No, this isn’t spam, the blog has not been hacked, and I am not speaking in tongues here. DALPUG refers to the Denver Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop Users Group. Started relatively recently by a guy I know named Brian Reyman, it’s a great local resource for photographers to not only learn from one another, but also to network and get an opportunity to see some of the latest developments in the industry.
I had a chance to attend the meeting last night, and the mini-workshop that Brian ran on plugins included quick looks at things like OnOne Software, Topaz Labs, Nik, and a bunch of others. Not only were they showing you how to use the plugins, they were offering up giveaways too! It’s a great group, offering people opportunities to learn, share, and network with others in the field in the area. Definitely worthy of a diversion from the regular blog schedule to give some shout outs here today.
I’ve also learned that these sorts of groups are all over the place – Adobe sponsors user groups across the globe! So, here’s a chance to sprad the word about your area groups. Got one you know about? Attend any regularly? Let me know here in the comments and link to your website or user group site so people can find you!
Short but sweet, so keep on shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
Blooming Orchid, by photographer John Dunne, of Ireland. He’s got quite a nice portfolio of images too over on his Flickr photostream, so do stop over and give him a little kudos, pat on the back, congratulations, etc. as he’s won the Adobe Lightroom Contest here at Learning Digital Photography! His winning image (surprise surprise) is a blooming orchid, shown below:
Congratulations again to John for this beautiful shot. I know I said it before but it is worth saying again that the decision was a very difficult one to make as there were so many excellent images contributed! Thanks also to the folks over at Adobe for their generous contribution, and to all the participants for making this first contest a huge success!
Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
Actually, all 53 of the images that were submitted to the Lightroom Giveaway I’ve been taking entries for on the blog were contenders. Truly some great images were submitted to the Flickr Thread for the giveaway I’ve been hosting for the past month. Some really great images.
The rules were simple: Take any two pictures you like in May, share them on Flickr thread (& be family/work-safe) and you are eligible to win a copy of Adobe Lightroom – courtesy of the good folks over at Adobe (especially Tom Hogarty who was kind enough to make an appearance on the podcast to talk about the product and to take so many listener questions!
Anyway, I said that after the close date (end of May), I would pick the ten images I thought were best and forward those on to him for a grand prize winner decision (not that there’s a 2nd place, runner-up, or anything like that). well, in perusing the images Monday and Tuesday, I really couldn’t decide on ten. There were just too many images that I felt deserving. Such is the case of contests and giveaways though – and the role of judge is a lot harder than I thought it would be. But, I did winnow the entries down though – just couldn’t go lower than 14. So, without further ado, here are the 14 finalists!
Naturally, rather than display the images in the blog, I figured it’d be appropriate to do so in a web gallery, created at the hands of Adobe Lightroom! Hopefully, this will also give people a little more insight into not only Lightroom, but into critiquing your own work and prepping contest submissions.
That’s it for today – congrats to all the finalists, ant thanks to everyone who participated – it was a lot of fun to see everything. We’ll see you back here again tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll hear from Tom soon on who the lucky winner is for the free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom! Keep on shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
Lame teaser alert, but that’s the title for the podcast over at Learning Digital Photography. Make sure to stop over to the podcast and download the show today! Here’s the show notes (I may add to these as I remember link references – if any are missing, let me know in the comments so I can be sure to add them…)
The last day to enter your photos for the Lightroom giveaway is super close – so get your shots in the Flickr thread here pretty soon!
Adobe updated the ACR to 5.4 (still in beta), and is downloadable here
Canon announced some firmware updates and break/fix news on some of its SLR lines. Tune into the podcast for details.
Seriously folks, don’t miss out on your chance for a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom! Get your photos in today! A $30o retail value and free from the folks over at Adobe – in this economy we could all use a little help and Adobe is being very generous here.
Well, that’s about all for this week. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you back here on Monday – as we head out for the weekend, don’t forget to have fun out there. With that in mind, here’s my favorite WTD from this past week – so fitting for my job in IT!
Happy Shooting!
ETA: Thanks to reader Don for reminding me about the link to the PhotographyBB magazine article. You can download the full magazine here
One of the more popular posts here on the blog has been two that consisted of explanations on how to bracket multiple exposures in camera in order to capture a wider range of exposure values than is typically permitted in a single frame. Typically, these various exposures are then seamed together in some editor like Photoshop, Photomatix or other that is available to produce an effect called HDR – high dynamic range. You can get some impressive results with various techniques that appeal to different subjective perspectives.
Here at the blog though, rather than take sides on such post processing methods, it’s more fun to show people how to do things, and then let you all take your own liberties either with the approach or with your processing afterward, or both to get results that appeal to you! With that in mind, the feedback I’ve received from the previous discussions included a large number of people that asked for visuals of the process (I guess they are all visual learners).
Well, rather than take several dozens of images showing all the various settings and then explaining how I got toeach, a video seemed a more appropriate approach. So, here’s the video short for those of you that requested visual aids. It’s not the most professional but you should be able to get the gist.
This would also be a good time to remind everyone that we are in the dwindling days of the Adobe Lightroom contest. You can win your own free copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, courtesy of the folks at Adobe, simply by entering images you’ve taken in May over at the LDP Flickr thread. Limit two images per person, but there’s still room for many more entries (no limit on the number of PEOPLE that can participate!) just join the group for free and post your images. Good luck to all and may the best photo win! (Final results will be posted in June – I’l send my top ten picks back to Tom Hogarty for final judging when he’ll pick the winner!)
That’s it for today – I should have the podcast up tomorrow, but as always, no promises as my schedule has been fluctuating at work lately. Happy shooting, and I will be back with more news, information, insights, tips and tricks tomorrow, whether in written or audio form. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
Ever since Tom Hogarty came on the podcast and I’ve had some time to dive into Lightroom, I am thinking more and more that this is a much better solution for managing all of my photo assets. Since I’ve found myself spending more time in LR and less time in PS CS3 (Extended), I started debating if I really needed so much horsepower under the hood. After all, CS3 Extended is quite the workhorse, from performance, to functionality, to footprint, and of course, price. It left me wondering about my upgrade path.
In all honesty though, I think the term “upgrade” may be a misnomer – after all, am I really using all the features of the full version of Photoshop Cs3? If not, what’s the point in upgrading? Perhaps I should be looking at a downgrade. After all, I really do spend less time post processing these days. So, what are the differences between CS3 and this thing called Elements? Well, for the loyal readers of this blog, I decided to find out.
First up, I downloaded a trial version of Elements 7.0 from Adobe’s website. The download is about half the size of the Photoshop Cs4 download (400+ MB for Windows Elements, and over 800 MB for Photoshop Creative Suite on Windows). To the geek in me, that means a smaller footprint on my hard drive, and less consumption of system resources. Something to consider…
Anyway, I decided to really do a side by side comparison, and loaded CS3 and Elements in their default work spaces, then compared notes. Here’s what I found (CS3 is first, Elements is second):
Photoshop CS3 Default WorkspaceDefault Elements Workspace
Wow! Quite a difference. I first noticed the much darker color of the work space for Elements. Not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but something that I would necessarily have to adjust to. So, what else is there? Well, rather than go over each painstaking difference of the two applications, I decided to just give a quick overview here. And, with the quick overview, I figured the best place to start would be the toolbars, since that’s what we really need to use in either of these anyway, right? So, let’s look at them side-by-side:
Photoshop CS3 Extended ToolbarPhotoshop Elements Toolbar
They actually don’t look too diferent when you look at them side by side, do they? I didn’t think so, and I set out to count the various tool bars. Know what? On a quick overview of the 22 tools in CS3, I counted 17 commonalities between CS3 and Elements 7! That’s a lot of overlap! Are there more buried tools in CS3? Most likely. On quick count, I found 60 tools throughout the CS3 Toolbar. In elements, 48! Even still, not a lot extra. From a percentage perspective, that is 20% additional functionality in CS3 Extended versus Elements 7.0 My guess is CS3 Regular would have less of a difference still.
The question is though – how often do you go searching for some buried tool in CS3? As a photographer, in all honesty, not that often. If you think about it, as photographers, we crop, re-size, perhaps straighten an occasional horizon, add some sharpening, and if we want to get really serious with a photo, we’ll do some dodging and burning. All of these functions are present in Elements 7.0
So, why would you want to go with the CS3 or CS4 version of Photoshop – truly if you want to take your photos to the Nth degree, or do serious work like graphic design, web design, or photo restoration, I can totally see the need for some of the more advanced tools in the Creative Suite. But more and more, I find myself using CS3 less and less. Take a look at the commonalities listed below – these are identical features in both applications! It took me a little by surprise when I noticed the similarities even in tool names. See if you can find the common tools from the listing below:
Common Tools between CS3 and Elements
So, what other important factors go into an image editing program for me? Well, having been working in the Creative Suite for a long time – I do enjoy the benefits of layered files for different purposes. Well, guess what – Elements does that too! That means you can edit and save files as PSD’s!
I also like using actions to automate my work flow. Uh Oh…from my initial glance, it does not appear that Elements 7.0 has this functionality built in. But, can it be added? Well, a Google search on the topic of “Elements Actions” says yes, so I think I could probably figure it out enough to eek the process to my needs.
The other major functionality I have an interest in is the ability to edit and manage raw files from my camera. Can I see the raw files? Sure enough, the ACR converter has made its way into Elements as well!
Adobe Camera Raw Converter in Elements
In fact, a lot of the preferences settings seem to have migrated over from Photoshop CS3…look at the same screen from there:
Photoshop CS3 Preferences Settings
As similarities continue to mount, the last major thing to consider is price. Retail, CS4 runs at $700 for the full price, an upgrade runs $200. Elements? Well, I think y’all know where this is headed: Retail $139 and upgrade for $119. I don’t know about you, but that is a HUGE cost savings. It almost seems too good to be true, and given my penchant for not taking things at face value – I will take a look at the image processing capabilities in greater detail next week. We’ll take a look at noise handling, speed, performance, and see how it does with a variety of images from my Canon 40D.
The biggest downside that I can see is that you don’t have the color management capabilities in Elements that you have in the Creative Suite – I like making some LAB adjustments from time to time, and filters may suffer in availability too – but more on that next week.
For the time being though, given the similarity in apparent functionality, the reduced price for Elements, and the proportionate footprint on my computer – Elements is definitely a contender. For all I know – as I learn more about Lightroom after the workshop from Scott Kelby and NAPP on Wednesday, the idea of a separate application for image editing may go by the wayside too, especially when the cost for the CS product is 400% that of Elements.
So, what do you think? Anyone out there using Elements? Any other downgraders care to share their thoughts? Have you enjoyed downsizing? Found things you missed? Workarounds? Add-ons? Tell me more as I continue to explore Elements next week – I’ll add reader observations there too! In the meantime, happy shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow after the NAPP workshop!
Happy Saturday all. It’s a rare weekend post here – since Friday was silent. Two things – first off, Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there! Second, as the podcast on Tuesday announced, don’t forget the first ever Learning Digital Photography Contest is under way – all during the month of May, submit your shots to the Flickr group (2 entries per person) for your chance to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0! Not only is it a great chance to win this wonderful program, but a great way to get increased visibility of your work and to network with others.
Information is available in the podcast, but you are welcome to just submit your entries directly to the Flickr group. This is a prize package worth $300 retail, so definitely one worth entering! Good luck and happy shooting!
Well, yesterday I had a great conversation with Tom Hogarty, senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for inclusion in the upcoming podcast. In my excitement to finish the post production side, I came downstairs at 3am to my man-cave, and found that Jason Moore had finished an article I sent him for possible inclusion in his “Workflow Friday” series, and posted that out there. Egads! Thanks to Jason for that outlet as well.
What’s kind of exciting about that article, is that not only did Jason find it interesting enough to include with the collection of folks that have been featured thus far on his blog, but the good folks (Hi Dave!) over at Photography BB have released their latest free online magazine, and the article was included in there as well! (I must be doing something right! *grin*) Be sure to download that magazine as well, because there really are some talented writers and photographers sharing their perspectives. I’m also honored that Dave has included the CB Learning Digital Photography podcast in his list of favorite online media sources for photography (we’re #1 in the audio section – woOt!).
When it rains, ir really does pour! However, because of the interview with Mr. Hogarty, the podcast is thus delayed again, because the two themes of Listener Questions and Answers and Questions with Adobe seamed together pretty well. I may have it compiled early enough to post before the weekend, but don’t expect any miracles there. More likely that will be published next week Tuesday under the software heading of the new schedule (since it’s about Lightroom – there’s also some great links you’ll want in the show notes).
For today though, I do have a little maintenance announcement as well: for those of you picking up the blog via Feedburner, you will likely be getting a double dose of images, because as promised, I am also uploading the images from yesterday’s post to share on Flickr, so you will likely see some repetition there. It’s also a little exciting to share that the feedburner subscription hit an all time high not once but twice this week of 691 listeners/readers. So, thanks to everyone that has signed up – it really means a lot that so many have found the CB resource useful!
That’s about it for this first Friday in May – have a great weekend everyone! Happy Shooting and we’ll catch you back here on Monday for the latest in the hardware reviews. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite selections from this past week in the What the Duck series:
For many of us, an upgrade of one element in our tool kit comes with many unforeseen consequences and additional expenditures. Just as a new camera body can necesitate the need for larger memory cards, hardware upgrades can also come with software upgrades. The reason? Camera file formats! As camera vendors develop new proprietary formats for their raw file formats (CR2 for Canon and NEF for Nikon as the two predominant players in the game), the need has always existed to update your software to accommodate the new formats for body upgrades.
The best example of this was when I did my upgrade of the Canon XT to the Canon 40D just last year (or was it two years ago now?)…at the time I was using Adobe Photoshop CS2 to process my files. Well CS2 development stopped as CS3 development started. My Canon 40D was stuck in between application life cycles, and as a result, I was no longer able to process my CR2 files from the 40D natively in CS2. Granted, I did upgrade to CS3 because of my interest in the field, but for those that either may not be interested in the software upgrade, or cannot afford to upgrade, there is a free alternative from Adobe – the Adobe DNG converter.
This is a really cool utility and it gets updated on the same schedule as the Adobe Camera Raw utility that is unique to the image-editing applications of all Photoshop applications (CS4, LR, etc.). The Adobe DNG stands for a Digital NeGative so it may help to think of this as a way of preserving your original data, yet still making it accessible, regardless of what other developments happen in the software world down the road. I know, we all think that Adobe will be around forever, but the same was also thought of Kodak 20 years ago – and now those Kodak CD’s are becoming difficult to manage. With that little nugget, it may be useful to consider the Adobe DNG option. Additionally, the Adobe DNG negative has been submitted to the ISO standards setting organization for acceptance as a universal conversion utility, and are releasing it under the GNU licensing, so it will hopefully always be available for anyone.
With the stage set then, for those who are not able to or not interested in upgrading, here is a brief tutorial of the Adobe DNG converter (in it’s current iteration as of 4/27/09), with screenshots. If your folders of images look like this:
Then the Adobe DNG Conversion Utility may be for you. It starts pretty easily…you can download the Windows or Mac versions of it from here:
Once you download and install this utility (did I mention it’s free?), start the application to get this screen:
First off, specify the path where the images are that you want to encapsulate into the DNG format. You can specify one folder, or you can specifiy a folder and all its sub-folders (in case you want to convert an entire library or set of images at once). Then specify the output folder and naming convention you want to use. Once that’s been decided, it’s time to select your preferences for how you convert your images.
Click on the “Preferences button” to specify how you want to conversion to occur: Do you want full size conversions or do you want to reduce the image resolution sizes for smaller storage requirements? (I always choose full size for maximum flexibility.) What about compression? Adding compression can further reduce the footprint that each DNG file has on your hard drive. (It’s a judgement call, but I choose not to compress, again to maximize flexibility down the road.) What about conversion methods? You can convert to a linear format, but I don’t like this option because it’s a one-way street (you can’t go back). Last but not least, what about inclusion of the original raw file? In most cases I would actually recommend that. It may increase file size, but this way you have access to the original raw date if your software needs ever change and you have access to software that can better handle the raw data you currently may not be able to manage. All these are things to consider. Hopefully, this short explanation of your options and the pros/cons will help in deciding how to proceed.
From here it’s pretty straightforward – you’ve specified everything from your input folder to your output folder, naming conventions, and conversion preferences, so now, simply click the button on the lower right to start the conversion process. You will get a dialog window showing you the progress:
If you like, you can always click the button in the lower left to stop or abort the conversion process in case you specify the wrong folder or for some other reason. Once the process is complete, the window will show all converted images. Simply click “OK” to close the DNG converter utility from that window, as shown below:
Finally, open the destination folder, and voila! Your image files will now have thumbnail previews again:
There you have it, your files are now prepped for one of the easiest, simplest, and most cost effective ways (did I mention this is free?) for both management, archiving, and accessibility – 3 very important things to consider in your image management workflow.
Granted, as with anything else, the Adobe DNG converter utility is not for everyone, as we all have work flows that call for different approaches. So, what approaches do you use? Feel free to share your own thoughts, processes, and suc in the comments or via email. Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
On this weeks show, I take a look at the power of the pen – the artist statement. For those of us with aspirations of sharing our work with others via art shows, galleries, and contests/competitions, the value of the artist statement can make the difference between getting into a show, gallery or other event and buying a ticket. So, if you want to learn what the artist statement is, how to write one, and things to consider, this is the show for you. Here’s the show notes:
Make sure you stop in and grab the podcast from the good folks over at Personal Life Media, and visit our show sponsor Lensbaby if you are thinking about the Lensbaby Composer. Diggs from PLM and reviews from iTunes are encouraged, welcomed, and appreciated! Happy shooting all and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 🙂
Don’t forget, you can email me from the show link with any questions, comments, feedback or thoughts, as well as share comments here, and reviews on iTunes. For those without iTunes or Zune, I can provide an mp3 version of the show on request.
