Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Technique Tuesday: Lightroom Lighting

Good Morning Everybody,
Things are hopping this week at the studio with clients yesterday and today and the PhotoProExpo kicking off later this week. I got huge chunks of my wedding book wrapped this weekend so that's a good thing.

And, we are putting finishing touches on the Digital WakeUp Call - A New Dawn 2009 Tour. I should be able to point you to the web site by the end of the month. I'm also a volunteer for a lot of the PhotoProExpo activities so time is a bit short around here this week. I sure hope several of you will come on by the convention - it's a HUGE photographic talent fest this year. Here is the ProPhotoExpo link again if you missed it on an earlier post. The trade show looks to be very promising as well. It's a GREAT opportunity to hear some fantastic speakers and I encourage each and everyone of you to register and attend if you live with in the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia area.

Well, how about on with this week's edition of Technique Tuesday - I think you re going to enjoy it - here we go...

Technique Tuesday: Lightroom Lighting
So how many times didn't you get the image you wanted in the camera. Or you wish you would have tweaked the exposure/lighting a bit more in the camera? Or maybe there wasn't time during the wedding day to tweak the shot and you had to settle for a Lightroom fix after getting back to the studio?

Well today folks I offer the solution to these problems. Lightroom has some wonderful built in tools that literally let us put light on the scene exactly where we want it. We can easily control the densities and tonalities of the image transforming it dramatically to obtain a beautiful finished result.

In this tutorial, I'll take only a few minutes to take an image at first glance appears not that great. After a few Lightroom tweaks and judicious use of Lightroom 2's new tools, you will see the image transformed into a very cool looking portrait of the groom. Hit the PLAY button below and enjoy the show...


Hey gang, that's it for me today. I've got another episode of Analysis Of A Wedding Shoot planned for tomorrow, so be sure to tune in. See everybody then. -David

10 comments:

  1. Great tips, I especially like the use of color in the grad. Lightroom is such a powerful tool really. Great timing too, as I just watched your related photo shoot tutorial on Kelby Traning last night even :) BTW, looking forward to the expo this weekend, I couldn't pass up the Ligtroom 2 seminar for all day Friday.

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  2. David, I am not able to get the links to the ProPhotoExpo to work. You might check on them. I grt something like

    http://imaging%20expo%20convention/

    I think you forgot part of the link.

    I really look forward to reading you posts daily.

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  3. This was fantastic. Your workflow is almost bang on to what I normally do in my images, except for one important thing... I feel embarrassed I hadn't even noticed the gradient tool before when it's so useful. (That would have saved me a lot of work in Photoshop all this time!)

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  4. Very nice! I can only imagine the cumbersomeness of accomplishing this technique just a decade ago with film.

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  5. Nice video as always. I think you can now bring across some of the Canon picture styling into LR2 + if you also get your hands on the DNG beta from Adobe Labs. This will read any DNG profiling written to the RAW file by the camera (which i think Canon Picture Styles are)

    http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles

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  6. Another great tutorial - I really appreciate all the time and effort you put into your website.

    Is there a reason you used the "Contrast" slider rather than the tone curve?

    In the video, it looks like you are using the Medium Contrast tone curve. With Canon cameras, I find that is normally too contrasty, so I import the raws with a flat tone curve. Then I can add contrast or switch to a higher contrast tone curve if needed.

    I also find that the default "5" setting on the "Blacks" slider tends to be too dark, and I loose too much detail in the shadows. I normally back that off to somewhere between 0 and 3.

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  7. Thank you Mr. Ziser, for this wonderful tutorial. It gave me a little bit more insight in to how our cameras perceived contrast, and is already helped me in several of my photographs.

    Thanks again, Zechariah

    PS: Thank you for the previous tutorial on the inexpensive monopod for the off camera flash. I really enjoy all of the ideas and techniques on equipment that we can use, and still have some money left over.

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  8. David, The volume for the music is great, but your voice is low on the video. I notice this is a trend lately. Can you turn the volume up on the voice for your next one to balance it out and make it easier to hear?

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  9. Thank you! Great tutorial!

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