Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Lightroom
Adobe have updated Lightroom to version CC2115.8 or 6.8 depending on which version you have. The latest update provides some bug fixes as well as new camera and lens profiles. It also adds a significant new feature called Reference View (Only available in the Creative Cloud version I’m afraid)
At this time of the year, the days can get very dark and dreary here in Ireland. With the short winter days, when it’s sunny it’s actually quite beautiful, but when it clouds over, it becomes very dark and dreary. On days like this, it’s often tempting not to bother shooting, and certainly, I’ve been put off by what seems like bad light. However, as Jay Maisel once said, there’s no such thing as bad light, just difficult light.
This is pretty old news at this point, but as I hadn’t covered it before, I thought I’d touch on it briefly. A while ago VSCO released an updated version of their Film series of Lightroom Presets to support the Fuji X-Pro 2 and XT-2. I finally got around to trying it out, and I’m liking the results.
A while ago I created a set of Lightroom presets called “Landscape Gold”. In fact, I had originally created the set for Aperture, and it was one of my more popular sets. The idea was to add a “golden” touch to landscape images, and it’s particularly effective at this time of the year. With all the autumn colours, Landscape gold can work well to give them an additional sheen (pardon the pun) and in this post, I’ll give you some examples as well as some tips for working with the presets
I recently posted a piece about shooting some photos using the in-camera Acros mode on the X-Pro 2. While I posted Jpegs straight from the camera in that post, I’ve also been working on matching the effect in Raw. This might sound like a straight forward process. You just set the colour profile, right? Well, after experimenting for a bit, there seems to be more to it than that.
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.
Ever since upgrading to the latest version of Lightroom, I’ve noticed that the software has been running much slower for me than it had been previously. At first I thought it was something to do with my computer, but I checked it out out on my Laptop, and it seems to be having some issues too.
Adobe yesterday released a new update to Lightroom. This brings the release to 2015.7 for CC users or 6.7 for non creative cloud owners. Among the numerous bug fixes and new camera and lens support were a couple of new features. One in particular bears a bit of discussion. Apple has added the option to use Smart Previews instead of originals as a way to speed up Lightroom.
It may seem like a simple thing, but getting the correct white balance can have a significant impact on the overall look of an image. Often you may hear people complaining about the colours of a particular camera, and that they don’t like the colours that a specific brand of camera might produce. It is a common misconception that this has to do with the design of the sensor. In many cases much of what is perceived as differences in a camera’s ability to capture colours may be partly due to the way a camera’s white balance is calibrated.
I’m very pleased to announce, that after a very long time in production, my newest guide is now available. this e-book guide is called “Processing Sony A6000 Raw files in Lightroom: A Workflow and settings guide”. While that’s probably a bit of a mouthful, it pretty much sums up what this new guide is about. In the same way that I have previously written guides for Fuji X-Series shooters, this guide is designed specifically for Sony A6000 shooters who want to get the best from their camera when processing their images in Lightroom.
I’ve created a new set of presets for Fuji users and I’m happy to announce that I’m giving these away for free. Basically, I really like the various film simulation modes available on Fuji’s cameras, and the corresponding picture profiles in Lightroom. They’re good on their own, but they also make a good starting point for some further manipulation. So, using the various profiles as a starting point, I created my own set of “Variations” of these.
I’ve added two new bundles of Lightroom Preset packs to the store. Previously I had created a bundle of my first 6 presets, and I’ve been waiting till I had another 6 to do a second bundle. Well, with the recent release of FilmLUX I now had another 6 Lightroom Preset packs, and so I’ve created another Bundle.
Lightroom’s noise reduction tools are pretty good, and can help reduce digital noise in an image quite effectively. However, one of the things that sometimes occurs with images taken on a digital camera is that the overall image may be ok, but there may be excessive noise in the shadows. This is because most digital cameras are noisier in the shadow part of the image than they are in the brighter parts. While this is decreasing with modern cameras, it can still be an issue, especially when pushing an image in Lightroom.
I’ve long complained about the lack of certain metadata functionality in Lightroom. I don’t particularly like the interface for entering metadata as it is, but the software lacks certain key features that I have long missed since moving from Aperture..... Recently I set about trying to find a solution, and it came in the form of a plug-in from John Beardsworth called “Search Replace Transfer”
Adobe has released an update for Lightroom which provides support fort the Fuji X-T2 as well as some bug fixes. Hopefully it fixes the memory leak that I reported on last week (it is listed as one of the fixes).
I’m delighted to announce, that after much delay, my latest set of Lightroom Presets, FilmLUX is now available. I came up with the idea for FilmLUX a little while ago when I was in the midst of scanning lots of old slide and transparency film. I noticed that the results I was getting had a really nice quality to them, and they weren’t quite like what I was getting from other presets. With this in mind I set about trying to create my own, paying close attention to the results I was getting from my own film scans.
It’s been a while since I last released a set of Lightroom presets, despite my plan to release one set a month this year. I’ve actually been working on a new set for a while now though, and I’m excited about the results. Called “Film Lux” it’s a continuation of my “Lux” series,and this time it’s about some more realistic film styles.
I’ve been plagued by a nasty bug in the latest version of Lightroom on the Mac. It’s affected me several times now, and the same action triggers it, so it’s not a a random one off. On top of that I’ve read similar stories online from people with similar issues. Basically, every so often, when you open the import window, the memory usage of Lightroom goes through the roof and the application becomes frozen. If you don’t force quit the application quickly after this happens, the entire system hangs.
