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!

Where has Jason gone??

Well, to start, I spent the last few months preparing to move one state over and actually accomplishing this task. (Which is no easy task considering the move was about 650 miles and nearly a five-fold increase in elevation, plus I clearly under-estimated the size of the moving truck necessary to accomplish this task efficiently.) Needless to say, we made it and all of our belongings made it in one piece as well. Though still unpacking, the necessities are set-up and working now. (Computer, Television, Bed) On that, I am currently taking a short break from full-time work to concentrate on full-time school so that I can accelerate through my degree program even faster than before. (Business Administration with a specialization in Small Business and Entrepreneurship, who would have guessed that from an award winning photographer!?)

Keep reading! >>

Oloneo PhotoEngine 1.0 – May 2011

So after a year or more of beta testing the upcoming Oloneo PhotoEngine HDR software, they are releasing the full version to be purchased at a price of $149 (beta users get a 25% discount) this May. After testing and using the beta for a long time, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is clearly the best and most easy to use HDR software currently. Although they don’t have a Mac native version available yet, I have had no problems using the software under VMWare Fusion 3.x on my Mac Pro (2008 8gig, 8-core w/ OS 10.6.x). Alternatively you could run it even better under Boot Camp if you don’t mind rebooting into Windows.

On the same subject, look for my upcoming full-length DVD video tutorial showing how to do your own HDR blends based on my award winning recipe for amazing HDR images. I will post more information about that as soon as I am ready to share more.

Press release after the jump:

Pixel Bender + Fixel Plug-Ins

I’m already hearing the confusion from a number of people reading this. “What’s Pixel Bender?” or “What’s a Fixel?” Well, that is what this post is about.

First off, I want to say that before I came across the Fixel plug-ins for the “Pixel Bender” plug-in for CS5, I only had a vague knowledge of the Pixel Bender myself. So now that we are all starting on the same page, lets get going…

Adobe Labs - Pixel Bender

My Experience: First time in a PPA print competition.

Although I planned on doing competitions in past years, something always came up around the time I planned on prepping images to be printed for competition. And I suppose i was a little scared to submit, mostly due to lack of knowledge on the process. But this year things changed in my favor. Nothing came up, I had ample time to prepare digital files and I decided to contact some people who have been through the process before to help walk me through step by step.

Favorite Software for Photographers

Like most photographers, you may have the basic software to get the job done. Typically some version of Photoshop and possibly software that came with your camera for importing and processing files. But what about software for a very specific purpose? Or better yet, what software is worth even getting? I can honestly say that I have tested and tried many of the most popular plug-in’s and programs made for photographers and image processing. Most are decent in their own way, some are a waste of money but here is my short list of those that make the cut as my favorites and/or most used programs (excluding Photoshop which is a given).

Facebook Ads for Photographers

I found this blog post about using Facebook for targeted advertising, specifically written for photographers. For anyone who hasn’t already tried it, this might be worth a quick read before you try out the pay-per-click system on Facebook yourself.

http://jeffsmithbooks.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/facebook-ads-for-photographers/

Eye Retouching – Lightroom Edition

So, you watched my video or read the tutorials on how to do some of my retouching tricks in Photoshop. Eye Retouching and Enhancing – Photoshop Tutorial But you’re still not impressed… Or perhaps you like to work within Lightroom for as much editing as you can. Now you can do complex retouching in Lightroom!

I show the steps to do my eye retouching and enhancing as done in Photoshop, except this time in Adobe Lightroom on a camera raw file in a completely non-destructive way. This may be the future of editing so now is a good time to start practicing! These tips and tricks can be applied to just about any retouching in Lightroom so don’t limit your experimentation to just eyes or simple things. Dig in and see how complex you can go with the tools provided!

Eye Enhancing and Retouching Video Tutorial

I’ve added a short video tutorial to go along with the older Quickie Eye Enhancement Part 1 and Quickie Eye Enhancement Part 2 tutorials. In the video I show some of the tricks from each and a few new tips not covered in the original tutorials.

Click through for the video.

It’s a rare day…

Rarely do I ever link anything back to another blog or post on an internet forum unless it is truly worthy. And this clearly falls into that category of worthy links.

Click through for the link.