+X-equals.com + Digest – FREE Sneak Peek

+X-equals.com + Digest – FREE Sneak Peek: "

We’ve spent the better half of the last month teasing you into signing up for the X-Equals + Digest.

For those of you that haven’t yet signed up, you’re in luck, because today we’re releasing the first issue here as well so you can see EXACTLY how we’re mixing things up! And remember, there’s a free Lightroom Preset included in the deal (scroll down for the goods) so everyone wins!

If you like what you see, here’s the link to signup. All we ask for is an email address … we promise to take good care of of you!

|Brandon Oelling

x=photography+consulting+media – image+workflow+technology+business

+X-equals.com + Digest – September 1st, 2009

Welcome!

It feels like we’ve been at it forever but here we are – the inaugural issue of the X-Equals+Digest!

We’re so excited to bring you this first issue and we’ve filled it with a cool freebie and nuggets of knowledge for you to take away and use in your own workflows and creative projects.

If you’ve got a friend or colleague that missed out on this issue … feel free to froward them this email but be sure to have them signup too.

So let’s get down to the good stuff … read on!

|Brandon Oelling

x=photography+consulting – image+workflow+technology+business

Linkage

Killer content from across the web that not only makes our life easier … but yours too.

• Infrared Photography Explained


• Back up your Mac: Time Machine and Alternatives


• 20 Tools For The Freelance Designer On A Shoestring Budget


• How To Get The Most Out Of Your Camera Battery


• DNG, RAW and Jpeg – What I Use and Why


• Fashionphotography Blog – Shot of the Week


• Creating diptychs in Lightroom


• Dripbook delivers a Facebook auto-posting application


• Negotiation Toolbox: 5 Must-Use Tips for Negotiating with Clients


• How to Format an External Hard Drive

Correcting Color Cast with Lightroom

Michael W. Gray – LifeInDigitalFilm

Color casting is, quite possibly, one of the most frustrating issues you can have with an image. Regardless of how the image was captured, digitally or on film, you can easily run into issues with your lighting, leading to some major color issues.

Even when utilizing RAW, you will occasionally run into color casts that are not easily resolved with a simple click of Lightroom’s White Balance Selector. That’s when you need to dig a bit deeper to perfect you image.

Between this and my next article, I am going to touch on some basics of color correction. This time I am going to focus on Lightroom, which handles most color issues great, but has a rather limited toolset that falls apart when you encounter more complex color issues.

Next time I will look at a few of the multitude of options made available to you in Photoshop, where you should be able to fix most any image that you couldn’t quite manage with Lightroom.

Before we move further, we need to consider the quality of the images we are about to correct. To get the best results in Lightroom you should be working with camera RAW files or high-bit depth TIFF files. If you drop a bunch of Jpegs off your point and shoot, Lightroom will be of limited value when it comes to correcting color issues.

When you need to fix a Jpeg, save yourself the headaches and just head over to Photoshop. But with RAW files and high quality TIFF files Lightroom should be adequate to rectify most color casts. It is a case of choosing the right tool for the job.

So let’s take a look at color corrections in Lightroom. Unlike Photoshop, there is a limited amount of tools available to you in Lightroom to solve color issues, but limited does not mean incapable. The most versatile tools for fixing color issues in Lightroom are the White Balance settings. This should be obvious, as the white balance directly affects the overall color of the photo and is often the root cause of color casts.

If you were planning ahead before a photo session, you should remember to grab a gray card or color-checker to shoot any time you have a change in lighting. Snap one of the cards in a few frames and you can set the white balance to the gray of the cards and copy the white balance settings to all the other images in the set. Ninety percent of you color issues are easily solved in this manner. However you don’t always have a gray card with you and sometimes photo opportunities pop up in the worst of lighting conditions.

Other times you are working on a scan of a film shot and you have to compete with the color rendition of that particular film stock. Either which way, there is no automatic solution for color issues in these situation.

Go ahead and open a photo that has a definite color cast. I chose a film scan with a definite blue color cast.

Head over to the Develop Module and select the White Balance selector.

Now, you want to scan the image with the selector, watching the preview in the upper left hand corner. Slowly move the selector tool across the image until the preview shows you a more acceptable color range for your image.

Keep in mind, you are not wanting to choose a normal white point, you are using the selector creatively to compensate for color issues, which was caused in this case was a badly expired film. Once you find a decent white balance to correct the color error, click to lock in the selection.

This will most likely not be perfect, but will present you with a suitable starting point for further correction.

As you can see, the image is definitely improved, but now has a noticeable yellow cast to it. This can be further treated by refining the Temp and Tint settings. I am going to back off the yellow some by moving the Temp slider left slightly toward blue. Then to bring some more yellow out, I am going to pull the Tint slider toward green slightly.

These two minor adjustments helped correct the image quite a bit.

So far, everything has been done in the White Balance tools. Unfortunately, Lightroom does not count the blacks in the image into this equation as Levels in Photoshop does. So, to bring back some of the blacks, I increase the Blacks slider a bit. Give it just enough to bring some punch into the shadows.

Finally, give the image a hit of Clarity and the color cast correction is just about as good as you are going to get it in Lightroom.

Now consider the before and after image.

So that is the basic process for correcting color casts in Lightroom. I am going to be honest with you now. Lightroom can do an acceptable job at this for most images. However, you will run into images that Lightroom will not be able to correct. For these images you are going to need Photoshop.

Truth be told, Photoshop can usually outperform Lightroom when it comes to removing color casts. So next time we will look at the options that Photoshop provides you to correct color casts. Lightroom is pretty much limited to one basic method to remove color casts. There are countless ways to do so in Photoshop and we will look at a few in the next digest.

Cool Free Stuff

Michael W. Gray – LifeInDigitalFilm

Every issue of the X-Equals+Digest will include a new preset for your use and enjoyment. Today we present to you Stark Raging Black, a monochrome preset that really pushes contrast and boosts fine detail. This particular preset is based off the Kodak Panatomic-X preset from LifeInDigitalFilm, and was tuned to create darker richer with stark contrast.

The download consists of a zip file containing 3 Lightroom presets and 3 Adobe Camera RAW XMP presets. Each set contains the core preset, an auto preset and a curve preset. Here is the difference between the differing versions.

• Stark Raging Black – This is the core preset, which is the result of the preset creation process. The core preset adjusts most Lightroom settings like most presets you encounter.


• Stark Raging Black Auto – This is an Auto-toning version of the core preset. This preset allows Lightroom to automatically adjust the image’s basic tone.


• Stark Raging Black Curve – This preset alters your image the least, only applying the monochrome conversion, tone curve and adjusts Clarity. The Curve preset is also well suited to be used with the X-Equals Monochrome Toolkit.

You can keep all of them, or only the iteration you like best. Each version will give different results giving you a choice of image interpretation with a few clicks.

Here’s a Before/After sample of the Stark Raging Black core preset:

Photo © Brandon Oelling

Here are a few notes I made during development and testing to help you get the most out of this preset.

• This preset pushed up the Clarity considerably, if you find it to bee too much, try bringing it down 10-20 clicks.


• If you are needing more or less contrast in the image, try adjusting the tone curve before you apply basic contrast. Adjusting the tone curve tends to keep image quality better than cranking up contrast, which can cause some image artifacts, especially on hard edges between black and white.


• If you are using the core or auto version of the preset, it applies some aggressive sharpening with a heavy mask. Be aware and resharpen your image if you find it to be over sharp.


• If your original image contained a lot of light blues and after applying the preset you happen to find some artifacts in your processed image, try increasing the Aqua channel in the mixer. There is a pretty sharp adjustment of -50 set and some images do not handle this well. Usually increasing to about -40 will correct the artifacts without changing to overall tone too much.


• The tone curve is aggressive, lending towards the presets high contrast nature. If you blow out highlights, feel free to increase recovery to bring back some highlight detail.

Hopefully these tips get you started with the preset, these tips are simply items I noticed that you should be aware of if using this preset in a production environment.

Have fun!

Share your ideas with us!

We’re always looking for new and interesting topics to include in the X-Equals + Digest.

Let us know if there is a particular topic you’d like to know more about and we’ll bring it to life!

Thank You, Thank You, Thank … YOU!

We hope you enjoyed this first issue of the X-Equals + Digest. We pour our heart and souls into this and will continue to focus on delivering no-nonsense, cost-effective solutions for both up-and-coming and seasoned photography professionals.

Last but definitely not least, a very special thanks goes out to Mike Gray of LifeInDigitalFilm and Alex Wright at Dripbook for helping make this inaugural issue possible.

Dripbook offers powerful promotional tools to professional visual creatives worldwide. We make it easy to upload, organize, and present cleanly designed portfolios of your work that you can update anytime with no technical knowledge.

That’s it for Issue #1!

We hope you’ll come onboard … and in the interim, jump into the discussion and share your ideas!

|Brandon Oelling

x=photography+consulting – image+workflow+technology+business

+X-equals.com + Digest – FREE Sneak Peek

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