I continually try to push creative image editing to its limits. There are so many ways to tweak an image, to get that dialed-in look and feel that you envisioned when you photographed it. Since the change from Camera to Color Profiles in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, the creative possibilities expanded and became so simple to use, adding them to the Basic panel and allowing users to adjust the amount it’s applied.
You know that feeling you get when you finish a shoot and realize how many hours you now have to work in post? Wouldn’t it be nice to just import in Lightroom, click a few presets and export files? That’s the point of Lightroom’s efficiency, but there is some additional finessing required to ensure your images are consistent while maintaining your look and feel. Here are 10 tricks to help you get through this grueling season and edit faster.
Now that Adobe has launched four patch updates for its latest Lightroom apps, we are seeing the essential Lightroom features pour over from the desktop to the mobile app. Lightroom is supposed to make editing simple, and this is exactly what you get from the mobile Lightroom CC. From your shoot to your sofa, you can edit accurately on an iPad.
As creatives, it is in our blood to break out of the box and try something new. If you are not pushing yourself and developing your photography, where’s your growth as an artist? In this article, I give you the tools to try something new and pack a punch with your images. We will dive into corrective adjustments and how to direct your viewer. These are the basics you may already be doing today, but we are going to mix things up a bit.
Those who long for Lightroom like myself but have been looking for a better all-in-one solution need to add ON1 Photo RAW 2018 to their arsenal. Why should you switch this close to wedding season? My answer always comes down to time: the time it takes to finish shooting a job, time to fully process edits, time the client wants their images, time I get with my family, time to sleep. I want to keep my processing time at a minimum without my clients seeing a drop in quality.
Of all the editing tools at our disposal, not all of them make sense for every task. Lightroom is not the end-all/be-all program—even though I use it for almost everything. It’s important to try out other programs, especially when you want to push the envelope and unleash your creativity. To bring out structure and details in an image, I have always relied on plugins like Macphun Intensify (recently renamed Skylum Intensify). With the release of Skylum’s Luminar, I can now edit with all the tools I need in one place. Once I have finished selecting my best shot of the shoot, I am ready to launch Luminar and get working. Let’s get set up and familiar with Luminar to get a better feel for how we can attack this image.
The biggest fear when shooting is losing the peak focus on the subject’s eye and having an unusable image because you shot them at such a thin aperture. We’ve all been there. Even with full-frame digital cameras and the best glass, there is a chance for failure. That’s where editing programs can save the image and bring back the sharpness you intended to capture. There are different processes and programs we can use to sharpen our images. Knowing when and how to get the most out of sharpening is where I am going to focus in this article. I will be working strictly in Lightroom and ON1 RAW 2018 to demonstrate a complete Raw workflow. Let’s get started in Lightroom.
I began teaching myself how to retouch images with Photoshop version 4.0 (Photoshop CC 2018 is considered version 19). To this day, I still use some of the original processes and tools for retouching. In this article, I discuss the most important step in retouching, then explore the basics of retouching skin, enhancing eye color with blending modes and layer masks, and, finally, problem-solving stray hairs.
Why Photographers Should Embrace Digital Retouching with Nino Batista Want more information on this article? Get access to video content and additional supporting images. Launch the December 2017 issue of the magazine by logging in or signing up for a free account. Shutter Magazine is the industry’s leading professional photography magazine.…
A commercial or editorial client will likely require editing images for a greater dynamic range. In that case, you will want to know what your editing options are after the shoot. Ideally, you want to work with a tripod to give yourself the most flexibility in stopping down your aperture, staying at a low ISO and taking long exposures. Long exposure sometimes removes your option to shoot handheld. Let’s look at some options for multiple exposures and how we can merge these files.