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.
One of the advantages of using Lightroom catalogs is while you travel or are on location shooting you can download photos to your laptop, develop them on your laptop then transfer all the work to your studio computer at a later date. This is a real common workflow for photographers who travel with a laptop and have a studio computer back at home. Without a little knowledge of catalogs and how to transfer them, this could be a headache and potentially make a mess of your studio catalog if not done right. Let's take a look at how to transfer your photos in Lightroom from your laptop to your studio computer.
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.
One of the cool new features in Lightroom 4 (LR4) is the added control to the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter. The more features and controls Adobe adds to this tool the better it gets. Now in LR4 Adobe has added a local White Balance control which is a huge benefit for photographs shooting in mixed light sources. A new HIghlights and Shadows control is also added. The third set of new controls added are Noise and Moiré sliders which are a welcome addition for those who want to remove noise in selected areas of your photo when its not needed in the entire image.
Truly the biggest addition here in my opinion is the added White Balance control. The Noise and Moiré controls are great too but I've had too many photos that were taken indoors and contaminated by the outside light from a window. Previously in LR3 you could only balance for one light and that presents a problem. Also, if you're photographing a wedding there is no control over light and you're at the mercy of what is falling on your subjects. This is not going to be a local adjustment you apply to a hundred photos but for the real important ones, you can make the fix when needed.
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).
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