Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

First off, I wanted to give a great-big-huge thank you to everyone who posted comments on my photo update from last week. I expected a few people to reply and I got over 100 comments. What really struck me though, was not the number of comments but the number of you who actually took the time to really look at the photos and leave very insightful comments. You guys rock!

OK, last week I promised a new preset that dealt with an effect we just couldn’t achieve with Lightroom 1. I remember getting plenty of requests for a soft focus or dreamy styled effect. There was no blurring feature in Lightroom 1 so it just couldn’t be done but with Lightroom 2 we can use a negative clarity setting. I’ve included 2 different versions of varying intensities. For the most part, they leave the major details intact but those will get blurred to a degree as well. However, tomorrow’s post will be a video showing you how to bring back those details using Lightroom 2.
(update… I added an update in the comments section here so make sure you read through the comments. I do this often but I’m going to start making sure I let you guys know when I add something).

Click here to see a sample of the presets.
Click here to download Matt’s Soft Focus Presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

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Howdy! Feel free to scroll down to the next post to get right to the tip for today. This post is just for folks that would like to see a few photos I’ve taken as of late. If you’ve noticed that I’ve been a little silent this week it’s because I’ve been on a cruise in Hawaii teaching Photoshop and Lightroom with Moose Peterson, Laurie Excel and Dave Cross. We’ve had a great time with the class and gotten some fabulous photo opportunities. I thought I’d share a few here:

1) Photo taken during sunset at Lahaina Beach

2) Another sunset photo from Lahaina

3) Sunrise at Wailea Beach

4) Another Sunrise at Wailea Beach

5) This one was taken at a hotel in Maui (the little girl’s father and I started talking photography and the light was just too good).

6) The lava flow on The Big Island from about 1/2 mile off shore on our cruise ship (shot at 3200 ISO - the photo just doesn’t do it justice)
Note: This one is just for fun. I thought it was an amazing site to see and wanted to share it with you. That lava flow doesn’t happen all the time and many folks come here and never get to see it. However, the photo is just too noisy and not sharp enough to print.

Please do me a big favor and leave a comment to let me know which one you like best (if any). I’m going to be doing some printing when I get back and maybe you can help me narrow the list down. Anyway, the cruise is over tomorrow and I’ll be really sad to say goodbye to some great friends that I’ve made during the week. Now I gotta go get some sleep. Getting up at 5:00am for a sunrise shoot. See ya!

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Here’s a quick tip that managed to sneak under the radar when Lightroom 2 came out. You know when you edit a photo in Photoshop and you get to choose the bit depth (8 or 16 bit), file type (PSD or TIFF), and color space. Well did you know that in Lightroom 2 you can also choose the Resolution that the photo will be rendered in when it gets to Photoshop? Yep, it wasn’t there in Lightroom 1 (Honestly, if some one had asked me, I would have bet $100 it was by the way). To choose the resolution go to your Lightroom preferences and choose the External Editing tab. In that tab you’ll see the resolution setting that Lightroom will use when getting ready to edit the photo in Photoshop and you can change it right there.

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Well everyone, once again I’m deferring my weekly preset duty to some one else. See, Sean McCormack has some graduated filter presets available over at his site. Here’s the deal. He’s selling a package of 70 graduated filter presets for Lightroom 2 (they cost about $7.75 US). But, he’s also got some samples available free for download. Here’s the link to the website where you’ll see some samples of the presets in action as well as instructions on how to download them. Sound good? I’ll be back next week with a cool preset I’ve been working on (hint: it’s something that lots of folks asked for in Lightroom 1 but we just couldn’t do it). Enjoy your day

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Happy Friday everyone. I figured I’d close out the week with a quick tip. One of the new features in Lightroom 2 is the volume browser. I absolutely love it! I use external hard drives all the time and the volume browser finally let’s me manage them in an easier with Lightroom. It’s in the Folders panel in the Library module on the left hand side. The volume browser displays what volume (A.K.A. hard drive) you have your photos stored on so if you ever disconnect the drive you’ll be able to see which one to connect to get to your photos. Here’s an example of what I mean.

One of the things that’s cool is that the volume browser displays how much hard drive space you have total and how much is left. But if you right click on it, you’ll see there’s a few other choices like photo count, status, or even none (which I can’t figure out why you’d choose none). It’s a really neat feature so if you haven’t imported any photos from an external drive yet make sure you give it a try. It’s a lot easier now. Have a great weekend!

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