For the last months I’ve been finishing a project that I think will resonate with many of you explorers. As I photographed nature’s wildlife and landscapes for years I always faced the challenge of tagging my images with consistent, accurate and rich meta-data for my own offline cataloging needs but more importantly to improve their search relevance online. I’m happy to introduce a set of keyword sets for Aperture and Lightroom based on a massive scientific government database, covering different areas of the animal and plant kingdoms. I also created keyword sets for the entire US National Park System and Canadian equivalent; great helper sets to add location information to your images. You can read more about these unique keyword sets here.

I made a note of this in the last post about the free Photomatix export plugin for Lightroom but I thought it would be important enough to break it out to its own post.

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HDR-Soft has released a Photomatix Pro export plugin for Lightroom. The idea is to streamline the work-flow by allowing you to send the images selected in Lightroom directly into Photomatix Pro. The plugin uses the Lightroom engine to render your RAWs to 16-bit TIFFs on their way to Photomatix, a recommended step as Lightroom is the best place (acording to HDR-Soft) to do the RAW interpretation and rendering prior to external processing by 3rd party software. Plugin installation was streightforward and using it was just as easy, definitely a useful add-on for your HDR workflow.

First and foremost, let’s recall that RAW is not a format nor an acronym, it just means (as illustrated in the figure below) the image file contains “unprocessed” data, “raw” from the sensor.

(figure above from photo.net)

Digital cameras outputing RAW have been around for many years now but some of the factors that made it cumbersome to work with RAW files were file size, proprietary RAW formats from different manufacturers unsupported by mainstream photo editing software, and very limited RAW editing tools. In the last couple years, however, Adobe and Apple (with Lightroom 2.0 and Aperture 2 respectively) have made a huge impact in streamlining RAW editing and making it a central part of the photographer’s workflow. (more…)

If you’re looking for a cross process effect in Lightroom, I’m posting a preset I’ve worked on and tweaked. The preset is intended to be a starting point for you, you’ll likely need to adjust brightness/exposure at the very least as cross processing can have widely different outcomes depending on the picture it’s applied to. (more…)

Like many photographers did, prior to Lightroom 2.0 I did a great deal of post-processing in Photoshop CS3, including sharpening for final output. Since 2.0 however, I have kept 95% of my work-flow inside of Lightroom, but the sharpening tool does not behave the way I expected it to.

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The digital workflow has given photographers an incredible arsenal of tools to help us “develop” and shape our images towards unique visions far from their original “negatives”. How far can you go until it’s “too far”? (more…)

When Adobe released Lightroom 2.0 they also released beta versions of a number of camera profiles from different manufacturers with the intent of providing a more accurate RAW reading and interpretation for individual camera types and brands. The complaint from photographers has been that since ACR used the same default values for all RAW formats, not everyone was getting a decent image when first opened in ACR/Lightroom. (more…)

  With Lightroom 2.0′s greatly enhanced feature set, I recently decided to centralize my workflow around it. I now do 90% of the work there, 10% in Photoshop. The convenience of having a now very decent set of localized and non destructive edit tools at your fingertips is extremely convenient in my workflow. Lightroom even allows me to make develop adjustments on non RAW files which can have a serious downside if you’re not careful. (more…)

As I started using the keyword tagging function in Lightroom 2.0 I started organizing the keywords in logical hierarchies under the “keyword list” panel. As an example I created the following hierarchy “nature -> wildlife -> insect” and tagged a dragonfly picture with the “insect” keyword by checkmarking that keyword in the keywords list panel. At that point, my picture only has the “insect” tag assigned to it, HOWEVER (more…)