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 today released a set of updates for the various versions of Lightroom. This includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC and the various mobile versions. One of the key features in the CC version of Lightroom is something that people have been requesting for a long time, and that is the ability to sync presets across devices running Lightroom CC.
One of the key new features of Lightroom 7.3 and the corresponding Photoshop release, was the addition of creative profiles. If you’re not familiar with these, they are sort of a cross between presets and LUTS, and can be applied to both RAW and JPEG images (and of course tiff, and psd etc). You may be wondering how to create these new profiles. Well, it’s actually pretty easy, but you need to use photoshop. What follows is a basic guide. I will do a more in-depth version in a future post which goes into the more technical details.
I’m pleased to announce that my latest set of Lightroom presets are now finally available. I had previewed these a while ago, with the intention of releasing them shortly thereafter, but then Adobe went and changed the preset format, so I had to delay the launch until I made sure everything was working ok. The advantage of the delay is that the set is now compatible with both Photoshop and Lightroom, and I’ve also included 5 creative profiles too. So without further ado, introducing Alpine for Lightroom and Photoshop.
Ever since adobe updated Lightroom earlier this moth and changed the way presets are stored, there has been a lot of confusion around the new system, and I myself have been caught out by this too. In fact, I was so confused by the changes, I mistook one aspect of the new format completely wrong, and ended up putting out some incorrect information. Luckily a reader set me straight, and so here is the semi definitive guide to the new preset format.
I recently posted a video about processing a photoshoot that I did with my Fuji X-Pro 2, and in that video I used Iridient X-Transformer to convert the files to DNGs. I got a number of questions after posting this, with a number of people still unsure as to why one would want to use this software in the first place. I had thought that most people understood what the software did, and why you might want to use it, but as that doesn’t seem to be the case I thought I would clarify it a bit. So here is an extract from my X-Transformer book where I outline what the software does and why you might want to use it.
Perhaps it is the designer in me, but I love capturing images of details, whether it’s graffiti, street art, quirky objects, or simply bold colours and textures. Dublin city is full of these sights. I recently set out on a photo walk/shoot to capture a set of this kind of imagery for my Streets of Dublin project, and I decided to record the process of processing these when I got back to the computer.
I briefly covered the recent 7.3 version of Lightroom which was released during the week on the day it was released, and since then, I’ve had a chance to dig a little deeper. The update has delivered some substantial changes to the software, including some big under the hood changes.
Adobe has just released a major new version of Lightroom that includes some significant changes. The biggest and most notable one is the inclusion of new Raw and “Creative” profiles. However, there are also some major changes under the hood. Specifically, they have changed the file format that presets use. If you have any of my guides or presets, you may be wondering what happens.
I’ve been busy working on my latest set of Lightroom presets, and I wanted to give you a taste of what I’ve been creating. It’s actually been a while since I last made a set, so it’s good to get back to it. My inspiration for this was to come up with a way to creatively grade some photos I had taken in a forest I had visited a while ago. That’s where it started and it kind of snowballed from there. I have made a short video giving you a demo of the work in progress.
Whenever I set about editing an image or a whole shoot, I usually break the task down into two passes. First, I do any necessary corrections to the picture, and then I do more creative editing. I use this approach regardless of what software that I’m using, and by doing this, it makes it a bit easier to manage your editing process, and also to make multiple versions of an image. Let me explain a bit further.
In this Lightroom Quick Tip video, I sow you how to convert your Lightroom presets for use with Photoshop Camera Raw. It’s a fairly straightforward process and only takes a minute.
I was playing around with some photos in Photoshop earlier today, and I was also using Luminar as a plug-in, when I stumbled across something cool, almost by accident. It’s one of those things, that seems kind of obvious on hindsight, but I had never thought of trying this before. You can use Luminar non-destructively within Photoshop if you use it on a smart layer.
Yesterday Adobe released the much-hyped “speed most” update to Lightroom. The new version, which had been previously released to a number of websites in beta also has a few new features in addition to the performance improvements. So is it any good?
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I go through periods of wanting to put the effort into it and then wondering if its worth the effort. On the one hand, it’s the platform of choice at the moment for photographers, whether you like that or not. On the other hand, ever since Facebook took over and started integrating its algorithm, I now only see a fraction of the posts from the people I follow, which is infuriating. However, I’ve decided to give it one more push before I give up. With that in mind, I was researching various techniques and tips for growing the platform, and I’ve come across some interesting ideas.
A couple of sites have been reporting over the last few days about the upcoming 7.2 release of Lightroom. Adobe have decided to focus on performance for this next release, and as a testament as to how important they feel this is, they’ve sent beta copies to various photography websites and news organisations ahead of time to show how serious they are about it.
I recently wrote about and made a video demonstrating Lightroom’s new AI-based automatic settings. If you haven’t seen it already, Lightroom now uses artificial intelligence when applying its automatic settings, and it’s much improved over the previous incarnation. However, after I had talked about that a reader sent me an interesting question: “How do you sync this auto option across multiple images?”. At first, I thought you would just use the synchronisation button at the bottom of the develop module, but it turns out, it’s not that straightforward. There are a few ways to do it, but they require a little work to find.
When Lightroom first came out, one of the biggest complaints that people had, was that the colours would change when importing RAW files. This led to the inclusion of colour profiles, designed to mimic a camera’s various picture modes, and this seems to address the problem. However, as time has gone by and Lightroom has supported more and more cameras, the quality and accuracy of the included colour profiles have started to vary significantly. If you find that, even with selecting a colour profile that matches what you shot in camera, the colours are still quite a bit off, then this trick may help you resolve the problem.
If there’s one complaint I hear again and again about Sony cameras, is that the colours are not pleasant. This is the most common complaint that people have when trying the camera. I have certainly grappled with this myself in the past when first using Sony cameras. The thing is though, it’s not strictly true. There isn’t really anything inherently wrong with Sony’s cameras though. The problem often comes from either a poor white balance or the calibration. If you’re shooting RAW and using Lightroom, there’s another issue: Adobe’s calibration for Sony files in Lightroom is awful.
