X-Equals – image, workflow, technology, business

Bringing it Home – The Lightroom Import Module – Part 1 of 2

Bringing photos into Lightroom has never been one of my favorite tasks. Lightroom 1 and 2 both had an import interface that seemed like it was thrown in as an after thought. Personally, I never used anything but the Import from Folder option in the prior versions of Lightroom. Never did I allow Lightroom to move [...]

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$19.99 – Living in the Cloud – Offsite Storage for Photographers

The cloud fluff becomes reality You’ve heard about cloud computing, you’ve heard about cloud storage, but now it’s time to get real. As digital photographer’s and consultants, we were overrun with data. We wanted an easy to use, simple, and scalable storage solution that worked with both in-house and remote systems – across PC, Mac, and Linux [...]

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Lightroom 3 – the new ‘Process’

Lightroom 3 is a great product. It retained all the feel of Lightroom 2 while further refining and improving upon the formula that has made Lightroom the image processing tool of choice for many photographers. To many, the transition has been seamless, as if Lightroom 3 was simply an improvement to [...]

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Lens Correction and Alteration in Lightroom 3

Now that Lightroom 3 has finally arrived, everyone gets to take advantage of the new Lens Corrections panel. Adobe has many common lenses from various manufacturers profiled, and Lightroom can automatically correct any abnormalities and perspective issues present in the lens. Another benefit is that Adobe Labs has pre-released the Adobe [...]

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Hack No More! – The Lightroom 3 Tone Curve

When you launch Lightroom 3 and head over to the Develop Module, you may notice some minor differences from Lightroom 2. The point of interest today is located in the Tone Curve palette. At first glance you see the old, friendly Parametric Tone Curve tool Lightroom has had since day one. But look closer. At the bottom, [...]

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High Pass Sharpening in Photoshop

In Lightroom, sharpening is a rather simple endeavor. While Lightroom’s built-in sharpening tool is excellent, it is a bit lacking when it comes to fine control of sharpening. Photoshop is a much better tool for doing fine sharpening, as it offers a myriad of sharpening option and the ability to use layers [...]

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Lightroom Print Templates – Picture Packages

Everyone knows about Lightoom’s presets (if not you should). From Development Presets to Export Presets – presets make you life easier. However, in the print module there are not any presets, per se. Instead you have the ability to save templates, maintaining a layout of images for print jobs. Personally I do [...]

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Freezeframe – Editing Action Sequences in Lightroom

This workflow from our May 12th Email Digest was so popular I thought I’d pull it over to the blog as well. I’m still having a blast shooting sequences, and would love to hear how you folks are shooting them out in the field. I’m looking forward to your comments! Something new We ran a contest a while [...]

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Correcting Color Cast with Lightroom

Color casting is, quite possibly, one of the most frustrating issues you can have with an image. Regardless of how the image was captured, digitally or on film, you can easily run into issues with your lighting, leading to some major color issues. Even when utilizing RAW, you will occasionally run into color casts that are [...]

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Mastering HSL in Lightroom – Part 3 of 3

Now that we have learned the basics of the HSL in Part One and the general method of working with the HSL in Part Two, it is time to expand our horizons a bit. So far we have focused on using HSL to improve an image by attempting to get realistic colors that have been [...]

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