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Posts Tagged ‘post processing’

Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

OnOne Perfect Effects – Tech Thursday

Post Processing

Almost there with getting through my backlog of photo edits! Just in time for the weekend coming up. I am scheduled to cover the That’s Dancing Summer Showcase on Saturday. If you will be dancing, please see me at the studio! I will be taking orders there for special event pricing for your photos. For today’s post, I will be looking at the OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 plugin for Adobe Lightroom.

Washington Monument - out of camera - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument – out of camera – ©TimeLine Media

Lightroom Plugin

If you follow OnOne on social media, or if you are on their mailing list, they have lots of tutors and offers for their products. A few months ago, they offered this program completely free! I have wanted to try their software for a while, but I know that I do not have the time to really invest in a new program. After downloading, it easily integrates into Lightroom. To start working on an image, right click the photo, select “Edit In” then select “Perfect Effects 8”. You will then have the option to work on the original image (if it is a Tiff or JPG file) or to work on a copy with Lightroom adjustments (if it is a RAW file).

OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
OnOne Software Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

The program will open and you have all the presets listed on the left. When you select one of the presets, the large preview in the middle of the screen will change with each selection. On the right panel, you can see that Perfect Effects uses layers, much like Photoshop, to have more control over the adjustments. For this preset, I like the saturation that it adds to the sky and the grass. Here is the photo after export-

Washington Monument - Magic Forest preset from Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument – Magic Forest preset from Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

The presets have a large amount of choices to change your images. You can add borders, grain, you can even make tilt shift images with their blur options. Many of these functions are already available from mobile photo editing apps, but now you can have this in the desktop. The control that you have over them can be fine-tuned with the layers in Perfect Effects 8. I will definitely try more of this with future projects to see the power of the program, but as a first try, it is really impressive!

Washington Monument with grain and borders from Perfect Effects 8 - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument with grain and borders from Perfect Effects 8 – ©TimeLine Media

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

Event, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Rename Photos – Tech Thursday

Flowers in Bon Air Park - ©TimeLine Media

Photo Processing

This is a simple idea for a blog post, but one that I think is very important for many reasons. Digital cameras are small, very advanced computers that specialize in making images. The computers run an operating system that conforms to the Design Rule for Camera File Systems or DCF. This is the reason that in any digital camera, your images are stored in a file folder named “DCIM”. After that level, camera manufacturers can change the default naming conventions for images captured by your camera. For Nikon, Fuji and Sony cameras, the default is “DSCXXXX.jpg” while for Canon cameras, the default is “IMGXXXX.jpg”.

Flowers in Bon Air Park - ©TimeLine Media
Flowers in Bon Air Park – ©TimeLine Media

In the menus for your cameras, you can change the default name for your images. When I am setting up a new camera body, this is one of the first things I change for two reasons. The first is so that I can easily identify which images are from which camera, or photographer if I am covering an event with multiple photographers. The second is that in post-processing, I can more easily keep track of photos that I am editing.

Rename Photos

For example, I rename all my images W2A for one camera, W2B for another camera, etc. When at an event with other photographers where we are collecting all the images on one workstation, I can almost ensure that there will not be any accidental rewriting of images since the filenames will likely be different. If I kept the default DSC names, there is a danger that copying files from 2 different Nikon bodies will be overwritten if the user is not careful in copying images. During a busy event, something like this can definitely happen!

Field of Buttercups - ©TimeLine Media
Field of Buttercups – rename example – ©TimeLine Media

Before posting images online, it is also important to rename your images. This makes it easier for search engines to find your images when people search. It is much more likely that someone online will find my image of the “Washington_Monument.jpg” when searching for images of DC when it is renamed rather than if it was posted as “W2A7879.jpg” as it was named straight out of camera. Come up with some naming conventions for your images. Especially as your image collection grows, it helps to keep organized and will help you to recall the images later if/when they are needed. Perfect for #TBT Throwback Thursdays!

Washington Monument at night - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument at night – ©TimeLine Media

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

Ballroom Dance, Event, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Website Updates for Memorial Day Weekend

Website Updates

It has been a busy week at the TimeLine Media websites! The long weekend for Memorial Day is here. It is time to take a little break to look back at some exciting updates on the website. Thanks to everyone that has visited the proofing website to view the 2014 American Star Ball photos! I am so happy that many of you have found images that you would like to have printed or shared online. There is an early-bird sale for all purchases made at the website until June 9, 2014.

http://proofs.timelinedc.com

2014 American Star Ball - ©TimeLine Media
2014 American Star Ball – ©TimeLine Media

Other updates include the blog site you are reading right now. Unless you are on an RSS reader you may have noticed that there is a change to the look of the blog. After a few years of the old design, it was time for a change. Thanks to some of the regular visitors to the blog that noticed some of the errors popping up. If any of you notice that there are still some things that need to be fixed, please send me an email: Rassi at timelinedc.com

Arthur Murray Gaithersburg poter - ©TimeLine Media
Arthur Murray Gaithersburg poster – ©TimeLine Media

Finally, I wanted to post about the Facebook poll about the upcoming Arthur Murray Summer Showcase. I have made posters from each of the professional shows from the Spring Freestyles. They are a bit of a departure from my usual images as I posted yesterday. I wanted to give the Analog Efex Pro 2 plugin a run with some of my images to see what it could do. It is definitely much more than an “Instagram-like” filter with all of the option and control you have over the adjustments, and can be a very useful tool for photographers. Please check out all 8 of the posters at the TimeLine Media Facebook page, and like your favorites. I will count up the Likes on Sunday, and the 2 posters with the most votes will be printed to display at the June 1 showcase. Happy Memorial Day!

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

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