Lightroom Tip - Split Screen Grayscale Conversion
If you use the Develop Modules "before and after" split view It becomes much easier, and more effective to make slider adjustments.
The Split view in the Develop Module before
Grayscale conversion
Once you convert the
image to grayscale you can then see both the original
colour image and the converted grayscale. Now suppose
you want to darken the blue sky it becomes much
easier to see the effect with both views in screen.
Split view used to view the real time effect of
the slider adjustments
The colour image shows
that the foreground is best lightened using the
Orange slider and you can see the effect whilst
keeping the original colour image in view.
Very powerful.
Hope you find this
useful.
Technorati Tags: adobe, photography, lightroom tips, lightroom, workflow
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Lightroom tips.
NoiseWARE Professional Photoshop Plug-in Review
Slide scanning is quite a steep learning curve and even when you do master it you often suffer from significant amounts of noise in the scanned image. The grainy effect of slide scanning was something I lived with until I discovered NoiseWARE from IMAGENOMIC.
NoiseWARE is a sophisticated Photoshop plug-in which allows you to remove noise from your image but will minimize the noise reduction on the less-noisy and other areas of critical detail.
The plugin allows you to see both before and after views of the effect of noise removal. There are lots of viewing options to choose from including horizontal and vertical before and after screen views. Also the work area of the plugin can be resized to fit what ever screen area you want.
NoiseWARE Photoshop Plugin - sky selected as area
for noise removal
The image above is a
particularly noisy in the sky. Selecting one or more
areas of the image allows noise removal to be based
on the chosen areas. If you don't want to get in to
that level of complexity you can just have Noiseware
do the removal process automatically.
There are a whole host of presets including ones for
Landscape, Portraits etc. If you really want fine
control you can fine tune the removal process by
noise frequency, colour and tonal range. Sharpening
can be turned off altogether or set as you want.
NoiseWARE vs Photoshop built in Dust and Grain
filter
I compared using
NoiseWARE with the built in Photoshop "Dust and
Grain" noise filter and you can see that NoiseWARE
preserves the fine detail as well as the detail in
the non sky area.
NoiseWARE is fast in operation and can take advantage
of dual processors. It claims to process an 8 MPixel
image in under 4 seconds. My images are usually start
at about 64MB in photoshop and typically take 7
seconds to process.
Other product features include:
- Self-learning noise profiles
- Bracketing and Multiple previews
- 16 bit supported
- batch processing via Photoshop Actions
Conclusion
I have no association with IMAGENOMIC. It's a great product which has improved my workflow. I would score it 5 out of 5.
Good luck and good shooting.
NoiseWARE professional lists for $69.95 and is available in both Mac and Windows versions.
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Link to NoiseWARE product page on the IMAGENOMIC website.
Technorati Tags: adobe, photography, Photoshop, workflow
Lightroom Tip - Thumbnail Icon Tricks
Lightroom Thumbnail showing Icons in bottom right
corner
Icons are added whenever
you do any of the following:
- Change image using the Develop Module
- Crop the image
- Add Keywords
All very interesting you
say, but there is more!
Click the Develop Icon - the Develop Module
will open with your image selected and you can fine
tune the edit.
Click the Keyword Icon - the Library Module
will open with the image selected and the Keyword
highlighted in the Keyword editor.
Click the Crop Icon - the Develop Module
with the image shown and the last crop edit is
displayed.
Note the icons are always shown in the Filmstrip
panel and clicking on them from there works as well.
This means that you can click an icon no matter which
Module you are working in.
Hope you find this
useful.
Technorati Tags: adobe, photography, lightroom tips, lightroom, workflow
Lightroom Tip - Clone Tool Options
Lightroom - Clone / Heal Tool
In the picture below the
red circle is the area being repaired and the green
circle is the area selected to provide the repair.
Clone Tool in action
What you may not have
noticed is that you can select the green circle and
change both it's position and size to obtain a better
result. This can be done with either the mouse or via
the keyboard arrow keys. Shift arrow is a course move
and control arrow is a fine move. On the Mac use
command arrow to change the size of the tool.
Hope you find this
useful.
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Lightroom Tip - Use the Lightsout Mode
First Press of the "L" key - Interface 50% dimmed
The amount of the initial
dimming can be set in the Preferences/Interface menu.
I like to use 50% for the initial dimming as I can
still see and use the other interface tools.
Second Press of the "L" key - Interface fully
dimmed
Press "L" again and it
will dim right down and just leave the selected
image.
Works in any of the modules. An gives you a really
uncluttered view of the image, or set of images, that
you are working on.
Hope you find this
useful.
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Lightroom - Five Reasons why I Switched from Aperture
Here is my reasoning:
- Folder Management. By using my simplified folder structure of Places, People and Objects I can now structure my library so that I can easily locate images without having to perform complex searches. One of the main reasons I used Aperture was the folder and file management. I can now do this just as well in Lightroom; and Lightroom has the big advantage that it directly mirrors the folder structure on the disk with Lightroom application view.
- Metadata Browsing. In particular the date browser which automatically sorts and presents your images by date. This can be set up in Aperture, but its a time consuming manual process and it lacks the granularity I require.
- Develop Module Tools. In my view they are much more powerful. The ability to do curve manipulation is much more intuitive for me than altering the histogram alone. The Targeted Adjustment Tool which allows adjustment based on a selected area of tonality is very powerful.
- Performance. Lightroom is just faster with big libraries. My modest collection of 12,000 images always slows down Aperture after relatively short sessions - 30 minutes or less. Lightroom does not slow down.
- Printing. I always revert to Lightroom for printing as it has a very simple and easy to use print layout interface. I just works. I can select the profile I want in a few clicks of the mouse and it remembers my settings. It's one of the cleanest interfaces I have seen for printing. Bottom line is I don't waste time, paper and ink anymore.
At last I am not having to to keep two workflow applications running in parallel !
Hope you find this useful.
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