Michael Frye talks about Lightroom 4 tone controls
Head on over to Michael Frye’s site and check out his video on Lightroom 4 : the new tone controls. If you are not reading Michael’s blog on a regular basis you are missing out on some great landscape photography imagery and tips, so add him to your RSS feed and stay tuned.
Free Craft & Vision ebook available
Head on over to Craft & Vision and check out the free ebook
Craft & Vision
11 ways to improve your photography
It includes articles from several notables including Michael Frye, who I have written about here before. His section includes one of my favorite spots to take pictures of Half Dome and the Learning to Direct the Eye section is fantastic.
How-To: Easy X-rite ColorChecker Passport Profile Generation in Lightroom 3
My earlier post contained a link to a video from X-rite that goes into detail about how to use the X-rite ColorChecker Passport in Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw).
This is just the quick steps to generate a profile in Lightroom 3
- In Lightroom, select a picture you took with your camera of the ColorChecker Passport
- Right click on the picture and select Export > ColorChecker Passport
- Give it a name that will mean something to you later,
I use: (camera model) – (conditions) – (Photos WB settings) - Wait… and done.
- Restart Lightroom and it will show up in Develop > Camera Calibration > Profile
A Nice Article on Lens Testing
I follow a blog called Canon Rumors and this week they posted an article from Roger Cicala over at LensRentals.com about lens testing for people who take pictures called How To Test a Lens.
Roger brings an interesting perspective to this conversation because LensRentals.com have so many lenses and test them so frequently. Something most of us don’t have the luxury to do.
Another great article from Roger is This Lens is Soft that delves in tolerances of camera and lens manufacturing and how one lens might be soft on one camera and not on another.
Monitor Calibration and Print Profile Troubleshooting
Everybody says calibrate your monitor and use print profiles and everything will turn out great.
What happens if you are calibrating and profiling, following great workflow using good paper blah blah blah and things still don’t seem right. For me I knew something was wrong because my video looked over saturated and my prints dull.
After searching the web and coming up with nothing useful, I started digging around and found that my Nividia drivers have their own color control (other video makers may as well). Under Nvidia Control Panel, Display, Adjust desktop color settings there are Gamma, Hue, Vibrance and even a Color channel mixer.
For 2. Choose how color is set pick Other applications control color settings
For 3. Apply the following enhancements
Vibrance = 50%
Hue = 0
Mine was set to a Vibrance of 58% and it was enough to cause no end of headaches. How it got this way I may never know, that was the first time I had seen that dialog box.
X-rite ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw
I heard about the X-rite ColorChecker Passport on Michael Frye’s website. If you are calibrating your monitor, this is a great way to calibrate your camera. Ok, technically you are not calibrating your camera, you are calibrating your RAW images. If you are not calibrating your monitor, nothing else you do with color calibration will matter, you should stop reading this and google monitor calibration. Michael does a good job explaining the ColorChecker but I found X-rite has an excellent webinar video tutorial for using the ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw to get the most accurate color from your camera. The video goes over how to use the Passport to get the right white balance in portraits and landscapes. It also shows how to make camera profiles in Lightroom without doing DNG conversions first.
Canon EOS Bulb mode timer is on the LCD
When using Bulb mode, the LCD display shows the exposure time in the upper right corner, so there is no need to use a watch. You will however need a flashlight at night because the LCD light will not stay on during a long exposure.
This is probably in the documentation and from doing a little research, it looks like it has been around since the EOS 20D (through to the 60D). As of this posting it appears Nikon does not offer this feature.