Many smart photographers offer free backgrounds, aka wallpaper, to people and potential clients. What's a wallpaper? It's an image used as a background for a computer, a tablet, or a cell phone. The problem with the wallpapers is that you need to offer a wallpaper at the resolution of the computer/device or it will look bad. Ask the owners of the iPad 3, aka the new iPad. Many apps and wallpapers do not support the new resolution and look terrible on the iPad 3.

Sit down, strap your seat belt, there will be some math involved.

• Select the photo or the photos
• Print and output to JPEG. Sounds simple but remember the math…

For “regular” computers, this means desktops and good laptops, you should set the resolution to 96 ppi. For the iPad 1 and the iPad 2, the resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels at 132 ppi, For the iPad 3, aka the new iPad, the resolution is 2048 by 1536 pixels at 264 ppi. Many Netbooks have a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 at 72 ppi. The iPhone 4 has a resolution of 960 by 640 pixels at 326 ppi.

You will need these numbers. What does this all mean? It means that you will have to make a few wallpapers of the same image for the different sizes and resolutions.

You can the size of your current catalog by going to Edit > Catalog Settings on a Windows, or Lightroom > Catalog Settings on a Mac on the General tab.

Here is what's included in the SQLite database file aka the Lightroom catalog:

Not too many people use the brushes, they are either afraid or don't know how to. The brushes compensate for the lack of layers in Lightroom vs. PhotoShop. The brushes can do the vast majority of the everyday use of the layers. The brushes do not have the advanced power of the layers in PhotoShop, but for everyday use…

When using the brushes, I recommend being at 2:1 or even higher, so you can see the details.

1. Press on the Brush at tag #1. BTW, to me, this doesn't look like a brush but it looks more like a match that is about to be lit.
2. This opens the brush/local adjustment panel.
3. The first thing to deal with is the size and the feather of the brush. The size, tag #2, is big or small in pixels. The feather, tag #3, is the edge and how big it will be and is an additional softness to the brush. The feather shows as the second outer circle. A hard brush has a feather of 0 and displays as a single circle.

Every month, I buy PDN, Photo District News, the photo magazine. I do not subscribe to it, the subscription is more expensive than buying it at the newsstand. PDN is a magazine directed toward the professional photographers and is a must-read for anybody/everybody that wants to keep current with the business, the marketing of photography and the commercial photography trends. Every issue has big ads from both Canon and Nikon.

In the May 2012 issue, Nikon USA did a double truck spread, that's a two facing pages, about a wedding photographer, Doug Gordon, on page 42 and page 43. Two large photographs, and two smaller ones. Excellent photos (they'd better be), great inspiration…

His go-to cameras: the Nikon D3x and the Nikon D3s…

Then Nikon USA goes on explaining the D3X and the D3s… engineered for professionals…

There's only one problem with the ad, it's a small photograph, 3 inch by 2 inch, of Doug Gordon, the photographer, taking photos with a Canon camera (that looks like a Canon 5DMk2) and a Canon 70-200L f/2.8.

Canada, the Wet West Coast, the Pacific NorthWest is the last place on earth with any “significant” tempered rain forest. The keyword word here is “rain.” This is what the rain forest looks like.

In the “good old days”, before the advent of digital, many professionals and a few “more serious” amateurs used slide films, but the vast majority of people, including most portrait and wedding photographers, used negatives to take their photos. Today, it's rare to see a negative.

There is no need to use Photoshop, it's very easy and simple to create negatives in Lightroom:

1. Select a photo, it should be of a simple design
2. Create a virtual copy
3. In the Tone Curve section of the Develop module, switch to Linear

As everybody knows by now, Adobe has changed the way the sliders of the basic panel operates. 0 = No effect, and then there is the +100 to -100 and the effect depends on the beer, the tequila or the coffee.

So what's the right way? Of course, my way is the “right way.” In Lightroom 1, 2 and 3, I used the Auto as the starting point for my changes/setting the photo, not anymore in LR4. I do not like how LR4 does the Auto.

This is not a finished photo, but it's more than good enough to show the person and if he picks it, then it will be fine tuned like opening the eyes, sharpening for the skin, clarity, vibrance…

On 26-Apr-2012, Adobe has announced Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate 2. You can download it at: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/lightroom4-1.html. Adobe has always used the Release Candidate system with Lightroom to further test Lightroom with more unpaid guinea pigs a bigger pool of users. When people report bugs or problems with the release candidate, then they try to fix them and incorporate them in the version that is published.

This is the first time that Adobe has used a second release candidate for Lightroom, as far as I remember. What happened? Not only big problems have cropped up, but Adobe is not sure if they have fixed them and they need more guinea pigs. My guess is that Adobe wants/needs more testing with the new Color Fringe Correction Controls in the Lens Correction panel.

By now, you must have heard that Adobe will release Photoshop CS6 in the first week of May. One of the big new feature is the cloud! I see and read a lot of “misunderstanding / misinformation” about the cloud. People use the word “cloud” just like people used the “information super highway” expression in the years 1996-1997.

1. What's the cloud? When they talk about the cloud, they either mean that the data and/or some programs are on computers/servers that are accessed via the Internet. In the “good old days,” the data and/or the programs were stored on the local network. You could walk to the server room and see the computers, the lights, the cables and some techie that was looking after the whole “shebang.” The advantage and/or the problem with the cloud is that you do not know what's inside, how it's configured…

If you are only using print and not using the web, then don't bother reading this blog post. For the rest of us, this is one of the most important and fundamental to photography and the web. BTW ain't you reading this on the web?

Go to this web page: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page2 but not yet, let me first explain. You will need to have Javascript enabled on your web browser to analyse the web page.

There a big photograph that you can view in the various color spaces: sRGB, AdobeRBG, ColorMatch, ProPhoto, WideRGB and AppleRGB.

Lightroom uses SQLite for keeping tracks of “things” in the catalog. In the Lightroom world, it's called a catalog, in the computer world it's called a database. Databases are like rolodex on steroids. You can ask all kind of questions, aka queries in the computer world, aka filters in the Lightroom world, like: show me all the photos that have dogs and are a family pet… or show me all the photos that I have NOT sold to customer…

The library module is “just” a front-end to ask questions about the information in the catalog.

1. Lightroom supports AND and OR conditions in “regular” and smart filters.
2. Lightroom supports some NOT conditions with the smart filters.

This post is about the “regular” filters

AND

“Show me all the photos that have ALL the keywords:” Granville Island AND motorcycle

The SQL query would be:

  SELECT photos
  FROM catalog
  WHERE keywords = 'Granville Island' AND keywords = 'motorcycle';

You know something bad is going to happen when somebody says: “Hey, watch this!” Lately have been hanging around with Jon (that's not a spelling mistake), he also has a Canon 7D. So we decided to do one of those “Hey, watch this!” We decided to exchange cameras for an hour. The rules were simple:

I've always heard the expression “chimping” and knew what it meant: taking a photo and reviewing it on the LCD panel at the back of the camera. But I never knew where the expression came from:

Like most speedlight flashes, the Canon Speedlite's heads are hermetically sealed. “Hermetically sealed” means that no air can go in or go out. When things are hermetically sealed, things tend to heat with use.

The rumor is that “you can't do too many flashes or the speedlight flash will shut down for 10 to 20 minutes while the flash tube cools down.”

Yes, too many flashes will shutdown the speedlight flash to give it time to cool down. The question is: “How many is too many flashes?”

Canon has extremely sophisticated focusing systems, but there are still people that can't make them work. Most of the problems are due to the fact that they do not understand how Canon has designed them to fit all the various possibilities/combinations. I explained it on DPReview.com. Here it is in a slightly different format.

One Shot

The AF assumes that the subject is static

• If the subject is static, The AF will achieve focus immediately and that's it, you can remove your finger from the back button, it won't keep on focusing.
• If the subject is moving, the photos will be out of focus.

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