After the Shutter Clicks...
Camera Club Post Processing Conversations
I belong to a camera club that is doing an excellent job of transitioning from a social meeting environment to an online Zoom community. I am dedicating this project to discussions with club members about post processing techniques and art that can be created with the tools included in the Photography Plan from Adobe.
We can all learn from different perspectives and exercises are a great way to decide which tool best suits a photographic style. I will do my very best to talk about these projects in the generic. If you use tools other than Adobe products, I would be very interested in seeing members demonstrate how their tools compare to Lightroom and Photoshop.
We can all learn from different perspectives and exercises are a great way to decide which tool best suits a photographic style. I will do my very best to talk about these projects in the generic. If you use tools other than Adobe products, I would be very interested in seeing members demonstrate how their tools compare to Lightroom and Photoshop.
I enjoyed a one-year camera club competition cycle. Thank you to the judges for all the excellent and valuable feedback. Competing is no longer a motivation for me and I look to this photographic community to improve my art, tell stories, and draw on the energy of the members of our club. If anyone is interested, my 2018 camera club entries are in my Bēhance project list. This will be fun. 📸
Workflow
Here is some self-promotion. In my Workflow Project, I explored what a digital photographic workflow could look like if you didn't understand the software or if someone used entirely different applications. All of the layers assemble into a piece of art, photographic or otherwise. The project has tools to help a beginner craft a mental image of their blossoming style. How many steps do you use for a portfolio image?
Tea Time for Zippy
This is a Bēhance Live, Daily Creative Challenge presented by Adobe Evangelist Paul Trani, Bending Pixels. The starter file can be found here. There were a lot of great insights on where to get resources and this one was found at the RIJKS Museum. This was a fun project and the image made its way to my Instagram Stories via Adobe Spark Post. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
Bēhance File Formats/Match Font...
There was a question about file formats and if Adobe’s PDF was supported on Bēhance. Exporting a book as a PDF has many useful features and is usually part of the bookmaking process. I wondered about exporting a book page with all the fonts, layout, and design intact.
Looking at a recent book I found that my cover font had been deauthorized for some reason and was replaced with a default font from my library. But I couldn’t remember what the font was called. I created a JPG from the preview of the PDF and opened that into Photoshop and used Type > Match Font…
Once cropped onto the font I wanted to know the name of, Adobe told me the fonts I needed. I clicked on the stars to fav them and voila, all the fonts were restored with the original book layout in Lightroom. So if you want to export an entire book as JPEGs with all your design effort preserved, it is possible.
This book was created using the Book module in Adobe Lightroom and printed by Blurb, all from within the Adobe environment. It was never my intention to sell this book, however, I knew I wanted to share it with the people on the excursion. Ireland - A Visual Delight, I can share a link to a PDF if anyone prefer viewing that format. Has anyone in the club sold a photographic book of their work? I would love to see some of the books our members have made, maybe a Bēhance project for an evening's conversation.
Two extra copies were printed for our travel companions as a memento of all the good times we had together. There is a full book preview so that I could share with all the people we met on the trip. It was a thank you for all the times I fell behind getting that last shot before the bus had to leave. If anyone would like to talk about printing books, I would be happy to share my experience. Consider sharing links to your books, I'd love to have a look. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
Monogram
This is a Bēhance Live, Daily Creative Challenge presented by Adobe Evangelist Kathleen Martin, Monogram. Text always seems to end up on a beautiful photograph. This was a fun project to play with shapes and ideas. I made a variation that could be used as a watermark. The starter file can be downloaded at the Photoshop Daily Creative Challenge, Starter File. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
Creating a Personal Bēhance Site and Project
Matt Kloskowski is an online educator based in Florida. Matt has a Fresh Start series and his very first project is to get your 20 best images from 2019 and share them. I invite everyone in the camera club to try this. If you don't have a social site for your images, may I suggest Bēhance. If you do have another site(s), Bēhance can display links to expand your photographic network.
Creating a Bēhance site is a simple process, made even easier if you have Lightroom. You can connect to your Lightroom catalogue and quickly import your images into your page or project. You don't have to have an Adobe product, a free account can be created with any email address. I created this secondary account to have a fresh start to demonstrate how to create your very own online artistic profile.
Bēhance also has "Work in Progress", a way to post projects that are under construction so to say. These are similar to Instagram and Facebook Stories. As a club, this would be an excellent way to get feedback on projects and ideas from other members and add additional refinements before saying, complete.
Once you have a Bēhance page and projects, it is really easy to create and populate an Adobe Portfolio site that can serve as a major image repository for your art. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
File Management, Storage, and Backup
Jared Platt is a wedding and portrait photographer that presented a system to organize, store, and backup all his images, Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow. While a little dated, the process is just as sound today. In addition to knowing exactly where your images are, it is just as important to back them up to protect them against loss, especially your LrC catalogue. I believe that a good system is one that works well for your environment, works in the background, and allows you to sleep well knowing that you will never lose an important memory or client file. My approach builds on Jared's hardware, externals, and workflow, there will never be a one size fits all. We could look at different approaches and why you might wish to incorporate the cloud. It's about protecting your digital assets and the importance of regular automated backups. I use Carbon Copy Cloner on Mac for all my storage locations and Time Machine for the operating system boot drive. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
30 Days of Photoshop - Phlearn
"I would prefer to learn from Phearn" many camera club members have stated. Aaron Nace is a wonderful presenter and this free series is very well done. 30 Days of Photoshop - Phlearn. Just enough new and refresher information. The lessons are easily digestible and source files are included. Completing this course will provide a sound foundation for using Photoshop. When taking images from LrC to Ps, for some projects, I like to open as a Smart Object for an additional layer of non-destructive editing. If you double-click on a Smart Object, you can re-edit in the ACR - Adobe Camera Raw. JPEGs are converted into Smart Objects on Open and then you have access to non-destructive editing with ACR as a filter. Let's learn from the other club members, what can we show each other, how do you use Photoshop? Have a great day, Rick. 📸
Bakster - Phlearn Compositing Tutorial
After completing the 30 Days of Photoshop, you may wish to put all of your new found skills to test with this compositing tutorial from Aaron Nace. Bakster includes all of the starter files and brushes needed to complete the project.
There are so many ways to colour grade a project, unifying the colours to create a cohesive image that brings all the pieces together. This is my challenge. My red-green colour deficiency makes visually adjusting the fine colour details with curves or levels very difficult. In this tutorial, Aaron uses "check layers" to help him to see and identify issues while guiding corrections. Check layers make it easier to see problems with tone, hue, and saturation. For all with normal colour vision, this may be all they need to complete an image.
I need to use an additional tool to match disparate images, Match Colours - Photoshop Training Channel. With this technique, I have more confidence that the parts of my image all match in colour. Have a look at these two variations. The one on the left is done with check layers only and the one on the right adds the PTC technique to colour correct with colours from the base layer. Is the difference noticeable? Here is one great discussion we might have. How do you colour grade your images? Have a great day, Rick. 📸
I need to use an additional tool to match disparate images, Match Colours - Photoshop Training Channel. With this technique, I have more confidence that the parts of my image all match in colour. Have a look at these two variations. The one on the left is done with check layers only and the one on the right adds the PTC technique to colour correct with colours from the base layer. Is the difference noticeable? Here is one great discussion we might have. How do you colour grade your images? Have a great day, Rick. 📸
Selective Colour in Lightroom and Photoshop
There are a couple of methods to create a selective colour image. This would be a good time to start a collection in Lightroom, or folder if you use file system. A great project idea while you look back through your files. Drag images you think would work well with this technique onto your collection. Consider a series and make your first Bēhance project. Have a great day, Rick. 📸
