Lightroom 5: Upright

Upright is an semi-automatied push-button solution to get rid of leveling and perspective convergence problems in your photos. It’s located in the Develop Module >  Lens Corrections> Basic

• Enable Profile Correction and Remove Chromatic Abberation to make Upright work better
• Auto: applies a balanced level, aspect ratio, and perspective correction. Lines may not be perfectly vertical or horizontal, but it looks more natural.
• Level: Enable level correction only.
• Vertical: Enable level and vertical perspective correction only.
• Full: Enable full level, horizontal and vertical perspective corrections.

Synchronizing Upright Settings between multiple photos

• Upright Mode: Applies Upright to each photo individually. Each photo is evaluated independently.
• Upright Transforms: Applies the same Upright transformations to all the photos. Good for HDR or time lapse sequences.

Flash (Photography) Speeds and how they affect the shot

Here is a few articles that show how studio flashes and speedlites differ in speed. The setup is to capture and freeze the motion of a drop of milk dropping.

• Speed of flash units for high speed flash photography http://www.scantips.com/speed.html
• Why Studio Flash and Speedlights are different Speeds. http://www.scantips.com/speed2.html
• Discharge Curves of Electronic Flash at Different Power Settings. http://www.chem.helsinki.fi/~toomas/photo/flash-discharge/regular.html

It’s definitely a good read. I can’t remember all the details of how tings work, but basically, lower power flash = faster light

Lenses and the Effect of Changing to a 1.6 Crop Factor

Reddit User GeneralSarsby created this diagram to show the effect of lenses and the effects of changing to a 1.6x crop sensor. Nice!

 

Create a 360° Image Sequence for Digital Publishing

Click to see the car rotate!

One of the features of Adobe’s Digital Publishing System is that you can create an image sequence overlay through the new overlay panel. With this interaction, you can scrub back and forth through a sequence of images with a swipe of your finger. The sequence of images can be anything, but one popular implementation is to use it as a 360° product viewer. Let’s do this!

Some of the samples I’ve seen uses 3D rendering software to come up with the individual images. Since I’m not apt at 3D rendering, I’ll photograph my product.

Materials

To photograph your 360 image sequence I used the following:

• A cheap plastic turn table.
• A circle cutout with a mark every 10 degrees.
  I made my in Illustrator, but you can download a copy 10degree_circle.
  There is a start/stop marker. and a faint cross in the center to help you center it on the turn table.
• Camera with Manual settings.
• Tripod
• Shutter Release

Shooting the Images

• You can see my setup here.
• I set my camera to full manual mode, with a locked shutter speed and aperture, the exposure will be the same every time. This will help in post processing. I also switched off auto focus after I found a good focal point.
• Before shooting, I rotate the whole object around while looking through the camera viewfinder to make sure the object doesn’t drift off center.
• I line up my start/stop marker on my circle to a pen, on the side away from the main light source. I don’t want to block the light each time I have to rotate the object.
• A shutter release is nice because I don’t really need to, or want to, be in front of the camera at this point. I am off to the side, rotating and lining up my circle for the next shot.

Post Processing

• After shooting, I open up all the images in Bridge and run a batch rename (for DPS)
• Open everything up in Photoshop, crop and clean up your images. use only global adjustments so you can replicate it for each and every photo. Record an action to make this part easier.
• Load the images into a stack in Bridge. You can “play” a Bridge stack as if it’s a movie. This will act as a preview of the rotation.

Make an Animated Gif

For this post, I made the sequence into an animated gif. Here’s how

• Load all the images into one Photoshop file by using File > scripts > load files into stack…
• Then, in the animation panel, choose Make Frames from Layers
• Down sample the image so it’s small. (i made my 300 pixels wide)
• Save as a Gif using the Save for web and devices dialog box

Now you have an image sequence ready to load into DPS!

Open Jpgs/Raw files in Photoshop as Smart Objects

So, yes, you can embed an entire camera raw into Photoshop as a smart object. There are a couple of ways to do this. This is the easiest one, though a bit unintuitive.

1. Oopen your file in camera raw
2. In the camera raw dialog box, click on the blue underlined text at the bottom center of the screen to access the Workflow Options dialog box.
3. From the Workflow Options dialog box, you can choose to open in Photoshop As Smart Object.

Reciprocity Law (Photography)

The Reciprocity Law explains how exposures work in photography. Basically, the Total Exposure is determined by the intensity of the light times the duration of the light. So, if you want to change your camera settings and get the same exposure, whatever you move in one direction for one setting (longer shutter speed), you have to move the other setting in the opposite direction (smaller aperature).

How Light Enters a Camera and Exits Out to Your Eye

Camera basics here…

All the f-Stops of the Rainbow

Red = Full Stops
Green = Half Stops
Blue = Third Stops
Orange = Quarter Stops.

Wikipedia says that it’s okay that sometimes the numbers are the same in the different systems.

Remove Missing Images from Adobe Lightroom, Deleting Images from Adobe Lightroom

I didn’t realize how difficult it would be for Lightroom to delete 15 thousand photos from the catalog and from my hard drive by itself till it died on me (not enough memory). Instead, I just deleted the images from the drive manually, and then had Lightroom remove the images from the catalog it can no longer find.

• Delete the images on your hard drive. Lightroom should see them as missing now.
• In the Library Module, right click on the Folder where your images are located. Collections won’t work for this. Select “Synchronize Folder”
• In the pop up dialog box, one of the options is to “Remove Missing Photos from Catalog”.
• Awesome.

Graph the Your Lenses For Your Camera Kit!

I made a chart where you can plug in your lens numbers, and Excel will generate a chart to plot out your zoom and aperture on an XY Graph. This is helpful when building your dream camera kit (or, in my case, day dreaming about it) or deciding what gear to bring for a shoot. You can jazz it up yourself to be even more useful if you’d like. File can be downloaded here.

Plug in your lens name and aperture range (widest aperture at shortest and longest zoom) and zoom range for each lens. If it’s a prime lens, just put in one set numbers. Then, put in your crop multiplation factor factor.