Saturday, August 30, 2008

Lightroom Tips.....

Thanks to everyone who emailed tips, here's one from Matthew Farrell on cropping in Lightroom, thanks Matthew!!

Lightroom lets you specify a custom aspect ratio to use while cropping. Since our images are 1600 x 2166, I made the aspect ratio 21.66 x 16. You can then apply, or “sync”, this aspect ratio to all the images in a folder. This aspect ratio will be maintained while using the cropping tool. When it comes time to output (or “export” in Lightroom lingo), I use the option, “Resize to fit…long edge” with the value 2166. Then, viola, all the images are exported at 1600 x 2166. One caveat though—every once in a while, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the aspect ratio doesn’t carry over properly, and one or two images might come out at 1595 x 2166 or 1604 x 2166 or something like that. To catch those, I just display the folder in Windows Explorer with the files sorted by dimension. It’s really easy then to pick out the oddballs and reapply the correct aspect ratio just to those files. I’d say that happens to about 1-2% of my images. Also, that was in Lightroom 1.3 so the bug may be fixed in version 2.0

Thursday, August 28, 2008

A little help please.....

I'm a photographer, not a computer genius. I came from film and would have happily stayed there. :) I've spent many years learning how to use Photoshop, taking classes and researching on the internet, I really don't want to learn another software program, just the thought of it makes my head hurt, really. But not everyone uses Photoshop and I'm often asked questions about other programs. So I'm reaching out to the network, if anyone is using Aperture, Lightroom or something other than Photoshop to crop for MaxPreps galleries and have any tips or information for your fellow photographers, please send me an email. I'll gather them up and post them on this blog. Thanks!