It’s Gavin Seim here and I’m in on site in New Orleans for the next three days at Imaging USA 2012. I’ll be checking out the latest in the photography world and imaging education.
Also if you’re at the conference, shout out. Send an email to prophotoshow@gmail.com to get on the list because we’re working on planning a photo walk into the French Quarter tomorrow night. Good times coming up.
If your at the con and trying to find me you’re also welcome to email or text me, 509-951-4860.
by Gavin Seim: With the new LR4 beta now out, I’ve of course been poking around inside. One great feature for us that capture video, is the ability to play and do light edits via Quick Develop and build video clips into our LR workflow.
But there’s something more that you may have noticed. Initially just basic settings are shown available for video, as we can see on the left. Exposure, contrast and the like. Others get greyed out. Also when you attempt to go into the Develop module for more advanced edits, it simply says “Video is not supported in Develop.”
And yet, it seems we can use some Develop settings via presets. I decided to just run a few from Seim Effects presets and see what happened. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the dialog below and that while not all, many of the develop settings are actually available using presets. Settings I was able to apply and export on my clip.
Needless to say I was pretty excited. I didn’t see this shown at the Adobe press conference a few weeks back and as far as I know Adobe has announced no official develop module support for video. But it stands to reason it may be coming.
The Technique for right now is to make Develop presets on a still frame and then apply those settings to video. We can tweak color channels, curves and the like and really gain a great deal of control over video clips in very short order. It’s not perfect: There’s still some settings missing that would be valuable, but we’re off to a good start.
I’m rather excited at the workflow potential. And that I’ll be able to offer presets that can be used for video editing. We’ll see what happens. I plan to experiment further and post some free video presets soon on my blog.. G
LR tells me that not all settings from the preset are being used and lists what's available before applying the effect. Still a pretty effective lineup of tools.Copy Settings showed all available tools currently available on video. Not all, but all these, plus B&W adjustments (not shown in this dialogue) are some of the most important ones. With these we can do some serious effects.
by Gavin Seim: I received an email from a PPS listener Jonathan Bielaski of Light Imaging in Canada. He just started a great personal project called For the Love of It where he’s finding interesting people and doing environmental portraits that tell something about them. I wanted to share because he’s doing it quire well.
Another twist is that he’s staying away from heavy Photoshop work and working with tools we had from the darkroom days like burn and dodge. Way to go Jonathan. As you clearly know, good light and the basic tools work like nothing else.
It’s a neat project and they’re making some beautiful portraits from it. Jonathan says they plan to have a gallery showing of the results in the future. I think it would make and amazing series of wall portraits to really showcase these people. That’s the beauty of an environmental portrait. It’s a portrait and a piece of art and those are the sort of items that become heirlooms.
It’s not that personalized portraits are new, but Jonathan is getting out and taking on something unique. Trying to achieve a quality that separates him from the crowd. That’s Raising the Bar and since I talk about doing that so much. I thought it deserved sharing…. Gav
The new Silver Shadows 2, black and white toolkit for Lightroom is now available from Seim Effects Photo Tools. SS2 is a complete black and white preset system that’s been refined and rebuilt from the ground up for stunning silver conversions without leaving LR.
V2 contains over 100 refined easy-to-use black-and-white presets that address the subtleties of digital silver conversion, photographers can easily mix and match, customize and tweak to create artisan quality black-and-white images without leaving Lightroom. I uses the Seim Effects workflow structure that permits both large batches and single images to be processed quickly and accurately without leaving Lightroom.
The cost is Silver shadows is just just over $50 for the entire collection. You can find out more on the Seim Effects website. Silver Shadows 2.
by Gavin Seim: Panasonic seems to be making a statement with this ad they released earlier this year before infamous Nikon Page Fail. I’m seeing a pattern in the industry. The Lumix spot insults skilled photographers everywhere & mislead consumers into thinking skill and experience is irreverent as long a you have a good camera.
Perhaps it’s meant to be funny, perhaps it’s creatively done, but if you understand photography and how much work it took you to master it, I think you’ll know how insulting this this really is. But it’s not just this ad. It’s the whole mindset and it’s part of the attitude that is breaking down this industry. Watch it, then lets talk.
The photography world is inundated with the idea that experience is not necessary and it’s breaking it down. This promotes that and that promotes the idea that a photograph is of no value. Anyone can do it.
It’s not true. A great photographer cannot be clueless about how they made a photo or how their equipment works. That’s a snapshooter. Understanding shutter speed, aperture and beyond are the most basic essentials to consistent quality. People who don’t understand the basics often think it’s not critical because of marketing like this. They are wrong.
Photographers that have spent years and even decades mastering their craft are shown in this ad as irreverent. As if their saying “Those skills don’t matter as long as you own a good camera.
The man here is portrayed as doing a showcase to his peers. He’s the expert. Yet in the real world you won’t get accolades by snapping photos that are only as good as your camera can make them. Anyone can do that.
Great is no longer great when everyone else is doing it. A camera can have good quality, but without skill you just have quality snapshots. That’s what everyone else, including many so called pro’s, are making today.
So this is targeted consumers. What’s the big deal right? Wrong. This is also targeting would be photographer, but that aside this mindset is a big problem right now and it’s really hurting this industry. People are believing this stuff, and those that do are being mislead into thinking that a camera makes a photograph and not a photographer. Some have told me their are great photographers who have no idea how they make their images. I have yet to have one shown to me.
I know this is extreme, but imagine an ad for a scalpel that says “it’s so good, anyone can do surgery”. Imagine a world where everyone claimed to be a surgeon, airline pilot, etc and you did not even know how to find one that was actually experienced. Photographic skills have not really changed over the past 150 years. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you won’t make great images. You’ll just be making images like the droves other consumers and even pros who have bought into the idea that cool gear makes you good. The problem is, it’s not great when everyone else is doing it. That defies the meaning of the word. We need to Raise the Bar.
It’s Gavin Seim here and I’m in on site in New Orleans for the next three days at Imaging USA 2012. I’ll be checking out the latest in the photography world and imaging education.
