Katie at the Daisy to Brownie Bridge Ceremony
Adobe Lightroom
- I’m used to working with 6 megapixel JPGs. 16 megapixel, 14-bit RAW files take a lot more time to transfer and load. It would be nice to have a new internal cardreader that supports UHS-I.
- On the other hand, if I set up a default import profile with the major post-processing steps I want I can start the import and walk away.
- I’m gonna need a bigger hard drive.
- Lightroom is going to help me get the color right more often. Looking forward to learning the color controls in class.
- Lightroom 3.4 should support profile corrections for all of my lenses. Where are the profiles for the 35mm F1.8 and 18-105mm VR?
- The publish to Facebook feature might be handy, but is there a way to publish images as a folder rather than Wall images?
- I liked the Star feature in Picasa for marking the best photos. The 1-5 rating system in Lightroom is even better for grading and sorting photos.
Nikon D7000 and 70-200mm F2.8 VR lens
- You’re shooting manual, Les. You gotta check the meter every single time you put the camera up to your eye. If you don’t have time for that then shoot Aperture priority or Shutter priority so the exposure is correct.
- Most lenses don’t look their best at the aperture extremes or focal length extremes. Instead of shooting the F2.8 wide open, stop it down a bit to 3.2 or 3.5. If you hit the 200mm end, back off just a bit.
- Just because it’s an F2.8 doesn’t mean you should always shoot it wide open. If you’re shooting a scene rather than a person or a thing stop down to 5.6 or 8 or 11 to get more depth of field.
- Just because you camera has 39 focus points doesn’t mean that’s always the best solution. With single point focus you always get focus where you expect it, just like you did with the D40.
First experiments with video
- Is 1080p overkill? It makes for an awfully big movie window and an enormous file size. Try 720p.
- For telephoto I’m gonna have to use a tripod. Even with VR/IS I’m way too shaky with that big lens. Shorter focal lengths and smaller lenses might be doable handheld. My 18-105mm VR could be an ideal video lens.
- The internal microphone isn’t terrible, but a shotgun mic would upgrade the sound quality and eliminate ambient noise.
- After some of the horror stories I’ve heard about DSLR video I had low expectations. I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t detect any noise from the camera’s autofocus system, zooming or VR/IS. I didn’t notice any jello effects, but I wasn’t doing any fast pans, either.
- It seems like the video might be fairly useful for family video use and talking head video.
- I need some video editing software.
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A couple questions, if you don’t mind.
I was a latecomer to digital photography and I still haven’t really learned how to manipulate or post process photos. I’ve reached the decision that I will probably have to take a class as my attempts to teach myself Photoshop were utter failures.
But, now I don’t know what program I should try to learn. The three I keep hearing about are:
Photoshop
Photoshop Elements
and now Lightroom
I don’tunderstand what the difference is between them and which I should purchase and learn.
Any advice on which to pick and why?
Rob
Photoshop vs. Photoshop Elements is pretty easy. It’s all about what you’d have to pay for them and how much money you want to spend.
Elements is like $80. The full Photoshop CS is around $500, $200 with the student discount. I know people who use Elements and feel like they aren’t missing anything.
I personally couldn’t justify paying full price for Photoshop CS for personal use. I have it for work. I may get it at the educational price while I’m taking this class at UT.
As far as Lightroom vs. Photoshop there’s a difference in what they are. Photoshop is a graphics program that’s used for all sorts of things besides photography. That’s good in that it does more. It’s bad in that it’s more of a general purpose tool, so you’ll have to dig around a bit more to find the tools to do what you want.
It’s more powerful, but harder to learn and use. The main things it has that Lightroom doesn’t are layers, sophisticated selection tools, and a huge choice of filters.
Lightroom is strictly built for photography. On the file management side, it handles importing, cataloging and searching photographs. You can do things like search photos by keyword, date, camera used, lens used, focal length, etc.
It has a nice, smooth workflow for working with pictures in batches during the import process. Then you can work on individual photos in the Develop module. That’s where you get all of Photoshop’s photograph-centric tools, along with things like color adjustment and levels.
One big advantage of Lightroom is that it does non-destructive editing. The original photo is never modified. The changes are recorded in the Lightroom catalog. You can undo any change, even after you’ve closed Lightroom, restarted the computer 100 times, and come back a year later.
Price-wise, Lightroom is pretty affordable at $200.
People who want to heavily modify their photographs and who have more of a design background seem to prefer Photoshop. People like me who just want to touch things up tend towards Lightroom.
There are demos of both programs. Classes help tremendously. If you’re spending the money on Photoshop you need to invest in some kind of training to make it worthwhile.
There’s always Google Picasa, which is free, easy, and pretty darned good. It’s what I’ve used up until now.
Welcome to my world Les.
Got going with my HD video setup a couple of years ago and suddenly 1TB worth of space looks small!
You’re in the industry so I don’t have to preach: be sure to either make it RAID or have a good backup process!
Welcome to the 21st century?
Heh. Yeh, I’m starting at square one on video. I haven’t even cracked that part of the manual yet.
What’s some decent video software to get started? Preferably free or cheap.
Thanks Les, that was extremely helpful.
You could post it as a blog entry itself.
Based on price, and what I need to do at this level of skill, I think I’ll either try Picassa for awhile or spring for Elements. I’m not at the skill or need where I can justify $200 or more on software.
When I started into video editing, my preliminary search didn’t turn up any decent free/low cost products. MS does offer their “Live” toolset but I found it cumbersome and finicky with what format you’re starting with. In my case, the Flip videos were .MP4 which Live refused to import.
This lead me to using Sony’s Vegas line of software. I went ahead and paid for a license of “Movie Studio HD”. Wasn’t expensive (when compared to most Adobe products) but it wasn’t their professional line of software either.
Good results for me up to this point but I’m certain I’m not taking full advantage of the product by any means.
Best of luck Les!
TinMan
Rob: Hope that helped. I might turn that into a blog post when I finish the LR class.
TinMan: Cool. I had heard good things about Vegas video. May have to try it. Thanks.
Did you ever find the lenses profiles? I’ve just upgraded Lightroom from 3.3 and can’t seem to find them either.
They’re in there for all my lenses. Try bringing up a pic and see if they’re in there.
testing
Well, I have some pics taken with my kit Nikkor 18-105 which is supposed to be amongst the newly added profiles, but I can’t find it in the profile selection in the “lens correction” section, for either raw or JPEG files. The list is quite small relative to the list of the updated profiles in Adobe’s site, so I’m probably missing some setting or something like that.
You might try upgrading to 3.4. It’s free.
Yeah, I upgraded to 3.4.1, “about” says also Camera Raw is 6.4.1. Really weird.
So I guess you’ve gone to Develop module, Lens Correction panel, and then clicked Enable Profile Correction? If so, they oughta be there. Mine’s set on Default, FWIW.
Yup. Funny thing is that now I can finally see it (where I couldn’t before). Thanks!
That’s sort of how mine was. The options weren’t there and then suddenly they were. Glad it’s working.
Yeah, me too. Though going through my photos it seems to me as if with the profile the image is more distorted than it was without it. Looks to me like barrel distortion is over corrected.
Is the camera already doing distortion control? On recent Nikon’s the camera can do distortion control itself. If so, you’ll either want to use the one in the camera or the one in Lightroom, but not both.
I turn it off on my D7000 because it’s known to slow down high speed shooting.
It shouldn’t matter for raw files — there is no processing applied for them.