Archive for the ‘Adobe Lightroom’ Category

I’ve spent hours today going through my photo files. I am deleting duplicates. There was a time not too long ago when the first thing I did after transferring my photographs from the camera card to my computer was batch processing in Adobe Photoshop to create a photoshop document for each image. That means I have hundreds of .psd files that duplicate .nef files. Sometimes, I batch processed a whole set of .jpgs at the same time. More needless duplication.

I am also finding photographs in my main Chronological Photos file that belong in other files, such as the Photos By Others file. I just moved three sets of photographs that I was given by another parent when we did the Faces of Chastain quilt project in 2007. Today I still remember that they were taken by Susan, but who knows how long I would have remembered. It is so much easier to go through hundreds, nay thousands, of photographs in digital form than as prints, or negatives. I know this from the organizational project I am helping my mother with.

I am learning more about how to use Adobe Lightroom’s organizational tools, including search functions and collections. The fun part of doing this is I am seeing lots and lots of photographs. I took these two photographs in October and November 2011. (They aren’t my kids and they’ve grown up a lot since then.)

Here’s my favorite of the photographs we took while we were doing video. This is a garden snail I found under the leaf litter in my butterfly garden. It was just after cold weather had zapped my busy lizzies (impatiens) and the snails were all tucked in around the slimy stems.

Today I want to take video of a wolfsnail settled into a cool spot (on a brick). I filled a plastic container with bricks and I am hoping it will find a cool brick the best surface to settle onto. We’ll see.

You can see from the above photograph that I have decided I should be watermarking the photographs I post on the blog. Adobe Lightroom makes it very easy to watermark photographs during the Export process. One of my goals this coming year is to take more advantage of the organizational tools in Lightroom. As you might imagine from the number of photographs I share on the blog, we take and store a ton of photographs. We need to do a better job of clearing off the ones we’ll never use. I am going back through about 6 years worth of images stored on my external hard drive array and deleting anything that is clearly unusable (out of focus, awful exposure, etc.) As I do this, I am tagging the photographs with names, events, etc. Ultimately I hope it will make it easier to find photographs.

I’m planning to share some of the photographs I uncover as I go through.

I made this collage after taking a bunch of pictures of my trees with yellow leaves. However, I think I like the photographs as stand-alones better. What do you think?

It had been a while since I posted a collage and I had forgotten how to do it in Adobe Lightroom. So I watched this tutorial again. The photograph of the leaf on the bottom left was my attempt to take a photograph of a leaf that had been eaten by something — maybe snails. At top left, a cicada. Top right, amaryllis. Bottom right, mayhaw.

Now that we’re well into the digital photography revolution, I am curious about how you folks use your digital images. I have gotten out of the habit of printing very much. I post a lot to the blog. I create photographs for magazines and books. I post to facebook. I create homemade greeting cards. Once a year, Richard and I get calendars printed — our annual scrapbook. How do you use your digital images?