Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 2 – Flag, Rate, and Filter

In the previous article of this series we took an in-depth look at importing your photos into Lightroom. Now that your photos are imported, let’s take a few moments to go through them and tag them with a flag, rating or color so we can easily filter through them during the editing process.

It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

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Digital Photography Tips – White Balance with a Gray Card

One thing that often gets overlooked by amateur photographers is getting accurate color in your photos. The first step to getting good color is making sure you have paid attention to your white balance. White balance, sometimes known as color balance, is basically making sure that white appears as white in a given lighting scenario.

Many people deal with white balance by simply setting their digital camera to Auto White Balance (AWB). While cameras do fairly well at achieving good white balance automatically, there are a few steps you can take to insure more accurate depiction of colors. Read more

Edit Multiple Pictures with Photoshop

One of the best things about digital photography is how easily you can take dozens of pictures and quickly share them with your friends and family. No longer do we have to keep up with envelopes of negatives or worry about getting your film developed. However, with each improved model of digital camera, the number of pixels used to create our photos increases, often by the millions.

This isn’t a problem when it comes to printing your photos. In fact, the more pixels you have the better your printed photos will look. The problem arises when we just want to share these pictures on the web or email a few of them to a friend or relative. You see, the more pixels an image uses, the larger its file size will be. Large file sizes mean longer downloads for your friends and family, and can also be the reason why your emails won’t go through (many email servers won’t accept messages larger than 10mb). Read more

Photoshop Tips – Advanced Black and White Conversion Using Actions

There are several ways to convert your photos to black and white inside Photoshop; quick options like the Desaturate command or simply adding in a Black & White Adjustment layer. But there are other more advanced options available within Photoshop that can give you killer black and white results.

The thing about black and white conversion is that one process doesn’t always work the best for every photo. There are several different methods because sometimes certain methods work better than others for the picture in question.

What we’ll cover here is a quick way to to create an Action that will automatically add the most popular black and white conversion techniques to your photo. We’ll combine this action with Layer Comps to give you an easy way to run through each of the conversion options to get a glimpse of what works best with your photo. I tend to lovingly refer to this technique as, Not Yo Mama’s Black and White Conversion.

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Photoshop Tips – Quick and Easy Photo Vignette

Adding a vignette (darkening or lightening around the edges of the photo) is easy these days with the introduction of Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw. However, the tools in these utilities are limited in flexibility and customization.

The following is a quick and easy way to create either a dark or light vignette for your photo and give you the ability to have virtually limitless control over the effect. Read more

Make Images Transparent Using Only CSS

Most of the time, when you’re needing to have an image fade slightly or become transparent or opaque, you pop open the photo in Photoshop and lower the Opacity slider. Imagine being able to control the opacity of an image using only a few short lines of CSS.

Well, believe it or not this is easily doable, and it works across multiple browsers as well…though, it might not work through RSS feedreaders; if you’re reading this post through your feedreader, you might want to click through to our site to see the full effects of the transparency.

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DIY Safe and Easy Way to Preserve Child Footprints

This past Sunday, the kind ladies who run the nursery at my church asked us to bring our 4-month old child to get his handprint and footprint for the bulletin board. When we walked in the nursery, I saw a paper plate on the table holding a pool of blue liquid next to a sheet of construction paper.

I watched in mild horror as the ladies dipped my son’s hand in the blue liquid paint and attempt to press his hand flat against the construction paper. Only, my son closed his hand to make a fist. They had to pry his fingers open and feebly press down on the paper while he screamed and struggled to get away.

Afterwards, it looked like someone had spit a mouthful of blue paint onto the paper. It barely resembled a handprint at all. And even after the kind ladies scrubbed on my child’s hands to get the remnants of the paint off, there was still a slight hint of blue on his hand all day long.

I figured there had to be a better, easier way to get a handprint and footprint of a child. Here is what I’ve come up with.

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Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Importing Photos

What? You’re not using Adobe Lightroom? Well, you should be. Lightroom is a very powerful image editor and management system, and since it was created by Adobe then it integrates great with Photoshop. It has quickly become a vital program in my photography workflow and one of the easiest programs to recommend to friends who are looking for a better way to manage and edit photos.

The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.

This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving. Read more

Photoshop Tutorial – Change Eye Color

When working with portrait photography, you may want to change or enhance the color of your subject’s eyes. This can be easily done inside Photoshop CS3 and CS4. In this example, I will be using CS4, but this can be done in just about any version of Photoshop.

This technique can also be used for elements other than eyes. You can effectively change or enhance the colors of any object or photo inside Photoshop. For our purposes here, we’ll stick with stick with the eyes. Just keep in mind that you can apply these steps to any object to change its color.

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Photoshop Tips – Intro to Layer Masks

The ability to use Layer Masks is one of the more powerful features available in Photoshop. Yet, many beginning Photoshop users find it difficult to understand the purpose of masks and how to use them.

Once you understand what masks are and how they work, you’ll have a much easier time blending together layers, filters and effects, and you’ll be able to work with your images non-destructively. Read more

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