Technique/Workflow

If you’re a user of Lightroom, you’re probably aware that there are—confusingly—two products called Lightroom: That said, just because there are two different Lightrooms, it doesn’t mean that you can’t configure them to play somewhat-nicely with each other. The solution for this is Lightroom’s sync capabilities. Lightroom supports sync between both applications, with some caveats. In this post, I’ll try to explain and demystify the workings of sync as it’s an oft-asked question on various forums online. The key things to remember are listed below (for simplicity, I will refer to Lightroom Classic...

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  • January 20, 2023

In my last post, wherein I outlined how I added a link to each photo’s location on Google Maps, I mentioned that I thought I’d done a writeup on how I geo-tag photos, but couldn’t find it. After extensive searching of the archives, I can confirm that I don’t seem to actually have ever written about my process. Today, I’ll rectify that oversight. Let’s take a look at the tools I use, then I’ll walk you through how it all comes together. First, we need a way to record a GPS log. Typically,...

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  • February 28, 2019

Using services like Pixsy, TinEye or Google Image Search (built into Chrome!) to find where your images are being used without your permission is a “fun” way to spend some time (and anger you at the same time!). But there’s a special kind of image thief that annoys me to no-end…the kind that hotlinks your site’s assets, relying on you to use your hosting bandwidth/data to serve your own stolen photo on their site. How to find these? One trick I use is to go to Google Image Search and use a search...

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  • November 30, 2016

Our Meetup.Com group, Dallas Photo Walk (a great photography group and if you’re in the Dallas area, we’d love to have you join), had a scavenger hunt photo walk in Downtown Plano, Texas, this morning. For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to log my photo explorations on my iPhone so that I can geotag my photos after importing to Lightroom. I plan on writing about this process in the next few days, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a map of today’s walk. Perhaps in the coming weeks, I’ll...

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  • March 29, 2014

So, I’ve been contemplating a buying a new lens, but I couldn’t decide on what focal length I needed.  Did I want 11-16? 24-70? 24-105? 100-400?  600? I could make arguments for any of these, but I was still indecisive.  So, I decided to see what focal lengths I have been shooting at to guide me.  And the best way to do that would be to get some statistical analysis going.  Luckily, this isn’t terribly difficult to do with the right tools. I use Adobe Lightroom as my image catalog/workflow manager and I...

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  • March 28, 2013

A while back, I posted this video to Youtube: Earlier tonight, a user on Reddit asked how to do this very thing for a TV production he was working on.  I obliged him by doing a quick write-up of the process; after which, I decided to share here as well: First off, equipment used: Canon 60D with Sigma 17-200 lens (Magic Lantern installed –http://www.magiclantern.fm/), Tripod, FCPX I used ML to shoot 216 photos using the intervalometer function. Since this was a “spur-of-the moment” idea I had, I didn’t really think things through and...

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  • October 24, 2012

A lot of people are confused when it comes to RAW vs. JPG, so I just wanted to show you a quick before/after of what kind of dynamic range you can get out of RAW. The before is what it looked like out of the camera, while the after is with the exposure boosted. And while I’d never publish the “after” without some serious post-processing to clean up the banding and noise, you can clearly see that an amazing amount of detail and color information is hidden away in the dark areas of...

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  • March 6, 2012

Sometimes (by which I mean, honestly, “a lot of times”), I second-guess the photo I’ve chosen for a particular day on the photoblog.  I usually post the next day’s photo the night before, queuing up several days if I’m going to be busy or out of town, choosing a photo that I think–at the time–has interesting composition and subject matter and looks great.  But then, sometime the next day or week or even  month–I’ll look at the photo and be like “what the hell was I thinking?”.  Ninety-nine percent of the time I...

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  • August 15, 2011