Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Walk my Time Line in LightRoom

 Hi everyone.   I thought I would put down the steps I am NOW taking from image to the final spot the images live.  Its like my timeline for processing.

 I am not shooting RAW.  I updated my LR so it knew my camera, uploaded test images and it took forever, honestly I can not tell much difference between my large format and raw so I went back to what I am comfie with.
Last month I was asked for a couple photos that had my watermark on it and I needed to remove that.  No big deal but would have been better if I had two copies, one with my watermark and one without in a larger size.   Now I am re thinking what I have been doing and how I save my work.

The steps I am now taking might be useful to you if you are stuck in my rut.  Geee, it might still be a rut in the future, but for now its better than what I did before.  Here goes:

* take my photos and import into LR
*review what I want to keep and get rid of and delete the unwanted photos.
*review the saved images, mark a couple I want to work on 
*develop one image and pop it over to Elements for more edits if needed
* Once finished in Elements I do a  "save" for LR which ends up as a psd 
*I now go back into LR to export to a folder on my external storage!   
*Now I can choose to export a huge file like 4MP as a .jpg to any folder I want with a name!
*I can also export another file as an email size into another folder for sharing in places like the web and Flicker.
*leave my watermark off unless I need it, as the small file sizes are not worth stealing.

So what I have created right now are two folders, one that has LARGE files and one folder that has the smaller files for sharing.  I have done this because the LARGE photos are ones that are for sales.  And of course inside that I have catagory folders like Flowers or Birds.  
I hope that these steps might help some of you crate a visual walk through your work with LR and Elements.  

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Celebrating and Victory Dance

 Life can be so strange at times, just when I think I have nothing to share that is exciting or new, I go ahead and put it out there and Pizzaz...something amazing happens.  My images get noticed, get chosen and become part of a bigger picture. 

Now you might wonder what I think of when I go out with my camera but on this day we went out with family on vacation to this great stretch of beach, I knew I was looking for birds so I took my lens that would work best.

I shot so many images that looked the same, similar, color, attitudes and once home the big process began to widdled down to just a few.  Choosing just one or two out of hundreds to share.  Big job.  Flicker noticed, and I hope the world does too.   The big thing I find most interesting in photography is that what you might consider sorta random, might not be random in another persons eyes.  

Keep shooting, sharing and enjoying life through your camera lens.