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White Balance With Friends (And Other Ways To Break Through Photographer’s Block)
While I have taken a lot of food photography shots over the past few weeks for my new culinary project, I still feel like I’ve been in a bit of a rut, not branching out, and not really comfortable with my gear. A lot of that comes from being stagnant for the last part of the year. It turns out, a good photographer friend of mine found herself in the same place, so together, we decided to give ourselves weekly challenges.
When writers get writers block, some times the best course of action is to just keep writing. The same is true with photography. If you find yourself uninspired, or in a photographic rut, the best thing to do is to keep taking pictures. Best case, you work through your funk and come up with some new ideas. Worst case, maybe you learn something.
To kick it off this week, we went back to basics: white balance. Find a scene, and make an image using all the white balance settings on the camera. The goal is to get the camera out of the bag, to work the rust of the dials, and to get a refresher on how white balance affects the image.
Of course, I had to use a piece of food as my model; in this case, a load of artisan bread just out of the oven. The full set of images in the gallery below.
It was a good exercise. Especially shooting in RAW, how often do you really think about white balance? I find that 95% of the time, I’m in auto white balance because I know I’ll just correct it later in Lightroom. But really, if I took the time to set the proper white balance before I made the images even though I am shooting RAW, Lightroom could do that for me with the “As Shot” white balance setting, saving me a step in post.
I look forward to next weeks challenge, but I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts.
What do you do to work through your photographic ruts?
Also posted in inspiration, photography
Tagged lightroom, photography, photography block, white balance
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Lightroom 4 Beta Initial Thoughts and Video Support
Well, include me among the eager Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users looking forward to the next major release of our image management and editing tool. When Adobe announced the initial beta release for Lightroom 4 this week, I had it downloaded and installed in very short order.
Installation was easy enough, and LR4 is riding along side my main LR3 instance, each with their own catalog. I imported all of my pictures in to the LR4 catalog, and because I export the XMP data automatically, LR4 shows the edits I did in LR3.
The big thing for me is that it appears that I can keep my current workflow with LR4. There’s nothing worse than having to change the sequence of events or learn a new flow in order to upgrade to a new version of a piece of software, but it appears that LR4 kept the same feel (so far). As a result, working with LR4 felt very natural. In develop mode, there were a few changes to the Basic edits, clarifying and streamlining things a bit. All of my presets from my previous version of Lightroom where there and useable, too.
One of the big, new features that I’m excited about is better support for video inside of Lightroom. Sure, you could import video files in to your catalog , but that was about it. LR3 used an external video player, and you couldn’t really do anything with the video.
Lightroom 4 changes that. Not only can you play the video inside of the application, but you can do some basic editing of your video files. Now, this isn’t going to replace Premiere, After Effects, or Final Cut, just like Lightroom doesn’t technically replace Photoshop. But just like you can do a good chunk of your work in Lightroom for photo processing without going in to Photoshop, you can do the same for video files. You can trim and crop video files, sure. I mean, I can do that on my iPhone. But in LR4, you can also do some basic adjustments to the video files; things like adjusting exposure, correcting white balance, and, yes, applying some of your photo presets to video files!
Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode
The video editing options come up when you select a video file (here, from my iPhone backup). As you can see in the image above, the movie timeline shows up below the larger still from the movie, where you can play and trim the video file. On the right column are the controls for applying edits to the video. You can apply a custom white balance (more limited options than you get with a video file at this point), adjust the exposure up or down, or apply a preset. On that front, if your preset includes adjustments that are unsupported for video files, you are presented with the dialog below.
Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode Preset Dialog
That dialog gives you a list of the types of presets that you can apply to a video file that, honestly, is pretty impressive and covers a lot of the basic edits you would do to a file, for example, that you were going to upload to Facebook or your blog. Again, if you’re doing a wedding video or something more heavy-duty, Lightroom 4 probably won’t get you there. But it might be great for previews.
In the image below, I applied a split-toning preset to the video file. After I applied the preset, I was able to play the video inside of LR4 and see the video played with my adjustments without having to encode or export the video.
Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode Preset Applied
An interesting note, though, is that while you can apply a preset to a video file, the Develop module, at least in this first Beta, does not support video files. So you’d have to create a preset, then apply it to the video file. You can’t make individual edits. Not a deal breaker, but certainly something that can be improved.
Lightroom 4 Beta - No Video In Develop Module
Exporting a video was also straight forward. File > Export, and there is a new “Video” tab that includes a few options, such as quality and format. Exporting the 8-second video below took under a minute on an older MacBook Pro with LR3 and a bunch of other applications running.
Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Export Dialog
My initial impressions of Lightroom 4 are pretty positive. On the video side, even the basic adjustments that I’m able to do inside of the application are really going to give me a simple way to clean up and tweak my videos before I upload them. Granted, I only used small iPhone videos here; I’ll likely use some larger videos in different formats down the road. But I figure 90% of the videos I’ll be editing in this way will be from my iPhone, so I’m pretty pleased.
Here is the exported video with the preset applied.
Also posted in Uncategorized, video
Tagged adobe, h.264, lightroom, lightroom 4 beta, preset, video
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Uploading Images To Your WordPress Blog Using Lightroom
Last year, I stopped using Flickr to host my images and, instead, started hosting images myself.
First, you’re going to need the LR/Blog plugin for Lightroom from the Photographer’s Toolbox. It’s free to try, and the £8.00 price tag for the full version is well worth the convenience it provides. If you’re unfamiliar with how to install a plugin for Lightroom, the website provides the basic steps, although it’s basically navigating to your plugins in Lightroom, clicking Add, and then pointing to the downloaded file.
For WordPress users, you’ll need to update your site configuration, basically enabling outside applications to upload images and create posts. The LR/Blog plugin uses WordPress’s supported mechanisms for doing this, so you’re not going to far outside the box. But it does require enabling this functionality, which the PT website describes here. The plugin does support other blogging platforms, as well, including Blogger and TypePad. The PT website includes configuration details for them, as well.
Once the LR/Blog plugin is installed, and WordPress is ready to accept uploads, the next step is to define your blog and upload settings inside of Lightroom. I have a few different blogs that I run, so for easy organization, I created a folder called Blogs and I have an export profile for each of my blogs, which you can see in the image below.
Quickly running through the different options…
Each of the profiles has, at the top, the URL for each of the different blogs. Easy enough. Next up, you can have LR/Blog only upload the images, or upload the images and insert them in to a new blog post. By default, I have the plugin upload the images. If you want to use the WordPress Gallery feature, make sure you have LR/Blog create a post. For whatever reason, if you upload images to WordPress, then separately create a post and insert the images, those images don’t show up in the Gallery tab of the post and, therefore, you can’t use them in an inserted gallery. This isn’t an LR/Blog limitation, it’s just the way WordPress works. If you want to use a gallery, have LR/Blog create the post, then you can go in to the draft post and move things around, remove the inserted images (they will still be “associated” with the post), and then insert a gallery.
The other options I changed were the file naming so that I can change the name of the uploaded image to make it easier to find inside of the media library of the blog (and/or SEO). I resized the images to the maximum size I’d need, changed the Quality to 75 and Output Sharpening to Screen. This seems to work for the way I use most of the images, although if you’re looking for more portfolio-sized and quality images, you should adjust accordingly.