So how do you get the correct white balance?
One way could be to use the camera settings and set the white balance manually. To do this you need a white sheet of paper or a white balance card (also called gray card). Set your camera to PRE (a mode in the white balance menu) and fill your viewfinder with the white paper. When you press the shutter, your camera will take a reference picture and use it as the source for the rest of your photos white balance (Please read the instructions for your specific camera model).
This is a great way to set the white balance on-site and if you’re shooting in JPEG (I never use JPEG for important sessions though!). Remember that if your environmental light sources changes, you need to set your white balance again. Same procedure is needed if you change photo location (taking product photos in a studio one day and model photos outside the next day etc.)

White balance during post-processing (on the computer)
Another way to set the white balance is to do it in the post-processing phase. This is the way I do it! Shooting in RAW for best possibilities to edit the images after a session is a must.  When shooting in RAW, the image is separated into two pieces. One with the image and one with all Data like white balance, B&W conversions etc. When you import RAW images into Lightroom these two pieces are put together virtually so that you can manipulate the image without any loss of quality. When you’re done editing you finally export your image to the format you like (JPEG, TIF etc) and the two pieces is put together and merged into one, the image. Since you’ve shoot in RAW, you have the original file intact and can continue to make changes to it over and over again without any loss of quality. I never edit a JPEG-file twice if it’s an important photo. Everytime a JPEG is opened and saved it’s being compressed. Every compression of it will reduce its quality.

This is how I set the white balance in Lightroom.
On the first photo I take in a photo session, I place a gray card, or tell the person in front to hold it for me. This photo will be my reference photo that I will use when I start the post-processing in Lightroom. I only need one reference shoot with this gray card for each location I shoot (or if the light sources changes).

When I have imported all of my photos from my session, I start by setting the white balance for my reference image. To do this I simply use the White balance selector (shortcut = W ) and click on the gray card (there shouldn’t be any reflections on the card!). This will make sure that the image has the right white balance and since all of my other photos have been shoot in the same set-up (environment) I just have to synchronize them with my reference image. Voila, now all of my image are set with the correct white balance.

Video of how to set the white balance in Lightroom for many images:

What’s new in Lightroom 3?

There are so many new things so you should really download a copy of the beta release yourself, to try them out.
Scott Kelby from Photoshop Insider has written a great post about some of the new features. Check it out:

(1) Importing has been redesigned with a new import window that lets you easily see where your images are coming from and where they’re going, with lots of little improvements and enhancements to make the process easier and much more visual.

(2) Drag and Drop Publishing to the Web (and more). Now you can just drag and drop an image to have it automatically published directly from Lightroom right up to Flickr, or directly to an iPhone sync folder, etc..

(3) Pro-level Noise Reduction. This is an area that Lightroom always lagged behind on, but now they have real pro-level noise reduction which competes, or beats, about anything out there (especially because it can do its noise reduction at the Raw file level, rather than on a processed 8-bit file).

(4) Built-in Film Grain feature. There’s been a lot of buzz recently about bringing back that film-grain look, and now that’s built right in.

(5) Better vignetting by a long shot. They really enhanced the post crop vignetting, and now post crop gives you a much better looking, and more natural result (and you have two choices for the type of vignetting effect as well).

(6) You can finally (finally, finally!!!!!) export a slideshow with music embedded in the slideshow (at last), and you can have your slideshow automatically sync the length of the slideshow to the length of your song. Plus, they made it so, on a Mac, you don’t need to use iTunes to host your slideshow music.

(7) Real watermarking is here! Now you can create real watermarks, at different sizes and opacities, and put them where you want them, for both web and print.

(8) Create print layouts with photos wherever you want them. Now there’s a Custom Print Package feature that lets you put as many photos, in whatever shape and size, on the page wherever you want them (you’re no longer restricted to use a grid of uniform cells), so now you can really come up with some creative print layouts without having your hands tied.

(9) You can change the background color for prints. Now you can choose any color as your background for printed pages. I know it sounds like a little thing, but it’s big.

(10) The Collections panel is now in the Develop Module, too. This one addition will dramatically increase your efficiency because now you don’t have to constantly switch back and forth between the Library Module and Develop Module, because you can get to all your collections and images from right within the Develop Module itself.

Check out these three videos to see what’s new in Lightroom 3:

Part one:

- Library and develop modules
- New streamline import function
- Improved sharpening tool and color noise reduction
- More natural vignetting and… Add Grain!
- Faster!

Part two:

- New ways to share and publish images (Direct access to your Flickr account)
- Add sound to your slideshows
- Custom package in the Print mode for better layouts
- Edit watermarks (text or image)

Part three:

- 25+ new features
- New crop presets
- Sort images based on cropped size
- New option for overlay info in loupe view
- Turn autosync (new feature) on and off in the loupe view
- Create and import new folders and images easier
- “Show photos in subfolders” easier to set on/off
- New improved Collection functions
- Lock library filters
- Filter images on flash state
- Find missing files
- Back-up on exit
- Access to Collections in the Develop mode

For more details on the new functionality in the Lightroom 3 beta:

• Read the blog post from the Lightroom team to learn about the vision behind the features included in the beta.
• Find helpful resources on the new NAPP Lightroom 3 beta Resource Center.
• Read the release notes (PDF) for detailed information.

Download now

Lightroom 3 SDK for developers will be released when Lightroom 3 is out on the market (according to the Adobe forum)

Updated 10-03-01: The screencap above link to the page where you can find the move. This due to an “Embed Video” bug at Adobe.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Click here to see more great video tutorials for Lightroom from Adobe TV

In my example photo, the lower part of the photo is very dark. Almost to dark to see the details at all. I could lighten it up using brightness and contrast in Lightroom, but that would affect the whole image and result in a very bright sky instead.

To fix this issue I use graduated filters which can be found under the “Develop” tab in Lightroom.

See the preset in action:

SOOC/ORIGINAL:

PH Graduated Horisont:

Graduated filters can be used with the same effects as the “Adjustmen Brush“. With this in mind I have added a blue color tone on the filter for the sky to make it more dramatic.

Play around
Your horizon might be on a different position in the photo. Luckily you can replace the graduated filters to fit your own horizon.

If you would like to change the brightness or contrast (or any other effect) you can easily do that too.

Finally you might want to change the color of the sky…

Did you know there’s a plugin for Lightroom that makes it possible for you to export your photos directly to your blog!?

Timothy Armes’, the man behind LR2/Mogrify (which I’ve talked about before) has made it again.

This plug-in for Lightroom 2 has been released very early in order to garner the feedback necessary to meet your needs. It will undergo rapid development, but needs your help to grow. What features would you like to see? Which blogs would you like to see supported? Please leave your ideas in the comments section of his related blog article.

Please note that this plugin is donationware. The trial version can only upload one image at a time. Donating towards the development of this plug-in will unlock this restriction.

Installation:

Download the plug-in
Unzip the download. You should now have a plug-in called ‘LR2Blog.lrplugin’. If your unzip program didn’t keep this parent directory, then you should create it and copy your unzipped files into it.

The plug-in is installed via the Lightroom 2 plug-in manager.

1. Move LR2Blog.lrplugin to a convenient location of your own choosing.
2. Open Lightroom’s plug-in manager from the File menu.
3. Click the “Add” button.
4. Browse to the plug-in and click “OK” on a Mac or “Add plugin” on a PC.

To get a quickguide of how to use the plug-in, please visit this page

You may also be interested in his LR2/Mogrify plug-in which allows you to adds watermarks, borders and text annotations to images as they are exported. It can be used in tandem with LR2/Blog or indeed any other export plug-in.LR2/Blog is a Lightroom 2 export plug-in that allows you to export your images directly to your blog.

Version 1.20 has been tested with WordPress (2.6 and 2.7) and Blogger (hosted blogs only) however this will soon evolve.

You can get the latest version of the LR2/Blog plug-in at Photographer’s Toolbox

Enjoy!

1. Soften the skin:

2. How to use the luminance feature in Lightroom:

3. Selective colouring:

4. Batch your settings  – Apply the same adjustments on many photos at the same time:

5. How to use the adjustment brush:

6. Convert your photos into Black & White:

7. Sorting and ranking photos in Lightroom:

8. Create virtual copies of photos in Lightroom:

9. How to watermark images with your own logo/text:

10. Remove unwanted items in photos:

Other great sources to mention are:

Lightroom 2 Learning center
Discover the powerful new features in Lightroom 2 with this free online resource from the experts at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.

Lightroom 2 Learning site
One of the most popular Photoshop sites on the web, PhotoshopCAFE.com continues to deliver. Discover and learn Lightroom 2 with free tutorials, step-by-step shortcuts, and links to more resources.

Adobe TV – Lightroom tutorials
Listen to the pros at Adobe when they teach you all new cool stuff in Lightroom 2

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips
Get your weekly dose of the coolest Adobe® Lightroom tutorials, tips, time-saving shortcuts, photographic inspiration, and undocumented tricks with Matt Kloskowski from Photoshop User TV. New videos posted each Monday and other news over the week.

Step one to success – Digital cameras and big memory cards
Get a big memory card for your camera. In the old days you had to think carefully when to press the button or not. You had to make a choice if the motive in front of you was worthy enough to be put in an album or not. After all you just had 24 or 36 frames per film roll.

With a big memory card (4 GB or bigger) you can get wild and crazy and take 20 photos of the same motive in different angles and with different camera settings. The more you press the shutter button the bigger chance you get home with ONE (or more) great shot in your back pocket. That one is the ONE professional photographers get on the second or third shot, if they are lucky. The biggest difference between you and a professional photographer is the ability they have to “frame” the photo in the mind before they take press the trigger. Don’t think too much about this, you will learn by practice.

Step two to success – Lightroom and presets
Get familiar with Lightroom. I did and I really recommend you to do it as well. Play around with it and don’t be afraid to mess things up. You can always undo your mistakes. I strongly advise you to read my article about “6 good tips how to organize all your digital photos” thou it will be of great value in the future when your bank of images expand.

Key benefits
Some of the key benefits using Lightroom:

1. You can apply changes and adjustments on your RAW (Wikipedia link) images without destroying the original file. Just export a new version of it with your applied settings.
2. Import- and backup functions are built-in and easy to use.
3. You can tag your images with Meta keywords, ratings, colors and flags for easy filtering.
4. If you like, you can export your favorite images to a flash/html web gallery for easy publishing on your website. This is done inside of Lightroom and you have plenty of layout templates to choose from.
5. Compare your original file with your modified. Before/after images side by side.
6. Finally, my favorite one. You can save, import and export your photo adjustments using presets. That mean you can use them on other photos to create the same look of an image!

I will focus on the last point (6), cause presets is the main reason I got a crush on Lightroom. A preset is a file in Lightroom that makes it easy for you to apply an earlier made adjustment, on other photos, just by a click! It’s pretty much like actions in Photoshop or a macro in Excel etc. The best part of the story is that you really don’t even need to know how to make the presets. You just need to know how to import and use them. You see, presets are easy to export from Lightroom and to share with other people. There are many Lightroom users out there who share their presets on web pages and blogs. In fact, some even sell them to make it easy for you to become a pro. I got tired of searching the net for pre-made presets and came up with the idea of making the biggest web resource of free presets for download.

I started www.presetsheaven.com which now has hundreds of free presets for download! Everyone of them has a before/after image.

Live preview
Presets have something called “live preview”. That’s a great feature in Lightroom and it’s a big time-saver to be able to see the effect of a preset before applying it to a photo. When you place your mouse over the presets name, a small preview window above will show you what the effect will look like.

How to import/install presets
If you’ve been to PresetsHeaven or any other site and found a preset you like, you need to follow these steps to import it to lightroom:

1. Download the file and unzip it (if it’s a compressed file) to your desktop.
2. Open Lightroom and select “Develop” in the top-right menu.
3. To the left on the screen you’ll see a section called “Presets” with a grey arrow infront of the name. Open/expand your preset list.
4. On top of this list there is a preset collection called “Lightroom Presets”. You can’t import presets to this location, therefore you need to make a new folder (if you haven’t allready done that). Right-click (Windows user) in the list and choose “New folder”.
5. Right-click again but this time on your new folder. Choose “Import…” from the list and browse to your desktop where your downloaded and unzipped file is located.
6. Select it and import – Done!

If you want to import many presets at the same time with different foldernames, you can right-click any presetfolder in the list, exept the one called “Lightroom Presets”. Then choose “Show in explorer”. This opens up the file location of the specific preset you clicked. As you can see, this folder contains all your presets. While this folder is open you can easily import your presets by drag them into it (or use copy/paste). Remember to restart Lightroom to make the presets available in the presets list.

In Microsoft Vista the URL of the presets location looks like this:
C:\Users\Pierre \AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets
(Unless your name also is \Pierre\ it should be something else here)

Remember that a preset effect doesn’t have to look the same on all images when applied. It very much depends on the amount of adjustments that has been used or how dark, light or colorful the targeted image is.

These are just a few images that proof a regular photo can look like a professional photographers work of art, just by using a decent digital camera and presets in Lightroom.

I hope you enjoyed the article and that you really take a closer look at Adobe Lightroom and what presets can do for you and your images. Hopefully this article inspired you who not already have tested Lightroom.

To be able to do this in a simple way, you can use a plug-in for Lightroom called LR/Mogrify. Timothy Armes is the developer of this great plug-in and apart from for the graphical watermark function you can do much more funny things; You can create borders, Text annotations, resize photos and sharpen them, modify color space and play with colors’ processing.
All effects are applied on export and each one of them can easily be customized to your needs.

The free version of this plug-in can export 10 images at a time but a donation of any amount will give you an unrestricted version of this software.

Here you can download the plug-in and also read the installation instructions:
»Get the Plug-in!
Be sure to download the right version of the plug-in since it’s available for both LR 1 and LR 2.

! To get this to work you also need to download ImageMagick ( Currently I have version “ImageMagick-6.4.4-Q16) which is the image engine used with this plugin: http://www.imagemagick.org

This is how I use the plug-in to put image stamps on my photos:

1. I start by making the watermark stamp in Photoshop; To be sure my stamp doesn’t get placed to close the photos corners I put 10px of margin around it. In Photoshop I make the background layer invisible and put a stroke effect with 2px on my text/logo layer. I prefer to use white color for my stamp (text) since it looks good on most of my photos. The black stroke around it makes sure it will be visible on really light photos as well.
2. To get the feeling of a soft semi-transparent stamp, I change the Opacity of my text/logo layer to 50%.
3. When I’m satisfied I save my logo as a PNG image which is a great format that can handle transparent photos with anti-aliasing edges (GIF is not an option for me here).
4. When saved, the stamp is ready for Lightroom.
5. When I have installed the LR2/Mogrify plug-in to Lightroom I simply open the Export window as usual. A few clicks are needed so I start by inserting “Mogrify Configuration” and “Graphical Watermark” from the “Post-Process Actions:”-panel (you find it on the lower left side in the export window).
6. Since this plug-in is using open source software called ImageMagic to modify the images, the path to the software needs to be added. I add my installation path of Mogrify.exe to the Mogrify Configuration panel (See, “Path of Mogrify application:” ).
7. In the “Mogrify Graphical Watermark” panel I then add the path to my stamp/logo.
8. Finally I select the position for my stamp by using the checkbox option for “Position”. This selection will place my stamp in the bottom right corner.

Instruction steps 1-4

Instruction steps 5-8

My final image exported with a stamp directly from Lightroom:

See more of Timothys work and other plugins here.

1. Select one image from your collection of images that has spots
2. Go to the Develop mode (Press D)
3. Select the “Spot removal” tool
4. Choose “Heal” (the other choice is “clone”) as brush type
5. Resize the brush size to fit your spots
6. Click on each spot you which to remove
7. When all spots are gone, select all images you would like to apply this removal on
8. Press the “sync…”-button (you find it in the bottom of the develop sidebar)
9. Be sure to activate the checkbox for “Spot removal” and then press “Synchronize”
10. Done! All selected images have now been “healed” on the same position as your first modified photo.

Note: To see the video in high quality, please use the link below the video.

Tutorial: How to remove spots on multiple photos from Pierre on Vimeo.

Spot removal

These trapped particles are very small to the eye in a natural environment but in your camera they get blown up when processing your photos. So if you see a repeated pattern of spots in your photos from a vacation etc. you probably have some dust in your camera. Ok, enough talking about the dust now. Let me instead show you how you can remove these spots easily in Lightroom.

1. Select the photo you want to retouch
2. Open the develop mode (press D)
3. Click on the spot removal tool
4. Change the size of the circle (area) using a scroll-wheel on your mouse or the slider in the control panel. The circle should be just about the size of the spot you wish to remove.
5. Place your cursor (circle) over the spot you wish to remove and press your mouse.
6. A new circle with the same size will appear next to your removed spot. This circles (no.2) position has been chosen by Lightroom as the best/recommended choice as clone source. If you’re not satisfied with the clone source you can easily move the circle to a new position. If you need to resize the circle to fit your area, simply place your cursor on it until you see two arrows, then press and drag to resize.
7. To see the result without the circles disturbing, press the spot removal tool again. If you’re not satisfied with the result, try changing the opacity of your spots or the size of the circles.

I’ve made a quick and dirty screencast to show you how to quickly remove spots in photos. I suggest you click on the link below the movie to be able to see it in high quality.

Tutorial: How to remove spots in photos with Lightroom 2 from Pierre on Vimeo.

To make it easy for you, I have made a Photoshop template you can use to be sure your logo fits correctly. Download link can be found at the end of this post.

How to change it then?

When you have downloaded the template file and created your own plate, I suggest you have a look at my video tutorial below which will go through the few steps that are needed to customize your identity plate’s look. Tip: Press the “HD is off” button and read instructions or press the link right below the movieclip. Use fullscreen view!

Before the digital camera came to our world, everyone put their photos in albums. By that time most of us took 24 or 36 shoots before we sent in the photo rolls for process. Those were the days… But now when everyone is using a digital cam, we have an overflow of photos on our hard drives. I’ve come up with a technique that works for me and it might work for you too…

If we don’t take care of this mass of photofiles directly after import to PC there’s a big chance we won’t do it at all. Storage isn’t an issue today since drive space is so cheap to buy. I always take my photos in RAW format to be sure I got all information untouched (like the old-time negatives) for future use.

No matter if you use RAW or compressed JPG format, you still have to organize your files in a way you can find them easily days, weeks or even years later.

Follow my way to success:

1. Buy a BIG external Hard drive
I have an external 1TB drive were I place my photos only. I never place anything else on this drive to keep it clean. It doesn’t matter if you just take a few photos a year. Five or ten years from now you’ll thank me for advice you to use a separate disk for this matter

2. Back-up often!
Surely you have lost information some time because of negligence or just bad luck. A computer is always a computer right? :-). So with this said, back-up your photos often! Burn them on DVD/CD or use an extra disk as I do. I recommend you to backup your files at least once a week. Oh, you will thank me for this one too (smile).

3. Tag your photos with keywords.
In Lightroom you have the possibility to assign keywords on the photos you import. Don’t ignore this great feature. It’s a time saver when you got +7000 photos. You can easily filter your photos based on these keywords to get a better view. I use keywords like Family, Vacation, Paris, Jessica and Wedding etc.

4. Organize your photos
This is the one of the most important parts here. I’ve come up with a structure I like when it comes to organizing my photos. The first thing I did when I got my external drive was to set up a folder structure that could fill all of my future needs. I started by making a few main folders that I named: Private, Family, Friends and Travel. In each folder I created subfolders with the year the photos were taken. Finally I created subfolders into the year folders. These subfolders are named “Year-Month-Day NameOfEvent”. A typical structure for photos I took last year during a holiday in France could look like this:
“Travel/2007/2007-04-31 Weekend in Paris”

5. Get rid of the crap
I prefer to keep most of my photos in the camera before I start to delete the ones I think look bad. Everyone says it’s so great with digital cameras since you can delete photos directly if you’re not satisfied and then take new ones. Well it’s great if you have lack of space on your memory card but I’d rather delete them when I see them on a big screen. Even if the image looks good/bad on the display back on your camera it surely will look different on the computer screen.

So this means I end up with a lot of variations of the same motive. Therefore I need to start to clear out those images I don’t like after import to PC. In Lightroom I start by flagging out all “bad” images as “rejected”. This is my first manual filtering round. Second round I start by rating the images from 1-5 with stars. When I went through the images the first round I did notice some great shoots (the best ones). With this in mind I know when to give a 4 or 5-star or not. At this point I’ve given out just 4 and 5 stars.

By using filters in Lighroom I make all rated and flagged (rejected) images hidden. This way I don’t need to see the images I’ve already given a status (star or flag). The further I go the fewer images I have left to rate and it’s getting easier and easier for each rating-round. Finally I have photos with both keywords and rating and I can easily filter out the best photos from my weekend I Paris where Jessica is in the picture. :-)

6. Use more than one memory card
This is a practical and useful tip when you’re on a vacation or just out in the backyard taking photos of your kids. I prefer to have a couple of mid-size memory cards instead of one big. Think of the disaster if all your photos are gone because your memory card stopped working! With the minimum of two cards, you might still have some of your photos left on the other card. A few is better than none right? When you buy your memory cards, ask for a card with the right read/write speed for your camera.

This is just the way I prefer to take care of all my photos. You might have another way of doing it so let the rest of us know how you do it, please make a comment.

Best regards,
Pierre