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I'd like to give my family some framed photos for chistmas this year. My mom in particular has been bugging me to show her all of the photos I took during my Arctic fieldwork this summer, and we're trying to keep things low-cost and simple this year. Anyways, I was wondering if anyone has some general advice for getting good prints from digital photos. Most of what I've got are landscape shots, taken with my Pentax K10D in JPG "High Quality" mode and either my 18-55mm kit lens or my 100-300mm telephoto zoom, with the default white balance settings. I was in the High Arctic, so the light is always mid-day, though the weather of course was variable - no evenings, no sunsets, no interiors, no artifical lighting of any kind. Here's an example of the kind of thing I'm looking at, the only modification is I rescaled it to 800 px wide (the original image is 3872 x 2592).  Some EXIF data: 1/400s, F 6.7, ISO 100, 300mm. Given a photo like this, how would you process it for a 8 x 10 print? I've got GIMP because I'm broke.
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Dec 4, 2010 22:12
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TheLastManStanding posted:I wouldn't. It's an odd crop and there isn't much to look at. Do you have any more photos to choose from?  As before, this is unmodified except for resizing. There are a couple of dust spots from my dirty sensor, and I might need to rotate the image a bit, but otherwise I was planning to just play with the brightness and contrast and probably crop out some of the clutter near the bottom edge. That's about the limit of what I know how to do, and I was wondering if people had general advice for the digital -> print transcription. EDIT: I remembered I'd already taken a crack at that particular image. Maybe somebody can tell me what they would have done differently?  Patterson River Campsite by Execudork, on Flickr ExecuDork fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 5, 2010 |
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Dec 5, 2010 20:37
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Cool, thanks very much to both of you. I spent the last couple of hours picking out some more, and this helps to motivate me to keep going and try to get a couple more up to something decent.
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Dec 7, 2010 02:11
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I was tasked with taking some pictures at the department christmas party last weekend, including this one of the organising committee, shrunk to 800px wide to avoid broken tables. I'm more-or-less OK with how it came out, but everyone's eyes have blue dots in them. Is the best way to remove these spots the clone tool on a single-pixel brush and zoomed in at 800%, or is there some other way to remove the reflectance of my flash in their eyes? Am I being uselessly paranoid, and pixel-peeping? Also, does anyone have any tips on avoiding this in future? Have the flash separate from the camera, off to one side some distance, maybe? 
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Dec 11, 2010 06:21
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SirRobin posted:Keeping the flash well away from the camera will help but so long as they're not red, a reflection highlight on an eye doesn't always look bad. Eyes are round and wet and do reflect highlights. If there are none there, they can look a little lifeless. Scaled down like this, I can barely make out highlights in any of the eyes so unless it's going to be displayed a lot larger than this you probably don't need to worry about them. The too-dark hair and the too-bright foreheads both seem like tricky problems to me. I guess I'll try to select faces / hair and and play with brightness and contrast and colour balance on those as layers. If nothing else, I'll learn what not to do... Oprah Haza posted:So... you're saying that you don't like catchlights...?
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Dec 12, 2010 04:57
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I posted in the general questions thread, something that started as a whine but turned into "I need post-processing advice". I took some photos at the work christmas party and at the christmas family gathering, and looking at them now I realized my bad focus habits (and other bad habits) are causing me grief. You've already seen the key picture from the work christmas party (shiny, shiny foreheads), so here are some family pictures. I don't want to put these up on Flickr yet because knowing my mom, she'll grab them as soon as they appear and I'm not happy with them, yet. Family gathering Straight from camera but resized to 1024 wide (to keep Waffleimages filesize down)  Click here for the full 1024x685 image. My first use of Lightroom 3  Click here for the full 1024x683 image. My cousin expressing her disgust at the artificial worms her father recieved for fishing. Straight from camera but resized to 1024 wide  Click here for the full 1024x685 image. Messing around with GIMP  Click here for the full 872x1024 image. Resized from the camera, I haven't tried to edit this one yet. Crop and deal with the underexposure I know for sure, but is there something else you would do?  Click here for the full 1024x685 image. Even if the response is universally "learn to compose, learn exposure, turn down the suck" I think I'm benefitting from staring critically at some of these. Plus the practice with Lightroom and GIMP. Thanks in advance!
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Jan 7, 2011 03:11
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I dunno about the rest of you, but my most common thing to do in Lightroom is to click on one of those number boxes then tap the up and down arrows to change the value. It's more precise than my spastic mouse wanderings, and I don't usually know an exact value I'll want so just tap-tap-tap gets me there. Holding the arrow key down causes rapid scrolling, useful for the more subtle sliders. Each tap of the key on the colour temperature slider produces a noticeable change, but I've got to crank it 10 or 20 at a time to see an effect on the clarity slider. Stupid Question about Lightroom: I'm running 3.3, and all is well. My question is, does importing files clog up Lightroom? This is a dumb question. My worry is that maintaining 1000s of photos already imported into Lightroom is slowing it down when I import more. This is dumb, right? I'm totally wrong about how Lightroom handles files, aren't I?
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Feb 26, 2011 21:59
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/\/\/\ I like the before picture as it is, personally. It looks like she's lit by some weird artificial light, because the background is more normal. In the after shot, everything is funky so it looks like you're trying for some artistic effect that I'm not artistic enough to follow.gib posted:Also, I just use a lightbox and a macro lens on a tripod mounted vertically. It's a little more wonky than the bellows systems but it works pretty well. You can go through negatives VERY quickly once you have it set up right.
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Mar 5, 2011 02:21
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Presumably my question has been asked and answered before, but I can't figure out how to phrase a search query. I bought a new computer, partly to speed up Lightroom (OK, mostly to play games). I installed Lightroom 3.2 on the new beast, and immediately on start-up it asked to update to 3.6, so I did that. The old computer was running 3.3. I exported the catalogue (33 000 photos) from the old computer, and opened that catalogue in LR3.6 on the new computer; so far, so good. All of the folders are unlocated, of course. All of the pictures are on a couple of external harddrives. Sooner or later I plan to sort that out, but for now I'm happy leaving the files where they are. Lightroom will let me locate each folder individually, which is slow and tedious because my folder structure on the external drive is foolishly complicated - my photos are spread across a couple of hundred folders. Nothing has changed about the files or where they're located and how they're organized, I want to just point LR at the relevant near-root folders ("Pictures from Pentax K10D", "Blog", "Norway 2010" etc.) and say "go". Is there a way to mass-relocate folders in LR 3.6? Adobe help isn't very helpful.
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Mar 10, 2012 22:24
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Similar to this:big cheese posted:What would be the easiest way to move pretty much all of my photos from my internal HD to an external? I'm using Lightroom. I remember last time I moved a whole bunch I had to tell Lightroom where to look for the photos in their new location for each folder individually. It was a bit of a pain. If I re-import my photos, is there a way for Lightroom 3.6 to recognize (most) of them as already in the catalogue, just update the directory information? /\/\/\/ I found that. The problem is I've got about 200 directories to do that way. I'm hoping there's an automated method. ExecuDork fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Jun 23, 2012 |
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Jun 23, 2012 03:26
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I'm getting some pretty noticeable purple fringing when I use my supertele. No surprises there, but I can't figure out how to reduce or eliminate it. Some places online have suggested the chromatic aberation settings in Lightroom (I have LR 3.6), but I played with those sliders and couldn't seen any changes, probably because my subject, a Kingfisher, is in the middle of the frame and I wasn't paying attention to the edges. Any suggestions? I have Lightroom 3.6, and the GIMP.
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Jul 31, 2012 04:59
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I don't use a Mac but I do use Lightroom, and a few months ago I got annoyed by Adobe's business model (I don't want to subcribe, I want to buy the thing - it's not a newspaper, it's a book). I heard about Aperture through Facebook, an old friend wrote an open letter to Adobe asking for the Heads-Up-Display (HUD) or full-screen editing functiona of Aperture to be implemented in Lightroom. This isn't a feature I would use - GIMP has a kind of HUD mode as its default and I find it annoying - but his letter is reasonable (warning: he's a professional comedian so it's full of jokes, not all of which you may find funny). http://robmitchelson.com/nubert-says/2014/6/28/an-open-letter-to-adobe-in-regards-to-apple-dropping-aperture I replied with links to the programs I found a while ago in my procrastination-y search for LR alternatives. Corel Raw Therapee ACDSee LightZone Darktable I never tried any of them, so I can't say anything about them other than "They exist, and apparently allow most of the functions you currently get from Aperture or Lightroom".
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Jun 29, 2014 00:13
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rio posted:Your "comedian" friend used a pretty bad example of a lightroom screenshot to make his point since those panels can be hidden or resized. Yeah, I noticed that, too. I didn't point that out to him, nor did I talk about another friend, a professional wedding photog, who runs Lightroom on a multi-monitor setup, one screen entirely devoted to just the image, another with most of the tool panels.
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Jun 29, 2014 09:20
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I just really hate Adobe's subscription-based business model. I think you can just buy only LR, still, while the rest of "Creative Suite" (Photoshop etc.) is subscription-only. Pretty much all software these days is available as a full-function (or like 95% of functions) trial version for free, either as a lightly-crippled form (I've seen video editing software that splatters a big watermark over everything, but otherwise lets you play with it) or for a set time limit (typically 30 days). Being "serious" as a photographer, in my mind, comes down to willing to put at least a token effort into making your pictures look good, and working to make the pictures you take tomorrow better than the pictures you took yesterday; learning and improving, in other words. Post-processing is key to this, again this is just my own opinion, but I've seen plenty of pretty good photos that would be pretty drat good if the photog had just bothered to tweak basic parameters like rotation, white balance, contrast, crop; this takes about 10 seconds in LR once you get used to it (and it's pretty intuitive) so there's no excuse for crappy photos.
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Aug 15, 2014 20:37
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rio posted:My Lightroom catalog is hosed because I moved from pc to Mac. The drive letter is not the same (because of no drive letters on Mac?) so I have all of these pictures in folders arranged by year and then by date imported (which I believe is standard for lightroom). I would have to click every goddamn stupid folder to find all lost files. Is there anyway around this? It would essentially be impossible to go folder by folder due to the amount of time it would take to do thousands of folders manually. Even if there were a way to just get all these files in one folder, losing edits, would be better than nothing. Re-import everything into a brand-new catalogue? You'd lose all your edits, but LR would know where everything is. I had a similar problem because I moved a bunch of folders around in Windows Explorer, and suddenly LR had no idea. Pointing LR at the top-level folder containing hundreds of subfolders but no images didn't work, I had to go through and do each image-containing folder individually, one-at-a-time. I recommend a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and some upbeat tunes if you go that route.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:13
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dakana posted:Can you add the parent folder, then just tell Lightroom where the new parent folder is? This is what I tried in LR 3.6 - no dice. Lightroom (at least, version 3) doesn't really play nice with my file/folder structure. If you import the files originally in their nested-folder structure by importing from as close to the root as possible, it seems to improve the LR catalogue's ability to know where the gently caress anything is.
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Nov 6, 2014 19:56
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