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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Presets as a Platform – Making it Happen

“Editing shouldn’t feel like work.” That is the byline that runs on our ads here at X-Equals for our preset collections we offer for sale. It is a creed that we take seriously here at X-Equals, one that the Lightroom team takes seriously and one you should take seriously as well. Lightroom makes getting the most [...]

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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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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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Mastering HSL in Lightroom – Part 2 of 3

In the first part of Mastering HSL in Lightroom, we covered exactly what the HSL is and how it is used. If you spent some time experimenting with the Color Checker DNG we provided you should have some sense of how Hue, Saturation and Luminance interact with the different colors. If not, jump back to [...]

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Mastering HSL in Lightroom – Part 1 of 3

Color – it’s the first aspect of a photograph most viewers ever notice. Colors bring an image to life, and mastering the color rendition of your image is of the utmost importance. Usually the color right from a RAW file is rather unimpressive, and needs some adjustment to make the image pop. To help manage color [...]

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