timeimmortal

Adobe’s top-rate RAW workflow and editing software just got even better.

The list of new features is pretty substantial, so let it suffice to say that this new iteration of Lightroom is a truly awesome photographer’s tool, and will probably be sufficient for 95%+ of the photo editing I will do in the foreseeable future.

If you’ve been using Lightroom 1, O Reader, I whole-heartedly suggest upgrading. It’s worth it.

Yet another picture from Grace’s grandparents’ yard. I wasn’t outside for all that long when I went picture-taking the first day we were there, but in that time I managed to grab several shots I’m fairly pleased with. Here’s another of them.

The only negative I really find in this image is that it once again underscores just how desperately I need to get my hands on a graduated neutral density filter — the sky behind the trees is, unfortunately, rather washed out. On the other hand, Lightroom 2 did an exceptional job of reducing the chromatic aberration along the highlight edges, and highlight recovery managed to bring some additional fine detail out of the wash.

This birdbath was situated in the (unused and somewhat grown-in) front yard of the house, and was flanked by several tall trees which wouldn’t surprise if they turned out to be a century old (if not older). Actually, the front yard was pretty dark overall (cast into shadow by said trees), and I found that I had to dial up the ISO a fair bit to get steady shots.

Edit-wise, apart from what I mentioned above, I applied the calibration/Punch preset that I favour, and also switched from ACR 3.1 to ACR 4.4 (ACR stands for Adobe Camera Raw, the technology Adobe applications use to interpret RAW-format photographs). A few shadow adjustments brought out some nice contrast in the shot, and a bit of noise reduction smoothed out the grain from the higher ISO setting.

I’m a huge fan of Adobe’s Lightroom RAW processing software, and use it for post-processing on almost every image I take. It’s a highly useful artistic utility, and provides powerful, and generally flexible, tools for turning an image into something stunning.

And it looks like it’s about to get even better.

There is a public beta available for download, O Reader, which comes with a 30-day trial period. Unless you’ve already bought the original version of Lightroom — your serial number will enable the beta to be used for as long as the beta testing period lasts.

I didn’t know this:

In the grand scheme of human history, February 19th may not go down as a momentous occasion, but it’s recently come to light that at least in the world of digital imaging, today signifies a more important date than most anybody realized. And that folks, is the delicious irony.

Just too cool, given how vital a tool Lightroom has become for me.

First snow of the year. Well, okay, not strictly true (also see here). Let’s call it the first snow of the approaching winter season instead, which would be the most accurate term for it, I think.

Where was this taken?

I remember a time when I was surprised by snow in October — I think I was in third grade at the time, in fact. Of course, the opposite has since become true; now I get surprised when there isn’t snow to be seen by Halloween.

It took me a lot of time in Adobe Lightroom to get the colours in this shot to normalize, actually. The streetlights produce an amazingly harsh light, and compensating for the white balance (colour temperature) of the shot typically produces an unacceptable green (or possibly magenta) tint on everything. At that point, one has to tweak the levels and saturations of individual spectral components. In this case, I had to diminish the magenta and cyan levels quite drastically.