Single-Serving Photo

In my workshops I teach people how to organize their photos, both the physical files on disk as well as their Photoshop Lightroom catalogs. Although I’ve been teaching these classes for years, I realized that I’ve never once written about it.

Well, that’s coming to an end.

What you’re about to read is a totally inclusive, top-to-bottom, front-to-back workflow for organizing, sorting, and managing your digital photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Similar techniques will, I’m sure, apply to Apple Aperture, though all keyboard shortcuts and terminology will be Lightroom-specific.

For the record, I use Lightroom on a Mac and chose it because of Adobe’s openness to beta testing and feedback from the photography community, which I believe has made Lightroom the best tool for the job. Let’s get to it. (more…)

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway? (more…)

No, no, not you. Other digital artists, like those guys who spend ten days recalibrating all of their equipment before developing each photograph. I hope you don’t do that.

What I mean by “functionally retarded” is, ironically, that these artists are smart—very smart. Genius level, in some cases. However, their intelligence draws them into an irrational attention to detail and measurement, which incurs a logarithmic increase in effort for each fractional gain in image quality.

As a digital artist, you are faced with an ever-expanding array of tools that can be brought to bear on your work. The mere existence of such tools is an invitation, to some, to spend the rest of their lives tweaking and re-developing a single image, printing it on every possible paper, using every possible ink combination, surface treatment, and mounting option. This is not what I would call art, it is completionism, pure and simple. (more…)