“It is critical to understand that Lightroom will always take its own database to be correct,” says Victoria Bampton, raw processing guru and self-dubbed “Lightroom Queen.” (And rightly so!) In case you’re not clear, Bampton is talking about the fact that when working with images in a LR catalog, LR will always refer to the most recent changes that were made in LR, even you worked on images more recently in another program.
Huh?
What this means is that if you update any metadata — from keywords to develop settings – in any other program besides LR (such as Adobe Bridge or Adobe Camera Raw), LR will not be aware of those changes. Considering that many of use do use multiple programs to work with our image, you can see how we could quickly end up with a very big mess.
Continue reading “Lightroom Data Practices Revealed”
Tags: "Lightroom Data Practices: Getting Under the Hood”, Adobe Lightroom - The Missing FAQ, Lightroom Catalog, Lightroom Data, Lightroom Queen, Read Metadata from Files, Victoria Bampton
The title of one of Scott Kelby’s most recent books can be misleading. “Photoshop CS4: Down & Dirty Tricks” suggests to me, well, “down and dirty tricks,” which aren’t something that I am particularly interested in learning. However, with this title, Kelby, the well-known “#1 best-selling Photoshop author,” has turned out another great one.
To help you better appraise Kelby’s “Down & Dirty Tricks,” let me suggest a new name for the book:
“Scott Kelby’s Impressive Scope of In-Depth Photoshop CS4 Projects with Continue reading “Kelby’s CS4 “Tricks” Are Closer to Magic”
Tags: Book Learning Resources, Book Review, CS4, Learning Resources, Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4: Down & Dirty Tricks, Postproduction Techniques, Scott Kelby
Photographed brilliantly by Layne Kennedy and featuring wonderful essays by Greg Breining, “A Hard-Water World: Ice Fishing and Why We Do It” is a great book in its own right, and a fabulous example of how images and words in book form – when handled with such intelligence – can still illuminate a topic like no other media.
Frankly, when I split open “A Hard-Water World” I wasn’t really expecting that much. For one thing, too many topical photography books disappoint. And for another, ice fishing isn’t Continue reading “Inspiring Little Book on a Strange, Cold World”
Tags: A Hard-Water World, A Hard-Water World: Ice Fishing and Why We Do It, Book Review, Documentary Photography, Editing, Greg Breining, Ice Fishing, Image Editing, Inspiration, Layne Kennedy, Photojournalism, Picture Stories, Sports Photography, Storytelling
If you are a successful photographer secure in you image making there’s no need to turn to “Rick Sammon’s Exploring the Light: Making the Very Best In-Camera Exposures.” If however, you need help with your process, your composition, your use of natural and strobe light, not to mention critical fundamentals regarding exposure, this book is a fantastic, easy and enlightening read.
“Exploring the Light” is also a perfect book to recommend to the would-be photographers or amateurs you encounter who need a good, helping hand, but that find that most basic photography how-to books fall short. The reason most basic photography books fall short is because they miss critical fundamentals or over-explain over-rated technical fine-points.
A respected photographic educator, Rick Sammon has written more than twenty books and scores of articles as well as Continue reading “Fantastic Book on In-Camera Digital Fundamentals”
Tags: Basic Techniques, Book Review, Educational, How-To, In-Camera Techniques, Rick Sammon, Rick Sammon’s Exploring the Light
“Learning to Breath: One Woman’s Journey of Spirit and Survival” by acclaimed photojournalist Alison Wright is definitely a book of note for picture professionals. Whether you will find it amazingly and uniquely inspiring or whether they will find it frustratingly lacking will depend utterly on personality, interests and taste in literary style. From my point of view, each perspective – that the book is a soaring success or a frustrating failure – seems entirely valid.
“Learning to Breath” revolves around Wright’s horrifying, very-near-death accident in a bus in the windy, isolated mountain roads of Loas, just after New Year’s 2000. As always, Wright was busy both globetrotting around the world to photographically record endangered cultures as she also Continue reading “Inspiring Photojournalist Shares Gasping Buddhist Learnings”
Tags: Alison Wright, Book Review, Buddism, Documentary Photography, Inspiration, Learning to Breath: One Woman’s Journey of Spirit and Survival, Photojournalism, The Photographer's Life
I try to avoid writing reviews of books I don’t deem worthy of reading. But I feel that it is important to steer you away from Scott McNulty’s “Building a WordPress Blog People Want To Read.”
McNulty is one of the few people actually earning a living blogging, and he is certainly an expert on the topic, having a wealth of information to share. But that wealth is not shared well in “Building a WordPress Blog.” The book definitely contains valuable tidbits, but this information is Continue reading “A Blogging Book To Avoid”
Tags: Blogging, Blogging Strategies, Book Review, Building a WordPress Blog People Want To Re, Scott McNulty, WordPress
“Real World Video Compression” sounded pretty boring to me, even though I’ve started playing around with video, and even though I’m pretty excited about the convergence of still and motion.
Written by compressionist extraordinaire Andy Beach, “Real World Video Compression” is a surprising delight and utterly relevant to still-focused picture professionals—from movie-making photographs to office-bound photo assistants prepping Flash movies of still images for the Web.
The reason that Beach deserves such big-time, hats-off applause is because Continue reading “Engaging, Relevant Insights Into Video Compression”
Tags: Andy Beach, Movie Making, Multimedia, QuickTime Pro, Real World Video Compression, Video Compression
We all know Al Gore invented the Internet, but who invented photography? I have to admit I’m a little confused on what would seem to be a very basic point. Maybe you can help clear things up, or a least throw in your two cents.
When I took history of photography during my first year at RIT in 1988, we were told that it was going to be a pretty exciting year for photography: The 150th year birthday! Then we learned that, while there were a number of guys messing around with seriously dangerous chemicals in the 1830s, it was the Frenchman Louis Daguerre who invented photography in 1839 with his nifty daguerreotype.
Continue reading “Who Invented Photography, Anyway?”
Tags: calotype, Creations of a Moment: The Photography of William Henry Fox Talbot, daguerreotype, Geoffrey Batchen, History of Photography, Louis Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot
With her stunningly beautiful and truly inspiring Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking (O’Reilly Media, 2006), Julieanne Kost has created one of the very best books on the topic of the creative process of digital photography. It is safe to say that utterly unique and provocative book Kost, who is Adobe’s Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist, will motivate and help focus your digital image making efforts regardless of your skill level or photographic specialty.
Window Seat is structured around a portfolio of more than 150 images that Kost photographed out of commercial airplane windows while traveling for business over a five-year period. In her book, Kost couples her digitally-made images with a description of her creative process. The premise is simple. But there is power in simplicity when a project is executed with the elegance found in Window Seat.
In producing Window Seat, Kost risked creating a book that could have easily been labeled trite. But taking risks is one of the most important Continue reading “An Utterly Inspiring View for Improving Digital Creativity”
Tags: Books, Creative Thinking, Digital Photography, Julieanne Kost, Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking
We all know that excellent color management practices are the foundation of survival, success and satisfaction in the world of digital photography postproduction. Yet, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that many photographers still do not even systematically calibrate their monitors—let alone juggle different color spaces, make CMYK conversions and maintain mastery over a lot of other critical color practices.
If you’re struggling with any aspect of color management, you probably have two pressing questions. Am I a color management moron? No! Is there Continue reading “Tapp Into Excellent, Enjoyable Color Management”
Tags: CMYK Conversion, Color Management, Color Space, Eddie Tapp, Monitor Calibration, Practical Color Management: Eddie Tapp on Digital Photography
