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.
Lightroom Classic CC 7.3.1 has restructured the tools in the Develop module to get us exactly what we need and faster access. Along with the new layout, there is a ton of new presets provided by Adobe and a greater supply of creative options with a single click. After reading this article, you will be ready to pivot to Lightroom Classic CC to fully experience the changes Adobe offers. Let’s dig into the new Develop module layout and get our editing bearings.
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.
Shooting and editing Raw files is a major part of my workflow. Editing in a Raw processor is a must for me, and I am always trying new programs from software companies that are always seeking the edge with new capabilities. From a beauty retouching perspective, there has always been such a dependency on Photoshop’s layers. Working in Lightroom, the closest thing I get to layers are local adjustment brushes and editing pins. These lack in skin retouching, requiring me to export the Raw file to another program just to smooth skin. On1 Photo RAW offers a nondestructive Raw processing alternative for retouching.
To make a beautiful composition in Photoshop, a photographer needs time and the necessary skills, to be sure. But perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle is to have vision for the image. What’s the story you want to bring to life? Who are your characters? Where do they come from? Here are five steps to creating alternate realities in Photoshop. By following these suggestions, you can bring other worlds and characters into focus (and possibly inspire other up-and-coming composite artists).
With the new year approaching, I finally found time to explore more of what Adobe has released in Lightroom Classic. So what’s all the hype with the new masking feature? Much like the addition of the Auto-Mask added in the brush panel, there is a new innovative and more accurate method called Range Masks. Instead of your mask’s edge being analyzed for hard edges and somewhat similar tones, you have more control in choosing the range of Color and Luminosity. Like many of us, we fear Photoshop because of its complexity and inefficiency with hundreds of images. In this article, I show you how to keep things simple, how to move fast and, above all, how to create quality edits.
As a photographer with a workflow built around Adobe Lightroom, the major changes released back in October 2017 got my head spinning. This industry is full of surprises, and we have to move forward instead of staying stagnant. Do these changes affect my efficiency, and am I paying more for a product I have to have? Before we jump to conclusions about Adobe taking us down a rabbit hole of lackluster enhancements, let’s talk shop. What the hell is going to happen to desktop-oriented Lightroom as we know it today?
