Computers


8
Aug 09

Lightroom Plug-Ins

If you a lightroom lover your about to love it even more! Thanks to Jeffery Friedl we have some amazing lightroom export plug-ins. If your like everyone else in the world you have a Facebook page and there is a export plug-in for that, all you have to do is click “HERE” and it will take you to his lightroom goodies page.

Now this is where it gets even better there not just a facebook plug-in there is a blogger, flickr, photobucket, and a few others. Just select the ones you want and download them.

Screen shot 2009-10-22 at 1.55.39 AM

Screen shot of Jeffrey’s blog, as you can see in the upper left corner there is a list of all the plug-ins. Just click to download.

Then your going to want to go to your lightroom catalog, while in the library mode your want to click the export button or hit (Command+Shift+E). This will bring up the export dialog then go to the bottom left where it says plug-in manager and hit the “add” button to add a plug-in. Go to your download folder and import your plug-in. Once it is added there should be a green dot to the side of the plug-in name, which means “I’m ready to rock!”

Screen shot 2009-10-22 at 1.54.37 AM

This is what you should see in your plug in manager

Hit done, now your back to the regular export menu. So go up to the top of the menu and by default it will say files on disk or something to that affect. Click on it and select your plug-in from the drop down menu. Now your a boat load of options for that plug-in. All I did was verify my account by putting in my user name and password for facebook and I also set up which folder it would export my images to. (for the facebook plug-in it will swap you to facebook and you will have to allow the plug-in to export to facebook. Sounds complex but your see what I mean) Once you set all that fun stuff up your going to want to go to the left of your menu and hit “add” and name it something useful like Facebook.

Screen shot 2009-10-22 at 2.02.22 AM

Now all you have to do is hit that magic button called export and it should automatically swap to your browser into a new facebook tab and all you have to do is select the images you want to add and confirm and its just that easy!

Screen shot 2009-10-22 at 2.03.39 AM

Just to note all the plug-ins are basically the same set up.

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28
Jul 09

Auto Mask in Lightroom

I was just using the auto mask feature in Adobe Lightroom on one of my recent New York shots. I was using it to select the sky behind the statue of liberty, and this photo looked like the perfect photo to use the auto mask feature with the local adjustment brush.

Auto Mask

I put on a red over lay so you can see exactly where my brush painted. As you can see it did a fantastic job of just selecting the sky and not the statue. Saving me hours of time selecting it myself. All I had to do was turn on auto mask and paint away and it avoided cutting into the statue. Then all I had to do was tweak with the setting making the sky darker. I was trying to get more detail out of the sky you can kind of see that I did in the bottom right corner. But most of the sky didn’t have any detail at all so I just lowered the brightness of the sky to make the statue stand out a little more.

GageThompson-4

Before and after auto mask and darkening of sky

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1
May 09

Soccer Image Tutorial

GageThompson-2048-Background

(Background source)

GageThompson-2064_Croped

(Shot to be edited)

GageThompson-12-Final
(Final image)

This post is explaining how I took 2 shots from this soccer shoot and photoshoped the moon to another spot dropped in the background and fixed the motion on the soccer ball in under 20 mins.

Step 1. Open your main image your going to be working with this one happens to be the one with the ball in the air.

Step 2. Create a new layer (Command + N) do your basic retouching with your clone stamp tool and healing tool.

Step 3. Select the moon with the marquee tool and hit (Command + J) to through it onto its own layer then select your move tool (V) and move it where you would like and when I moved it to a different spot the excess sky around the moon didn’t match the new sky area I wanted to put it so I created a mask and with a soft brush just blended it into the new sky. *Don’t forget to retouch out your old moon or your have two this is earth remember)

Step 4. In this step we are working on fixing the ball. As it is now in the original image it looks like its almost coming towards him because I didn’t have my flash on second curtain sync. So when I did my 1/15th of a second it was frozen at the being of the exposure then got burned in with the ambient exposure. Anyways select the ball through it on a new layer. Select (Command + J) this new ball on its own layer is going to be our original ball. Now select the ball in the original image and through a motion blur on it in the right direction. Then with a mask blend it together. (*I also had to do a little clone stamp on the top of the original ball image to get rid of that motion blur so it only had the one when I was done)

Step 5. Now for the background open your background image select just what you need then (Command + X) to cut it out (Command + W) to close old document. Then go to your working document and (Command + V) to paste. Place it where you want it with the move tool and what I had to do was basically clone stamp him out of the background shot and needless to say it look horrible so I also used the patch tool to blend the blochy spots. Now comes the magic back in the day I would have selected him and masked him and it would have took FOREVER! But instead just switch your blending mode on your layer from normal to Lighten and BAM! Everything light (him) will stay and everything darker then gray will be replaced basically.

And then I cropped it and walla.

(*Props to you if you read this whole thing! Hope it helped)

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8
Mar 09

Lightroom Red-Eye Correction

I found this image of my lovely Kari. I thought I would try out the red eye reduction in lightroom and it worked fantastic and I thought I should share that with you the world.

Screen shot 2009-10-24 at 1.21.54 AM

You can find the red-eye removing tool in the developing tab. Its right next to all the other local adjustment tools.

Kari redeye

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6
Feb 09

Loving the Lightroom

I love lightroom so much I’m going to be there spokes person for a minute. So I took an image from a shoot I did the other day and decided to only do lightroom adjustments (no photoshop) just to see how much I could get out of it while it was still a raw file. and Here ya go. I took out the fill light catchlight, made it softer, softened the shadows just a bit. Lightened the eyes and kept them sharp, gave a little bit more shine to hair and did a little white vignette.

www.gagethompson.com

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