Image editing

Managing your photo library: pruning old growth

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At the end of October, 2019, my photo library contained approximately 60,000 images, mostly taken over the past 20 years. (Of those, nearly 40% are from the past five years.) Comparing the size of my library with those of friends of mine, I’m about average, but still, 60,000 is a big number, and managing that many photos can be a bit intimidating. I once topped out at 80,000 photos, but about six years ago I came up with an exercise — pruning a single year’s worth of photos — that has helped me get my library better organized and more efficient. As a photo-management tool, I felt it was worth sharing here.

The editing conundrum

I tend to do the majority of my editing — culling, sorting and post-processing — on my most recent photos. For example, out of a shoot where I end up with 600-800 images, I’ll quickly get that to upwards of 50 selects, and I will then spend most of my time working on those photos. The rest soon get lost into the archives. It’s not that they’re unimportant, but they aren’t compelling to me at the moment, and as such, they end up disappearing. As time goes on, and I take more photos, it becomes harder to find key photos from the past (at least those non-portfolio photos), or to even know what I might have hidden that is of some value.

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Hudson Henry’s Advanced Pano Course

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Hudson Henry Advanced Pano CourseOur good friend—and ace adventure photographer—Hudson Henry has just released his long-awaited Advanced Panorama Course, and is offering it at half-price for a limited time.

Building upon Hudson’s best-selling Panoramas Made Simple ebook (published by CDP Press), this new course contains more than two hours of videos, focusing on all aspects of panorama creation, from choosing gear to field setup, capture, and postproduction.

The Advanced Panorama Course includes everything you need to know to capture both simple panos and complex multi-row and HDR panoramas. Hudson also shows you his process for assembling and editing panoramas in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and ON1 Photo RAW. (There are two versions of the course available: one for Lightroom and Photoshop, the other for Photo RAW.)

Included with the course are the raw files Hudson uses in the videos (for you to follow along), as well as a gear list, course notes and cheatsheets.

The Advanced Panorama course is currently on sale for $29.99 directly from Hudson, and will be priced at $59.99 after January 31.

You can find out all the details on Hudson’s website. If you would like to get a sample of the course, Hudson is also offering a free download of one of the videos: “Finding the No-Parallax Point (aka the Nodal Point)”

Photoshop on the iPad Coming in 2019

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This week marks the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, Adobe’s annual centerpiece for product announcements. While there is little major news in the Lightroom Classic/Lightroom CC space (beyond some small updates, which you can read about over on the Lightroom Killer Tips blog), Adobe demoed Photoshop CC for iPad, a brand-new version of the company’s flagship image editor, which “shares the same code base as its desktop counterpart, so there’s no compromise on power and performance or editing results.”

Redesigned for a modern touch experience, Photoshop CC on iPad will deliver the power and precision of its desktop counterpart. Photoshop CC on iPad will let users open and edit native PSD files using Photoshop’s industry-standard image-editing tools and will feature the familiar Photoshop layers panel. With Photoshop CC across devices, coming first to iPad in 2019, you will be able to start your work on an iPad and seamlessly roundtrip all of your edits with Photoshop CC on the desktop via Creative Cloud.

Unlike previous attempts at porting Photoshop to tablets, Adobe appears to be doubling down on the future, which it believes is centered around cloud- and tablet-based editing. The new app (and corresponding desktop versions of Photoshop CC) will use a new format, called Cloud PSD, to sync edits between the cloud and mobile and desktop devices. This new format appears to be similar in intent to the way that Lightroom CC syncs images and edits across devices, albeit in a more Dropbox-style environment.

Adobe gave the Verge an exclusive on the new app, and they have both a good overview of Photoshop CC for iPad and the new Cloud PSD format, as well as a hands-on preview of the app that is well worth watching:

“I’ve been using Photoshop for the iPad for the past week, and it feels distinctly like Photoshop with a few design choices optimized for a touchscreen. It doesn’t have every tool available in desktop Photoshop; in fact, it’s missing the entire upper task bar with the drop-down menu. Instead, you’ll find tools like adjustment layers in the collapsible right-side toolbar.”

[Update: Adobe has made the MAX keynote available online; the Photoshop iPad section starts at approximately 1 hour and 1 minute into the presentation, and lasts about ten minutes.]

Matt K’s Lightroom Crash Course

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Matt K Lightroom Crash CourseMatt Kloskowski is one of the best Lightroom (and Photoshop) trainers out there, bar none. He has all the hallmarks of a great trainer, including an innate capacity to learn from his students as well as to teach them, and he understands where many users get lost in the weeds with photo editing software.

Over the years, he and I have had a few conversations about the difficulties that some new users run into when setting Lightroom up, and why they never really use the app to the best of its capabilities. To that end, Matt has released a 60-minute Lightroom Crash Course, designed solely to help people get over those initial hurdles when learning Lightroom Classic CC:

This course is meant to cut through all of the thousands of features that Lightroom has and get you feeling good about getting your photos in to it, and (most importantly), to start editing those photos and having some fun. My personal goal in teaching photo editing is to get you editing and enjoying your photography as fast as possible and that’s exactly what this 60 minute crash course will do.

This course is great if you have thought about jumping into Lightroom Classic, or if you’ve played around with it and are confused about things like where your photos are, or how to edit your photos effectively. Despite the course’s short length, Matt also talks about Lightroom features like brushes and graduated filters and how to export and print your photos. In addition, all of the sample photos used in the course are included for you to follow along.

For $50, the Lightroom Crash Course is darn close to a perfect hour (well, an hour and two minutes). And, if you want a deeper dive into Lightroom Classic, check out Matt’s much more comprehensive Lightroom System course, which is currently priced at $150. I highly recommend both courses, although all of Matt’s training—including his courses on Photoshop and ON1’s Photo Raw—is top-notch.

ON1 Photo RAW 2018.5 adds profiles, LUT support, speed boosts

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Photo RAW Browse module

ON1 is now shipping ON1 Photo RAW 2018.5, the mid-year release of its photo editor and image-management app for Windows and macOS. The update adds support for embedded camera profiles in the Develop module; an expanded Transform function; a new LUT (look-up table) filter for the Effects module; a revamped import/export manager for presets, LUTs, and border and texture files; and the addition of nested albums and presets. The update also includes support for recently released cameras and lenses.

Profiles and LUTs

Photo RAW 2018.5 adds support for the built-in profiles that come with most modern digital cameras, letting you get the same basic look that you see on your camera back. In addition,  ON1 has included a number of its own camera profiles for landscape, portrait and other scene types.

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Adobe updates Lightroom ecosystem

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Today, Adobe released updates to its Lightroom family of apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android devices. The majority of the updates center around Lightroom CC, but Lightroom Classic also got a little bit of love as well, and many of the options will also trickle to the browser-based version of Lightroom. Here are the main features in the release:

  • The Lightroom CC mobile apps can now create presets. And, with this addition, presets (and profiles) can now be synchronized across all platforms—desktop, mobile, and web. This includes your own custom presets and any third-party presets you’ve added, anywhere in the Lightroom CC app world. (If you’re using Lightroom Classic, Julianne Kost posted a cool tip on how to synchronize presets and profiles between Classic and Lightroom CC mobile devices.)
  • A Manage Preset option has been added to the entire ecosystem, letting you show or hide presets by installed category.
  • The mobile apps also get the Healing Brush tool and chromatic aberration correction. The iOS version of Lightroom CC also has a Long Exposure Technology Preview (for iPhone 7 and up only).
  • You can now copy and paste edit settings inside the Lightroom CC desktop app. And, as you can with Lightroom Classic, you have the option to choose which settings you wish to copy.
  • Lightroom Classic’s HDR and Panorama merge features now include an option to automatically stack the images used and place the finished image at the top of the stack.
  • The Mac versions of Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC also get support for the High Efficiency Image Format (HEIC), currently used by Apple with their latest iPhone and iPad cameras. This is supported on the Mac for now, but as acceptance grows, it should move to other platforms as well. [For more on HEIC, see this page.]
  • Adobe also added a few new web-portfolio sharing options from within Lightroom CC, letting you control image downloads, and whether metadata and location information is viewable.

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DxO releases Nik Collection 2018

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DxO Labs has released its first version of the Nik Software plug-ins since acquiring the suite last year from Google. Nik Collection 2018, provides compatibility with the current versions of Photoshop CC, Lightroom Classic CC and Photoshop Elements, and includes 64-bit support for both macOS and Windows; there are no other new features. According to a company spokesman,

“It was necessary to recover and recompile source code that had not been maintained for a long time in order to make it compatible with the latest versions of Adobe products and the latest Apple OS updates. This is a first step that allows us to start afresh.”

The seven plug-ins included with the Nik Collection—Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro, Analog Efex Pro, Viveza, Dfine, and Sharpener Pro—perform color and black and white effects, selective color editing, noise reduction and sharpening to your images. Originally created by Nik Software, the plug-ins were acquired by Google when the company purchased Nik in 2012, and were left to languish as Google’s photo priorities changed. (Google originally sold them for $150, and ultimately made them free, but as time went on, they became incompatible with newer versions of the CC apps.)

 

Photoshop Elements Techniques back issues

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[Updated February 14, 2024, with link to the Dropbox folder that houses all of the back issues see below…]

For a number of years (2008 through 2013), I was the editor and publisher of Photoshop Elements Techniques, a magazine for Elements users (also known as PET). Sadly, the publication—and associated website—shut down in 2016, and I’ve been working on a way to make the back issues of the magazine (and videos) available online.

[02/14/2024 update] While we had a few pages here with links for downloading the issues (and searching an online index), it’s not feasible to house the archives on this website. They now reside in a Dropbox folder where you can download some or all of the magazine PDFs, extras and more: PET-issues.

Thanks,
Rick

Rolling Your Own Lightroom Creative Profiles

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Following up on the recent Lightroom announcements, Adobe’s Josh Haftel has posted a step-by-step video for making your own creative profiles for use with Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera Raw. It is well worth watching, if you’re a bit technically inclined; even if you don’t think you’re going to make your own, it’s a fascinating look at what these profiles do.

And, if you’re a Lightroom user, the Lightroom team’s YouTube channel is an excellent source of videos on Lightroom topics. We’re big fans of Benjamin Warde’s Lightroom Coffee Break videos (playlist), which are short—most are 60 seconds or less—little tips for getting the most out of Lightroom. Warde is great at shedding light into a few of Lightroom’s hidden corners, like the recent one below, which shows how to selectively use Lightroom’s Auto setting in the Develop module.

Using DNG Converter with Lightroom 6 (and Elements) and new cameras

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Lightroom 6 has reached the end of its road, so it’s all gravel lane from here on out. The last perpetual revision, Lightroom 6.14, was released on December 19, 2017, and Adobe isn’t going to update or support it going forward. The app still works fine, however, so if you’ve chosen it over Adobe’s subscription offerings (Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC), you shouldn’t see much of a difference for the time being.

Unless you buy a new camera.

If you’re shooting with a camera released after that date, Lightroom 6 won’t recognize those raw files. Camera manufacturers tweak the raw recipe for each camera model, which is why you frequently see updates to Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop and Lightroom that add new raw formats. Since Adobe ended support for Lightroom 6 at the end of 2017, the software will no longer receive those updates.

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