Learning Lightroom 5 with George

 Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Learning Lightroom 5 with George
Jul 182013
 

I’m getting the hang of Lightroom 5 now thanks to George Jardine’s excellent new video series on mastering Lightroom. It’s really worth checking out if you want to get the most out of your photos, or if you’re like me, and stare at a so-so photo for 10 minutes, trying to figure out how to tease out the little bits that will make it better.

Sometimes a photo just isn’t salvageable, and that’s a shame. But George’s videos bring more photos into range of “fixable” for me.

One of the tools he really focuses on is the tone curve, more so than the other exposure controls in Lightroom 5. The nice thing about the Tone Curve is that it will “unbunch” bunched-up tones, bringing out the contrast. It does so without smushing up other tones as much as the sliders do. At least that’s my experience so far. I need more practice with the tone curve to make it work really well, though.

I picked up his Library videos a while back, and those were really useful, too. I have all of my photos cataloged and stored in folders where I can find everything fairly quickly, all on a small portable USB-3 hard drive I move from computer to computer. That way I don’t have to worry about messing up my catalog file. I just back that up to a removable HDD on a regular basis.

I recommend all of his Lightroom videos, they’re worth the money and very informative.

The money you’ll save on never buying presets again will more than cover the cost. Really, why would anyone use presets? No two photos are alike, so why would you treat all of your photos as if they’re all the same? I don’t understand the thinking.

My main problem now is plowing through the 10,000+ photos in my library backlog. I love to shoot photos, but edit them? Not so much. Picking just a few is always so agonizing. I love them all, even the really bad ones.

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