X-Equals – image, workflow, technology, business

Quickie Fix – Exposure

Everyone has encountered shots that have been over or under exposed before. Be it accidental or the result of bracketing, there are always a few less than ideal exposures in any project. Fixing each of the images can be time consuming, but if you leverage some tricks in Lightroom, you can speed up your workflow [...]

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Good to the last Drop – Photoshop Droplets

I always loved Photoshop for its ability to create Actions, and in turn automate a LOT of my work by leveraging those actions to create Photoshop Droplets for batch processing. And, the best part is I can access these Actions from directly within Lightroom. By leveraging Droplets within your Lightroom workflow, you can take advantage of Photoshop’s [...]

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Fixing Perspective in Photoshop – It’s Easy!

This workflow is by far the shortest and easiest path to fixing the Leaning Tower of Pisa effect that often happens when shooting architectural photos without fancy equipment like a View Camera or a Tilt Shift Lens. Let’s start out by by looking at our final image: Check out those nice sweet STRAIGHT lines! But we didn’t [...]

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We don’t need no stinking Photoshop – Retouching 101

I’m constantly on the search for the smoothest and quickest way to process images. That’s it, nothing fancy about it. I like speed, accuracy, and quality. Can they all be wrapped into one workflow that can take care of the majority of my shoots? – I certainly think so! This little gem of a workflow has been in [...]

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Bokeh – The Art of Blur

I’m a big fan of shooting with a shallow depth of field, and as a result of this, I’m also a fan of the resulting bokeh. What is Bokeh you may ask … ? Wikipedia defines Bokeh as: Bokeh (derived from Japanese, a noun boke, meaning “blurred or fuzzy”) is a photographic term referring to the appearance of [...]

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Digital Asset Management – The X-Equals Way – Part 4 of 4

And here we are … the last part of our series on Folders and Filenames. It’s been quite a journey! We’ll put the last piece of our workflow in place by discussing how to handle derivative files. At the end of this post, we’ll offer a download of our structure for stress testing and commentary from all [...]

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Digital Asset Management – The X-Equals Way – Part 3 of 4

Continuing on from Part 2 of our series, we’ll now begin to tie all our concepts together along with some automation to streamline the workflow for a sample project. Once the Lightroom Import dialog and file naming parameters are set, it’s a snap to introduce subsequent jobs into our system. For future reference, you can bookmark [...]

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Digital Asset Management – The X-Equals Way – Part 2 of 4

Continuing on from Part 1 of our series, we’ll use our data definitions and storage considerations set forth in Part 1 to build a flexible and easy to manage folder structure … We’ll also get into some of the file naming conventions that we put in place for naming folders, although we’ll be getting into more [...]

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Digital Asset Management – The X-Equals Way – Part 1 of 4

We have been asked hundreds of times, to define our model, or a model, for file naming and folder organization for photographers. We’ve been consulting on the setup and ongoing use of these systems for a number of years and I thought it was a good time to distill many of our findings into a [...]

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Digital Asset Management – The X-Equals Way – A Prelude

We’re going from start to finish in this series, and in part 4 we’ll offer a download of our structure for stress testing and commentary from all of you out in the field. You’ll get detailed descriptions of why, how, and when we do what we do when setting up the core system for managing [...]

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