Evening By The Water
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Introduction to Lightroom
Further to the previous post, here is a video from Adobe that will introduce you to Lightroom. I'll post more great videos in the near future. If you want to be notified when new posts arrive, please subscribe using the buttons near the bottom-right of the blog.
Should I Buy Photoshop? It's A Question I Get Asked A Lot.
People that are new to photography, or even those that have been taking pictures for years, often ask me if they should buy Photoshop to start manipulating their images. The answer is NO!
Don't get me wrong. In my opinion Photoshop is the greatest program ever written. It's just not for most people. Photoshop is a large application that can do more things than you can imagine. It can do things that seem like magic. It is, however, a complex thing to learn. You can't just jump into Photoshop and expect it to be easy to use. Being really good at Photoshop takes years and requires you to climb a pretty steep learning curve. Take it on if you want to, but there is an easier (and cheaper) way for most people to access and manipulate their images.
I'm not talking about the cheaper, stripped-down version of PS called Photoshop Elements. No, that has most of the same issues that the new/amateur photographer has to climb with the full version of Photoshop. That is, to get the most out of PS you need to use layers, adjustment layers, blending modes, layer masks, etc. If climbing that learning curve over the next few years doesn't interest you, then let me introduce you to Adobe Lightroom.
Lightroom is made by the same company that makes Photoshop (ie. Adobe). Lightroom has much of the same functionality of PS, but doesn't have the really advanced stuff listed above (layers, etc). However, it has a lot of components that PS simply doesn't have. For example:
- LR is fantastic at storing and cataloguing your images. PS doesn't do that. LR makes it easy to import your images into the program and then store them in easy-to-use catalogues (think folders). I have my images catalogued by year, and then within each year there are folders for each photo shoot I've done. Within each photo shoot folder is a folder for the raw images from the shoot and a folder for the finished/processed images from the shoot.
- LR can tag your images with a flag, various colours, or stars. This makes organizing your images a breeze. For example, the first thing I do after I've loaded the raw images from a shoot into LR and put them into a catalog is to go through them at hi-res and select the "good ones". I simply press the letter "P" to add a flag to any image I like. Once this is done for the entire folder, I can simply tell LR to show me only the flagged images (hiding the non-flagged ones). Now I can start to work on the good images only.
- LR can do really excellent slide shows.
- LR has many, many print templates so you can easily print you images in all kinds of sizes and combinations.
- LR can export your images to a web gallery. It has many built-in flash and html templates that make building a web gallery incredibly simple.
There is much more, but I'll leave it at that for now. The two final things I'll say is that learning LR takes a fraction of the time it takes to learn PS (you can learn LR in a day or two), and LR is about one-third the price of the full version of PS!
I'll be posting some training videos for LR in the future, and will likely be offering some training classes for those that buy LR and want to know how to get the most out of it.
What are your thoughts?
Best!
John
First panorama from AutoStitch app (and app review!)
Howdy! This is the first image I took with the AutoStitch app I just downloaded to my iPhone.
Not bad! It's not Photoshop but for a camera phone it's pretty darn good. It is a combination of about 7 images. The final image weighs in at 1Meg and almost 4MP. What do you think?
(BTW, that's my coffee on the far left! I put it down to try out the new app)
The AutoStitch app is available in Apple's app store for $1.99. It couldn't be simpler to use. You simply use the iphone's standard camera and take a series of images. They could be left to right, right to left, high to low, low to high, or a combination of these. The key is that you must overlap some of the photos. For example, take the gas station near the left of the image. If my first image has the gas station in the middle of the frame, then the next image I take to the right should include a good portion of the right side of the gas station in that next image, and so on. This gives the stitching software some landmarks on two shots to help it put things together. Once all your images are taken, go into the AutotStitch app, select all the images you want it to use for the panorama, and hit the "Stitch" button. The software puts all the images together and tries to blend them to the best of it's ability. When it's done it will give you the opportunity to drag a few corner sliders to crop your image (trust me, you will need to do this). From there you can save it to your phone's photo library, manipulate it with other apps, or share it with you friends.
Let me know if you have any questions...
Best!
John
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
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