If you are using lightroom on more than one computer, say a laptop and a desktop, or perhaps you have an assistant to does some of your post processing work, or you have outsourced your post processing to Shoot Dot Edit, you will find that knowing how to share, transfer and sync Lightroom Catalogs as well as image XMP data will be invaluable. Most often, I am using this feature to take a little work with me on my laptop as I am traveling to teach a workshop. But many of you will also find this lesson useful in outsourcing your work to someone like Shoot Dot Edit. To learn more about the best workflow methods and Adobe Lightroom, go to www.jaredplatt.com. Watch for the
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Inside the Image- Lightroom Custom Vignettes
Living in the desert is a unique experience. Forget about the 120 degree summer days and the horribly unfriendly plant life. To me, the weather is quite fascinating. I love the monsoon rainstorms and the lightning is fantastic. Other places in the world have their own challenging weather situations, many much more dangerous. There are tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, etc… and none of these options are very appealing to me, which is why I prefer my native state of Arizona. But we do have our own unique weather effect: the dust storm. I was traveling back from a job in Tucson and took a back road route home (rather than the freeway). I enjoy doing this because everything goes by so quickly on the freeway
Not Your Typical Engagement Shoot
An Open Letter to Jim: Last week, you came to the Phoenix PUG and spoke with us about success. The business stuff was great, but I took something away from that night which was far more important and I wanted to show you the results. You spoke of why photographers fade. Photographers get stuck in the same routine, and stop trying new things. Interesting that we as creatives would be satisfied with standing still and resting on the creative laurels of our past. “Push yourselves into new territory”, you said (I donʼt know if you said that, but it is a good paraphrase). Well, I am a documentary photographer and when I shoot weddings and engagement photos, I typically shoot things that are unposed and
Guess that ISO – A Lesson in Film and Digital Grain Structures
So I have a little game I first played with Elizabeth Pratt from Canon. The game is called “Guess that ISO”. We are going to play it here today. For those of you who are not professional photographers, ISO is the sensitivity rating of the film or chip in the camera. Lower ISOs are best in bright lighting conditions and higher ISOs allow for proper exposure in low light situations. Here is the image we are going to work with. It was shot with a Canon 1D Mark IV. This is the final image with various adjustments and increased noise reduction etc. I just wanted you to get a feel for the image we are working with. The Fine Print: The zoomed in detail images
Know Who Your Clients Are and Let the Other Ones Go
Sit back and let me tell you a story. One that is a bit too open, but I am going to tell it because it is the elephant in the room and must be discussed, regardless of whether or not past and potential clients can read this blog. I met the couple downtown in a coffee shop / book shop. I had only ever spoken to the bride and she seemed very nice on the phone. She was so cute and so very nice, and he was a bit full of himself. As I spoke with the clients, I got an uneasy feeling, but I enjoyed the bride to be well enough and they (meaning she) seemed to like my work. So I gave them
Speaker Spotlight
Greetings from an accidental storm chaser: As you know, I have been traveling, teaching the Lightroom Workflow Workshops over the last few weeks and I just finished one in Houston, Texas today (Thursday, October 29th). I planned my workshop tour to coincide with Pictage Partner Conference, in New Orleans. But, with a few days to myself, I thought I would swing up to visit my family in Shreveport, Louisiana. Have you seen the weather lately? An absolute nightmare of a storm has spread itself directly up my path with tornados touching down all over Shreveport. So, while my family hunkers down in a closet amidst storm sirens, and with road closures everywhere, I am left half way between Houston and Shreveport in a Best Wester
Undeniable Truth
Undeniable Truths of Life (including jpgs) There are certain things I hold as undeniable truths in life, among these are: 1. God exists. 2. All humans are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 3. Hot liquid magma is not a toy. 4. JPGs are a very bad filetype! I know that most of you reading this entry will say, “well I shoot RAW, so I’m cool!” But you may only be half right about that. So let me fill you in and then you take stock of your image pipeline and decide weather or not what you feel good about what you are doing. I am not passing any judgement on you, I
What’s On Your Desktop?
So your computer is slowing down to the point of a near crawl, your Adobe Lightroom database is slowing down too, but you have lots of RAM (critical to image editing speed) and a fast new processor. Nothing has changed on your computer. So why is everything so slow? There are a few of things that can be effecting the general speed of your computer and your Lightroom database and they are easy to fix. The speed of your computer may be directly proportional to your organizational skills. If your desktop looks like a landfill with hundreds of documents and folders on it, you are probably not very organized and a slow computer is the least of your problems, but you should know that your
Hard Drive Advice: Speed and Security
Hard Drive Advice: Speed and Security. Here’s a quick tip on increasing the speed of your computer as you churn through all those files. At the same time, you will also increase your protection against data loss and drive failure. Here it is: use two hard drives, rather than one. If you are on a desktop, you can install a second internal drive into your computer, if you are on a laptop, you can use an eSATA or Firewire connection to an external hard drive. This second drive will act as your “working drive” on which you will store all of your image files. All of your programs, etc will go on the original drive. My drives are simply named “Macintosh HD” and “Working Drive”.
Educating Your Clients Creates a Bond of Trust – Jared Platt
Why is it so important to educate your clients and create bonds of trust? In this blog post, Pictage member and Phoenix Wedding Photographer, Jared Platt answers this question and gives three helpful tips to doing just that. Check out more posts by Jared here on the Pictage Blog and also get more information about his upcoming workshop tour coming to a city near you on our worthy workshops page. From Jared: I have a crazy notion that I would like to present to you today. There is a reason that people hire a professional photographer to shoot their weddings and portraits and other events, rather than having uncle Bob take the photos. If you think extremely hard you might come up with that reason