Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Tricks
When working in Capture One last week, I had been thinking to myself: “Self, you must come up with some new tutorials for the kind folks that read your blog” but I just couldn’t come up with anything profound and dramatic. Then I realised that perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, and it occurred to me that many of the little things that I do regularly may not be known by everyone. So, with that in mind here is a random collection of quick little tips that may help your workflow…
When Adobe first introduced the syncing feature in Lightroom, which let you sync to its cloud services, it only synced smart previews, and at the time this wasn’t a big deal, as there was limits to what you could do on the mobile applications. Now, many versions later and Lightroom has become a whole eco system, and the mobile versions are much more powerful. We now also have the desktop version of the mobile applications, so it is odd that Lightroom Classic is still stuck syncing only smart previews. But what if you want full res versions that you can edit on another device but still synced to your classic library? Well, there is a workaround.
Adobe recently introduced a new feature for the mobile version of Lightroom CC that people had been requesting for a long time, and that is the ability to use presets. What’s more, they also added preset syncing between the desktop and mobile versions of Lightroom CC. You can now use all of your Lightroom presets, and profiles on your mobile device, and the process is fairly simple. You will however need to use Lightroom CC on the desktop. You will also need a creative cloud subscription.
If you’re a user of any of my presets, then you will know that I’ve designed them with the idea of being used with the “Standard” camera profile. The idea behind this was to provide a base level of compatibility across cameras, without having to create custom colour profiles for different models. Most manufacturers have a standard profile, and while obviously this isn’t exactly the same across different cameras, it’s generally the most “normal” looking profile, which is why I use that as the base for my presets.
One of the key features announced when Lightroom CC 2015.4 was released, was the new boundary wrap function in the merge panorama feature. Boundary wrap solves one of the problems with cylindrical panoramas, where the edges are normally distorted and need to be cropped out. It also addresses some of the distortion in cylindrical panoramas.
Someone recently wrote to me and asked me how I got my images looking so punchy. They assumed I was using some sort of plug-in or preset. While I do use presets a good bit (obviously) most of the time, I just do some basic adjustments to an image, depending on what Im trying to achieve. A lot of the time I don’t want an image to look too treated, so here are some of the things I do in Lightroom to add some “punch” to an image.
