Words & Images

Recently, on my way to Montana, I was driving through Moab and Green River. I spent the late afternoon in Arches N.P., seeing it for the first time with snow. Sadly the weather was not that great with many clouds around. The next morning, I continued on and the area around Green River was a showstopper. I had to pull onto the shoulder on the freeway because I could not let all the images I saw go by.

Here are 2 of the images:

Winter Sunset in Arches N.P.

Cold Winter Morning

Lines can play an important part in taking images. They are also an easy aspect. Some examples of a line: a road, a row of trees or shrubs, a fence, a course of water. The ‘line’ is placed so it leads the viewer into the image.

Don’t forget that shadows can also serve as lines. It can be used for the same purpose.

This image is not the best, but it serves as an illustration.

I prefer the softer S-curves. They are more elegant and invite a more thorough exploration of the image. S-curves are a bit harder to find. The most likely places are creeks and dunes, roads often offer a curve.

One caution with using lines: do not place them so they exit the image. It can also be tricky to have a fence in the foreground running from left to right. It makes it harder to ‘enter’ the image.

When you open an image in the Develop Module, you can see that some sliders have presets. Since they sort of work for me, I have not taken the time to find out if I can change those settings.

My flow is influenced by my habit of just going back in the develop history instead of actually undoing a step. I feel if the log gets too long it becomes cumbersome and it is easy to undo a step that did not work out.

Normally, I start with the spot brush set on healing (not cloning) to clean up spots – sometimes a bird can look like a ’spot’. You can move the circle from where LR gets its data for replacement, which can allow for some creativity. Then I look at the temperature. In the camera, I have the White Balance set on Automatic and most of the time it is right on. Next, I look at the exposure / brightness of an image as well as shadows and highlights. If there are relatively straight lines bordering the area that needs to be changed (overexposed sky for instance), I use the ND filter otherwise the adjustment brush (check the automask this helps in the transition areas)

ND filter: by having the 3 lines of the filter close together, you work with a hard transition. The more they are apart, the softer the transition becomes. You can tilt the lines of the filter to parallel ‘lines’ in the image. Depending on need, I apply the filter from the top down, from the bottom up (usually to open up a shadow area) or from the sides in.

Adjustment brush: I use it for the same purposes where the ND filter does not work or to play with light in small selective areas. It works great to make white really white.

The next step is the clarity slider and last the color treatment. In about 90% of the time I am done at that point. In rare cases, I will export the image now into Photoshop for more complex editing

After all the hectic with the Christmas Fairs, I finally had time to go out and take pictures. I got one Christmas wish fulfilled on the 24th with a wonderful day of a snow covered landscape. On the 25th, I got a surprise present in the form of being the first person in Plaza Blanca: no human tracks!

I wish all of you the best for the New Year; plenty and successful photography

Here are some of the images:

In the Develop Module, the sliders Vibrance and Saturation sit right next to each other, yet have very different effects on the image, which sometimes can be subtle and sometimes drastic.

Vibrance gets applied in a curve. It affects already saturated areas the least and dull areas the most.

Saturation gets applied equally to all the colors of the image. Therefore, if you have some areas already well saturated, they will start to look unnatural.

Overall, I tend to use Vibrance  more than Saturation

Saturation – Luminance: Often I go for the individual color sliders with the setting on Saturation to fine tune an image. (By clicking on the circle in the upper left corner of the field, you can select with the cursor the color in the image you want to affect. By pulling up, the saturation is increased, pulling down will decrease it.) Lately, I have begun to also look at the Luminance of a color. When Saturation is the ‘amount’ of color, then Luminance is the ‘amount of light’ in that color. The effect in an image is quite different and, when applying Luminance, you have to watch your histogram so you don’t create a hot spot. The image below is am example of applying Saturation in the highlights and Luminance in the shadows.

Split-toning: With this, you apply a selected hue to the highlights and / or the shadows. I have used this mostly with my ice crystal images to create a sense of cold. Some of them I needed to convert to greyscale in order to bring out the crystal structures. I then added ‘color’ to mostly the highlights.

In my first LR Virtual Copy post, I referred to the possibility to editing for mood / weather. I want to show an example with one of my images.

First, I edited the original. When I was satisfied with it, I made a virtual copy of it.

Then, I gently pulled the clarity slider to the left in this copy to give more the effect of the wind I experienced while taking the photo. I feel it also enhances the windblown grasses.

Finally, I selected both copies in LR, under the drop down menu ‘Photo’, is ‘edit in’. I chose edit in CS4 as layers. This means both copies will be opened in CS4 where I then combined them into one image. The original edit was layer 1, the edited virtuI copy layer 2. I erased the sandhill cranes in the front to show the sharp birds from layer 1. After being done with the composit, I saved the new image back into the folder in LR where the copies had come from.

Last week, we had 2 days we did not break freezing and a low of 3 and 7 Fahrenheit. Naturally, I went to the creek and here are some of the shots I got.

I have folders for my images on both the external hard drive and in LR. On the hard drive, the Raw images are sorted under either shoots by year and month, by trip, or subject. The “shoots” folder contains the mix of images taken during that particular month.

In LR any new images are imported into the folder ‘new’ with a subfolder for the month or trip. Once I am done with the selection and editing, the really good images get moved into the appropriate folder, the rest stays for a little while longer in the ‘new’ folder until I decide to have a final look at them and toss what I do not like.

In the LR library, I have many folders that make sense to me and allow me to quickly find images without having to do a search with keywords. (I have to admit that I am often not very good at keywording when I import and it is something I feel I need to to do some catch up work). Here are some folder titles as examples: National Parks (with subfolders for each park I have pictures of), landscapes (subfolders for areas in the US), International Travel (subfolders for countries or larger geographic areas). All local images go into the folder ‘Greater Santa Fe Area’ with subfolders for special local projects.

Since I have more images on my computer than I have on the web sites, I use color coding to denote which image is where. I don’t use the star coding much, except during the selection process.

As I said, my keywording can use some improvement. I am good with it, if I import images after every single outing where I can apply the keywords to all imported images. In catching up with it, I select the images, which get the same keyword(s) and apply them this way. Another option is the spray can symbol at the bottom.

In the beginning, while still learning much about editing photos, I decided to keep an untouched version of the image files. Today, I still do a dual import: one to an external hard drive and the other into LR where I can be ruthless in the selection of images. Knowing I can go back any time and import a photo again, allows me to delete all images that, at this point in time, don’t appeal to me as ‘keepers’.

The selection process has several rounds, the number depending on the number of images. In the first round, I delete all the obvious ones. Normally I have more images of moving objects – wildlife, trains, wave action along the coast – than of stationary ones – landscapes, clouds, trees, etc. I look for good composition. With the landscape images, for instance, I analyze the ones I toss for the mistakes so I can learn.

After the first round, I go through the remaining images again and again until I feel I have the best ones left. In those instances I use the compare feature and begin to mark with a star those that stand out for me. With a larger shoot, I often need to take a break and come back the next day with fresh eyes to finish the selection process. A third round often includes minor editing to be better able to discern if an image truly has potential. The final round is done completely in the develop module of LR with an occasional ‘excursion’ to Photoshop.

In sharing my personal workflow, I want to invite you to think about your current workflow, to analyze it, to experiment a bit and, in the end, decide to either stay with your method or to make adjustments that streamline it for your needs.

I will not go into descriptions of how to import, how to create library folders in LR, to enter key words, to navigate between the different modules. I assume that you know how to do it or how to find it in the help files.