Sometimes we start working with our photos and start to outgrow the hard drive we started with and add new ones as they fill up. Soon you can find yourself in a mess of drives and unclear as to where any of your photos are. The following procedures are for consolidating your photos in Lightroom which are residing on multiple hard drives in to a single hard drive and eliminating any missing photos in your Lightroom catalog. To perform this task you will need to have all your hard drives containing your photos connected, a newly formatted hard drive large enough to accommodate all your photographs and room for future photos, and know where your current Catalog is on your drive.
With the new version of any software there's always changes that leave us asking, "Where did that go?". With the introduction of the new Photoshop CS6, it was no different. With CS6 having more changes than any release of Photoshop in a very long time, you can be certain you will be wondering where some of your favorite tools went. Some were moved, changed or renamed but most of them still exist. It's just a matter of finding them. Lets take a look at where the Mask panel went and what happened to the Adjustments panel.
One of the many questions I get in my Photoshop classes is how to do selective black and white photos where the subject is in color but the background is desaturated and turned to black and white. One of my Photoshop students, Jo Brady, happened on this fox in her yard one morning and caught it in this great picture. She wanted to turn the background black and white while leaving the fox in color to enhance its presence. So I thought I would share a step-by-step process on how to do this in Photoshop CS6. You can also do this in older versions of Photoshop including Elements.
One of the new features to appear in the new version of Lightroom 4 is the ability to email directly out of the Lightroom program. The new feature allows you to send email containing your photos from Lightroom or use your default email application. Lightroom is set up to use email providers like AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or your own provider.
Creating a Contact Sheet for a photo shoot is one of the easiest ways to present your client a sheet of photo thumbnails so they can decide which ones to choose. Fortunately, Adobe created a more streamlined version of this process in CS5 by adding it directly in to Adobe Bridge under the Output workspace. In earlier versions, you had to create seperate JPEGs of the contact sheet in the Bridge menu Tools<Photoshop>Contact Sheet II. They are bringing it back in CS6 again but I like the new version because I can output PDFs directly from Bridge. Lets look at how to make a Contact Sheet in Adobe Bridge.
One of the new features to appear in Lightroom 4 is the addition of the Map module. The Map module allows you to see on a Google map where your pictures where taken if your camera has built in GPS. If your camera does not have built in GPS you can place your photos on the map manually or import a track log from a GPS device and match them up to selected photos in your catalog. The map data and screen images come from Google so you will need to be connected to the Internet in order to see the map.
Many Lightroom users are familiar with the Star Rating system for rating and filtering your photos to eventually find your selects and picks for developing but Lightroom also gives you another set of labels called the Color Label. These are another set of labels to use in your studio workflow and can be customized. I like to use the Star Ratings for finding my selects then reserve the Color Labels for labeling my photos as reminders that certain photos need to be printed, retouched, or color corrected. This can be particularly helpful if you have more than one person working on the photos in a studio setting. When dividing tasks in the Studio one can easily see which photos need to be color corrected or printed for a client.
If you have been a Lightroom user and have upgraded from previous versions the first thing you need to understand is the new arrangement and the renaming of the tone control sliders in the Basic panel of Lightroom 4. The new and improved tone controls have changed and moved around enough to confuse you at first look so lets see what's changed and how the new controls affect the developing of our photos.
First off, if you are developing photos you previously imported in to Lightroom 3 (LR3) they will default to the old Process Version 2010 when you first develop them in Lightroom 4 (LR4). To update your photo to the new Process Version 2012, and see the new Tone controls in the Basic panel, you can update your photo any of these ways: Either click on the exclamation point icon in the bottom right of the image preview window in the Develop module, select the new process in the menu Settings>Process>2012 (Current), or select the new version in the Process section of the Camera Calibration panel.
One of the ways to make your workflow more efficient when working with Raw files in Photoshop is to sync settings across multiple images that have the same setup like in a studio table top shot or even a portrait session. Using a gray card or similar like the ColorChecker Passport can make life even easier since you will have something to measure your grey balance with. Even if you don't have a gray card you can set the develop settings in one image and sync them to the rest of images with a simple command in Bridge. Lets take a look on how to do this in Bridge.
If you're using a gray card of some sort you want to get your White Balance set first. Select the photo with your gray card in Bridge and open it in Camera Raw by going to the menu File>Open In Camera Raw… (Command-R).
As photographers were always trying to create unique looking images and a great way to add some flavor to your photo is with color. You can enhance the mood of a photo by warming or cooling it and the color is what gives a retro looking photo its nostalgic feel. An easy way to add flavor to your photos in Lightroom is by adding color with the Split Toning panel in the Develop module. You can use this heavily adding lots of color or just a hint to nudge the feeling a bit. This can also be done in Adobe Camera Raw with the Split Toning tab.
Using the Split Toning panel when developing your photographs will allow you to add your own unique look by adding color to the highlights or shadows or both. Below is a photo with no color added and the Saturation sliders are set at 0.
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