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Posts Tagged ‘Lightroom’

Photography, Technology, Travel | 0 comment

Comparing HDR to Non-HDR images

Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument from Virginia - ©TimeLine Media

With all my landscape images, I have been bracketing exposures with the intent to do some post processing on the photos and create a high dynamic range (HDR) final image. One evening, I walked out on the Virginia side of the Potomac River from Washington, DC to the Memorial Bridge. This is a beautiful spot to make images of the Lincoln and Washington Monuments especially in the early evening. With the sun lowering, the white buildings again take on that pink/orange hue of the fading light.

Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument from Virginia - ©TimeLine Media
Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument from Virginia – ©TimeLine Media

HDR testing

In looking through the set of images that I made after the shoot, I did notice that this night had a smoggy haze. With rush hour traffic starting to build, it did not make for as nice a scene as the crisp winter mornings. The haze came in the middle of the frames underneath the blue, and stayed over the pink part of the sky overlaying this ugly gray layer.

This was just bad luck for the time I happened to be out there shooting. Obviously, it makes me want to try this on a different day. Perhaps I can get a better result next time. In any case, I saw the result from the post processing the bracketed photos with Photomatix. I wanted to compare it to the RAW file images. With this in mind, I had a feeling that being able to shoot at a low ISO. Additionally, with all the detail and information that the Nikon D4 gathers, I could make one of the RAW files that was in the middle of the bracket look just as good as the HDR image.

Washington, DC

Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument from Virginia - ©TimeLine Media
Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument HDR from Virginia – ©TimeLine Media
Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument from Virginia - ©TimeLine Media
Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument non-HDR from Virginia – ©TimeLine Media

What I learned in looking at these photos, is that there is not a huge difference between the dark and light sections of the photo. Moreover it is very possible to make one exposure similar to a realistic HDR image from 7 bracketed photos. The Raw file was adjusted in Adobe Lightroom with just some contrast, clarity, and vibrance added to the original file.

I then adjusted the white balance of the scene to mimic the HDR, and these photos looked very similar. Although it is not something that I am comfortable yet pre-visualizing. So it is nice to have the bracketed photos as a backup. I will probably continue to shoot both ways, and processes them in 2 ways, until I can more easily predict when it will save me a lot of time and memory card space to shoot just one photo instead of the whole series.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Watermark Images – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - Fairfax Corner Christmas Tree Lighting

A few readers and Facebook friends have asked about how I watermark my images. This is the “TimeLine Media” bar that I add to the bottom edge of all the photos I post online. Currently, there is a hot debate online about the use of watermarks when posting photos online. With software, most watermarks are easily removed, and their addition to your image will add a VERY distracting element to the frame.

Yes, it may deter some from stealing your image, but if someone is out to take your image, they would never have been a paying client for you whether you added the it or not. That being the case, I continue to add watermarks to all my images – selfishly to see the images used around the web, and in case I forget that I made a particular photo. In case you were wondering, if you purchase a digital download (any size) from the proofing website, there is no mark whatsoever on the file. If you paid for it, you should have a clean image! As the debate goes on, I may change my stance on my personal posting, but for now, the watermarks stay. Here is how to watermark your images easily with  Adobe Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom

©TimeLine Media - Fairfax Corner Christmas Tree Lighting
©TimeLine Media – Fairfax Corner Christmas Tree Lighting

First, create a PNG file in Photoshop or other image editor like Microsoft Powerpoint with the design that you want for your watermark. I have a transparent bar at the bottom with my logo and text with my website. The file is sized 600 px by 400 px, my default size for posting images on the blog. Create your watermark with a transparent background, then save as a PNG file which will preserve the transparency over the larger part of the image which you do not want covered in any way. This is easily done in Photoshop, and here is a screen shot from my layer setup of the watermark image.

Watermark Images

Adobe Photoshop - watermark setup
Adobe Photoshop – watermark setup

In Lightroom, you can add a watermark at the bottom of the Export dialog box. From this box, you can add a text watermark such as “©TimeLine Media” or you can select your PNG file as your watermark. You can adjust many settings in this box including the font of the watermark (if using a text watermark). how much the watermark takes up in the photo, and whether you want it in a corner or over the center of the image.

Lightroom Export Image dialog box
Lightroom Export Image dialog box

With Lightroom, you can select a group of photos to export at one time. If you choose to add a mark with this dialog box, it will add it to every image you export. If you like how it looks, and you think that you will use it more in the future, you can create a preset of your watermark that you can add with one click each time you import a batch of photos. Let me know how this goes for you, or if you have any other questions on how this is done. If you have any thoughts on the use of watermarks in general, please let me know!

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Studio, Technology | 0 comment

Working with Lightroom Catalogs – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

Adobe Lightroom is the best photo editing software available today. At this time it has support of all the major camera manufacturers and is best suited to handle professional RAW files from digital cameras. Many of my Tech Thursday articles have talked about working in the program, but I want to post today about the backend of working with Lightroom, specifically Catalogs. These are files that have the “.lrcat” extension. There are different strategies for working with these files, but I wanted to show you how I work with them to keep things organized, and to keep your hard work safe from potential data loss.

Catalogs in Lightroom

With this in mind, I create a new catalog file for every big event that I photograph. If it is a wedding, I will create a new catalog “brides_name__grooms_name.lrcat”, if it is a ballroom dance event, I will make a catalog “year_eventname.lrcat”. Afterwards, I will import only the files from each event into the catalogs, and work with them from there. There are some that will add every image from every shoot into one large catalog. With the metadata searching power of the Library, I can see the advantage of doing this. According to Adobe, there is no limit to the amount of photos you can have in one catalog – some have reported using catalogs with 800,000 images and more!

I separate my shoots into separate catalogs for 2 reasons. The first is that I have experienced catalog corruption when working with some Lightroom catalogs. In these cases, there was some data errors in the lrcat file which prevented the file from being opened! All of the edits from that event  with ~1200 photos were lost, and had to be redone. What if that were to happen in a catalog with 800,000+ photos! From then on, I have clicked the “Automatically write changes into XMP” under Catalog Settings so that if a catalog was corrupted, the work would be saved in the XMP sidecar files along with the RAW files, and the catalog could easily be recreated. Let me know if you have any tips with working on your Lightroom catalogs.

Enough with the geeky talk, here’s a pretty photo. The Capitol building will need major renovations which are scheduled to begin later this year. Here is a late afternoon photo before all of the scaffolding goes up. Enjoy!

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC
©TimeLine Media – US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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