Iguana!

One more before I hit the sack…this is (as the title says so) a shot of an Iguana taken at Safari World in Bangkok, Thailand. For this photo, all adjustments were done in Lightroom 2.0 including sharpening. It seems that the sharpening output in LR2.0 is better. As with the previous post, I actually used a little bit of the retouching brush here to add more drama to the photo. And of course, the new ‘Crop Vignette’ is crucial to achieve the effect.

I’ve always wanted to have a pet Iguana ever since a college buddy of mine brought his iguana to the dorm.

Hope you like it!

First Looks: Lightroom 2.0’s Splash Screen

If you look at it carefully, the Lr and the BETA are both transparent (slightly) and you can see the image/text that’s directly under it. In the image above, I made sure I put t in a colored photo so you can see the difference. Nothing extraordinary, but just wanted to share it with you because I thought it was cool! Hahaha!

One more thing, the Mac application icon of Lightroom (Lr) is also the same… if you check  your dock closely, you’ll see it has the same effect too! Cool!!!

Grand Palace Temple

While I’m still finalizing the edits of my Bangkok photos, here’s 1 of the temples taken at the Grand Palace. I started to adjust the image in LR 1.3 and since LR 2.0 Beta came out, I decided to experiment with the shadows. The final photo was done entirely in LR 2.0 Beta with final sharpening in Photoshop before I sent it to the web. Hope you like it. Comments are welcome.

 

LR 2.0 Beta First Looks: Retouch Brush

The new Retouch Brush seems to be the best feature of Lightroom 2.0. I was curious to see how I could apply it to an image as part of post-processing. Here’s what I did – I opened up a recent photo from my Bangkok trip.

I have already done my basic LR adjustments to the image and my next step would probably be to open the image in Photoshop and then do a Shadow/Highlight Adjustment Layer do bring up the shadows. I realized that this would be a great example of where the ‘Retouch Brush’ would help me. I could specifically target certain areas and then adjust the tone of that area alone and make them brighter. After some adjustments, here’s a before-and-after look of the image:

Note: click on the image to see the larger version.

As you can see, the middle part of the temple lit up very well compared to the original one. It’s like there’s a light coming from the inside of the temple when I took the shot! 🙂

How did I do it? Simple – here’s a snapshot of what happens when you select the Retouch Brush. Notice that there a small dots that shows you have an area selected. If you can’t see the dots, there are 2 of them: 1 in the sky and 1 in the red circle in the middle.

Note: click on the image to see the larger version.

Once you have a spot selected, make sure that the spot marker has a black dot on it. That means that it’s the spot that you’re currently working on. And then, you just paint, and paint (or brush) the areas that you want the adjustment to work on. For my purposes the ‘Auto Mask’ option was also turned on. The mask that I created in this instance is seen below:

Note: click on the image to see the larger version.

If you see the bigger photo, you can see that I adjusted the exposure, brightness and clarity sliders. Those 3 sliders alone made a huge difference in the photo and in lightening up the shadows!

Well, that’s it for now. I have to play around with the other features of LR 2.0 Beta. I noticed that it’s a bit slow especially in rendering the photos with the adjustments I made above. I don’t know why… I hope the final version will improve in this aspect.

Oh, and before I forget, the 2 best things about why this feature rocks: (1) no Photoshop is required; I saved a on disk space since I didn’t have to create a PSD file and (2) the changes are non-destructive! They can easily be reverted back!

Lightroom 2.0 Beta

Exciting news today! Adobe just announced the public beta of Lightroom 2.0. A couple of the changes that are big to me are:

• Multiple Monitor Support: finally, I can maximize my Cinema Display at home for Lightroom!
• Print to JPG functionality: a powerful feature because now, you can layout your photos in the Print module and then output them to JPG. Some practical applications would be – you can put your copyright info anywhere in the image, add borders and export them to JPG. No need to go to Photoshop anymore! 🙂
• Post-Crop Vignette: no need to explain this if you’re familiar with Lightroom! Hehehe!

Oh, it also works alongside with LR 1.3. And don’t worry, 1.4 is still being worked on by Adobe. The beta version expires on August 31, 2008.

So, here are the links to Lightroom 2.0 beta:

• Tom Hogarty’s blog entry on Lightroom 2.0: make sure you read the disclaimer! The new features are listed there.
• Adobe Labs Lightroom 2.0 Download Page: Take note, Adobe ID is required to download the beta software
• John Nack’s blog entry on Lightroom 2.0
• Lightroom 2 beta preview by Ian Lyons
• Lightroom 2 beta review by Uwe Steinmueller at OutbackPhoto.com.

I’ll post my initial comments once I try it out.

Oh, and don’t forget Rule #5!