Landscape Photography Post-Processing Tutorial in Lightroom
In this tutorial, I will show you how to transform boring landscape pictures to vibrant and beautiful images in Lightroom in quick and easy steps. I will show you the real benefits of using the RAW image format and just some of the possibilities it gives you to non-destructively enhance your photographs without ever leaving Lightroom. I personally use this technique for post-processing my landscape photography all the time and I hope you find it useful.
Read on if you want to be able to take an image like this (original, as came out of the camera):
and transform it to an image like this:
Continue reading 'Landscape Photography Post-Processing Tutorial in Lightroom'
Nostalgique
At times when my husband is away on a business trip or any trip whatsoever, I get so nostalgic, I start flipping the "pages" of Lightroom to glace over our old images. Oh, I do own those old style coffee table albums, too. If the technology keeps up the way it has been, I will soon forget which shelf is generously occupied by my albums. Instead of thinking or speaking out loud, which I do a lot, I decided to write my thoughts out loud. I am not sure if there is such a thing. If there is not, I hope people list "writing out loud" under my name in Wikipedia.
So, my husband is away for couple of more days. I am stuck home with my little dudes with no wallet or my phone! All my husband's fault! Which means all I get to do is cook, watch TV, attend to my boy's needs and get nostalgic of how my husband would play with the boys every night to give me a time off. Right about when I finished the last sentence, my younger son Osman, who is still not sleeping at 11:34PM is calling for his dad! Awwwwwwww, we miss you daddy-o, come back!
How to Organize Pictures in Lightroom
This Lightroom guide is for beginner-photographers who are getting started in Lightroom and are looking for a good way to organize their photos and photo catalogs. If you are looking for a generic guide on how to organize pictures without any third party photo software like Lightroom, then please read my "how to organize pictures" guide instead. If you do not currently own a copy of Lightroom, I highly recommend purchasing one from B&H or other resellers.
Lightroom has certainly become a very essential part of a photographer's workflow. I personally cannot imagine managing my photo catalog without Lightroom and I use it every day for my Photography needs. In fact, 95-98% of my post-processing work is done in Lightroom today and I rarely use Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, which not only simplifies my workflow, but also decreases the amount of time I spend on post-processing. The below process of folder structures and organization within Lightroom is my personal way of storing pictures and working with them for my home and professional use.
1) Where do you store your pictures and how?
The first question is, where and how do you currently store your pictures? I used to store all of my photographs in various subfolders of my hard drive (commonly in "My Pictures" or "My Documents"), but after I got into photography, I decided that it is best to keep all of my photographs in the root folder of my PC's hard drive that I use solely for storing photos and small family videos. Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays and you can snatch an external 1-1.5 Terabyte drive for under $100. I highly recommend getting a fault-redundant external drive though (usually two hard drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration). There are also other fault-tolerant external drive array solutions such as "Drobo" that some photographers rave about, but I personally do not use them, since they are expensive and take too much space. As long as you have a good backup strategy, which I talk about below, you do not have to worry about losing data.
So, I highly recommend dedicating one external storage volume to your photographs for easier management and backup.
RAW vs JPEG
What is RAW format in digital photography? What are the advantages and disadvantages of RAW versus JPEG and why? Should you shoot in RAW or JPEG? Will shooting in RAW complicate your post-production and workflow? These are some of the most common questions that people ask after they buy their first DSLR camera and go through the camera options. Having a thorough understanding of advantages and disadvantages is essential for photographers to make the right decision on whether to use RAW format for their work.
Sand Dunes - Shot in RAW
I remember my first time going through the camera options and reading the Nikon D80 manual, wondering about what RAW does and why I should consider using it. JPEG is a no-brainer - it's the default image format that is used in most point and shoot cameras and we all got used to it and know it very well, seeing and sharing JPEG images online and downloading/uploading them from and to our mobile devices. But there was something about RAW that I wanted to find out about immediately. Maybe it was the word "raw" that sounded intriguing, maybe it was the immediate desire to get the sharpest, highest quality and best pictures ever without knowing much about the camera...whatever it was, I went ahead and changed my camera settings to RAW and tried to take a picture. The first thing I noticed, was how small all of a sudden my memory card became. Wait a second! How come the number of pictures went down from over 700 to under 200? The image looked exactly the same on the LCD and yet it consumed more than three times more memory? Bummer. Then, I took the memory card and inserted it into my laptop. To my surprise, I couldn't even open the darn thing! Worthless, I thought and changed my camera settings back to JPEG.
DNG vs RAW
Should you use DNG or RAW format? This is one of the most important questions that you as a photographer need to ask yourself, because it will definitely affect your digital photography workflow. Every photographer has their own say on whether to use DNG or RAW, but it is important to know the key differences between the two, along with their advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I will provide as much information as I can about both formats, in addition to my opinion and workflow. If you are looking for more information about how RAW images compare to JPEG images, then please read my "RAW vs JPEG" article.
1) What is RAW?
RAW images, also known as "digital negatives" are truly "raw", meaning they are almost unprocessed data coming directly from the camera sensor. Unlike JPEG files that can be easily opened, viewed and printed by most image-viewing/editing programs, RAW is a proprietary format that is tied to the camera manufacturer and sensor, and therefore is not supported by all software products. RAW files preserve the most amount of information about an image and generally contain more colors and dynamic range than other formats.
Post-Processing Tips for Beginners
This page contains a collection of our articles on Post-Processing for Beginners. These beginner tips should hopefully help our readers to enhance their knowledge of photography and get the best out of their equipment.
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Post-processing Tips for Beginners:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop
How to remove EXIF Data
Now that I explained you what EXIF Data is and showed you how you can view EXIF on JPEG files, I will now show you how to remove EXIF Data completely or partially from JPEG files.
1) EXIF Data and XMP Data explained
There are multiple reasons why you might want to remove EXIF fully or partially from files:
a) You are posting an image to a low-bandwidth site and need to keep the file sizes to a minimum
b) You want to protect your work and photographic style
c) You want to remove unnecessary junk from JPEG files to keep the file smaller, yet need to retain important EXIF Data such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
I personally use the last reason to keep my files a little smaller and to make sure that unnecessary junk does not get written into my JPEG files.
Nikon RAW (NEF) Codec for 64 bit Vista or Windows 7
If you are running a 64 bit version of Windows Vista or Windows 7, you cannot use Nikon's NEF codec, because it is only compatible with 32 bit operating systems. It is unfortunate that Nikon has not yet released a 64 bit version yet and it seems like it will stay that way - Nikon basically said that they do not have any plans to develop a 64 bit version of the NEF codec.
For those who do not know what a "RAW codec" is, when you import a RAW image from your camera into your machine, if your PC has no support for that RAW file, it will not display the image thumbnail. In addition, none of the Windows image applications and viewers will be able to open the RAW files. Not that the latter is critically important, especially for those who always process RAW images in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, but it is still helpful to be able to see the image thumbnails of files when opening RAW images for editing directly in Windows or when browsing through the archived RAW files.
So, with no support from Nikon for NEF files in 64 bit operating systems, the only other option is to use third party codecs. As of today, there are multiple types of third party codecs, but I will only write about the one that works very well and is 100% free.
FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack
The FastPictureViewer RAW codec pack is a free product from fastpictureviewer.com, which includes support for both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 and covers over 20 RAW image formats and about 300 camera models (all current Nikon cameras, including D3s are supported). I installed it on my 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate and the installation went smoothly without any problems (requires reboot after install).
Continue reading 'Nikon RAW (NEF) Codec for 64 bit Vista or Windows 7'
Working on lots of photographs
I shot so many pictures during the last several months that I'm having a hard time keeping up with the post-processing. Regular pictures are easy - I just import them into Lightroom with default settings and I'm done. What takes the most amount of time is panoramas. It takes lots of processing power and time to stitch 16 bit TIFF images that are 70 megs each. It wouldn't be so bad if there were only a few images, but when you stitch 15-20 images at a time, it does take a while. In addition, cutting the image afterwards, playing with curves and levels, sharpening and other manual tweaking also takes up the precious time.
Hopefully one of those will be completed this week, so stay tuned!
Windows
How to take good pictures
One of the questions that I continuously get from some of my friends and blog readers that just got into photography is "How can I take good pictures with what I have, without spending too much money on new cameras and lenses?". Ever since DSLRs became more affordable and people started buying entry-level DSLRs, there has been a great interest in photography from the general public. One big obstacle everybody runs against at one point or another, is the fact that when most professional photographers show the equipment they used to make great-looking images, it creates an impression that only expensive gear can produce great photographs. What happens from there, really boils down to the wallet and how serious a person wants to get into photography - some start buying expensive gear and thinking it will help them to take good pictures and improve their photography, while others hold off and just keep their DSLRs as "point and shoots", realizing that they can't do any better with what they have.
If you do not have a DSLR camera yet and need some help on purchasing it, I recommend reading my article on how to buy a DSLR camera.
