutter speeds of 1/500th of a second and ever higher at times. But if you used that high of a shutter speed, here’s what you got.

See the problem? The propeller spin has gaps in the blur. Because of the speed at which the propeller spins, if you shoot at too high of a shutter speed you don’t get proper propeller blur. Essentially, you want a full rotation with no gaps in it. Because of that, I dropped my shutter speed to 1/80th and set the camera on Shutter Priority so it picked the appropriate aperture. Heck, even 1/80th on the yellow T-6 wasn’t slow enough, and sometimes I had to dip down to 1/60th to get the full prop blur. Throw that in with the fact that you’re in a moving plane, the planes behind you are also moving, and you can see how the guys who make a living photographing this stuff earn their money. It definitely wasn’t easy. And the pilots… don’t even get me started. They flew so damn still it was crazy.

Over the course of the next hour or so before sunset, the 4 planes flew various formations that included all of them alone at some point and all of them together at some point. You had about 3 minutes with each formation and the pilots and our crew on board planned this perfectly. It was the perfect amount of time to get honed in on what to shoot and how to shoot it. When you were done shooting, the next plane was on it’s way in.

We flew in a constant circle so we were able to get different backgrounds as well as different lighting based on where the sun was. My gear of choice was a Nikon D3s and 70-200mm lens. Moose said he sometimes puts the tele-extender on, but suggested I leave it off since it was my first time and just crop a little after if I needed. If I’ve ever learned one thing in my career as a photographer… Listen to Moose! So I did and I’m happy I left it off.

My favorite plane of them all was our last subject right at sunset. It was the L-39 Albatross Jet. I absolutely love jets! Ever since I first saw Top Gun as a kid, I was hooked. It’s been a dream of mine to fly in a jet. This was the next best thing (but I’m still determined to get up in a jet one day!). These guys came so close it was amazing. In one of the photos below, you’ll see my out-of-focus shoe circled at the bottom of the frame to help you gauge just how close they were. A-freakin’-mazing!!! Oh yeah, I was able to switch over to Aperture priority mode and control the aperture at this point, because the jet doesn’t have a prop to worry about.

Right on schedule, we finished up, landed safely and were on our way to our cars within minutes. The entire crew (pilots and all) joined the class for dinner. I had a 90+ minute drive back to Tampa (and was pretty beat from getting up at 5am), so I didn’t go with them but I really wished I did. All I can say is that this was an incredible day. It was everything I had hoped for and more. Moose, his entire team, as well as the folks over at Stallion 51, put on an impeccable workshop and performance that day.

All totaled I think I shot about 1500 photos in the air. It was constant shooting and I never wanted to stop. I had a 32 GB and a 16 GB card in my camera just in case. Personally, I didn’t shoot with two bodies, but some other guys had another body with a wide angle lens on. Being a newbie and because of the 1/80th of a second shutter speed, I’d say half the photos are slightly blurry (but nobody will ever see those right?). But I definitely got enough sharp ones to be excited about. And I learned a ton while shooting (and after) which will help me out the next time I go up… and trust me… there WILL be a next time.

On his website, Moose writes “There is literally no other workshop on the planet like this one!”. I can vouch for that statement and say that it’s absolutely 100% true. There isn’t anything out there like this and I feel confident in saying it was by far the most fun I’ve ever had shooting.

I just wanted to say a huge thanks to Moose, Richard, Scott, Lee, KT and all of the pilots and staff at Stallion 51 for a wonderful learning and shooting opportunity. If you can make it to one of Moose’s Air-to-Air photo workshops, I highly suggest you do. And if you’re ever in the Central Florida area, make sure you look up Stallion 51 and ask for KT (she rocks!). You can stop by to see the planes, and more importantly, you can actually get to fly in one too. I know I’ll be back. Thanks for reading!

Lightroom Tip – Resetting Sliders The Quick Way

Here’s one of those tips that, truth be told, I tend to forget about. But then, every time I use it I’m like “Crap! I’ve got to use that more”. Here’s an example. I’ll be editing a photo where I usually adjust the white balance first, then maybe some of the toning sliders in the Basic panel (Exposure, Fill Light, etc…). Then maybe I’ll drop the photo too. After I look at it for a while, sometimes I’m just not happy with it so I’ll reset the sliders and start from scratch. Well, so many times I just hit the Reset button which resets EVERYTHING, not just the toning sliders I’ve moved. So now, I have to recrop and adjust the white balance again when really, all I wanted to do was the toning sliders. Okay… all that to get to the tip. If you hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key when you’re in a panel, you’ll see some text appear at the top of the panel that reads “Reset Tone” (in my Basic Panel example). But it works for more than just the Basic Panel. So if you ever make adjustments in several panels, but then decide you want to ditch the settings in say, the Effects panel, there’s no need to manually reset all the sliders to their defaults. Just hold down Option/Alt and click Reset – it’ll do it for you. Hope you have a great weekend. I’m off to forget some more tips

Are DVDs Dead? (for Lightroom photo backup purposes that is)

Just curious… anyone using DVDs to backup their photos still? Some one asked me the other day how they should name their backup photo DVDs so that they’re easy to find later on in Lightroom. Honestly, it’s been YEARS since I’ve used a DVD to backup photos. The average DVD holds 4.7 Gigabytes per layer. Sure there’s different kind of DVDs but for the most part, you’re looking around 4 GB. So if you shoot with a 16 GB card (and fill it up), you’d need 4 DVDs just to back up that one card. If you’re shooting with a 32GB card (which I am), you’d need almost 8 DVDs. To me, it just doesn’t seem like a feasible backup solution any more. You can buy 1 TB external drives for under $150 now. That would be around 215 DVDs worth of storage. So you could even buy two of them to make sure you have two backups of your photos (something I rarely hear people who backup to DVDs do).

Are you still using DVDs to backup your photos? If so, why?

Lightroom 4 Tip – Blacks and Whites

Here’s a cool little tip that’s actually been around in Lightroom for a while now, but it makes MUCH more sense with the renamed sliders in Lightroom 4. Basically, I get asked what the whites and blacks sliders are for a lot. I use them to set the white and black point in the photo. Usually, you’d think you have to turn on the highlight and shadow clipping warnings (by pressing J) to use them but there’s another trick. Next time, try just holding down the Option key (PC: Alt key) when moving the sliders. For Whites, everything will turn black as you drag it to the right. When you start to see some details popping up (don’t worry too much about the color) that means you’ve got a good white point.

(here’s an example of what you’ll see – click to see it larger)

Then drag the black slider and everything will turn white. When you start to see a decent amount of black specs showing up, then you’ve got your black point. Setting a white and black point have been around for a while in Photoshop, so it’s definitely nice to see them show up in a more consistent way in Lightroom. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Why I Don’t Backup My Photos Using Lightroom

If you’ve used the Import dialog in Lightroom, you’ve probably noticed an area under File Handing called “Make a Second Copy To:”. This is Lightroom’s way of letting you make a backup of your photos as you import them. That way you can get your import and your backup all done at once. A while back, some one pointed out that when you use this feature, you don’t have much control over how the backup drive stores the photos. Basically, it just stores them in a folder named “Imported on….”. For me this is a big problem because it’s not how I store my photos in my main photo drive. So now, my backup drive and my main photo drive would be out of sync.

That’s why I leave this feature turned off. Instead, I simply import my photos like normal (by the way, I cover this stuff in my Lightroom In Depth classes on Kelby Training by the way). I store them on my main photo drive in a “Photos” folder and I put subfolders under that for each shoot. So it looks something like this:

Then, once a day/week/however long I simply clone the main photo drive to the backup drive. You could use a simple copy/paste or you could save some time by using a program like Super Duper (some other options including PC). Either way, the goal here is to have your photo backup drive look exactly like your main photo drive. That way, recovering from your backup drive is simple. Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather you use the 2nd copy feature in the Import dialog over nothing at all. But if you want my actual backup solution and why I don’t use Lightroom’s features to help me with this, now you know.

My Lightroom 4 Doesn’t Look Like Your Lightroom 4

In poking around forums, etc… I’ve seen a bunch of questions over the last few days about people not seeing the new Develop Module sliders in Lightroom 4 Beta (specifically the ones in the Basic Panel). In LR4, Adobe changed the Basic panel to include sliders that 1) Make more sense and, 2) Are way more powerful. However, because they’ve changed them so much you can indeed have two versions of the Basic panel because they couldn’t automatically switch older photos for you. So here’s the deal: Your Basic panel should like like the image below:

(click for larger view)

If it doesn’t, that means you’re editing a photo that was edited in an older version of Lightroom or Camera Raw. It’s easy enough to change though. Just scroll down to the Calibration panel in the Develop module. Under the Process setting make sure it reads 2012, not 2010.

Now you’ll be using the newest Lightroom stuff and you’ll be able to take advantage of the new sliders in the Basic panel.

Lightroom 4 Beta Q&A – The Day After

First off, I wanted to say a HUGE thanks to Tom Hogarty for spending the day with us at Kelby Training yesterday to answer all of your questions (and to Adobe for letting Tom get away for the day). The live broadcasts will be running all day so feel free to stop by Kelby Training’s website and watch them. Also, Tom and I answered a bunch of questions over the course of the day. I figured I’d dedicate a Q&A day to some of the most popular ones:

Q. If I upgrade to Lightroom 4 Beta, will it hurt or corrupt my copy of Lightroom 3?
A. Not at all. Lightroom 4 Beta is a totally separate install and doesn’t affect your copy of Lightroom 3 at all.

Q. Can I use Lightroom 4 Beta for my production work?
A. I wouldn’t really recommend it. Adobe definitely doesn’t recommend it. Having your paycheck tied to a beta version of the software probably isn’t such a good idea. That said, I can’t guarantee I’ll follow my own advice

Q. Can I upgrade my catalogs from Lightroom 3 to Lightroom 4 Beta?
A. Didn’t you read the previous question? You’re not really supposed to move your production/important work to LR4 Beta. In an effort to keep you from doing just that you can only create a new catalog for LR4. You can’t open an existing one from a previous version of Lightroom.

Q. Okay, but will the final release version of Lightroom 4 upgrade my Lightroom 3 catalogs though?
A. Absolutely!

Q. How about all the work I do in the beta version of Lightroom 4. Will that get upgraded too?
A. Yup. Adobe doesn’t make any promises that they’ll upgrade your beta stuff but in the past they’ve always been able to.

Q. Will Lightroom 4 Beta only work with Photoshop CS5?
A. Nope. Lightroom 4 will work just fine with CS4 (or CS3 or CS2 or Elements for that matter).

Q. Where can I get some awesome Lightroom 4 training?
A. Great question! No one really asked this but it’s a good way for me to plug a few things. First, Scott Kelby and I created NAPP’s Lightroom 4 Beta Launch Site. And don’t forget all of the live webcasts that Tom and I did on launch day over at Kelby Training.

Q. When will the final version of Lightroom 4 be released?
A. Adobe hasn’t officially announced this yet. In the past it’s been anywhere from 2 months to 14 months.

Q. Really? So you’re gonna leave us hangin’?
A. Sorry… I’ll lose my cushy Lightroom gig if I reveal any more I can say this… The expiration date listed for Lightroom 4 Beta is March 31, 2012. Typically, it’s not good practice for a company to let the beta expire without releasing the final version before the expiration date. It tends to leave people hanging and forget all about your brand new version of the product. That’s all I’m sayin’

Q. Will my plug-ins work with Lightroom 4 Beta (for example, onOne’s software, Nik’s Silver Efex Pro or Viveza)?
A. Here’s the deal. The official answer is that you should probably ask the plug-in company. Adobe does provide them with pre-release versions of the software so they can start planning and making their plug-ins available. That said, I installed Lightroom 4 Beta and most of my plug-ins were carried over in the Photo > Edit In menu. So give it a try. But officially, most plug-in companies probably won’t make any major updates until the final version of Lightroom 4 comes out.

Thanks for stopping by. If you have any other questions, post them in a comment and I’ll do round 2 of Q&A.