LR4

Lightroom v4

Lightroom: Improve Your Photos in Less than 1 minute

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 20. February 2012 - 7:10

Whenever somebody complains that their photos do not look “right”, it's always the same answer:

Hey, idiot! Why are you asking that dumb question? Obviously, you didn't calibrate your …

Just add the word monitor, printer…

Does calibration help? Yes, but not as much as you think, the problem is that it's almost impossible to match colors over different mediums. You can say and do whatever you want, you will never be able to exactly match the LCD screen that is illuminated from behind to a print that reflects light.

So what can you do? You have to make some choices and decisions.

You can calibrate everything and use Pantone colors (standard colors) in your photos, while matching the Pantone colors at every step of the way and hope/pray that the other people viewing your photos/prints are also fully calibrated from their lighting to their Adobe RGB capable LCD monitors.

You can decide that most of your photos are used for screen display by other people or to be viewed in various web browser, on iPhones/smartphones, photo frames…

Lightroom: Getting Good Prints from Costco

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 10. February 2012 - 6:10

Everybody is bashing Costco because their prints are cheap. I use Costco, not by choice but by necessity. I have a custom lab, but anything as next day service is very expensive and same day service, we are not talking 1 hour service here, cost an arm and a leg ($39 for one 5” by 7”.) I could print my own but I can never get it right on the first or the second print. There's always a tweak here and a tweak there, I want/need to change the print one more time…

I use Costco for most of my proofs, to show the customer before the final prints, even for myself to see if the concept will work.

The Secrets of Huge and Sharp Prints

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 6. February 2012 - 6:10

I just printed this photo 20” by 30” or 50 centimeters by 76 centimeters.

Pouch, the cat Wile E under his favorite tripod/platformpouch-20080810-0104.jpg — syv ritch ©2008 — foto-biz.com: http://http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms

You can't see it as a print, you can only view from the web. But… It looks great on the wall. Viewed even close, there's no pixilation, no visible noise with a naked eye even at 5 inch from the print. All the hairs and whiskers are sharp.

Lightroom: Smugmug Publishing Plug-in

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 2. February 2012 - 6:10

One of the least used feature, but very powerful feature of Lightroom, is the Publish function. Basically, Lightroom will export the photo to the destination if there's any “important” change to the photo. The important change could be the description/caption, the title, the keywords, the Develop treatment…

I use Smugmug for my photo “back-end.” I chose Smugmug over Zenfolio because Smugmug is integrated in Lightroom (I didn't know then, what I know now.)

  1. I'm not saying that Smugmug is better than Zenfolio. It's your personal choice. Each one has its good, its bad and its ugly.

Lightroom: You Have a Bad Backup

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. January 2012 - 6:10

Do you have a backup? The vast majority of the people do not even have a backup. My personal experience is that less than 1 in 10 people do have a backup. The problem is that people that claim to have a backup, actually have a bad backup! People claim that they have RAID 1, 5 or 10 or they use a Drobo box. Those are not backups.

The purpose of a backup is:

What's the cost of re-entering the data?

— Syv Ritch, http://www.foto-biz.com

  • A guy, that I know, does weddings. He just raised his price from $199 to $249 per wedding.

Running Out of Ideas for Keywording?

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 17. January 2012 - 7:02

What's the purpose of keywords?

The purpose is to find the photos among the thousands of photos in your catalog. It can be for you or it can be for customers or it can be for internet searches.

The keywords are associated with a photo to describe:

  • subject matter
  • status
  • style
  • use

The simplest way of creating keywords is just add another keyword when you need it. The problem with just adding them on the fly without any structure is fine for the first few dozen keywords. Then it becomes unwieldy when it becomes thousands.

The “cleanest” way is to create base categories, then expand these various categories.

Lightroom Keywords Categories

First: Always fill in the IPTC information. The problem, with the IPTC information, is that you can't search for it! The IPTC search is so limited that I find it useless. It's only possible to search if you already know the exact word and you cannot select in which IPTC field.

The Important New Stuff in the Lightroom 4 Beta

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 11. January 2012 - 6:15

It's CES time in Last Vegas and Adobe has announced the Lightroom 4 beta. LR4 is out for the people to test and/or play with it. I haven't played with it yet, just downloaded it. You can too from: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_lightroom4 but you first need to register for an Adobe ID.

Here are a few videos released by Adobe.

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