Adobe Lightroom

Scenes from Colorado

July 30, 2010August 2, 2010
Mines, Photography

I finally broke down and bought Lightroom 3. It’s awesome and definitely worth getting (even if you have LR2). Anyway, I was in Colorado this last weekend for my college roommates wedding. It was pretty epic. I got to see some great friends from my College Days™ — many of whom I haven’t seen in years¹ — and meet some new people as well.

I think my favorite part was when Ben was reciting his vows to Kim, he did them in French. This was awesome because Kim was a French/Technical Writing major and Ben does not speak any French at all. I wasn’t part of the wedding party, but I was asked to take video of the event. So of course I brought my camera along too²:

50.0 mm || 1/1250 || f/2.5 || ISO320 || NIKON D70

50.0 mm || 1/1000 || f/2.5 || ISO320 || NIKON D70
Ken Caryl, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/60 || f/3.2 || ISO320 || NIKON D70
Ken Caryl, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/100 || f/2.2 || ISO400 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/80 || f/2.2 || ISO640 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/160 || f/2.2 || ISO640 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/80 || f/2.2 || ISO640 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/250 || f/2.2 || ISO640 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/100 || f/1.8 || ISO400 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/1000 || f/2.2 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Littleton, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/80 || f/2.0 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Ken Caryl, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/125 || f/2.0 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70
El Rancho, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/50 || f/2.0 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70
El Rancho, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/40 || f/2.0 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70
El Rancho, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/60 || f/2.0 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70
El Rancho, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/100 || f/2.0 || ISO1600 || NIKON D70
El Rancho, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/2000 || f/2.8 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Boulder, Colorado, United States

50.0 mm || 1/5000 || f/2.8 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
Broomfield, Colorado, United States

Update: Added a photo I forgot to upload. Also, per usual, you can see the rest of the wedding-related photos on Flickr: Sikora Wedding Awesome.

Okay, maybe 15 months ↩
with only my 50mm lens as an experiment in creative composition ↩

The Esoterics of Image Sharpening

April 25, 2009
Photography, Points to Ponder

I’ve been working on clearing out my huge backlog of photos. I’ve been trying to streamline my process as much as I can in order to get the pictures out the door. As it stands right now, I use no fewer than four programs to get a picture from my camera to the internet:

Adobe Lightroom: 99% of all editing
Adobe Photoshop: Image sharpening
Microsoft Pro Photo Tools: Geotagging
Flickr Uploadr: Image uploading

There’s some overlap in what Lightroom and Photoshop can do in terms of sharpening. However, I was curious to see what the actual differences are.

On the right is the regular image, as exported from Lightroom, with no sharpening.

In the middle is the image exported from Lightroom with the maximum amount of sharpening for the screen¹.

On the left is the regular image, as exported from Lightroom, with the 100% of the “Smart Sharpen” filter applied with default settings.

Here’s the image at 100% normal:

Can you tell the difference?

Here’s the same image, enlarged to almost 250%:

Looking at the eyes, you can definitely tell the difference. It also make a big difference in the hair too. However, I wonder if the Photoshop Smart Sharpen is adding too much grain? Sure, the eyes don’t look as good, but the cheeks seem more natural.

Like I said, esoteric.

Another issue also cropped² up with the differences in saving a JPEG at “12” (super best quality, there is no higher quality) versus “8” (just high quality). As it turns out, not as much difference as I had expected. The file size is also reduced by about 7 times as well.

Another thought, what happens when you save a JPEG over and over again? Hadto solves the question, or raises more questions, with his video Generation Loss, in which he “Open the last saved jpeg image. Save it as a new jpeg image with slightly more compression. Repeat 600 times”:

Generation Loss from hadto on Vimeo.

And yes, these are honestly the things that keep me awake at night.

versus print ↩
no pun intended, I swear ↩

10.5mm and RAW are Hawesome!

April 4, 2008
Mines

I shot just a bit over an entire roll on RAW (RAW is the format and an entire roll for me, at the moment, is a 1gig memory card, which is about 187 RAW photos).

The 10.5mm fisheye lens is freaking amazing! Also, shooting in RAW is the way to go, hands down.

I’ve taken a quick glance at the roll in Adobe Lightroom (which is also awesome and probably the best way to ‘develop’ RAW photos) and I am sooo happy with how everything has turned out so far.

I won’t get to any processing until after EDays, so don’t expect anything to appear until after Saturday at the very earliest and realistically not until later in the week.

I’m off to bed. I’ll get about 4 hours of sleep and then I have to get up for the Orecart pull (which I really actually have to get up for since the Oredigger photographer won’t be able to make it).