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…)

That is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to wrangle the proprietary formats of your camera manufacturer, or to take arms against a sea of sidecar files, and by opposing, end them…

But enough pseudo-Shakespeare for one post.

There has been some chatter on the Interwebs lately concerning the DNG format: there are quality and archival concerns, whether it’s worth converting one’s entire library to the format, what the benefits might be, and whether one ought to care. Today, I weigh in. For what it’s worth.

Coincidentally, I’ve used the same post title as Matt Kloskowski did in his take on the subject on Lightroom Killer Tips. Matt didn’t add a pseudo-Hamlet line, though, so I feel like I’ve done the headline proud.

After the break, a complete rundown on DNG; trust me, it’s going to be technical and editorial. (more…)

Adobe has finally released the first upgrade package for Photoshop Lightroom, which brings us to version 1.1. I say “finally” because this upgrade introduces at least one feature that we hoped against hope would be in the first release, the ability to merge libraries, among other enhancements.

First, if you have Lightroom and it hasn’t already popped up and told you to download the upgrade, you should seriously click over there and do that. (more…)

If you are serious about photography, you should answer this question very carefully: Is eight bits of color depth enough? Today I will uncover some truths about bit depth; explain what it means, demonstrate what it can do for you, and answer the question that gets so many photographers hot under the collar: 8-bit or 16-bit?

It’s never as simple as it sounds. (more…)

In the last chapter of my Automated Workflow series, I showed you how to use some neat scripting tricks to apply watermarks to your photos automatically. In this chapter, I’m going to talk about naming and organizing photos and show you how to set up some scripts to make things easier for you.

You have a bunch of pretty photos; shouldn’t they have pretty names? (more…)