Lightroom

In one of my previous missives I said that Lightroom did not have a very comprehensive printer control. Well obviously I am blind, slightly anyway, the printer controls appear - like all other menus - when you run your mouse over the menu button. My reservation with this is that if you use the print options in the "File" menu these alternatives are not shown.

Composition

Today I am going to try and cover composition. The first thing to say is that every person is entitled to see things their own way and that all rules (in life and composition) should be treated with an element of suspicion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so they say. As an example I am using a simple Austrian landscape. First as shot:-

As you can see - a typical mountain scene with a road leading to a house. It's no prize winner but I think it's OK. With the aid of hindsite I might have cropped it so that the farm house obeyed the Golden Mean or Section rule I suggest that a Google search on this subject would be better than me explaining the concept. But with an image editor (Elements or Photoshop) such a thing is possible.

This is going some way towards my aim - which is to have the road lead the eye to the farm house - but it needed to have slightly more foreground (I cut a chunk off and placed it at the bottom to give more depth). Doing this moved the farmhouse further up the picture so that it was close to the intersection of the image divided into thirds which approximately corresponds to the Golden Mean (Section or Ratio)

This is the way composition works - the eye needs to be drawn to the subject or object of interest. Any way of doing this has the same effect but the Golden Ratio system is meant to be aesthetically pleasing. If you are taking a picture for advertising purposes then anything that draws the viewers eye to where it matters is mostly what it's about. You could use lighting to the same effect.

Evening and Night Photography

This picture was taken as the sun was setting, when the sun has just gone below the rim of the earth. The street lights are on and the shops are lit-up. If you were to set the colour temperature setting on your camera to "Tungsten" the sky will go to a more interesting colour. The bottom picture is shot with a daylight setting and the top has been adjusted to look as it might shot with a tungsten setting.

This is just one approach to shooting at night. Another is to use flash to capture moving objects but also using a camera shuuter speed that will allow the ambient light to record. I don't recommend that you photograph passing vehicles in case you cause distress to the driver. At least not without warning them first. When shooting in this way it is best (if you can) to use something called second blade synchronisation. What happens here is the camera flash will fire at the end of an exposure instead of the beginning (as normally happens). For example: you could photograph someone running (dancing or any movement) and what happens with the image is that the last bit of the movement is recorded with flash and is static with the blur behind it. Try shootting both ways to see what I mean. I will try and produce some images to back me up on this. One more thing is to remember that the best light of the day occurs a couple of hours before sunset - when the shadows are long and the colour is warm.

This is how it looks with the outside at the original density. It isnt perfect as I only spent 5 minutes doing it - but you get the idea. This image was made using two layers the top layer being thae lightened version and the bottom being the original. I just used the "Lasso Tool" to select the glass bit of the window and deleted it from the lighter version. Easy when you know how. As there are several different ways you can do the same thing - why not try doing it differently.

Photoshop Levels

By special request I am covering levels in Photoshop today. Open a picture in Photoshop and you might find something like this image where the meter was reading what the light was doing outside. If you now click on "Image" on the top menu bar the "Adjustments" then levels you will see agraphic display of the highlight, midtone and shadow regions of the picture. Under the graph it will say 0(shadow) -1.0(mid-tone) - 250(highlight). Above each figure there is a slider. By dragging the midtone slider to the left (for example) the midtones are lightened - lowering the contrast of the picture. The slider on the right, when moved to the left, will lighten the image. In the following example I have done just that. In the lighter image the sliders now read o, 1.7, 180.

If you want to be really smart you could find a way to keep the image outside from becoming too bright and still retain the interior density. I will away now and do just that - for next time. As mentioned in a previous episode if you make a duplicate layer and do your levels adjustment on that you will find photoshop, rather cleverly, retains your changes in the levels panel, but only if you do the levels adjustment as an adjustment layer, "Layers", "New Adjustment Layer", "Levels" and tick the box that is next to the statement that says "Use Previous Layer to Create a Clipping Mask".

See the following blog

Printing photographs

If you have a printer that prints pictures at a good quality - and you cant wait to take your images to be printed at a photolab - make sure that you are using the best available settings on the printer. If you are printing from Adobe Photoshop or Elements it is better, in many cases, to let photoshop handle the "colour management". This means that you need to disable the printers own colour management preferences and make sure that Photoshop or Elements is set to use the programs colour management. I am using a Canon iP 4300 and have found that this produces the nearest print colour to the screen. The printer controls on both these Adobe products are excellent when used this way. In my experience, allowing the program to tell the printer what to do, seems to give the best results in whatever Image Editing system you use. While I am on the subject of printing I have found that printing from Adobe Lightroom doesnt give so many possibilities as Elements and Photoshop itself. The main thing it lacks is the control over how the image is enlarged or reduced to fit a print size. I have been printing 6inch x 4inch prints from digital images taken on my Minolta Dimage 7i. As the format does not fit the print size I have been adjusting the magnification, slightly, to fill the print area - you can't do this in Lightroom. This surprises me as the print engine must already exist for the other programs so why not use it on Lightroom? Maybe someone will let us all know. It is a waste of time and money if you have to keep swapping from one program to another merely to output your work.
You can regard the previous passage as part of my ongoing assessment of the Adobe products.

Title Picture

You may have noticed my new banner title. This is another advantage of using Adobe Photoshop. The type tool is very versatile and allows styles to be applied - such as drop-shadow, embossing, contouring and many others. Loads of control as well. I have played for hours getting the ultimate text design - mainly for web pages. Of course it is not necesarily a good idea to use images instead of text in a web page as our friends at google have one less thing to search on. Sometimes you have to do what is most pleasing to the eye.