Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

While I was teaching this week I realized a tip that I had forgotten about. Backing up your catalog automatically but doing it to another drive. Oddly enough, the backup location is not specified in Lightroom’s preferences (where of course, you choose your backup frequency). It’s in the actual dialog that pops up when you choose to backup. If you’re like me, for a long time you just left it as it’s default but you can indeed change it. I’ll explain more about why you want to change it and how in the quick video so click below to watch it.

Well that wraps up another week. I hope you have a great Mother’s Day weekend. Me and my kids are making Mother’s Day morning breakfast for my wife so if you smell smoke, don’t worry (or maybe worry just a little) See ya!

Click here to watch the video. (10Mb)

Lightroom can do a lot right? But, as we all know, it can’t do everything. One of the most common questions I get asked is when/why I move to Photoshop. Wanna know the main thing that Photoshop can do that Lightroom can’t? Retouching. To that end, I thought I’d share 3 inspirational retouching links that I’ve come across recently. I really dig those before and after sites and I think these deliver not only good inspirational value, but they can also be educational as you look into the mind of a retoucher. Here goes:

1) Glenn Feron - Glenn has a huge body of work and he shows the before and after for each of his images. You’ll find lots of models and portraits but you’ll also come across some cool product photography as well.

2) Sugar Digital - This one is probably the least of the traditional retouching sites that you’ll find but it’s probably one of my favorite. They’ve got a good mix of retouching as well as some really dramatic compositing. These are definitely things that Lightroom is just not good at, so you’d need to move to Photoshop to accomplish any of this work.

3) Amy Dresser - I love this site! Not all of the images have before and afters but the ones that do are incredibly educational. The ones that don’t… well they’re just flat out inspiring as well.

Well that wraps up inspiration day. I know there’s more then 3 cool retouching sites out there so make sure you leave a comment and let us all know your favorite retouching site. (Update: make sure you check out the comments as I’ve left my thoughts on some posts from other people there)
See you tomorrow to close out the week.

It’s Tuesday and I’m in New York City teaching Lightroom at B&H Photo. I had two jam packed classes yesterday and lot’s of blog readers came by to say hi. If you’re around today make sure you stop in and introduce yourself.

Anyway, on to the preset… this week I’ve got something really different for you. Instead of giving you free presets to download I’m going to let you make your own web presets (I know, I’m very generous today) However, ever though you’ll be making your own presets I’ll give you the tools to do it with to come up with some pretty sweet looking web galleries. See, one of the things people have the biggest problems with is figuring out which colors will look good for custom web galleries. Sure, you can choose the default black template in the Web module in Lightroom and be done with it. But what do you do if you want to be creative with some of the colors and you just don’t know where to start? Well, you can use Adobe Kuler (a free web application) to find some really great color combinations and then input them into the Web module. It works like this:

1) Go to kuler.adobe.com. Start searching through the website for color combinations you like. You can create your own or just click on Most Popular to see some good ideas.

2) Once you find the one you like click on it to select it. Then you’ll see 3 small icons under it. Click on the rightmost icon (the sliders) to make changes to the color settings.

3) Instead of changing the colors, just read the RGB color values for each color and write them down.

4) Go into Lightroom’s Web module. Scroll down to the Color Palette panel on the right.

5) Click on the Background, Cells, Rollover, Grid Lines, and Text color swatches and enter in the color values you took from Kuler.

Here’s a sample I made from the Kuler combination called “Quite Cry”.

It’s pretty cool how you can come up with some really amazing color combinations and make some totally different (yet nice looking) web galleries with color combinations from Kuler. Give it a try… (lame joke alert - very lame attempt at humor coming)… It’s Kule! I hope you enjoy and make sure you share your favorite Kuler preset name or color combos in the comments here. See ya!

If you’ve imported photos into Lightroom’s folders then everything is good right? But what happens when you want to import more photos into the same folder down the road. For example, this past week I created a folder called “Great Smokies Day 1″ and imported the photos from day 1 of my workshop into Lightroom. Then we went out and shot more photos later that day. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I was able to import those photos. The cool thing is that I didn’t have to go through Lightroom’s whole import process again. There’s a feature that allows you to add files into Lightroom that have been added to a folder on your hard drive but haven’t actually been imported into Lightroom yet. So sit back and watch the video to see how.

Click here to watch the video. (23Mb)

Hey folks, here’s a quick news update since I just finished teaching a workshop primarily on Lightroom and I figured I’d let you know where I’ll be teaching for the rest of the year. There’s another post today (another free preset) so feel free to scroll to the next post if you’re not interested in this.

Thank youI just wanted to say a great big huge thank you to everyone that came to my Great Smoky Mountains workshop this past weekend. We had a fantastic time and I made some really friends along the way. It was great getting to know all of you and the laughs we shared will stick with me for some time to come.

I also wanted to thank my friend Alessandro, from the workshop, for leaving such a nice comment here on the site. Here’s a peak if you’re interested. He totally made my day I can’t tell you how cool it is to see that I’ve helped people out like that. Thanks Alessandro (your pay off check is in the mail ) and thanks to the whole class for a great weekend!

Coming Up
OK, here’s where I’ll be for the rest of 2008 in case you’re thinking of coming out to a workshop or conference.

• May 5-6 - New York City: I’ll be teaching some Lightroom sessions at B&H photo on these two days. They’re totally free and you can find out more as well as register right here.

• Tuesday June 3 - Philadelphia, PA: I’m not sure about the details yet but I’m teaching a session for a CDW event (that is open to the public) that morning. I’ll update with details as they become available but I’ll definitely be there.

• August 9-16 - Hawaii Cruise: I’m teaching along side Dave Cross, Moose Peterson and Laurie Excel on a week long cruise through Hawaii. Folks, if you can make it out to this (I know it’s a stretch) it will be one amazing week.

• September 3-6 - Photoshop World Las Vegas: This is my favorite event of the year. It’s a 3-day Photoshop Love-Fest and hosts the best instructors in the world all in one place.

• October 15-18 - Bar Harbor/Acadia Natl. Park, Maine: This is another workshop for the Great American Photography Workshops (just like the one I taught in the Great Smokies last weekend). I’ve been to Bar Harbor before and I liked it so much that I’m going back. Sign up soon though. This is a hot spot for workshops and this one will definitely fill up.

That’s about it for now. I know there’s some more Lightroom training that I’ll be doing toward the end of the year but I don’t have the specifics yet. I’ll update here on the website as soon as I know. Thanks and I hope to see you out.