Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair

Skin correction is about subtlety, with eyes, specially the irises, I can go a beyond subtle. Hair is somewhere in between – especially colour.

There are generally two effects I apply to hair – sharpening and colour adjustment. But in this photo of H, he has no hair – it’s all under his hat! I should have picked a better (or do I mean worse?) photo to show my post processing of a portrait. In this case, I shall explain what I do for hair by using his beard; something I’ve never done before but it should work.

Of course, I start off with a new lay group and call it “hair”.

Create a hair layer group

Sharp hair

I sharpen just the highlights of hair to give a “more shine” look. This is done by using a high pass filter, and then a mask to limit the amount of effect it has on areas of hair (as well as the usual, layer opacity to turn down the whole effect).

This technique can also be used to sharpen eyebrows and eyelashes (or to sharpen anything for that matter) but I would these separately from hair because they would require slightly different options.

I duplicate the background layer, usually by pressing Ctrl-J, or you can drag the background layer over the “Create a new layer” icon. I drag this layer into the new hair layer group and rename it to sharp. This is layer that I perform my sharpening on. By carrying out sharpening on this layer, instead of the image directly, I can then make use of layer controls such as blending, masks and opacity. I could also make this layer a “smart object” to give me option of later adjusting the sharpening that I’m about to apply, but I’ve never (well, not yet) had to have that flexibility.

Sharpening

Create a duplicate layer

This duplicate layer will not have all the skin and eyes corrections that have been applied, but that’s ok, since I’m ultimately only going to be working on hair.

Now to actually sharpen the image, with the new sharp layer highlighted, on the menu select Filter > Other > High Pass…. I use a lowish number of 8 to 12px, just enough to start to see a little colour bleeding in. Basically, the higher the number, the more sharpening. In his case, I chose 10px. Now I end with a horrible grey mess!

Apply a high pass filter

And then, just change the blending mode to Overlay.

Change the blending mode

Now it’s sharp, but everything is sharp,and it’s all probably a bit too sharp as well!

Selective Sharpening

To sharpen just the hair it is a simple matter of using a layer mask. I select the hair, and the eyebrows and sometimes eyelashes. I usually have eyebrows and eyelashes less sharp than hair highlights but that will be taken care of shortly.

In this slightly contrived example, I’ll select his beard,but this means that I’ll also be including some of his skin in this hair processing which is not something that I want. The hair that I really want to sharpen is hair highlights,and often the fringe. After doing this for this gentleman’s beard, I think that unless the man has a full beard, don’t do it! But I’ll labour on.

Select the hair

Save the selection, apply a largish feathering by using Shift-F6 or menu Select > Modify > Feather…. I used 20px in this case. Then I add a mask of this selection to the sharp filter by clicking the Add layer mask icon.

Create a layer mask

I next lower the layer opacity until I get the area of hair I want the sharpest looking right. For all other hair that shouldn’t be as sharp, or not sharp at all, I use a large brush with a low flow, 20%, to paint black on areas of the mask. I paint over eyebrows a few times, and dark areas of hair. Ultimately, the hair highlights are left sharp.

For H in this photo, I turned down the layer opacity quite a bit, as well as masked quite a lot. I should have a picked a photo with a head of hair to show the sharpening and it’s effect :(

Rich coloured

Sharpen is fairly mechanical and straight forward, but playing with hair colour is fun! Especially if you’re working on a photo of someone with wild hair colour. Working on hair colour is also great to reduce those strands of grey ;)

There a a few easy ways to play with hair colour, by using the hair selection that was saved, I usually use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, or sometimes a curves adjustment layer.

Have a look at how the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer was created for Eye Whites. Of course, for hair, I am not trying to lower the red, usually I increase it a little.

And then have a look at Irises – levels adjustments to see how a curves adjustment layer is created.

Typically, I make hair a little darker, and more saturated. But I’m not going to do that for his beard!

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes

To me, the eyes are probably the most important part of a portrait shot. Ask me again after loads more experience and I’ll have probably changed mind. But for now, it’s the eyes. Unlike the post processing for skin, you can go a little wild with the irises.

This person already has great eyes – there is no need for any work. But I will go through the steps that I carry out when I want to add some extra punch to the eyes.

Just like for when doing the skin, I create a new layer group, and call it “eyes”.

Create a eyes layer group

Spot correction

“Spot correction for eyes?!” Yes, because there are often numerous catch lights in the eyes and I prefer them with just one well defined catch light. So if there are numerous catch lights, I clean them up in the same way as for skin.

I create a new layer, rename it to “spots” (I could perhaps call it “catch lights” but I as I said before, am such a lazy typist :)

Create a new layer

On this layer I make whatever corrections I need to. Mostly this is removing additional catching lights.

Eye whites

The white of an eye is not pure white! So I don’t make them pure white. But if the person has been awake all night (like me) having fun in Edinburgh (not like me, I’m stuck in front of a computer screen) then their eyes might be a little bloodshot (like mine).

Firstly, I select the eye whites, then save the selection and next very slightly feather (Sift-F6, menu Select, Modify, Feather) it, perhaps 2px.

Select the eye whites

Then I create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer

I rename the new layer to “eye whites”. Notice that this adjustment layer is not clipped to the layer below – there is no small downward pointing arrow in the icons for the layer. This is because I want the adjustment to be applied to all layers below, specifically the background layer, and not just to the layer immediately below. To toggle the “Clip to layer below”, use the button shown below.

Also, below are the two adjustments that are made. First, I reduce the saturations of the red, making any bloodshot eye whites greyer. Then I increase the master lightness to make them a little whiter. Care must be taken to not go overboard and give the person glow in the dark eye whites – these adjustments are usually very small (unlike I’ve shown here). Of course, I can always lower the power of the effect by reducing the layer opacity.

Desaturate the red and lighten it all

Irises

This where some fun and some fairly wild effects can be applied. There are numerous ways to make the irises really pop, but I tend to use just either levels adjustment or dodge/burn, sometimes I use both. There’s another method that involves painting and blending that I’ll describe, though I’ve not really had much success with it I’ll describe it because it a quite a different process – perhaps it’ll work better for you than it has for me. Methods similar to levels adjustment that also produce a pretty good effect and are worth trying out are Curves, Hue/Saturation or Brightness/Contrast adjustment layers.

Irises – levels adjustments

This adjustment is just for the irises, so I start out by making a selection of the irises (and of course, saving that selection), then some very fine feathering of just a few pixels. If the black pupil is reflecting some colour, I usually exclude that from the selection – I don’t want to make the pupil reflection more vibrant (except once when there was a very good silhouette of me taking the shot!).

Levels adjustments are very good for someone who has eyes in one of the adjustment channel colours – green, blue or red (ok, maybe not red). For other colours, I tend to increase saturation and brightness a curves adjustment, but it is a little trickier.

Select the irises

Create a Levels adjustment layer.

Create a Levels adjustment layer

For a Levels adjustment on blue or green eyes, simply reducing the brightness of the appropriate channel is usually enough – reduce blue channel brightness for blue eyes, green channel brightness for green eyes. Below, is the change that I would make for blue eyes, as well as the equivalent for a Curves adjustment.

Typical Levels adjustment for blue eyes (and equivalent Curves adjustment)

But this was not the effect I used for this gentleman’s irises.

Irises – dodge/burn

By dodging (lightening) and burning (darkening) the irises, I often manually draw in a slight effect to make the eyes stand out.

Dodging and burning can be carried out directly on the image, but I prefer to do such changes on a layer. That way I have the freedom adjust the effect, particularly in this case, the blending mode. So this almost starts out like most operations by creating a new layer, but this layer is created in a different way. Either hold down the Alt key at same time as clicking the “Create a new layer” button, or use the menu Layer > New > Layer…, or press Shift+Ctrl+N. This will open a dialog box to giving very useful options.

Creating the Dodge/Burn layer

I give the layer a name, and set the Mode to Overlay, and tick the “Fill with Overlay-neutral colour (50% gray)” option. This creates a grey layer that has no effect – my dodging and burning later will produce the effect that I want.

The new layer

Then I use the Dodge/Burn tool on this layer. Where the “burn” is applied to layer, the image gets darker. Similarly, when the “dodge” is drawn on this layer, the image gets lighter. While dodging and burning, I make sure that the exposure is set to something low, like 20% so that I can more carefully apply the effect,and I only use Midtones (the others have next to no effect). Like all eye changes, subtlety is the key!

What to dodge and burn? I could just say “Wherever is best” but there is a pretty good guide that I always follow – I darken the outside third of the iris, and lighten the inside third. Then I apply any extra little bits of dodging and burning as I see neccessary.

Darken the outer iris, lighten the inner iris

Finally, I change the layer blending mode from Overlay to Soft Light (to more exaggerate the effect) or to Hard Light (to extremely exaggerate it) to see how it looks. The effect can always be toned by by reducing the layer opacity.

Again, this was not the effect I used for this gentleman’s irises.

Irises – paint and blend

This is the quickest and probably easiest method on it’s own, but I usually find that it’s not enough on it’s on. In particular, the irises get darkened and so there is usually some extra work to do afterwards. Because of this, I very rarely use this method.

I use the Eye Dropper (keyboard I) to select the iris colour. Then I create a new layer, and use the Brush to paint the iris colour over the irises.

Paint the irises with the iris colour

After that, it’s just a simple matter of changing the blending mode from Normal – Soft Light is usually best but Overlay and Hard Light can also be good. Finally, lowering the opacity of the layer can make it look a lot less outlandish. A little selective erasing with a low flow and it’s done – easy, fast.

And even this was not the effect I used for this gentleman’s irises.

Irises – so what did I do?

H’s eyes were already brilliant. I initially did nothing to them, but in the end, I added an Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and increased the saturation just a fraction. It’s just enough to add a little more of the wonderful dark golden colour in his eyes.

Phew, that’s the eyes done!

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes (soon)
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Post processing part 3 – Nice skin

I have no order for doing post processing – it is simply driven by whatever catches my eye. But I typically start with skin since that is usually such a large area of the photo. I create a layer group, rename it to “skin” and place all the skin post processing in layers within this new group.

Create a skin layer group

Spots

Everyone has spots or small skin blemishes. The good news is that they are gone in a few days, the bad news is that I don’t have a few days to wait, so I correct them.

I create a new layer, rename it “spots” (I could perhaps call it the slightly less bad sounding “blemishes” but I am such a lazy typist :) and make sure it is in the “skin” layer group.

Create a spots layer

With the new “spots” layer selected, use the three healing tools. Make sure that “Sample all layers” option is checked so that the healing tool will heal the background image, but place the alteration on the “spots” layer (but I haven’t completely figured this important bit out!). I try not to over do it – I want the person to still look human and not like a porcelain doll. Apart from skin, I also correct things such a maybe a stray hair, distracting clothing glint (zips are bad for this) and lips.

Use the healing tools

Blue channel softlight blur

I had been applying a very similar process but just using greyscale until bassqee suggested Iuse the blue channel – what a great improvement! This is probably the most complex operation. It also has the one greatest effects on the image, particularly in shadowing and colour.

I start out by making a selection of the skin – avoid anything that you want to keep pin sharp such as eyes and eyebrows. For beards, sometimes I keep it out of this selection to keep it sharp, and sometimes I include it in – I have no rules on when or why, just what ever looks better to me at the time. Once I’ve made the selection, I save it (Shift+Ctrl+N, menu Select, Save Selection…) because it will needed again soon. Because I’m not imaginative at all, I named the saved selection “skin”.

Select the skin

Then I feather the selection (Sift+F6, menu Select, Modify, feather…) to something reasonably large so that the transition from unprocessed to processed skin is not (very) obvious. In this photo, I used 20px. I save the selection before any feathering so that if necessary, I can later apply a different feathering to reloaded unfeathered selection.

I create a new layer in the “skin” layer group and name it “skin” (see, no imagination). It is important now to highlight the “background” layer to make it the source of what I do next. Switch over the Channels tab and select the Blue channel, copy it (Ctrl-C), switch back to the Layers tab, select the new and empty “skin” and paste the blue channel into it (Ctrl-V). This will create a grey mask of the selected skin over the person.

Copy and pase the blue channel

But wait! There’s a problem. The mask is a copy of the blue colour that is in the “Background” layer, which means that any blemishes corrected on the”spots”, are also in this mask! To fix this, just do the steps again but for the “spots” layer – create a new layer above (this is important) the “skin” layer, select the “spots” layer, copy the blue channel into the new layer, finally merge this new layer and the “skin” layer. It sounds worse than it is, trust me.

I select the skin layer and blur it a lot (menu Filter, Blue, Gaussian Blur…) so that all detail is lost and only the general shape and shading remain. I used 20px here and probably should have gone quite a bit higher, 30px looks better.

Blur the mask

Finally, change the blending mode, “Soft Light” is usually best but for a more edgy look, “Hard Light”.The other modes give very freaky effects. I also adjust the opacity to lower the effect if it is a bit overwhelming and doesn’t look good.In this case, I left it at 100%.

Set the blending mode and opacity

Try toggling the “skin” layer on and off (click the little eyeball just to the left of the layer) to clearly see what effect this layer has on the image. The most obvious thing is some increased shadow definition and some very very gentle skin smoothing, but now there is a slightly yucky yellow cast!

Warming

To correct the slight yellowing, I add a warming filter. To add a warming filter, select “Create new fill or adjustment layer” (there are a few ways of doing this but I use the popup menu from the bottom of the layers tab), and chose “Photo Filter…”. Rename the new layer to “warm skin”.

Add a warming adjustment layer

The small downward pointing arrow in the icons for the layer indicate that the effect will only affect image in the layer below, which is what I want – I only want to warm the skin and not the whole image. The “Clip to layer below” switch (indicated above) on the Adjust tab for the layer toggles this option. Another way to restrict the warming layer to only the use would be to create a layer mask using the handily saved “skin” selection.

And that is it for the skin!

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Post processing part 2 – The shot

Raw

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 at ISO200, 85mm, f5.0, 1/500sec, exposure -2/3EV, flash +0.7EV

This is the photo straight from the camera. Often, white balance and exposure correction is required but not in this case. With the white balance set to “cloudy”, the colour was right.

This photo is a fairly typical of the way I do things. Since I am only interested in the persons face, I use center weighted metering to get the exposure for the face correct. I only care a little about the exposure of the environment behind them – a little – I want to darken it to make the persons face stand out from the background. I set my camera exposure compensation to -2/3EV making the whole image darker than it would be, and then I set my flash (SB800) to +0.7EV in commander mode (Custom Menu Setting, e3 Flash cntrl for built-in flash, Commander mode). This will lighten the foreground to a good exposure level, and leave the more distant background darker.

Basically, all I’m doing is setting a relative exposure difference between the background and the person.

Of course, there are some fine points to it.

• More often than not, I err on the side of slightly overexposing the person since it is easier to correct that than underexposure (well, at least with my camera).
• If I have time (and can be bothered), I use matrix metering and read the exposure setting for the whole scene and then later spot meter the person – this give an acurate exposure setting but it takes time to do.
• If it’s very sunny, then I increase the exposure difference and this reminds me of the most important thing, shot in the shade!

Importing

I import the photo in Lightroom, and then right-click it and select “Edit in Photoshop”. This will conveniently stack the Photoshop image with the original raw on in Lightroom so that the two images (the oringal raw, and the photoshoped one) are kept together.

From Lightroom, Edit in Photoshop

In Photoshop, I try not to make any changes directly to image, so there are still things I haven’t figured out and a few slightly mucky steps to manage and use layers – I must learn better ways!

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?

I was asked “What post processing do you do?”

“I really don’t know what I’m doing, but just enough to so that the person is really happy with their shot”, I replied. Truthfully, just “I really don’t know what I’m doing” would be right. I work through a few processes that I’ve discovered but I’m always learning and looking for better ways of doing things. At the moment, I’m not entirely happy with the way I currently process skin.

Anyway, yesterday I took a photo that I really liked – no white balance or exposure correction was required, but I then performed some post processing. The amount of post processing and the actual steps I carry out vary from photo to photo, but this is a reasonably typical example.

Here is a half-size crop (click the image to see the full size) that show the Photoshop alterations – skin, eyes, hair, clothing.The changes are subtle, I hope, but they add some impact, again, I hope :)

Before and after

The final Lightroom adjustments are some exposure gradients, and the obvious crop.

Full image

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 at ISO200, 85mm, f5.0, 1/500sec, exposure -2/3EV, flash +0.7EV

After Photoshop

Finally, after some Lightroom tweaks and cropping before publishing

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

What editing can Lightroom do?

Tonight I was asked, “what editing can Lightroom do”?

I use Lightroom as my library management tool. It allows me to sort and find all my photos with ease.

I also use it for most of my initial gross editing too. A few things I use pretty much all the time are file conversion, white balance correction and cropping. Frequently I use exposure and saturation corrections too. This type of change that is made to the entire the photo is what I call “gross editing”. Some slightly more localised editing is possible in Lightroom such as vignetting and gradients – this sort of editing only affects certain regions of a photo.

Here’s an example of the original photo (cropped) and after I had finished the gross editing in Lightroom.

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped and post processed in Lightroom

There are also some finer selective editing features in Lightroom too; these affect really small areas that you choose. Spot correction and red eye correction are two examples, and both work reasonably well. You can also use a brush a change the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity and sharpness over areas that you paint. But personally, I find that the brush does not give the control or the very careful selection that I want. And for the kind of portraits I do, I think that spot and eye correction can be done better elsewhere.

Lightroom is fast and easy to use, but the Lightroom adjustments were not quite enough for me with this photo. To complete it, I used Photoshop. I made very fine changes to the musician’s eyes, hair, and some other tweaks, in particular to the overblown forehead and ear. The final version is here.

Finally, who is he? Check out www.mayhewmusic.com :)

Lightroom workflow part 4 – Exporting photos to disk

I’ve come to the last step of my Lightroom workflow, exporting the photos.

Exporting photos does not change your original files in anyway, or removing them from Lightroom. Exporting uses the photos in Lightroom to make a copy – the way that that copy is made is what exporting is all about. For example, I usually export my DNG files inside Lightroom to produce small jpeg files that I can email to people – the DNGs are not affected at all.

I either export the photos from Lightroom to disk, or export them directly to Flickr.

I used to export the photos to disk and then manually upload them to Flickr, but now, I’m using a nifty Lightroom plugin that uploads them to Flickr for me. I’ll describe is later. I still frequently export the photos to disk usually so that I can email them to people who want copies of the photos.

The export settings

Since exporting to disk is something that I do often, usually with the same settings, it is a great to save all those settings and just use them again later. But first, all those settings must be set! I select the photo (or photos) to export, right click on them, and from the popup menu choose “Export”, “Export…”.

The opens up the Export window. There is quite a lot in this window, but one thing that I really like is that when all the section are collapsed, it shows a summary a summary of the settings. For example, from the Export Location section, I can see where the file is going to be written to. I can glance over the summary it to make sure that setting are what I expect, or if I need to make any changes.

Let’s go through the settings that I use to export the photo to disk.

Export Location

The location is the folder where the photo file is going to be created. I don’t keep the exported files – once they are dealt with (such as emailing them), I delete them. So I simply dump the exported files into a temporary folder named “Untilted Export”, and you can also see that I choose not to add the exported photos back into the catalogue.

Just in case you are wondering “why would someone ever want to add a photo back into Lightroom that was just exported from Lightroom”, it is because the are many changes made to the photo during exporting. It can be resized, changed file format, sharpened and even watermarked. By adding the exported photo back into Lightroom, that exported photo is available again without having to remember all the export settings that were used to create it. For me, that’s not so import – I don’t mind if I can’t export the original and get the exact same file again.

File Naming

The File Naming section lets you rename all the exported photos, and in very useful ways too. For example, you can rename a set of photos to “Chinese New Year – 1″, then “… – 2″ and so on, you add dates or other handy things to the file names.

I simply use the name of the original file… Because the file name matches the original file in Lightroom so I can quickly reconcile them if I need to, the exported file is only temporary and will soon be deleted, the Flickr title comes from the photo Title metadata and not the file name (if it is set), and because the file name is part of my naming convention… but perhaps, because I’m too lazy to be bothered thinking about a better file name. :)

File Settings

The File Settings section offers several different file formats that the photos will be exported to. And depending on which file format is chosen, different additional options are displayed.

I choose to export my photos in jpeg format, and at a quality level of 80 (which is pretty high). This is always good enough for Flickr, you may even want to go to a lower quality level if you are worried that someone might steal your photos from Flickr. This is also almost good enough for all people I meet, except other photographers – I usually just them the raw DNGs.

Image Sizing

Image Sizing is a very important setting since the size of the image has, of course, such a large impact on the size of the file produced. Of course, if have chosen to export a DNG or copy of the original file, you can resize it.

I size my photos so that the longest side is 1024. This size matches the largest size, other than full size, that Flickr can display photos. It is also a fairly large size to email to people – they’ll get a high quality print from a jpeg this large at a quality level of 80. I never enlarge the photo when exporting it, because I think that quality will degrade too much. And for people who want full size images, perhaps for high quality printing or their own photo editing, then I export those and hope that their email system can handle such large files! :)

Output Sharpening

Oh, this is awful – turn it off! Sharpening does exactly what is expected, it sharpened the exported photos. However I’ve usually done all my own editing before hand, and don’t want any further processing to wreck the photos. I once mistakenly had this setting on and what a mess!

It might be good if you had lots of photos just to rapidly dump out with minimal work, but it doesn’t fit the that I work.

Metadata

Metadata is all the extra information that is contained within a photo such as the camera and lens detail, when it was taken, keywords, title and comments… there is a lot of metadata. Perhaps you don’t want to export it all, then the “Minimize Embedded Metadata” is the option for you. I’ve not yet looked into what metadatais removed, and what metadata remained.

I have no idea what “Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy” does, and I do know what “Add Copyright Watermark” does. It adds some text to the bottom of your photos – it is not pretty but if are worried about people stealing your photos, this is a very easy way to mark your photos. The text comes from the photo metadata, the Copyright field.

I have all three of these options not set. Even though I have been thinking about watermarking my photos, I want something that looks better that what the “Add Copyright Watermark” produces but is just as fast and easy.

Post-Processing

In the Post-Processing section I do nothing because once again, my exported photos are normally only temporary. However an option that I find myself using more and more for “After Export” is “Show in Explorer”. This opens up a file manager to the exported photos once the exporting is finished. It is handy to quickly glance over the files, attach them to email, and do what ever else before deleting them.

But with post processing, it is possible to do things such as open the exported photo in Photoshop, or chose any other application.

Making an export preset

That’s the settings I use for export photos to disk but before you hit the “ok” and export them, it’s a good idea to save the settings so that they can used again for the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that…

Under the Preset panel on the left hand side of the Export Window, simply click the Add button. In the New Preset window, type in a name, and then click Create to create the preset. I used the name “1024 Disk” to remind me the size and destination of the export.

This present will now be available in the popup menu when right click on a photo and select “Export” – how handy is that! It will also be available in the Export window, just select it and all the settings will be set for you.

Preset problems

Updating an export preset can be a little tricky, first make any changes to any settings you like, then right-click on the preset name and chose “Update with Current Settings”. Take care not to select the preset and highlight it otherwise all the settings from the preset will be applied and you’ll lose the changes you’ve just made. Just right-click it. But if there are multiple presets, it can be hard to know for sure that you right-clicked on the correct one in the list because it will not be highlighted, and you might accidentally update the wrong present!

Either take great care, or to be safe create a brand new present and then delete the old one.

The exported files are ready

Finally, the exported photo are ready to be emailed, processed or whatever. They can of course be uploaded to Flickr… but there is a better way to upload them to Flickr which I’ll cover in my next workflow post.

Phew, there is a lot of detail in this post – probably too much! Once you’ve exported a few photos, and especially once you’ve set up a export presets, all this becomes so easy that you wont even think about it.

Lightroom workflow part 3 – Rating photos

Here is part three of my Lightroom workflow – but it is method that I have just recently starting using. Many thanks to fishsuckeggs who explained this to me – it is faster and easier than what I was doing.

Rating photos

In the Library module, I display all my recently imported photos. Or maybe just a particular set I want to evaluate. I usually view the photos one at time instead of grid view so that I can look at little more closely at them, but if there is a bunch of photos that are similar, I switch to Grid view. Sadly, this usually when I have made some terrible mistake and bunch of photos are so bad, that they should just be deleted :(

With the selected photo, I mostly use only 4 options (thanks fishsuckeggs)

• Press key X, to mark a photos as rejected, for a photo that is so bad, that it will be deleted.
• Press 1, to give a photo one star, for ones that are just passable.
• Press 3, to give a photo four stars, for photos that are ok and maybe with some work might be fine.
• or press 5, to give a photo five stars, for photos that are great as they are and probably should be published right away.

Sadly, I don’t get that many five star photos straight away – I need a lot more practice! The ones that I usually immediately mark as rejected are typically because the focus is bad, or the composition is not salvageable – I have too many of those :(

But for photos that are rated 3, I can then do some editing, correcting, cropping, whatever, and probably improve it. I try and work it up to a four star, or even five star photo to get it to a sate that I happy to show. Sometimes thought, the photo can not be “saved”. So the star rating I give a photo is flexible, it can change over time while the photo is be being edited.

It also changes over a slower time, as my like or dislike of certain changes, and as I improve my taking photos. But I don’t re-rate all those old photos – that would just take way too long!

I said that “I mostly use only 4 options” – sometimes I press 4 to give a photo 4 star that with just a little work, could become great. I almost never use 2.

After flagging all the photos and working through them, I end with rated groups:

• Five star photos that should be published right away because I think that they are great!
• Four start photos that are pretty good and can be published, and with a little work might become five star photos.
• Three star photos that are only ok, but maybe someone wants them or there is some little aspect about them I like.
• One, two and zero start photos that I learn “how not to do” from!
• And rejected photos that should not ever see the light of day.

Deleting rejected photos is easy, select the set you wish work with, and use the “Photo” menu, then “Delete Rejected Photos…” or just press Ctlr-Backspace. I must admit that I take quite a while to delete my rejected photos. They are not kept forever, just a few months before I am comfortable with losing them forever.

As you’d expect, it is easy to search for photos with whatever rating you want, and as you’d expect, I’ll cover searching later.

I don’t use the “Flagged” flag for photos, nor do I use colour labels. I did try and use the colour labels, and I marked different photos with different colours but in the end, I found it confusing and restrictive. For example, I would forget what the red label set was supposed to represent, and then I would become annoyed that I could apply more than one colour label to a photo at a time. This pushed me towards using tagging more – I could have descriptive tags than meant something, and I tag photos in extremely flexible ways. Basically, don’t use the coloured labels feature – it sucks.

Speaking of tagging, while I’m rating of photos, I am often refining the tags for photo at the same time.

What’s next?
Not searching, not the full tagging example, but the end – exporting.

Lightroom workflow part 2 – Tagging photos

This is the second part of my Lightroom workflow – it is how I apply keywords to photos.

Lightroom uses the term “keywords” but I tend use the more common term, “tags”, so be prepared since I’ll probably slip between each term. When For example, when I talk of “tagging” photos, others might talk of “keywording” photos.

Tagging photos

Tagging is adding keywords to photos so that they can be categorised, and later searched for. It is the primary mechanism by which I organise my photos. The date named folders created while importing photos are useful too, but to me, tagging is more important. I usually tag and rate photos at the same time as I browse them. However I generally start tagging first, and then refine the tags while I rate the photos.

My tags are organised in a hierarchy and the Keyword List panel nicely displays the hierarchy. I start off by creating a top level tag of a general description for the group a photos. Then as I go through the photos, I create child tags and tag the photos with these child tags, not the parent tag if possible. It’s easiest explained with an example.

Tagging example

I recently attended a cross country running event – I wasn’t running! I was photographing :). After all the photos had been imported and tagged, here was the end Keyword List hierarchy that I created.

This hierarchy was not created all at once, instead it was built up as I worked my way through the photos.

One of the very top level tags I have is “events”. Under “events” I crated a tag named after the event, “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″.

I added the synonyms “Bupa” and “run” and set the options to export the tag and synonyms – this is so that when I export the photo to Flickr, the tag and synonyms are exported along with it. The parent tag, “events”, is set to not be exported, it is just a high level organisational tag.

There are multiple ways to add photos to tags. You can select photos and while creating the tag, choose “Add to selected photos”. You can also create the tag, and then add the photos to the tag afterwards. Use what ever you find most convenient, I use both depending on what I’m doing. For the top tag, I usually select the recently imported photos (by using Library model, Catalog panel, Previous Import, then pressing Ctrl-A or picking the photos) and then create the tag with “Add to selected photos” picked. If there are other groups of photo, I create other top tags – this lets me very quickly separate the different groups of photos with the monolithic collection of “Previous Import”.

Next, I go through the photos and create child tags as necessary. Such as when going through the running photos, I created child tags for “runners” and “spectators”. Of course, some photos have both runners and spectators in them so those photos were added to both tags.

The important trick

Here is a slightly tricky thing I do. Whenever I tag a photo with a child tag, I remove it from the parent tag. For example, if one of the photos that is tagged with “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″, was actually a photo of a winner, I would tag that photo with the child tag “winner” and remove it from the parent tag “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″. When the winner photo is exported, it will exported with the tag “winner”, as well as the parent tag “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″ (but not with the topmost tag “events” because that is set to not export). In the end, I have most photos sorted into child tags, and photos that don’t really fit any nice child tag, such a photo of the empty finishing line, remain in the top tag. I can easily find any category of photo that I like by the child tags, as well as all the photos for the event, and even the photos that are for the event but are not further refined by a child tag – it give me great flexibility in organising and finding my photos.

Of course, you can have have as many tags, and as many child tags nested as deep as you like. For example, my topmost tags so far this year are “events”, “people”, “places” and “tech”. Under “places” I have countries such as “Scotland” and “Canada”, and under “Scotland” I have cities “Edinburgh”, “Inverness” and on and on. Under “people” I have “friends” and “photographers”. With this arrangement I can find photos of friends in Edinburgh quickly and easily. Or I can find photographers that are not in Scotland. Of course, I will have to explain searching in a future post.

Unfortunately, there is a further complication – this was a simplified example. I tag photos across multiple hierarchies. For example, ordinarily I don’t have a child tag of staff under the event. I have a “staff” child tag under “people”. Staff of an event are simply tagged with the event name, as well as “staff” in the entirely separate “people” hierarchy. This way, with one click I see all staff of any event, or the whole event, or with a few clicks I can see the staff of a particular event. In yet another future post, I’ll go over this further refinement, and I have just an example, a visit to a zoo, which would be good to describe searching as well.

What’s next

But next, rating photos.

Lightroom workflow part 1 – Importing

This is the first part of my Lightroom workflow – it is how I import my photos.

Taking the shots

I often take photos of people I met, and then give them the photos. But to keep track of who is who in photos, I use a simple file naming system. When I take a photo of someone, I write onto my card their photo number, and give them the card. They can then later email me the photo number, and I can then reply to them with their photo. This avoids the hassle of writing down loads of email addresses of people I meet and the probably making a complete mess up of it.

In the camera by, using Shooting Menu\File naming I set the first three characters of the filename to the year and the month. So today is 901, that is year 2009, month 01. All photos I take this month will have a filename that starts with 901 followed by a four digit sequence number.

I’ve never taken more 10,000 photos in a month so the four digit sequence is enough for me. And as for the three digit prefix for 2010, I’ll use 0 (zero) for the year.

Attaching the camera

I attach my D700 to my computer with a USB cable for importing the photos, launch Lightroom and turn on the camera. Then in the Library module, I click Import. The D700 is set to USB PTP mode so that when Lightroom lists locations to import from, it nicely lists D700.

Sadly, transferring photos in USB PTP mode is very slow. And unlike earlier cameras, such the D300, you cant change the mode to MSC (mass storage). Not being able to select MSC mode is really a big and annoying error by Nikon. It is much faster to remove the card and insert it into a card reader attached to the computer. And faster again if you are able to use firewire connection (and soon the upcoming USB 3.0). If you are able to, choose MSC mode, but for those with D700 or D90, you’re out of luck. In an effort to come up with something positive about USB PTP, I like to delude myself in thinking that USB PTP mode is slightly “friendlier” since Lightroom lists my camera, but with the faster MSC mode you may have to navigate to the card folder.

But I choose to put up with the slow speed and load my photos via the camera so that I don’t have to keep removing and inserting the cards from the camera. I worry that the fine pins inside the camera card slot are delicate and fragile. I think that the less that I fiddle with the card, the better. Now, the only time I extract a card from my camera is when it is full and I want to change to a spare card. I import the photos via from the camera for the card in the camera, and via a card reader for the other full cards.

Am I enduring slow imports because I am unnecessarily fearful of damaging the card pins within the camera? Probably, but one of my friends did manage to bend the pins inside their camera (luckily it was still under warranty). I have enough patience while one card full of photos is transferred via the camera (and other full cards via a card reader), and there is always something else to do on the computer.

Just how much slower is it? My non-scientific test shows that it is at least 50% slower! It also shows that quite a bit of the time importing the photos is taken up by converting the raw NEF files to DNG. Even when importing via a card reader, it takes quite a while. About 400 photos from via a card reader takes 20 minutes, while via the camera it takes 29. If I did not convert the NEF files to DNG (but I do) and just copied the NEF files, via a card reader it takes only 8 minutes, and via the camera it takes 15. Perhaps I should re-think my policy – nah, I’m too lazy to remove the card to save a few minutes.

Ideally, I would like to be able to change the USB mode like I could before – perhaps this could be done by a firmware update? And I would like a card contact system similar SD cards instead of pins – but this means a new body or a mount inside the card slot for a different type of card.

That’s a lot of woffle about USB connectivity but for me, it’s just plug the camera to computer, and go.

Importing

The import dialog is fairly straight forward.

File Handling I copy the raw files from the camera and convert them to DNG.

Copy to and Organize Photos are copied into date named folders. Later I rename the folder – I’ll cover that in future post.

File Naming I don’t rename the files – it is part of my file naming system.

Develop Settings I don’t use any. Any editing I perform are usually only a few photos after I have rated them – more on rating photos later.

Metadata This is very handy. I use presets to attach my name, website, copyright info etc to photos. Plus I have other presets for locations that I am frequently in, such as Edinburgh.
To create a preset, select New from the dropdown list, give the preset a name, enter all the settings you would like to apply to your photos, then click Create to save the preset. Now it will be available for whenever you import photos.

Keywords I leave blank. Perhaps I will will start to trying to use this to set some keywords by using this. But I have a thorough and detailed keywording system for my photos that I apply while rating the photos – again, I’ll cover this next time.

That’s all there is for importing.

Renaming the folders

After the importing is complete, I rename the dated folder name by appending a simple description. I rename the folder inside Lightroom so that it remains in sync with the Windows files, otherwise there is a little of pain to resync things.

The description just more than a reminder so that when I am browsing the files in Windows, I know what the folders contain. Here are the folders that began named just with a date, and then I renamed them to also include a simple description.

This leads me to another thought, I carry out all file manipulation inside Lightroom. That way, Lightroom remains synchronised with underlying files.

What’s next

That is my import process in too much gory detail. I take a break, relax, and then move onto rating and keywording, and ultimately editing the photos. I’ll go over my slightly complex tagging system next, then how I rate the photos.