The clear night sky under a new moon is almost always the same brightness in the same location. I have blindly put my camera on ISO 6400 as a result. But after having read somewhere that Sony supposedly builds sensors that are ISO invariant, I wanted to test this claim with my own Sony-equipped Nikon D750.
Back in July of 2016, Adobe released a major update to Lightroom Mobile for iOS that allows it to work directly with any and all raw files supported by the desktop version and to also sync them seamlessly with the desktop. But what does this actually mean for real-world use? What problem are we actually solving? Let's go on a trip with epic travel photographer Elia Locardi and find out.
One of the best things a portrait photographer can do is learn how to master a single off-camera light. Most photo shoots don’t allow enough time to set up multiple lights, and when shooting on location, carrying more than one light can be too cumbersome to manage. In this video, we see a very useful way to use one off-camera flash with some simple modifiers to create a dramatic portrait.
Today, Adobe has announced Lightroom for Apple TV. Featuring integration with Adobe's cloud services, it makes for a fun and interesting way to browse and show off your photos.
Dodge and burn is a well-known technique amongst the retouching community. Most retouchers will use it to smooth out transitions and micro-contrast on portrait, fashion, or beauty images. However, it can be utilized for any genre of photography and broader uses than just skin cleaning. It can be used to direct the viewer’s eye and create more compelling, dramatic images with a few clicks. If you shoot and edit weddings and are looking to step up your post-processing game, this article is definitely for you!
Last year we teamed up with Elia Locardi, one of the most followed landscape photographers in the world, to film "Photographing The World: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing." This is a 12-hour video tutorial on landscape photography, and today, we are releasing the first lesson for free.
Great news for mobile editing fans! Lightroom for iOS and Android has taken a large step forward today, making editing on the go more versatile and capable than ever.
The perfect black and white conversion technique will vary from photographer to photographer and rightfully so, because there’s truly no perfect technique. it’s subjective. However, there are three key areas that many photographers will overlook before exporting their files that directly influence how their final image will look.
Portrait photography is very diverse. While some enjoy the comfort of studio portraits and the flexibility it brings, others prefer the variety of backdrops the outdoors provides. While it is totally realistic to create all kinds of weather moods in the studio, it often involves a bigger budget, whereas one can achieve similar results for free by relying on the weather forecast and proper equipment choices.
Sharing your images on the web from point A to point B, in this case, from your desktop to Instagram, can be quite a hassle. You have to make a separate folder in your Dropbox, email it, or send it to yourself (there are a variety of ways), and clog up a bunch of storage on your phone. Yes, I know there several back door methods that have been discussed prior on this issue, and while Instagram has not yet made a plunge into the desktop world, we'll have to make do until then. But in the mean time, I came across this super user-friendly, free Lightroom plug-in that solidifies a solution!
When starting out in photography, one of the first things we hear about is the rule of thirds. We then venture out into the world, lining up our subjects onto imaginary intersecting lines. When we get home, we open our images into Lightroom and find that the crop tool is already set up to help us maintain this rule. But as we advance in our photography careers, we start to find that there are a lot more ways to compose an image. Luckily for us, there is a somewhat hidden option to change the overlay of the crop tool within Lightroom.
Adobe has launched their latest update to Lightroom and Photoshop in the 2015.1 update. In the Adobe Camera Raw module and Lightroom, they have developed a new feature that is something photographers in the travel, architecture, and cityscape photography industry will really find useful. It can actually change some of your old previously unusable images into great images.
Freckles are in. As more and more brands and publications start opting to hire models with realistic “imperfections,” we’re bound to see more and more ads with speckled skin. Score one for realistic expectations! However, lighting freckles isn't easy, as most broad light sources will flatten the tone in the skin. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to bring back and enhance freckles in Adobe Lightroom.
Adobe Lightroom was a game changer for me when it was introduced. I used to spend hours in Photoshop tweaking this and that, creating actions to batch a set of images I had shot, and output different resolutions from the giant PSD files I was working in. Lightroom gave me 90 percent of the control I use in PS anyway, and allowed me to do it quickly, easily, and without an ever-growing collection of PSD files. I was in love.
Peter Stewart is an internationally published photographer that specialized in travel and fine art photography. To understand how to take awesome scenery photos, you must know the three basic qualities of light: intensity, direction, and color. Check out how a master does his work.
SLR Lounge founding partner, photographer, and retoucher, Pye Jirsa, walks us through a quick Lightroom tutorial on how to adjust a photo that has mixed light. How many times have you taken a group shot only to find one or two of your subjects were poorly lit because they were too far from the source light, hidden behind another subject, or from using multiple ambient light sources?
This is a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to thank you in advance for indulging me. There seems to be a rampant misunderstanding in certain levels of the photo community as to what editing presets are, and what they actually accomplish. I (like many of you I would assume) am a member of various photo-centric groups on Facebook. In particular, I am a member of groups for people who have purchased Lightroom and ACR preset packs from a variety of creators. Almost daily I see posts in these groups that go something like this: "I thought my photos were beyond hope, but then I applied "WHIMSICAL PRESET NAME" and they were saved! These presets are amazing!!!1!111!!!" Sound familiar?
In the comments section of my last article, I remarked that "I always liked the rendering of X-Trans files on C1 more than Lightroom anyway, so maybe this is just the reason I need to make the switch back." A longtime contributor to the comments, Pete Miller, asked if that was indeed the case. Good question! Let's find out if the reputation Lightroom has gained for inferior Fuji X-Trans processing is still warranted.
With the wedding season right around the corner, it is time to find a solution to improve last year’s workflow. Most event photographers complain about the same thing: culling. It can quickly become a very time-consuming task, and it is far from being the most interesting part of the job. Although, there are a few ways to help speed up the process while retaining a solid quality control.
I am sure we have all had those days where you stare at an image and just start moving sliders up and down to see what they do. What happens if I take this slider all the way up and this slider all the way down? For the most part, the results are entertaining, but not really aesthetically pleasing. But every once in a while, you can stumble onto something pretty awesome.
Imagine yourself under a starry night sky. Wouldn’t it be great to capture the Milky Way to show it at home or on the web? Unfortunately, you are left with a black frame after you’ve pointed the camera upwards at settings you are used to. It's time to open up the aperture, lengthen the exposure, and bump up the ISO. You will introduce noise, but do you really care? Aren’t there tools out there to reduce noise but still keep the detail?
Nik software is one of the heavy hitters in the Lightroom and Photoshop plugin world. They are so big that in 2012, the company was bought up by Google. After Google's acquisition, they lowered the price for all the desktop plugins and made their mobile app (Snapseed) free of charge. Now, four years later, Google has decided to bring their desktop plugins into line with their mobile application by making all of them free.
I’m a big fan of getting images right in camera, and it's something that strive to do. I think there is something to be said for the skill that it takes, especially when shooting an event like a wedding. Getting the perfect light, the perfect composition, and the perfect moment while dealing with all the different variables of the day is quite a feat. The main image I’m going to be talking about today, though, does not fit into this category, but it still manages to be one of my favorite and most "liked” images.
I've started to embrace the mobile and web sides of Lightroom a bit more. The ability to access my catalog on the go, easily create and sync collections to show to clients, and cull and make basic edits while standing in line at the market has been a great boon in convenience for me. Adobe seems to be embracing it too, pushing ahead with the introduction of a useful and rather neat feature today.
There's this nifty piece of software called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and in my time as an educator in the craft of photography I have seen its use frequently abused and mishandled. The issues affect beginners and pros alike, and stem from multiple issues, everything from technical oversight, all the way to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Lightroom is meant for. Read on for an overview of common misconceptions and mistakes with regards to this immensely powerful photo editing system.
Great news for Lightroom users on Android: Adobe has just updated the app to version 2.0, introducing an in-app camera with DNG raw file capture, shoot-through non-destructive presets, split toning, and more.
I don't rate my photos nearly as much as I should. And part of it has been because I've been too lazy to look this exact tip up! Thankfully, Adobe has provided us with one of their now famous under-a-minute Lightroom Coffee Break videos to quickly explain how to auto-advance as you rate your photos. This trick also works for auto-advancing while flagging photos. The key to the trick? Caps lock.
Today, Adobe released version 2015.4/6.4 of Lightroom, which adds support for many new cameras and lenses, speeds up performance, and introduces an intriguing new feature: Boundary Warp.
Adobe launched a new YouTube series through their Lightroom channel to give Lightroom users some extra tips on features they may not have come across yet. While some highlighted features such as viewing masking for the sharpening tool are a little better known, others are more tucked away and might come as a surprise, like this feature that allows you to update the overall effect of a local adjustment with multiple sliders in effect.
If you enjoyed learning How to Create That Urban High Contrast Desaturated Look in Lightroom, then chances are you will like learning how to create dramatic black and white photos with Lightroom presets. In this tutorial, Serge Ramelli again teaches us some methods for editing in Lightroom. Whether you are an enthusiast of the program or just getting started and want to add a dramatic touch to your black and white photos, check out this video.
