Archive for the ‘Lightroom’ Category
Lightroom Rescue in under 10 minutes…
Grim Day... Day 1 of the summer series of workshops and we get a winter night.... in may.... It wasn't raining too much when we got to the reservoir, so I showed a couple of new people how to expose using a meter. Here's the shot I got - 4 seconds, histogram told me that the sky had not burned (I'd metered from the sky, so was expecting that!). It was also to show the effect of a polariser on the water and long exposures on the water surface. So you'd usually just throw these things away and return on a better night... but I ...
Yorkshire Photo Locations – West Burton Force
Wensleydale's Easy Access Waterfall Looking for an easy to shoot Yorkshire Photo Location? You can park and look at this waterfall from the car... it's that easy to see! A real gem of a waterfall, like another great Yorkshire Photo Location, High Force, it cascades over a large fault in the rock. It creates this lovely surrounding which is an ideal accompaniment to the cascading water. Look under the bridge There's also a very pretty waterfall under the foot bridge, this is rarely accessible unless you've got wellies on - though when ...
5 Tips on Cropping Photos
Cropping a shot is a great exercise - you can find completely new images within an existing frame. Here's a shot with lots going on, probably too much to be an effective shot on its own. We have a few rocks in the foreground and lots of lines and circles from the moving foamy water. It was taken on an overcast day, so no interesting light. Crop 1 - Most of the shot... So to start with, I've gone mono and done a little work bringing out detail in a few areas, the bank at the top being the ...
5 Post Shoot Tips
After a shoot:- Get your photos off your card straight away - do not leave over many shoots! Cards corrupt... you may loose ALL YOUR WORK! Create a folder structure which is easily searchable - maybe with keywords and dates in the folder name Make a backup on a second hard drive Import the photos into Lightroom - apply appropriate keywords to them at this stage (including meta data about you, your copyright etc) Go through each shot quickly and rate them out of 5 - easy in Lightoom (caps lock on - library mode - hit numbers to go ...
McFade Photography in Blackpool
Blackpool - Vegas of the north! [singlepic id=683 float=] Friday night saw me playing with the Blues Brothers band at the Empire in Blackburn, so I stopped in the area for the weekend, calling into Blackpool for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. Interesting light - sunny in one direction, overcast in the other, so decided to get lots of HDR shots of the iconic, and less well known structures around the north pier area. I also got loads of silly "kiss me quick" hat shots and stuff like that, but the building shots have been edited ...
Getting Floral….
On the way back from my sight test today, I called into a park and grabbed a few floral shots - thought I'd give it a bash, they're not really my thing to be honest but you never know who may need them.... The park's usually full of all kinds and colours of flowers, but today, I was greeted mainly with soil and dandilions... so here's a bunch of shots... all done in Lightroom V4.... see if you like them, I'll pop them up for sale if anyone fancies a print ! [nggallery
Cars in The Park – Newby Hall May 13th
Photographing Cars in the Park Prints of some of the cars can be bought here - email info@mcfade.co.uk if yours is missing and you want a print. http://www.photoboxgallery.com/mcfadeAuto/collection?album_id=1270798377 The rain was happily absent at Newby Hall, near Ripon, today, so the Cars In The Park show was a great success. A mix of sports cars from all eras converged on the greens in front of the hall - we were there taking photos and chatting with their owners along with Matt Netherwood ...
McFade Edits Phil Gledhill’s “Chris” playing
As part of the Lightroom 4 exploration, we’ve been editing our student’s shots for fun – using just Lightroom 4, no plugins or photoshop. Here’s one from the Lyric of Chris with his trombone on the stairs. Original Shot This shot seemed to suit mono, so started off with a black and white pre-set - went through a few till I got one which looked nice. Selective brush work to bring out detail and add light to interesting areas of the shot Added vignette to see whether it worked... down to personal taste ...
McFade Edits Phil Gledhill’s “Chris in Window” shot
As part of the Lightroom 4 exploration, we've been editing our student's shots for fun - using just Lightroom 4, no plugins or photoshop. Here's one from the Lyric of Chris playing his trombone. The gallery feature isn't in the right order, but each shot has a number after it;s name "brass-band-119-3" - that number is sequential :- Original Bleach bypass preset Crop, rotate a bit and some vignette Selective darken with brush tool Alternative crop to 4 [nggallery
McFade Edit of Dave Goodman’s “Chris” Shot
Here's a shot by Dave Goodman, who came on our Brass Workshop in the Lyric. It's a shot of Chris playing Trombone on the stairs up to the projector room. For me, the main thing here was the shadow and brick textures, so all the emphasis was dragged in that direction, leaving chris himself very shadowy. Original Image Tone and clarity added - used a GRAD effect to alter the texture on the left side of the shot Subtle change of contrast/clarity on LHS brickwork Cooled the dark tones to give more "cold" look Crop and slight ...
McFade Edit of Dave Goodman’s “Sam” shot
As part of the Lightroom 4 exploration, we offered to edit some of our students workshop photos to show what can be done just in light room. So this shot is from a McFade Taster shoot where we had Sam and Chris, the brass section from Sweet Soul Blues Brothers and many other bands. Here are the basic steps in Lightroom - click on the photo to scroll through each step:- Original Shot Tone edits Presence Curves (very little difference here actually) Crop and slight Vignette added Selective changes with brush to make sax stand ...
Ilkley Moor – Photographed in HDR
On Ilkley Moor Bah Tat A bright mid-morning trip up to the Cow and Calf is a lovely way to start a bank holiday Monday. Light breeze, nice patterned clouds and nice shadows were what we were greeted with. The ND Grad Problem Thing is, using ND Grad filters to keep detail in the sky would blacken the top of the rocks. So to get both nice, bright rocks, and the sky, I took 3 shots of each scene (dark, normal and light) and then used Photomatix V 4.2 to blend them together to get the best from all 3 shots. Working smart Using the same ...
Fake that sunset in Lightroom 4
So many landscapes have these amazing sunsets, nuclear red skies with amazing orange hues.... Do you think they "really" looked like that when the photographer was there? Here's a demo of how easy they are to fake in Lightroom 4.... Original Look Tone and Saturation changes Tidy up dust and lift the dark areas Lens correction And that's it really - just click on the photo to advance through the images [nggallery
5 Steps to better Coastal Shots
An example of workflow in Lightroom on a coastal shot. 5 shots here Unedited Tone to add contrast, slight rotation, dust removed Clarity added to boost detail/contrast Colour boost - more blues and orange Selective edits with the brush tool and final crop. To view each step, just click on the picture below [slideshow id=10 h=1000
Lightroom 4 to the rescue!
You can't always win :( Some days were just not made for landscape photography, unfortunately my recent Northumberland trip had 3 consecutive days.... Not one to be defeated, I did clamber onto some rocks and get a few wave shots, but as you can see here there was little help from the ambient light. Also, I'd found an old 3-stop ND filter that fitted my 28mm F1.8 lens, so used that - it gave a pretty horribly magenta cast.... The untouched RAW File So to rescue it in Lightroom... here's a few steps to show you what it can do - ...
