Remez Ramblings

Nifty came to work with me on Friday, and although I couldn’t get any exciting glamourous shots, I thought I’d go back to basics with a black and white portrait.

The first step to having a black and white portrait, is to get a colour portrait - it sounds obvious, but the best way to get a good black and white portrait is to get a sound colour one.

There are a million and one ways to convert colour shots to black and white, using the channel mixer is my favoured technique in Photoshop, and I’m discovering a million more in Lightroom.

What it does mean, is that you have no excuse not to try some black and white portraits. Black and white portraits are more flattering than colour, and have a timeless appeal.

Go on, try a black and white portrait!

I’m not normally one for architectural shots. Sure, I take the odd shot of landmarks on holiday, but I’m never happy with them, because they’re almost always shots that have been hundreds of times before, and better executed.

This morning, as I was waiting for my new coffee place to open, I looked up, and saw this wonderful sky and building. I then completely shocked myself by checking that I was square on to try and ensure that when I straightened the shot in Lightroom, that the verticals didn’t go wonky.

All I did to the shot was rotate it a tiny bit, crop the edges, and bumped up the blue saturation as I don’t have a polarizer at the moment.

Actually, this is one of the side effects I’ve found from using Lightroom - I used to nearly always use Photoshop on every shot, but now I try and avoid using Photoshop as much as possible. This means I’m limited to using the small set of image correction tools in Lightroom, which has, in turn, meant that I’m more careful when taking shots. In addition to having a nice end to end workflow, Lightroom is also cutting down my processing time as my shots need less processing.

Yesterday I had a jewelry shoot. I quite enjoy shooting jewlery - in the past I’ve only shot against black (velvet is a must as it sucks in all the light, and doesn’t give reflections, even under really strong direct lighting.

I shot most of the pieces in a lightbox, which was well constructed, but unfortunately, the interior wasn’t white enough. The ring in the image was shot on Tesco Value printer paper, which was whiter!

Now, it’s not a massive job to burn out the background in the other shots, but it’s a lot more manual than it should be, which means more time, which means a higher charge. The lightbox was supplied by the client, and if I do much more work like this, then it may be something I’ll invest in, but then I’ll need to pass on the cost somehow to future clients, to cover my costs.

Still, I enjoyed the shoot, there’s something quite calming about shooting jewelry - it’s not as unpredictable as shooting people, but it is nice to take one or two shots per piece, knowing I’ll get 90% or more great shots.

Edit: 5 minutes adjusting the Tone Curve in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (my new workflow tool of choice) seems to have got the lightbox shots close enough to full white, without losing detail from the jewelry itself.

When I first got my hands on the Adobe Lightroom beta I was really disappointed. The tutorial videos looked great, but the performance (to be brutally honest) sucked, and I couldnt’ see it replacing Raw Shooter Premium as my RAW converter.As a Raw Shooter Premium user, I was sent a free upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 when it was released, and, again, I was disappointed with its performance. It has memory leaks, and I’ve seen memory usage over 700MB a number of times.

I’ve been playing with it more now though, and am starting to really like it. I can adjust exposure, contrast, b&w / split tone conversions, cropping, cloning, and all basic high level edits required in a workflow application (barring sharpening).

Lightroom also offers the facility of virtual copies, as it’s non-detructive editing, this is a fantastic feature, and I started to play. Initially I thought, great, now let’s stack the different versions of the same image, but then I found this article on why you should use collections with virtual copies, and not stacks.

I think with an extra Gigabyte of RAM, and a couple of patches from Adobe, this could be a fantastic application, as opposed to just a really good one.

I’m sure I’ll post more tips I learn about Lightroom, as I get to grips with it.