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
The other day I posted a possible work around for an annoying Lightroom bug that had been frustrating me. When working with Sony ARW files, when you move from one image to another in the develop module, it can sometimes take seconds (sometimes 10 or more) before moving the sliders have any effect. The not really a solution, solution, that I offered was to wait till the Auto button enabled before trying to edit. Well, after a bit more research, I think I’ve found the source of this issue.
This is a tip that I shouldn’t have to write. There has been some serious performance issues in the last few versions of Lightroom. It seems worse for raw files from some cameras rather than others, but the issue seems reasonably widespread. While getting extremely frustrated at this bug the other day, I noticed something that may save you tearing your hair out.
A long time ago, in a version of Lightroom far far away…well, ok, a previous version…there were separate controls for brightness and exposure. Since then Adobe, apparently feeling that this was too confusing for the average user, decided to roll it into a single “exposure” control. However, brightness controls still exist in other applications, and while the exposure control is probably fine 90% of the time, there are still times when you may need to use a basic “brightness” adjustment in Lightroom.
I’m having a special deal on some of my Lightroom Presets this week. My 2016 Collection Bundle is on sale as is my Black and White Bundle.
A while ago I wrote about Iridient’s new product, X-Transformer. It was only available for Windows at the time. I don’t have access to a Windows computer, but I did try it under parallels at the time, and I was impressed with the results. However, because it was just too clunky to work with under emulation, I didn’t do too much with it, as a mac version was promised.
Recently I was out taking some photos in the city centre of Dublin, and I ended up shooting a lot of bracketed exposures. It was a moody, cloudy day, and while the low clouds would probably come out by pushing the Raw files with just one exposure, it as quite dramatic, and I wanted to maintain as much detail as possible. I wasn’t so much intending to create lots of HDR files, but I was more just trying to give myself options afterwards.
I have lots of Lightroom Presets available now on this store and I wanted to be able to give you a way to try some of them out, so I’ve put together a collection of presets taken from the various sets, to make a free sample pack.
I currently have three sets of black and white presets available for Lightroom and based on popular request, I’m now making them available as a single bundle. The three sets of presets are: Monolith, MonoLux and T-Pan. Each has a different style and different approach to creating the black and white look, and together I think they make a good range of styles for creating black and white images in Lightroom.
I wanted to share a quick video tip with you about removing people from a shot in Photoshop. This isn’t a video about how to use the clone tool or anything like that. In fact I only use the clone tool for a short part of it. I actually use two images to remove the people, and combine them using one of Photoshop’s lesser known but really useful tools. First, let me back up a bit and explain the circumstances surrounding the shot.
I was recently working on some bracketed exposures that I shot while on a walk by the coast north of Dublin. It was a beautiful and moody day, but the light was pretty strong, and I was shooting with my D700, which hasn’t the greatest dynamic range. With that in mind, I shot multiple exposures with the aim of combining them later so as not to loose any detail in the highlights and shadows. I originally tried combining the exposures in Lightroom, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so instead I decided to use Aurora HDR.
A while ago I released a set of Free Lightroom presets for Fuji users based on my own “variations’ of the Fuji Film simulation presets, or more specifically, the corresponding colour profile in Lightroom. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the follow up to that first set is now available.
I wrote a post yesterday where I compared my new T-Pan for Lightroom Presets , applied to some Fuji X-Pro 2 images, against some real film. It wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously, and wasn’t meant as a scientific comparison. I wanted to show, that I could mix images from both together in a single story and they would work together well. However, someone suggested that It wasn’t a fair comparison, because the film I was using Ilford XP2 wasn’t “real” black and white film.
I’m really proud of how well my T-Pan set of Lightroom presets turned out. I’m not just saying that as a shameless plug. I set about creating something that would work well to emulate black and white film, and I think the results work really well. I’m sure it’s not perfect. It’s not a full simulation as such, but rather an artistic interpretation, but I think it comes close. To see just how close I decided to do a little experiment
I’m delighted to announce that my first set of new Lightroom Presets for 2017 is now available. It’s called T-Pan and it’s a new set of Black and White Presets. I came up with the style when working on trying to copy the look of some film that a friend had asked me to scan, and I’m pretty happy with the results. T-PAN is an attempt to create a realistic set of monochrome film presets, and it is aiming to re-create the experience of shooting with a professional grade black and white film.
I’ve talked about MacPhun’s Luminar here before. Specifically I discussed it in the context of the software being a new RAW converter, and I talked about the possibilities it offers. However, there’s another way to use the application, which also works really well, and that’s as a plug-in. You can use it as a plug-in for either Photoshop or Lightroom, and it offers a lot of functionality. Recently I was using it on an actual project, and so I thought that I’d discuss what I did and how I used the software.
The creator of Iridient Developer has just released a public beta of a new product. It’s the company’s first Windows application, but it’s not a full version of Iridient Developer. Instead, it’s something that I think is even more interesting. He’s created a DNG Converter specifically for Fuji X-Trans files.
Occasionally I like to think out loud and note down my hopes and ideas for the next version of a particular piece of software. It’s not that I think a developer might actually read this and pick up on any of these points, but more as a fun little writing exercise. In this case, I want to talk about Lightroom, and what I would like to see in an updated version this year.
I have been having a devil of a problem with Photoshop and Camera Raw for quite some time now. Basically, when opening an image, or pretty much anything that triggered the Camera Raw engine, it would take ages to load the window. I’m not talking about a minor inconvenience of a few seconds either, I’m talking about minutes. On occasion it could take up to 10 minutes to launch the Camera Raw window, which in turn would grind Photoshop to a halt. I searched online for a solution but couldn’t find one. Then, the other day, like a bolt of lightning, a possible solution occurred to me, and it seems to have solved the problem.
