Lightroom 5 Beta: Highlights

 Posted by
Apr 162013
 

Lightroom 5 BetaLightroom 5 Beta is Here

It’s that time of year again when we can look forward to a new version of Lightroom. Yesterday Adobe released the Lightroom 5 Beta, and while it’s not a finished product, there’s a lot of new stuff to try out!  Today we’ll take a quick look at some important changes in the Library and Develop workflows.

Smart Preview

One of the innovative new features, that has real potential for improving Lightroom workflows moving forward, is the Smart Preview. Lightroom now provides the opportunity to create a special kind of preview at import (in addition to the default preview that is created with each file). This enables you to continue developing those files “offline”, if needed.

For example: if your primary computer is a laptop and your original photos are stored on external drives (e.g. import via Add), Smart Preview can ensure that when you’re not connected to your mobile drives, you can continue processing photos in the Develop module. The heart of the Smart Preview is a Lossy DNG format, which tends to maintain a higher quality than JPEG compression at smaller file sizes, and is quicker to load than full-sized previews. The downside is that with any lossy format, extreme changes to color or tonality can credit image artifacts; you may not have as much lattitude when editing shots that were taken under extreme lighting conditions, for example.

Lightroom 5 Beta - Smart Preview

The example above shows a Catalog built from a mobile hard drive. When connected to the drive the words “Original + Smart Preview” appears in the Histogram area (the Yellow text was put there by yours truly for visual reference only). When you go offline (i.e. disconnect your drive and head to the coffee shop), only the Smart Preview item is visible and a small black icon appears on each thumbnail to let you know that  the Smart Preview is active and ready for use.

Later when you re-connect to all your files, the changes that you made will be synced up with your metadata and original preview so that you don’t lose a beat! Continue reading »

Patagonia: A Photographer’s Paradise with Richard Bernabe

 Posted by
Apr 082013
 

Viedma - PatagoniaIntroduction

I’d like to welcome back landscape photographer and instructor Richard Bernabe, this time with some great stories about what it’s like to photograph a place that is definitely on my personal bucket list — Patagonia.

Thanks for joining us again, Richard! Tell us about the first trip that got you hooked on Patagonia. What was it like? What makes it different from other amazing locations?

My first trip down to Patagonia was three years ago and I just made my fourth visit to the region last month. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Love at first sight” … well what if that initial, overwhelming feeling never goes away when you visit a place? That’s how Patagonia makes me feel; I have to keep going back. I don’t really have a choice.

It’s easy for landscape photographers to get a little jaded from seeing so many beautiful places all the time, but when I look up at the Fitz Roy Massif of Argentina’s Los Glaciares National Park or the “Cuernos” in Torres del Paine of Chile, it never grows old. It’s almost impossible to look away when you are in their vicinity.

During a recent trip, you posted a tweet about how much you love Patagonia. What were you experiencing that day, to make you feel that way?

The comment was made on day 7 or 8 of a ten-day tour I was leading for some private clients. Weather-wise, the first few days of the tour were not very Patagonia-like. The skies were blue from horizon to horizon, there was no wind, no dramatic clouds, and it was hot. It didn’t feel like Patagonia at all.

I wasn’t happy about the conditions, but I did my best put a positive spin on it. Finally, the weather changed, as it always does down there. The winds kicked up, clouds rolled in, the temperature dropped; it all felt familiar again! The night I made that tweet, we had just finished photographing this amazing sunset in Torres del Paine from the backside of the island that our hotel was on. The wind was screaming 30, 40, 50 mph and the waves on Lago Pehoe were like ocean breakers. I was soaking wet and cold but I didn’t feel a thing! We were all giving each other high-fives and I just had this exhilarating feeling. I guess I felt like I had to let the rest of the world know about it.

Continue reading »

Pixel Blending: An Interview with Photoshop Artist Andrew Kavanagh

 Posted by
Apr 052013
 
"Comfort Zone" by Photoshop Artist Andrew Kavanagh

“Comfort Zone”

Introduction

This week we’re shifting gears and going back to the interview circuit, to learn more about how people use Photoshop in their work. However instead of interviewing a photographer, we have LA-based Photoshop Artist Andrew Kavanagh with us. Andrew is also a Photoshop instructor and offers 1-on-1 training for those living in the LA area. I thought he’d be a great person for readers to learn from, because of the diverse nature of his artwork and his Photoshop expertise.

Andrew thanks for joining us to discuss your artwork and Photoshop chops! You do a ton of work that people can find on your blog, covering quite a range of themes and topics. Have you always been an artist going back to your school days, or was the art bug something you picked up as a part of learning Photoshop?

I spent most of my childhood drawing & painting; I was very introverted. Later when I studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, I immediately fell in love with Photoshop and digital art. Creating art on a computer, knowing that in a moment the computer could crash and I could lose all that I had been working on, made the creative process much more exciting… I still am fascinated by the fact that I do not create art with physical tools. There is a zen-like quality of knowing my work can disappear or become corrupted, and that the tools I use feel as if they never existed, the moment I close Photoshop. Impermanence is compelling.

In terms of formal education, I also attended the College for Fine Arts (SUNY College at Purchase), then the School of The Museum of Fine Arts, and finally Massachusetts College of Art, located in Boston. During this time I studied Painting, Sculpture, Drawing and my major was Printmaking. I studied a lot of art history and my favorite artists as well.

Continue reading »

Photoshop CS6 Retouching and Image Adjustment

 Posted by
Feb 012013
 

Photoshop CS6

Photoshop CS6 Course for Photographers

I’m excited to announce a brand new Adobe training course for Mac, PC and mobile devices! Photoshop CS6 Retouching & Image Adjustment (Mac OS, Windows, iOS) provides over 3 hours of the best Photoshop CS6 techniques, for improving your digital photography. Learn the most important details of a  photo editing workflow, quickly and easily, and in HD quality!

Start with the right foundations, by creating a more efficient Photoshop setup (so you can work faster). From there jump right into the Photoshop CS6 retouching techniques! Everything from my favorite selection methods, to perfecting colors with popular filters and image adjustments like HDR Toning is covered. You’ll even discover different ways to quickly and accurately remove distracting elements from your pictures, using Photoshop’s new Content-Aware Patch mode and Content-Aware Move.

The Photoshop CS6 retouching demo below provides a look at one of the many useful retouching tools in Photoshop: the Fade Command. You can use this command to apply partial corrections to one region of your image, creating a more subtle result.

Introductory Photoshop CS6 Courses

If you’d like to back up a step and first learn about mission-critical Photoshop concepts and skills, you may want to check out the free demo tutorials for working with Photoshop layers, blend modes and Smart Objects, or the best techniques for learning Photoshop selections and layer masks.

Optimizing Raw Photos with Adobe Camera Raw 7

 Posted by
Jan 232013
 

Photoshop CS6The Raw Power of ACR 7

Few things are more important to the modern photographer than optimizing raw photos. Today raw photos are the very foundation of the medium, just as film quality was in the past. There are many software titles that offer raw photo editing capabilities, but the tools in Adobe Camera Raw 7 (part of Photoshop CS6) and their “twins” in Lightroom 4, are unmatched in their scope and power.

Optimizing Raw Photos with ACR 7 is a 2.5 hour course (Mac OS, Windows, iOS)  designed to help you master those tools as quickly as possible with a fun and easy process. Step through the ACR workflow, A to Z… whether you need the best tools for noise reduction, the ability to perfect your colors and saturation on a per-hue basis, or the option to remove distracting lens distortions, Adobe Camera Raw 7 provides the tools to get the job done.

The video below provides a glimpse into one of the most useful features, the Noise Reduction controls in the Details panel. It shows how, even with a very contrasty (and mostly dark) exposure, great results can be achieved as you zoom in and precisely manage the balance between details and smooth tones.

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