A Lightroom tutorial for Landscape & Urbanscape Photographers

Although I enjoy photographing unusual (and ordinary) people, my real joy of photography takes me out to unusual or beautiful locations to photograph objects or landscapes, sometimes even an “urbanscape” is worthy of capture too. Regardless, not every capture can come “straight out of camera” exactly as you wish. In fact, most of the time I see what I want from the image but know that their is no reasonable way I can get what I see in a single exposure. At the same time, I know I can easily set up and capture a bracket and make an HDR from it, more often than not, I can easily get a SINGLE exposure and do some extreme editing to get the very most detail and color out of the camera RAW file as possible.

Needless to say, that is what this video tutorial is about. Although it’s not my very best work, I felt it was a worthy image and I was working on it already since I captured this image just the night before.

On to the video!

Color Correction for Dummies. (And everyone else.)

Getting good color can sometimes be a difficult task, but if you follow some of these steps and use the tricks I explain in this post you can make color correction a much easier task.

Everyone has their own personal preference on what is “good color”. Some people prefer warmer skin tones and overall deeper, richer colors. (This is my own personal preference.) While others may prefer cooler skin tones with little or no yellow or red cast or low contrast bright images or very over saturated color or who knows! This is why learning to correct your color to your preference is ideal as nobody but yourself can get the color exactly how you want it and save a few dollars on lab fees for color correction.

Then again, some people wouldn’t know what good color is if it hit them in the head. Let’s be honest…. If that person is you, you can read on but you are probably better off sending your files to the lab as-is. Bad corrections can sometimes be more damaging than sending files with poor color straight out of the camera.

Color Checker Passport does EXTREME color correction.

I’m sure you’ve encountered this problem before. Lighting conditions that are so bad that even a custom white balance in camera simply cannot fix. And you don’t have time or perhaps don’t have the skill to correct for these color errors on your own in post production. Even if you do, it’s not time well spent. Instead, here is how you get the best color from these extreme lighting conditions.

Top 10 of 2009

Well, we made it through the first decade of the new millennium. I swear that went way way faster than I can believe. It feels like just yesterday people were scrambling to get ready for the “Y2k bug”.

In any case, 2009 was a good year for some and a very bad year for others. For me I feel it was very sideways. Although I keep looking ahead to the future, things kinda pass me at awkward angles making it difficult to really judge where I am going these days. (Imagine riding in a car and only looking out the side windows.) But I have to say that sometime in the spring of 2009 I decided to start blogging what was in my head as well as some random thoughts among other stuff that I enjoy about photography. I set goals for the site, it keeps growing and I keep blogging as a result. (I hope the said blog posts are getting better as well.) Needless to say, I blew away my 25,000 unique visits goal with almost exactly 28,000 hits as of January 1, 2010.

Thanks to an idea from several other sites I frequent, I decided to compile a list of the top 10 most popular posts on the site in 2009. Here is that list…

Get the best of your Pro Lab

First off, do feel free to read back to my lengthy review of a number of professional labs as well as several chain stores and other popular printers to understand better what labs may give you the best service for your money. The Big Lab Throwdown – Final Results

Here are some tips on how to get the most out of your lab and get back the best prints every time. Including press-printed products that many labs now offer.

Color Correction in Lightroom & Photoshop – Video Tutorial

Rather than show you all of the steps involved in detail on the blog, I decided to just record a video tutorial and post the link here.

Here is the before and after comparison. This was taken 2 years ago with a Nikon D70 camera and I am editing the NEF (camera raw) file in Lightroom first and then doing some final tweaks in Photoshop.

Before and After Color Corrections

Click through for the video.

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport – Test and Review

First off, a quick history on the ColorChecker:

“The Munsell ColorChecker—first produced as the Macbeth ColorChecker in 1976 and still widely known as the Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker—a cardboard-framed arrangement of twenty-four squares of painted samples based on Munsell colors. Its maker Munsell Labs and parent Gretag Macbeth were acquired in 2006 by X-Rite, a color management and colorimetry company.”

Color chart. Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec. 08, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker

Today it is used as a reference for color in both film and photography and it continues to be an accepted standard. But original cardboard versions are still quite expensive, large and easily damaged. It also needed to be kept safely in a plastic sleeve and kept out of direct light to avoid bleaching the colored squares. In comes the more durable, extremely compact and multi-talented X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.

Richer color without Saturation.

Here is a quick color tip that I learned as a professional printer & photo retoucher but use regularly now in my own photography to “boost” color without turning up the saturation. This gives me a beautiful, deep, rich color without touching the saturation slider at all.

Click in for more…

10 second Teeth Whitening + Video Tutorial

Here is a common problem. Perfect capture, perfect smile, perfect skin tone, yellowed teeth…… Yikes! It’s all too common these days no thanks to coffees, sodas or cigarette smoking causing discoloration to the front teeth. As a professional photographer, we really should fix these sort of things on a clients images before presenting them to them for purchase. But hand editing dozens, even hundreds of images can be rather time consuming.

Here comes the 10 second Teeth Whitening to the rescue. (Ok, it might take more than 10 seconds, but it is very quick.)

Contrast Gone Wild

You may have seen it from other photographers and wondered “just how did they do that?” Although their are plug-in filters and no doubt other ways to do it, here is a nice easy free way to do it with only Photoshop and starting with any file, even it if it is a boring, slightly underexposed JPEG.

Contrast Gone Wild