The Lady Gaga Pandora station seemed like a good idea.  I turned to Lady Gaga to spice up my editing soundtrack after exhausting my iTunes library and growing tired of the same old Pandora stations I usually listen to.  It was such a drastic change at first that I loved it.  But I could only take it for so long before I started wanting to tear my hair out – a stage I reached last week whilst editing.  No more.  Turns out I could not be romanced, Lady Gaga, thankyouverymuch.

I know I’m not alone on this – I often meet photographers who practically beg for suggestions of what to watch or listen to whilst editing.  So here’s a playlist I’ve been running with some success.  A little old, a little new, a little Bob Marley.  Because Bob Marley makes editing through the family photos just that much easier :)  Maybe one of the songs will inspire you to create a new Pandora station of your own.  I’m hoping someone will share their favorite playlist in return – I still need some new music myself, and I’d like to keep all of my hair intact :)

Are you tired of looking at images of soup?  Yeah.  Me too.  How about some behind the scenes Photoshop work?

This is one of my favorite family photos from the Adkins family session that I shot last fall in St. Louis.  Here’s the behind the scenes of what was done to the image before it was blogged:

Step One: Straight out of the camera, shot in RAW format at ISO 200, 38mm, 1/250 second at f/4.0

Step Two: Minor tweaks to increase brightness and contrast in Lightroom

Step Three: Totally Rad Actions Prettyizer at 60%;  Oh Snap 60%,  Yin Yang 15% on the dad.

It’s one of those “Doh!” moments for photographers.  You’ve uploaded your cards, and your second shooter’s cards.  You’ve arrange everything by date in your Lightroom catalog.  You’re sitting down to cull or edit the photos when you notice that somehow everything is just a little…off.  You’ve forgotten to sync the time on your cameras.  DOH!

Fortunately, Lighroom has made an easy fix for this.  Another photographer mentioned to me about a month back that she was fixing this issue manually, and I think she was a little heartbroken to hear it could be done with just the click of a button.  In case that sounds all too familiar, here’s how to fix it next time in about 30 seconds.

Open Lightroom and go to the Library view.  In the righthand menu, scroll down through the meta data until you reach the capture time.  Click on the little icon to the right of the time setting.  Here you can see what your camera was set on for the selected image, and input what the correct time was.  I suggest looking at the difference between your correctly shot images and the ones appearing at the incorrect time, select all the images in the incorrect time category and adjust by the hours or minutes necessary to have everything line up correctly.  It’s that easy.  Quit tearing your hair out about syncing your cameras.  :)

The last four days were a bit of a blur.  I spent them at a lighting workshop with Cliff Mautner outside Philadelphia.  I drank too much coffee.  I sat in awe of Cliff’s talent.  I learned about light.

Learning to shoot in harsh lighting and creating dramatic light were my main goals for the workshop.  I still have to play around with what I’ve learned, but so far I’m happy with the information I took away from the experience.  These are just a few shots I took of models he hired to help us practice.  They’re all shot on location at some incredible spots in Philly.

Many thanks to Cliff and everyone who attended for making the workshop a success.  I look forward to testing out my new skills at my next shoot!

I wish I’d known how to do this my first year in business.  So in case someone else can benefit from the knowledge, here’s a quick little How To.

You can save LOADS of time editing images by batching them in Photoshop using actions.  There are a few somewhat generic adjustments that I tend to like on particular types of images, so I create custom actions with the exact steps I like built in.  Once I export and image to jpg, all I have to do is run the action on a specific folder and leave to do something else  (like make soup) while my MacPro does all the work.  It’s so easy, and a serious time saver.

Actions can get highly complicated, but for this demonstration I’ll show how to build a simple custom action for converting color images into black and white.   (Click the images to see them larger so you can read text!)

Step One: Select a jpg file to use as a sample image and open it in Photoshop.  Click on the Actions Palette, and select Add New Action.  Name your new action – in this case “Black & White.”

Step Two: Your custom action is now “recording,”  so you can edit the image how you’d like.  For a basic black and white conversion I would play the Totally Rad Action Boring Old Black and White, and lower the opacity of the Contrast Up layer.  Then I’d run the Kevin Kubota Edge Burner action, and adjust opacity. (Yes, you can use actions within your action.)

» Continue reading “How To: Create Photoshop Actions”