Posts Tagged ‘photoshop’

January 14th, 2010 Lightroom Tip – Setting your Camera Calibration and changing your Default Settings

Lightroom’s Default Develop Settings:

If you are anything like me, then you have spent all too long wondering a couple of things about lightroom (I use version 2.2) regarding importing RAW files and the default settings that Lightroom applies to them before you begin working on editing them.

Firstly, I wondered how to CHANGE those default settings that Lightroom applies – for example, it always applies certain values to the Basic settings as follows:

Note that the white balance is always defaulted to “As Shot” meaning it takes the setting from the RAW file each time.

I have taken issue with this in the past because a lot of my shots were starting off with the shadows clipped due to the combination of settings that were automatically applied. I could not find anywhere in the menu options that this could be changed and have previously  read on many forums that it is not possible to do so.

Camera Calibration:

Now the second thing that I have been wondering is about camera calibration. Since changing from my Sony A200 to a Canon 5D MkII I have noticed that a whole new bunch of options have appeared in the profile dropdown menu in the Develop module. Read the rest of this entry »

July 17th, 2009 Photoshop Tip: No more flattening your images

Here’s a real quick tip I wanted to share – I have only relatively recently happened upon it so I am thinking there may be a whole bunch of you out there who might not know about this simple yet excellent photoshop feature.

I see so many Photoshop tutorials that instruct you to flatten your image for various reasons, like sharpening for example and the vast majority of them literally tell you to do just that – flatten the layers. However this leaves you unable to go back and edit or adjust any of your layers should you wish to do so later.

As an alternative to flattening yout layers, I reccommend the following simple steps:

1. Ensure you have the topmost layer selected in your layers palette.
2. Hit ctrl-a (or your mac alternative) to make a selection covering your entire image
3. Hit ctrl-shift-c (or your mac alternative) to make a merged copy of all of your layers
4. Hit ctrl-v (or your mac alternative) to paste the merged layer as a new layer

The image below is an example of how my layers looked after I performed the above steps on one of my images – you can see all of my layers have been preserved whilst I am now free to perform sharpening on my top layer as I like.

This “copy merged” option is also available in the edit menu, but I never realised it was there until about a year ago – and I’ve been using photoshop for around 8 years… Makes me wonder what else I’m missing!

July 2nd, 2009 Recovering an underexposed shot

I originally posted this in the digital-photography-school.com forums, but in an effort to collate all of my best articles I am re-posting it here. The original read as follows:

Hey everybody,

I thought I would share with you my latest experience. I went out this evening with the intention of getting some nice dusk shots of the sea shore but left it a little late and it was pitch black when I got there. I took some shots anyway which turned out completely under exposed due to lack of light even at a 30 second exposure.

So I got them home, imported a RAW file into photoshop and after a little bit of fiddling about I came up with the image below.

Here are the steps I took to achieve the end result:

• Open RAW file in photoshop
• Increase the exposure by 2 stops and then “open image”
• Create an “Orton effect” layer by:
  • Duplicate background layer
  • Add gaussian blur to the duplicate
  • Set blend mode to Soft Light
• Add a curves adjustment layer to increase brightness
• Flatten, rotate to straighten and crop final image

I just wanted to share this really as an example of how awesome RAW files are in giving you the ability to recover a virtual complete disaster.

Before	After