Popular Photography magazine is hosting a contest called Lightroom through Your Lens for photographers who use Lightroom.  The grand prize winner will be published in Popular Photography magazine and will receive a trip to NYC!  Woohoo!

Don’t have Lightroom yet?  Download a free trial here by clicking on this image:

This is one of my favorite Lightroom edits.  I might submit this one and look for a few more.  It can’t hurt, right?

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Exposure:  F/10 for 1/6th of a second. 1000 ISO.  On a tripod.

It took me lots of shots to get the right settings on my camera, so I’ll post some of the EXIF data with these shots.  Next year, remind me about this post so that I won’t have to experiment so much with shutter speed!

Exposure:  F/10 for 1/3rd of a second. 1000 ISO.  On a tripod.

I especially like these reflection shots .

 Exposure:  F/10 for 1/3rd of a second. 1000 ISO.  On a tripod.

Back to the daily grind tomorrow.  Everyone have a great week!

Big Mozy Sale – Last Chance!

First off, don’t forget to subscribe to Mozy this month so that you can save 15%.  Use discount code JUNE15.  Less than $90 will buy you two years of unlimited backup and complete security.  All the files, photos, videos and music that you have on your computer will be completely protected from hard drive crashes or babies spilling milk on laptops.  The 15% sale, which doesn’t happen often, ends June 30.

Lightroom Presets

Next up, two presets I used for some of the shots I took at my photo session with a professional model.

A reader mentioned that she liked this style of vignette, so I wrote a tutorial on it last week.  There are two presets for you to download.  The first is the vignette only, and the second is the urban look combined with the vignette.

I don’t want to take credit for the creative idea behind the urban look.  It came straight from this book by Scott Kelby, which is a great purchase for anyone learning Lightroom.

And, as the book says, the preset is just a starting point.  You will probably need to adjust Saturation, if not some of your other settings, to suit the preset to the individual picture.  I also added some skin softening and eye adjustments using the adjustment brush.

Download these free Lightroom Presets here.  After unzipping them, load them into Lightroom by saving them somewhere on your hard drive.  (I recommend having a separate folder somewhere in My Documents to store all presets in – this will make upgrading Lightroom much easier.)  After saving the presets, right click on your preset palette in Lightroom, select Import and navigate to the folder where you saved those presets.  That’s it!

 Coming up next week – more info on the DPM contest to share $150 of my Clickin’ Moms earnings.  The contest has been extended throught July 31.  We just might do it!  Subscribe to Digital Photography For Moms via email or RSS so that you don’t miss it.

This photo was edited using Lightroom only.  It didn’t take Photoshop to create that edgy look, believe it or not!

Here are the Lightroom settings for the vignette:

• Post-crop vignette
• Amount -100
• Midpoint 19
• Roundness 0
• Feather 50

I’ll post Lightroom presets next week for the vignette and the style, for those of you who are interested.

And, for those of you who don’t have Lightroom, this method from my post on 8 Ways to Vignette in Photoshop Elements will work for you:

• Press  D to set your colors to Default black and white.
• If black isn’t the foreground color, type X.
• Use the Elliptical Marquee tool to select the central portion of your photo.  Hold down the shift key while selecting if you want a perfect circle rather than an oval.
• Invert the selection by pressing Shift+Control+I.
• Apply a large amount of feathering.  Start with something between 75-150 pixels.
• Create a new layer and fill the selection with black by pressing Alt+Backspace.
• If you wanted the darkened area larger or smaller, start over and change the size of your elliptical marquee.
• If you want to control how the black fades, start over and add more or less feathering.

Coming up next week:

• A revised Perfect Workflow free action for Photoshop Elements that doesn’t make a copy of your original file
• Lightroom presets
• And update on the Digital Photography for Moms contest for $150.  We just might do it!  Send everyone you can to DPM to sign up!

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And I don’t usually promote Lightroom unless it’s on sale.  But I am so pumped about this program from my Pixel Fairy Princess workshop last weekend.  Debbie processed her photos amazingly, right before our eyes in just a few minutes, using Lightroom only.

And, for $300, Lightroom is a nice step between Photoshop Elements and Photoshop.  With Adobe’s 30 day free trial, you have nothing to lose!

I never thought about using LR creatively.  For me, its biggest benefits were photo organization, Raw processing, and image correction.  But I processed all these images in this post using Lightroom only.  Even added the watermark.  How cool is that? 

One of my biggest problems with Photoshop is that I spend hours in it.   Lightroom produces spectacular effects without the temptation to try lots of extras, scroll through every blend mode or try every setting on every filter.

One one the most exciting things Debbie taught last weekend is how to use Lightroom’s Auto Mask feature.  Lightroom has an adjustment brush that allows you to selectively adjust the following issues in parts of an image only:

• Exposure
• Contrast
• Brightness
• Clarity
• Color
• Saturation
• Sharpening
• Skin Softening (yes, you can soften skin in Lightroom!)
  

So, here is a brief rundown of my trying-to-be-super-quick workflow in Lightroom:

• Import pictures from camera memory card into LR.
• Use LR’s awesome organization and ranking system to quickly weed out bad shots and choose the very best to edit.  I love that there is a side-by-side comparison where you can compare A to B, B to C,  B to D until you decide that B is the best. 
• Crop the image, remove spots and blemishes.
• Run down the Develop panel to make any corrections or adjustments to the picture as a whole.
• Use the adjustment brush to fine tune any specific areas.
• Add fancier effects like glows, tints or that urban grunge look.
• Vignette.
• Sharpen.
• Export as a JPEG with a watermark.

That’s it.  It’s quick and easy.  Considering that many, if not all, of the LR adjustments can be applied to all your photos at once, you really could process a batch of beautiful pictures quickly.

I bet that a lot of you saw  Rita’s recent CoffeeShop post about Lightroom.  We’re both pretty enthusiastic about it right now, so you can expect some really helpful Lightroom stuff in the near future.  So, start downloading Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 in minutes. No shipping needed. Only at Adobe.com.

Also stay tuned for a Digital Photography for Moms contest where the grand prize is a $150 Amazon.com gift card!    Here’s a hint:  anyone who signs up for Clickin’ Moms through my website between May 24 and June 30 is entered.  Plus, learn how to focus your camera better using Back Button Focus.
 

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