Use Lightroom to Enhance the Sky

This week I wanted to write about a Lightroom technique to enhance the sky in your photos. Sometime when you are out shooting landscapes you might get a fantastic shot, but when you get home to post process, you find the sky is kind of blown out, looking more white than blue with clouds. How can you fix this and not end up scrapping the image all together, or having the shot look ho hum, enter the Gradient Tool in Lightroom.

Blah sky with some clouds

 The Lightroom Gradient tool in the Develop Module can really help improve your sky, especially if you capture a shot at a lake or river and you can see the blue of the sky and white of the clouds in the reflection on the water. Select the Gradient Tool, which looks like a rectangle and then take the little + crosshair and hold it at the top of your image, now hold down the shift key, which will make your pull down go straight and drag to the bottom of the sky portion.

Some blue added in with Gradient Tool

Next go to the Adjustments for the Gradient Tool and use the Highlight slider or Exposure slider and pull out more of the details in the sky. Generally the Highlight slider will get the job done and I tend to always shoot my landscapes especially with my Light meter in the camera about two ticks before the mid center tick mark. Then, when I edit, I use the Highlight slider and the Shadows slider to pull in more details in those areas, but sometime, you need just a bit more to get that nice looking sky, and thats when the Gradient tool comes in handy.

Finished image

You can even take your adjustments when you are done and save them as a custom adjustment, name it, and then use it over and over again. Lightroom is without a doubt one of, if not THE best post processing software on the market for photography, which is why so many Pros use Lightroom worldwide. Now one thing to remember is shoot in RAW, so you can actually get those details to pull out in Post Processing. You can use Lightroom to work JPG files, but those file types don't allow nearly as much improvement without the file going to crap in the process.

I know what you are thinking, "But RAW files are so BIG"! They are, but memory cards are fairly cheap these days and if you are shooting landscapes, you don't need a large FPS like you would for sports. So, next time you get a nice landscape, but the sky is blown out, don't despair, just grab that Gradient Tool and work some "magic".

Comments/Questions

Removing "Noise" with Lightroom

One of the biggest advantages of digital cameras or DSLR’s over their film counterparts is the ability to switch ISO settings on the fly. ISO is the amount of light that you let into the camera’s sensor and in the days of film cameras this was accomplished with film speed, sometimes called ASA instead of ISO.

So if you wanted to shoot outdoors, you would load a roll of ISO or ASA 100 or 200 and be good to go, but if you then moved into a dimly lit building and wanted to shoot, you needed either a flash on that camera or you needed to have used up that roll of 100 or 200 film and switch to 400 or 800 to shoot well in those conditions.

With the advent of the digital camera, you can shoot outdoors at ISO 100, and then step indoors and with the flip of a switch or wheel, shoot at ISO 800 or even higher like 6400 or maybe even 12,800. The problem is as your ISO gets higher, you get digital “noise” in your photos. Noise is the little dots, speckles or grain look in your image that I am sure most everyone has seen at one time or another.

See the grains of noise in this image. I shot indoors at ISO 2000

 Some cameras are better at others at handling high ISO, low noise, but at some point even the best of these cameras will end up with noise in your images and it can make the image ugly and unusable. Luckily, Lightroom can help mitigate this for you and make this image useable again.

When you load your images in Lightroom and come across an image that has noise, this is how you can clean it up in the Lightroom Develop Module. The two big noise removal sliders are under the Detail section and called Luminance and Color.

After some Luminance and Color noise reduction notice the image is much cleaner

Here is what each does. Luminance: This kind of noise affects the brightness, but not the color, of individual pixels. If you had a picture of a dark grey piece of paper with a great deal of luminance noise it would appear similar to old-school television static with lots of light and dark fuzz.

Color or sometimes called Chroma noise: This shows up as oddly-colored pixels, scattered throughout an image, almost like someone has tossed a handful of red, blue, and green grains of sand at it. Lightroom calls this “Color” noise, but it’s just another term for Chroma noise.
Now, although you can remove considerable noise with Lightroom, you want to make sure you are careful not to use too much noise reduction as it can make the images look fake and give everything a plastic look. A lot of pros will counter some of the effects of the noise reduction by using some sharpening as well for the best results.

A side by side of the before on the left and after on the right.

 As you can see in my side by side before and after shot, the Lightroom noise reduction did help clean up this image a lot.

Comments/Questions

Are you ready to sign up new clients....?

Hello everyone.

I say this not because I am curious about what you have done in the past or what you have already prepared for your clients, but it is more of a question for myself?

Tonight I went to a showcase for a company that I work for. It was a showcase for wedding couples looking for photographer's, DJ's and videographers. I have to admit I was not sure what to expect because I had never attended one before. So let me prepare you so that you do not make the same mistakes that I made.

Firstly, they always say that you should have a website or a portfolio ready to show prospective clients. Well, I got all of these. I have Behance it has some of my work but it did not have any of my wedding portfolios or any of my engagement sessions. I just realized that you have to make sure that your portfolio is up-to-date with the latest work that you have recently done.

I also have my own website which showcases more recent work. However the point that I am trying to make here is that you have to be prepared to show your clients all of your work no matter where you are. Tonight I had a number of different options available to me.

I used my IPad to link my Lightroom collections to my LR Mobile app. This helped me ensure that prospective clients can see some of my best work on a screen and they are able to make a decision on whether my work is suitable for their particular event. If you have not used this option before then all you have to do is download the LR Mobile app from the Apple or Android store and then when you go into your Lightroom collections you click on the little square box next to the collection name and this will sync that collection to your mobile app.

Here is a short video to see how it works.

Now you don't need a collection with hundreds of images. Just make sure it is a collection with your best edited images.

Next, make sure that you make a few prints. Whether they are canvas wraps or even large prints in a frame they are good selling points for your clients. They can see what it looks like when they have their photographs printed. It is also an investment in you and your company. Do not think of it as an expense that is wasted. It is a portfolio that you can take with you wherever you go. 

Finally, make sure that you have your business cards with you. Let the client leave knowing who they have spoken to and whether they would like to come back to you. You need to make an impression. This is your career that you are talking about and you always want them thinking and talking about you.

One additional item that I have added is a slideshow of some of my work. If you are a wedding photographer then have a great wedding slideshow of some of your best work. Here is a sample slideshow that you could have running in the background when you are speaking to potential clients.

So be prepared for any and all eventualities. I wish you all the best and success in your careers.

Kind regards.

Denzil

Two Ways to Make Lightroom Faster

This week I thought I’d blog about something a little bit different than photography itself. This week’s post is all about ways to improve Lightroom’s performance for when your Libraries are 30,000+ photos for a single year like mine are.

One of the first things you should be doing is using an external drive for ALL your photos. Don’t put your photos on your OS drive as it will fill up and max out too quickly along with all your software. I personally use a 4TB external drive with USB 3 for best performance and as soon as I finish a shoot, I copy all the images off my cameras memory cards and into this drive by year, month and day. Once that is done, you have to import them into Lightroom, now the way to improve Lightroom performance is to use SmartPreviews all the time. SmartPreviews takes your large RAW files and makes small versions of them for Lightroom to use and in turn make scrolling through Lightroom’s Library Module and loading Lightroom faster.

Notice the red circle around SmartPreviews

There are two way to deploy SmartPreviews, the first is on Import, so when Importing, under the Import dialog where you can add Copyright info, Keywords and such, check the box to use SmartPreviews. As Lightroom imports your RAW files it will then run the SmartPreview builder and make SmartPreviews of all your new images. The second way to activate SmartPreview in an existing Library of images is to select ALL images from the Library Module and then click the Library menu item, go down to Previews, and then choose Build SmartPreviews.

Deploying SmartPreviews from the Library Menu

 Now since you are deploying SmartPreviews for an existing Library of images in the second option it will take some time for them to complete, especially if your Libraries are huge like mine, but the nice thing is, once it’s done, it’s done and you can move around in Lightroom so much easier. The only catch is when you have SmartPreviews of an existing Library, you will now have doubles of every image, in a way, but the way around this is unplug or just unmount your drive as you work in Lightroom and make your edits and exports. You only need the drive mounted when you are adding new images from your camera and when you want the edits permanently saved to the original RAW file, then just mount the drive and Lightroom will sync the edits AUTOMATICALLY, that is a NO BRAINER ;)

Now, the next thing you can do to improve Lightroom performance is increase Lightroom’s cache. For those of you who don’t work in I.T. like I do for my day job, cache is a portion of your hard drive that Lightroom uses to augment the memory in your system. So if you are editing say a batch of 1,000 50Mb RAW files. That’s 6GB of files you are working with at once time and let’s say your laptop only has 4GB of RAM, how does Lightroom work under these conditions? By using some of your say 1TB hard drive as cache to supplement your system RAM. Now by default, Lightroom only uses 1GB of your disk drive for cache, which is nowhere near enough, so bump that setting up to 50GB. How do you do this? Well, click Lightroom, then Preferences and on the pop up window, cluck the File Handling tab and at the bottom you see Camera RAW Cache setting, in that box delete 1GB and type in 50GB. Why 50, well, I have tested 20GB and with both an SSD drive and a regular hard disk I noticed no improvement, but at 50GB I noticed improvement. In the screenshot you see I have mine set at 100GB, that’s because I have 12TB to work with so I figured why not double mine from the 50GB I recommend to you. Can you use 100GB, sure, but make sure you have ample space free on your system drive to do so first.

Changing the Camera RAW Cache size

That’s it folks, two ways to improve Lightroom performance in your workflow!

Comments/Questions

Shooting HDR

Hello everyone

A belated Wednesday hello to everyone. It is almost Thursday so I do apologize for the late post here. I have been extremely busy with some night photography so I missed an early morning deadline because I was away from technology for a day or two.

Today I am going to discuss some HDR effects and what you can do when you are working with mixed light situations. Now I know many of you do not like shooting HDR because of the grungy look. You may not have even considered it before. Why should you even consider doing something like this?

Do you know what I am referring too?

Yes, it looks something like this...

In this image I used a plug-in to make some adjustments. The adjustments that I made were done using Nik Software from Google. I used HDR Efex Pro 2. The image is bordering on cartoony (if that is really a word), so it is not what I was looking for. The lights are close to been solarized and the tone compression has been crunched down to much.

Now, why should you continue reading? Well sooner or later you will be required to shoot some HDR photographs for some of your classes. Yes, you will not be getting away from it so easily. So you need to practice.

Now you don't need to buy any new plugins for this effect because it already comes built into Lightroom CC. If you do not have a subscription you will have to export the images to Photoshop and do the HDR there. It is found under Edit in... at the bottom of the list.

Well, if you don't like the HDR effect that you get when you use this method then that option may not be the best one to work for you. Well there is another way that you can get a realistic looking photograph without using the HDR effect process. 

As you can see in the image above you can export the bracketed files to Photoshop, but this time use the "Open as layers in Photoshop" option.

What you do this it opens  your bracketed images as layers into Photoshop and you now have the option to apply a mask to the photographs to help pull out the highlights or add shadows to your baseline photograph, i.e.: 0EV and build your "HDR" photograph.

In this photograph I have added my three bracketed photographs -2EV, 0EV and +2Ev photographs as layers to Photoshop. It is interesting to note that I have moved my 0EV photograph to the bottom of the stack. This becomes my baseline image.

Now add a black layer mask to your other two exposures. You have your under-exposed image and your over-exposed image. Using a medium to small soft brush you can now paint in your highlights and shadows and adjust your photograph to get a more realistic photograph for your final submission. Remember to adjust your opacity if you find the brush strokes are to bright for your highlights or to dark for your shadows. Once you have made your adjustments merge your layers, "CMD + E" on a MAC and "ALT + E" on a PC.

It is a great technique for future classes so I suggest you practice now. When working with mixed light in photograph it can help to even out your exposures for both outside and inside without getting the grungy look and feel to your photographs.

Here is the final result of to my merged photographs while using the Photoshop layers method.

There are so many ways that you can do HDR to manipulate your photographs so make sure to try as many of them while you can. 

One last point before I leave you and say goodbye. You all have access to Lynda.com training from the library module on your dashboard under the Online Library link . Get in there and learn something new each day. That is the best way to learn Photoshop and so many other applications.

It is located under the Photography icon

under the Industry information section.

Here's to having another great week and as always, please let me know if you would like to learn something new. Send me an email at denzilern@stu.aii.edu or just leave a comment for me under this post.

I would love to hear from you.

Have a great week and I will speak to you again next week.

Bye for now. 

Denzil