Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

More Flexible Lightroom to Photoshop editing

If you work in Lightroom, at some stage you’ll probably want to take an image to Photoshop for some additional processing. How you send it to Photoshop will have an impact on the options available to you. One option in Lightroom is to take an image to Photoshop as a Smart Object and that has some advantages. Here’s how to do it and why you might consider using this feature.

Open as a Smart Object

In Lightroom, when you’ve finished processing the image and you’re ready to head to Photoshop, right click the image and choose Edit in > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop (this is available if you’re using Photoshop CS5, CS4 or CS3 – Smart Objects weren’t available in earlier versions of Photoshop).

Photoshop will open with your image open on the screen. If you look at the Layers palette you’ll see the layer has an icon in the bottom right corner of its thumbnail. This tells you the image is a Smart Object.

If you want to make further adjustments to the image you don’t have to start over. Instead, double click the image thumbnail in the Layers palette and the image will open in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). The processing options in ACR are the same as you have in Lightroom so you can change how the image is processed.

When you are done making changes, click Ok. The changes to the image will appear in the Smart Object back in Photoshop.

Double processing

The obvious advantage of opening an image in Photoshop as a Smart Object is being able to make changes to the image even after it has been brought into Photoshop and even after you have made changes to it – such as adding an Adjustment Layer, for example.

In addition you can use this feature to process an image in more than one way and to blend the two versions together. To do this, right click on the smart object layer and choose New Smart Object via Copy. This creates a copy of the smart object layer.

Double click on the thumbnail of this second Smart Object to open it in ACR and now process it a second time to bring out detail in another part of the image. In this case I adjusted to get a better sky. When you’re done click Ok to return to Photoshop.

The changes have been applied to only the second copy of the image and not the first so there is a different version of the image in each layer.

To blend the two layers together add a Layer Mask to the topmost layer – to do this, select the layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon at the foot of the Layers palette. Target the mask by clicking its thumbnail in the Layers palette and paint on the image with black to bring back detail in the layer below.

If any of the layers still needs fine tuning, return it to ACR to fix it.

Because the two versions of the image are on separate layers you can blend those two layers together using a blend mode or adjust the Opacity of the top layer.

When you are done, click Save to save the file, close it and return to Lightroom. Your edited version of the image will be saved in the same location as the original image and will appear in Lightroom too.

If you want to edit this image again at a later date and have the Smart Objects still in place, when you right click the image and choose Edit In > Adobe Photoshop CS5 (or CS4 or CS3), choose Edit Original.

Taking your images to Photoshop as Smart Objects gives you additional tools for working with your images in Photoshop – it’s a handy technique to add to your Lightroom/Photoshop toolkit.

Labels: Layers, Lightroom, Photoshop, round trip to Photoshop, Smart Object

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

5 Gotchas in the Lightroom Print Module

When you’re setting up single or multiple image printing in the Lightroom Print module here are some things to be aware of:

Nonexistent Drag and drop

You can drag and drop pictures onto a print template in Lightroom in some circumstances but not in others. This can be confusing but there is some logic behind it.

When you select a Lightroom template from the Template Browser, make sure to open the Layout Style panel on the right at the same time. Templates can be one of three layout styles and each operates differently. Knowing what style a template is will help you understand its behavior.

If it is a Single Image/Contact Sheet template then you must select images on the filmstrip to add them to the contact sheet and they appear in the layout in the order they appear in the filmstrip. You can’t drag and drop images from the filmstrip into a Single Image/Contact Sheet layout.

If the template is a Custom Package then you can drag and drop an image into any of the containers on the screen. You can also drag and drop an image into any position in the layout and it will sit on the screen even overlapping other images.

If a template is a Picture Package, then you can fill it by clicking an image in the filmstrip. A picture package prints multiple images on a single sheet of paper. If you select two images in the filmstrip, you’ll then have two pages in your picture package – one for each of the selected images. You can drag and drop an image into a Picture Package but when you do, you’ll create all sorts of issues. Not only will you add a new image to the layout page you are seeing on the screen but you’ll do the same for all the pages in the current layout. It’s generally best not to drag and drop images into an already tightly designed picture package layout.

Understand Border behavior

If you have a Photo Border enabled for a either a Custom Package or a Picture Package then the width of the border will make the image smaller. The color of the border is the color of the page background if you have a page background selected. If not, it will be white. If you set an Inner Stroke then it too will reduce the size of the image but it can be set to your choice of color.

So, for example, if you want a black page background but a white border around your images, set the page background color to black and use the Inner Stroke rather than the Photo Border to apply the white border to the image.

Identity Plate Behavior

When you add an Identity Plate to a Custom Package it appears once on the page and you resize it to suit and place it where you want it to go. However, it only appears once in the layout so, if you add a second page to the print layout, the identity plate will appear only on the first page.

Alternatively you can add the identity plate to every image by selecting Render On Every Image. Now the identity plate will appear on each image rather than on each page but it will appear in the very middle of the image and you can’t move it.

So, if what you want is your name on each printout as an Identity Plate, create a Custom Package design with an Identity Plate but not set to render on every image. Make sure the identity plate is in the correct position and fill the page with images and print or save it. Then fill it again with a new set of images and output the result and repeat as required.

On the other hand, an Identity Plate added to a Single Image/Contact Sheet prints on every page of the document in the place you position it in.

Any size JPG output

You can print your layout to a JPG file that you can then upload to the web or send out for printing. To do this, from the Print Job panel, click the Print To: dropdown list and choose JPEG File.

Set the File Resolution and then the Custom File Dimensions for the page. Then, when you’re done assembling the images, click Print to File to print the layout to an image file rather than to a printer.

Crop your images

When you’re working with a Single Image/Contact Sheet, if the image is set to Zoom To Fill it will be made large enough to fill the container on the page. If the image height and width does not match the size of the container then part of the image will be removed. You can adjust the positioning of the image within the container by dragging on it with the mouse.

If you have a Picture Package or Custom Package selected you can move an image within its container also, but to do so you must hold the Ctrl key (Command) on the Mac.

The different behaviors of images within what appear to be similar layouts in Lightroom can be confusing but once you understand that different layout styles bring with them different key combinations and behaviors you’ll be on your way to creating great looking prints in Lightroom.

Labels: custom package, drag and drop, Lightroom, picture package, printing, problems, tips, tricks, troubleshooting

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

5 Top Tips for Lightroom Develop Presets

Develop Presets are powerful Lightroom tools. You can use them to quick start your editing in Lightroom and to apply creative fixes to your images. You can create your own presets and you can download them from the web. Here are my top five tips for harnessing the power of Develop Presets.

1 Create Disconnected Presets

Instead of creating a preset which, for example, applies a split toning effect as well as a vignette to an image, split this into two separate presets. Then you can use the split toning effect as well as the vignette if you want to do so but you also have the ability to apply one and not the other. If both effects are applied with one preset, you’ll have some work ahead of you to undo one of the effects. In addition when they are separate presets the vignette, for example, could be used on images where you would not consider also using the split toning effect.

2 Create Undo Presets

When you create a preset that adds, for example, grain or a vignette to your image, consider at the same time creating a preset that removes that effect. If you call the two presets the same name such as Grain_heavy and the delete preset Grain_heavy_del they will appear side by side in the list and it will be obvious that the second preset cancels out the effect of the first. Then, when you apply the preset and subsequently make other changes to the image you can easily remove the effect of the preset without having to wind back all the changes you’ve made.

3 Choose the Right Tools

I recently downloaded a great preset which applied a cool effect as well as a vignette. Unfortunately the designer applied the vignette using the Lens Vignetting tool in the Lens Correction panel. This isn’t a post crop vignette so, while the preset worked fine on some images it failed spectacularly on images which had been cropped. When you want to add a vignette, do this using the Effects panel’s Post Crop Vignetting options so your preset will work on any image cropped or not. Testing your presets with a range of images will tell you if they have problems that using a different solution may avoid.

4 Organizing Presets

If you’re creating a lot of presets or downloading a lot of presets from the web, it will help to organize them neatly. For this purpose, I like to create separate folders for preset sets that I download from the web. This allows me to open or close a folder of presets to display all its contents or shrink the list to show just the folder title. Be aware that the folder hierarchy for presets is very flat and you cannot create folders inside folders for example.

If you have a lot of your own presets consider grouping them in folders too – so you might have a folder of editing presets and then a second folder of more creative presets. You can drag and drop presets from one folder into another in the Develop module.

If you download or create presets and you know you will never use them, right click the preset and choose Delete to remove it from Lightroom and from your disk.

5 Apply them on Import

Here’s a good reason for ignoring Tip #1 (at least for now) and for creating a Develop Preset that applies all the changes you typically apply to your images. So, if you typically apply some extra Brightness, Clarity and Vibrance and some noise reduction to your images, make all these changes to an image and save them as a preset. Now, in the Import dialog’s Apply During Import panel you can choose this preset and have it applied automatically to all images as you import them.

Labels: develop preset, import preset, Lightroom, presets, saving, undo preset, updating

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 am1 Comment links to this post

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Lightroom – help my import dialog just shrunk!

I just got a help! email from a reader who lost her import dialog. It had shrunk to a small size and none of her regular options were available. She is using Lightroom 3 and this shrinking dialog is actually a feature – it’s just she wasn’t seeing it that way – and who can blame her?

If something happens to change your screen and you don’t know how to undo it all of a sudden a feature becomes a disaster. Here is what her screen looked like:

There is a small button in the bottom left of the Import dialog shown circled here and it switches you into this mode. All you need to do to get back to where you want to be is to click on it again and the import dialog goes back to its regular size.

When you know how, it really is a feature, until then… help! my Lightroom import dialog shrunk.

Labels: import dialog, Lightroom, lost, resize, shrunk

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:16 am1 Comment links to this post

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Blow it Up with Alien Skin Blow Up 3

I’ve never used an upsizing or enlarging program before. Instead, when I need to enlarge an image, I perform the age old trick of increasing an image’s size by 110 percent multiple times in Photoshop to enlarge it. It seems to do a reasonable job of the enlarging process.

However, recently I was offered Alien Skin’s Blow Up 3 to test – since the folks at Alien Skin make some really cool applications I thought I’d give Blow Up 3 a try. I actually had an image that needed of blowing up for a magazine article. The image I had was a totally cool image but from a very old camera phone so it was a tiny 479 x 640 pixels in size. Not only was it very small but it had some very obvious jpg artifacts so when I enlarged it 300 percent it showed not only those artifacts at an enlarged size (the result was horrible) but the image also showed some distinct pixelization.

This was a perfect image to try out with Blow Up 3 – if I succeeded with the task the image would be acceptable quality for the magazine, if not, I needed to find something else.

Alien Skin Blow Up 3 with Lightroom

I had already installed Alien Skin Blow Up 3 for Lightroom, so running it is as simple as right clicking the image in Lightroom and choosing and choose Edit In > Blow Up 3. You get a choice of opening the image from Lightroom either as a copy with Lightroom adjustments, you can edit a copy or edit the original. You just select the option to use and click Edit and it opens automatically in Blow Up 3.

Blow Up 3 really couldn’t be easier to use. In fact I was a little confused at first because I kept looking for more options where there really weren’t any. I selected the Before/After option at the foot of the main screen so I could see the before version on the left and the after version on the right. I wanted to see as I worked just how effective the program would be. I then selected the Crop & Resize option and set it to Percent. I selected 300 percent for width and height and a resolution of 300 pixels per inch.

With the Before/After view on the screen, it was clear that the result would be a significant improvement for this image. The settings you can choose from include grain and sharpening. I checked out the grain slider. For this image, if I didn’t add grain, the jpg artifacts were still very apparent and they really detracted from the image because they were so visible. I opted to add a lot of grain to the image so I set the value to around 30 to soften and blend the artifacts.

I also checked out the Sharpen Edges setting to see how that would affect the image. For this image, I really didn’t want a lot of sharpening so I opted to set it to 40. This gave me some sharpening around the edges such as in her eyes but not really obvious haloing which the higher values produce.

Then, it is as simple as clicking Ok to blow up the image and be taken back to Lightroom where the blownup version appears in the same folder as the original so I found it alongside the original in the filmstrip.

From its original size the image is now nearly 1500 x 1900 pixels in size well suited to being used in a magazine and way more pleasing to look at than it was originally – sans artifacts. If you need to enlarge images significantly this application has the goods.

Labels: Alien Skin blow up 3, blowup, enlarge, Lightroom, Photoshop, resize, upsize

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:56 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Lightroom: Add your IPTC metadata on Importing images

Most of us have heard of IPTC metadata but not everyone knows what it is, whether it is important to them or how to add it to their photos. In this post I’ll cover some of the basics of adding personal information about you as photographer as IPTC metadata to your images. I won’t be talking about image specific metadata such as keywording or captions – that’s a topic all of its own – this post is limited to things like your name, copyright status and so on – the type of information that doesn’t change from image to image.

What is all the fuss about?

The IPTC or International Press Telecommunications Council (www.iptc.org) develops industry standards for interchange of news data. It publishes standards for adding to a photograph certain data about who took it, what it is about and its copyright status among other things. This data is stored inside the image as IPTC Photo Metadata and it was originally developed for use by photojournalists. Nowadays many photographers add this to their images on a routine basis and many more probably would if they knew how to do it and why it is important to do so!

The primary reason to add personal details to your images is so that anyone locating that image somewhere on the web can determine who owns copyright in the image and what they can do with it. If the image is copyrighted the metadata can show this and give the finder the information they need to contact you if they would like to get permission to use your photo. Alternately if you prefer to apply a Creative Commons Licence to your work you would state this so that anyone can easily determine what they are licensed to do with the image. Without this data it could be difficult if not impossible for someone to locate the owner of an image. It is also one way to alert people to the fact that this image belongs to you.

Where does the information go?

The information added to the image is added inside the file – it doesn’t appear on the image itself so no one will notice any difference in the way the image looks. It is visible only by using a program which can read metadata. These days, most photo editing programs can do this – for example, the Metadata panel in the Library module in Lightroom shows the metadata in your images and it can also be used to add metadata to your images.

You can also add metadata to your images as you import them into Lightroom. The Apply During Import panel’s Metadata option not only lets you create a metadata preset but also to use it to add metadata to your images as you import them.

Add metadata on import

Before you can add metadata to your images it’s best to create a metadata preset with all the details that you need to apply to a typical image – this saves you having to type it afresh for each image. To create a preset, choose File > Import Photos and open the Apply During Import panel. From the Metadata drop down list choose New and type a name for your preset.

Completing the fields

Many of the fields in the panel are fields which relate to an individual image such as Label, Caption and Subject information. You won’t complete these fields in your preset – they’ll need to be added on an image by image basis as each image is usually different. The fields you can complete are in the IPTC Copyright and IPTC Creator Information sections.

Typically in the IPTC Copyright field you will type your copyright text – I type © 2011, Helen Bradley, All Rights Reserved. To get the copyright symbol hold Alt on the Windows keyboard and type out 0169 on the numbers keypad.

In the Copyright Status box choose Copyrighted.

In the Rights Usage Terms field you will explain how the image can be used – for example type no reproduction without prior permission.

Copyright Info URL is a field which is not recognized by a lot of other programs – you can complete it but you should be aware of this.

The IPTC Creator section is where you add your details including your name, address, email address, website and so on. If you have multiple email addresses or websites – separate them with commas.

Some other fields you may complete are in the IPTC Status and in the IPTC Extension Administrative sections and are Credit Line which shows how you should be credited when the image is used – for example Helen Bradley Photography.

In the Source field you can add your name as copyright holder.

In the Digital Source Field you would typically select Original digital capture of a real life scene for a photo taken with a digital camera.

Stripping metadata from an image

You should note that any field that has a checkmark to its right will be added to the image when you apply metadata to it.

For this reason, it’s important that you don’t check any field that is blank or that empty field will be added to the image overwriting any metadata that is already in the image in that particular field when applied.

That said, in some cases you may want to strip the IPTC metadata from an image. In this case you could create a preset that had nothing in it but every checkbox checked. This would then overwrite any corresponding data in those fields in the image’s metadata with ‘nothing’ effectively stripping that metadata from the image.

Save and apply a metadata preset

When you’ve finished creating your preset, click Create to create it. If you are editing a preset you will choose Update Preset <preset name> from the Preset dropdown list at the top of this dialog. Click Done to exit the dialog.

You can apply the metadata preset to images as you import them by making sure that the preset is selected in the Metadata box in the Apply During Import panel.

You can also apply a metadata preset that you’ve created to any image by viewing that image in the Library and from the Metadata panel select the preset to apply to the image. If you are in Grid view (press G) then you can select multiple images and apply metadata to them all at once.

More information

The topic of IPTC Metadata is big and understanding it can be very overwhelming. I’ve tried to give you a simple approach that will work for most amateur and hobbyist photographers in most cases.

There are some good resources online and some I like for their ability to explain what the fields mean include these pdfs:

http://www.iptc.org/std/Iptc4xmpCore/1.0/documentation/Iptc4xmpCore_1.0-doc-CpanelsUserGuide_13.pdf

This is a 22 page pdf that contains a lot of useful information on interpreting what the field names mean and what goes in them and has some examples.

http://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/IPTC-CS5-FileInfo-UserGuide_6.pdf

This 40 page pdf guide has a lot of information specific to Photoshop CS5 (and by extension is relevant to Lightroom users) and is more recent than the previous guide.

iptc metadata in lightroom 9 e1317684489705 Lightroom: Add your IPTC metadata on Importing images

http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/iptc_naa.html

This webpage has a set of sample IPTC fields in a table – scroll down to find them.

Labels: adding it to images, Adobe Photoshop, copyrighting your images, iptc, Lightroom, metadata, understanding iptc metadata fields

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:14 amNo Comments links to this post

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Lightroom toolbar techniques

If you’ve seen items come and go in your Lightroom interface and if you’re confused about what exactly is happening chances are you hit a keyboard shortcut that displays or hides one of the interface features. When I was new to Lightroom it was the Toolbar – I could make disappear in a heartbeat – problem was it took a lot longer to work out what had gone and how to get it back.

As I soon learned, the toolbar can be hidden and displayed using the T shortcut or you can choose View > Toolbar. The toolbar is visible in Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web view – but here’s the catch – there is a separate toolbar for each module and hiding one doesn’t hide them all – likewise displaying a toolbar only does so for the current module not all of them.

That said, you’ll want to have the toolbar visible in most of the modules most of the time because it has some handy features that you will use regularly.

The toolbars in the Library and Develop modules are customizable – those in the other modules are fixed in what they display. To add to the general confusion, the toolbar you see in Grid view and the one you see in Loupe view in the Library module are both toggled on and off as if they were the same toolbar but they are separately customizable so you can select which tools appear in which view and they can look very different in each view as shown in these images of firstly Loupe view then Grid view:

To customize a toolbar click the down pointing arrow at its far right and select the options to display and hide. When you are working on a laptop, for example, and where screen real estate is a valuable commodity, you’ll need to be judicious about what tools are visible and which are not.

One option on a laptop that I like to disable is the rotation tool in Grid view in the Library. The reason is that I can set the thumbnails in Grid view so they show rotation icons so I don’t need the additional tool on the toolbar. However, in Loupe view this rotation tool doesn’t appear so I add it to the toolbar.

If you often resize your thumbnails then including the Thumbnail Size slider is a good idea – if you need the space it takes up for other tools then hide it and learn the = and – shortcut keys for managing the thumbnail size instead.

One gotcha that is a guaranteed disaster in the making for new Lightroom users is the apparent duplication of rating, color and flags on the Toolbar and on the bar across the top of the Filmstrip. These are NOT duplicates and instead they are each very different options. The tools on the Toolbar are used to apply a flag, color and rating to images in the Grid or Loupe views. Those above the filmstrip are filters that you use to filter your images based on the flags, colors and ratings you have applied to them. It is important to understand the difference. If you get into trouble and some of your images disappear, selecting Filters Off from the dropdown list above the filmstrip will display all your images again.

Labels: customise, customize, display toolbar, filmstrip, Lightroom, show toolbar, toolbar, toolbar missing

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Secrets of the Lightroom toolbar

That said, you’ll want to have the toolbar visible in most of the modules most of the time because it has some handy features that you will use regularly.

One gotcha that is a guaranteed disaster in the making for new Lightroom users is the apparent duplication of rating, color and flags on the Toolbar and on the bar across the top of the Filmstrip. These are NOT duplicates and instead they are each very different options. The tools on the Toolbar are used to apply a flag, color and rating to images in the Grid or Loupe views. Those above the filmstrip are filters that you use to filter your images based on the flags, colors and ratings you have applied to them. It is important to understand the difference. If you get into trouble and some of your images disappear, selecting Filters Off from the drop-down list above the filmstrip will display all your images again.

Labels: customise, customize, Develop, Library, Lightroom, print, slideshow, toolbar, Web

Categories:Uncategorized

posted by Helen Bradley @ 5:36 amNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

Copyright watermark your images in Lightroom 3

In Lightroom 3 Adobe built watermarking into the Export module (and it is available in the Print, Slideshow and Web modules as well).

To watermark your images, select one or more images in the Library module, right click and choose Export > Export. In addition to choosing options such as the export location, file name and file type and sizing an image you will find the new watermarking option near the bottom of the dialog.

Enable the Watermark checkbox and from the dropdown list, select Edit Watermarks to display a watermark dialog. You can apply a text or a graphic watermark. For a text watermark, click the Text option button, then from the Text Options select your Font and Style.

Alignment controls the text alignment within the small box that it is placed inside so you will use this option if you have multiple lines of text. Color is the text color which you can select from a color picker – unfortunately there is no contrasting shadow added so you have to choose a text color that works on most images.

The Opacity setting adjusts the transparency of the copyright text and you can adjust this downwards to blend the copyright text in with the underlying image a little. Select Proportional size, Fit or Fill as desired. For my watermark I selected Proportional which is typically the option you will want to use.

The Anchor options allow you to place the copyright text within one of nine areas on the screen varying from top/left through center and to bottom/left.

Once you’ve selected the Anchor, adjust the Inset values to bring the text in from the vertical and horizontal margins so that it doesn’t sit at the very edge of the image.

You can rotate the text by clicking one of the Rotate options.

On the left of the dialog under your image is a text box with the word “copyright” in it. You can replace this with your own text – to create the copyright symbol type (C).

When you’re done, click Save and type a name to save the copyright data as a preset so you can use it again in the Export or any other module that supports watermarking of images.

If you are editing an existing watermark, click the down-pointing arrow in the top left of the dialog where it will show (edited) after the preset name and choose Update Preset or Save Current Settings as a New Preset depending on what you want to do.

Instead of a text watermark, you can use an image you have created. To do this, enable the Image option at the top of the dialog and click to select the image to use.

A watermark saved as a JPG image will not be transparent so the watermark will appear as a solid rectangle on your image, as shown here.

If you want to have a transparent background around your watermark, create the watermark as a PNG image with transparency in Photoshop or another editor, and import that as your watermark.

When you export your images, your watermark will be automatically added to them.

These same watermark options are also available, for example, in the Flickr Publish Services so you can automatically watermark images as you upload them to your Flickr account.

Labels: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Lightroom, Lightroom 3, watermark, watermarking

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 10:19 am1 Comment links to this post

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Create the Orton effect in Lightroom

The Orton effect is a process named after photographer Michael Orton. The process is a darkroom one where you take two negatives, both overexposed – one properly focused and one slightly out of focus. Sandwiching these together and processing them gives you an image with a slightly surreal look to it.

In Photoshop you can create a faux Orton look by duplicating your image’s background layer, set the layer’s blend mode to Screen and flatten the image. Duplicate this layer and set the blend mode to Multiply. Add a medium size radius Gaussian Blur to the topmost layer and, if desired, lighten the image and add some grain to it to give it a classic Orton look. I have a detailed blog post showing how to do this step by step here.

I’ve seen a few people who have said that you can’t replicate this effect in Lightroom because you don’t have layers in Lightroom. However, I’ve developed a workaround solution that gives a comparable result which I really like.

The advantage of this solution is that it can be saved as a Lightroom preset so you can apply it to other images at any time in future.

The process involves starting out with a well-adjusted image so process it as you would any image.

If desired make a virtual copy of the image by right clicking it and choose Create Virtual Copy.

Add a graduated filter to the image. Start the filter just inside the bottom edge of the image and drag down until you are just over the edge. What you want is for the filter to be anchored to the top edge of the image and to extend all the way across the image at a full intensity.

Set the Graduated filter so all values are zero except Clarity = -100 and Sharpness = -45. The combination of negative clarity and sharpness softens the image. Click the Done button under the image.

Now add a second Graduated filter over the top of the other one. Apply these settings to the image. Exposure +0.15, Brightness +10, Contrast = +80, Saturation +20, Clarity -100.

You can vary any of the settings on this last Graduated filter if desired to improve the image. What you’re looking for is an image with an ethereal glow.

It will help you to get this effect if you boost the Blacks in the image in the Basic panel.

Finish off the effect by opening the Effects panel and add some grain to the image.

To save this as a preset, click the plus symbol opposite the Presets panel on the left – give the preset a name and disable all checkboxes and then select only the Grain and Graduated Filters checkboxes. If you want to add the increased Black to the preset, click the Black Clipping checkbox too. When you’re done, click Create to create the preset.

You can now apply this preset to another image. First make sure to properly expose the image and then, open the Presets panel and click your preset to apply it to your image.

You may need to tweak some of the settings for the image as a result of doing this but you should have an image that has a glow effect to it and with a good approximation of the classic Orton look.

Of course, you can achieve the same effect in Adobe Camera Raw.

If you want to avoid the work and use my preset instead – here’s a link to download my free Orton Lightroom preset.

Labels: downoad, faux darkroom effects in Lightroom, free preset, Lightroom, Orton Effect

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:08 am3 Comments links to this post

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Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Open as a Smart Object

Double processing

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Nonexistent Drag and drop

Understand Border behavior

Identity Plate Behavior

Any size JPG output

Crop your images

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

1 Create Disconnected Presets

2 Create Undo Presets

3 Choose the Right Tools

4 Organizing Presets

5 Apply them on Import

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Alien Skin Blow Up 3 with Lightroom

Friday, November 18th, 2011

What is all the fuss about?

Where does the information go?

Add metadata on import

Completing the fields

Stripping metadata from an image

Save and apply a metadata preset

More information

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011