DIYPhotography.net

Adobe is bringing Lightroom to the iPad as an app. Over at The Grid yesterday Tom Hogarty, Adobe's group product manager for Lightroom showed an early stage iPad app designed to allow editing RAW images from your computer on a mobile device.

Hogarty explains that Adobe is trying to revamp the workflow between the desktop, laptop and other mobile devices. Here is the gap that Adobe's trying to bridge. Click to continue ›

You know that to get the most of your DSLR you should be shooting in RAW, right? But these days Nikon cameras gives you even more options: 12-bit or 14-bit, and compressed or uncompressed RAW (NEF) files. Which should you choose?

Short question: Does it matter? Will you see any difference between compressed (lossy) and uncompressed (lossless) RAW? And between 12 and 14 bits?

Short answer: No it does not matter. Choose 12-bit compressed (because they take up less space) and forget about this topic. Or choose 14-bit uncompressed because theoretically you’re getting the “most” from your camera – you just have to live with the file sizes.

Not happy with the short answer? Then read on… Click to continue ›

So, you can spend hours and hours on Halo, but wrist gets tired after 20 minutes of culling photos? It could be related to fun vs. work, but it could also be related to wrist fatigue.

Hitting the forward/backward arrows and assigning numbers/colors hundreds of time can be hard on your wrist. Compared to say hitting hundreds of buttons while playing Call of Duty. There is a reason for this. The gaming industry wants you at your game controller so they heavily invest in ergonomics R&D. That investment pays off in terms of being able to play for prolonged period of time (yes, I would definitely not play prolonged periods of time if it wasn't for the comfy controller. HA!).

This concept of ergonomic controller cane be taken to the editing process. Here are three ways to use a game controller with Lightroom. Click to continue ›

Here is a useful idea, using Photoshop's adjustment layers for quickening and improving retouching.

While usually adjustment layers are used for... how should I put it... adjusting, Calvin Hollywood shows a different way of using them. Rather than use adjustments layers to tweak the photo, he uses them as temporary 'check layers'. Those layers are actually your ordinary adjustment layers, but taken to extreme to reveal otherwise hard to find flaws in retouching. Click to continue ›

CS6 introduced a new adjustment layer. It’s called the Color Lookup Adjustment Layer, and it is a great tool to create different looks and styles. If used correctly it is a very powerful tool.

For the sake of this demo, I am going to use a photo called "Gentleman Mask", while it will be the base image for our layering games, there is a the movies at the bottom shows the entire processing done on the initial image.

Click to continue ›

Update: this was too good to be true, and Adobe shut it down (the dead link is not a result of overload). Read what this download was all about after the jump.

Here is something I did not see coming. (and had to verify that it was not April's 1st for a second). Adobe has just release their entire Creative Suit for free download.

It is not the latest version, but rather the 2005 CS2 version, but it rocked back then and it still rocks today if you are looking for a free photo editing program, video editing program, layout and all the rest of Adobe's Creative suite goodies.

I figure Adobe would rather people use their (bit dated) software for free than have 60% of its users pirate it. Click to continue ›

A while back I shared that fact that I was enjoying SLR Lounge's A-Z Lightroom video tutorials. One of the chapters I liked most is dealt with tweaking and adjusting an image which was hard to expose, turning it into a great landscape image. I asked Post Production Pye and the team over at SLRL for a tutorial on that technique which they gladly shared.

In this tutorial, I want to take an image that was shot several years ago on a Canon 40D in RAW, and show you just what we can do to artistically edit this very plain "walk-up" shot. Click to continue ›

If you are managing your photographs within a single Lightroom catalog, the fine guys are SLR Lounge have a sweet tip for file management from their new Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection DVD Series.

For a wedding photography studio like Lin and Jirsa, we like to keep multiple Catalogs in Lightroom because of the large volume of photos that we process every time we shoot.

Each wedding that we shoot can have thousands of images, so multiple Catalogs are a must for our workflow to remain at peak efficiency since Lightroom 4 will slow down with large catalog sizes. But for many photographers who shoot far less than we do, one Catalog or one Catalog per year, may just be enough to hold all your photos.

Now if you do use a single Lightroom Catalog workflow system and you have a folder with a lot of photos, we can show you how to break out those images into smaller shoots within their own respective folders inside of the same Lightroom Catalog. Click to continue ›

If you are only using one card reader or one memory card, this tip is of little use to you. But if you are using several cards or several readers this is a real time saver.

I use SanDisk's ImageMate All-in-One card reader which takes both my D3100 SD cards and my D300 CF cards. But up till now I used to read the cards one after the other, which was pretty annoying.

This 3 minutes video shows how you can read several cards simultaneously. This saves the hassle of key-wording or applying import presets twice, but more importantly, it saves the need to babysit Lightroom and wait for the first card to finish download.

P.S. B&H are having a huge one day sale on sandisk cards, so if you need more space...

[How To Download Multiple Memory Cards Simultaneously Into Adobe Lightroom via iso1200] Click to continue ›

If you like that cross processed look that you get with using instagram, but would rather to use a DSLR to shoot rather than the iPhone, the guys over at SLR Lounge has a sweet video tutorial for you.

The video covers how to use the Lightroom curves tool to get a cross-processed vintage look on an image. Click to continue ›