Photo Club

Last August, Adobe released the second incarnation of their photography workflow product Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to rave reviews. As is to be expected, new editions of companion Lightroom books are also coming to market to provide educational assistance to learning Lightroom. Scott Kelby's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book For Digital Photographers, along with being one of the best, is also one of the first out of the chutes.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, while it certainly addresses the new features of Lightroom 2, also guides you through the existing features that have not changed. This version is 456 pages in length (40 more pages of material) and contains 14 chapters (3 additional chapters)

Chapter 1, "Importing," devotes it's time to showing you how to get your photos into Lightroom. The improvement I see in this chapter is that not only are you shown how to get them in, there is more devotion to figuring out where to store your files, how to set up your folder organization, shooting tethered, as well as discussing topics like the use of the Adobe DNG file format advantage. Chapter 2, "Library," focuses on organizing your photographs. Here the author looks at using Collections, Quick Collections, adding Keywords, working with Metadata, and working with multiple catalogs. This chapter is more focused on the library and some of the content from the previous edition was reorganized and moved to the next chapter.

Chapter 3, "Customizing," looks at how to set up Lightroom 2 to fit your work style. Here you will work with setting up two monitors, adding a logo to your interface, choosing what the Filmstrip will display, and learning to work with panels in a faster and much easier method. Chapter 4, "Editing Essentials," gets into the basics of developing your photos. In this chapter you will see how to set the white balance, add more punch to the color of your images, adjust the tone, hue, and color of your photos, as well learning techniques such as vignetting, getting that gritty look, and using AutoSync to fix a bunch of photos live while editing just one.

Chapter 5, "Local Adjustments," moves beyond basics to editing specific parts of your image. This includes Dodging and Burning, working with the Adjustment Brush, retouching portraits, and learning how to fix skies. Chapter 6, "Problem Photos," will show you how to correct problems after you have taken the image. Here you will work with cropping, reducing noise, removing red-eye, fixing backlight photos, sharpening, and fixing chromatic aberrations.

Chapter 7, "Exporting Images," shows you how to save your images as JPEG's, how to email photos from Lightroom, using the export plug-ins to auto upload to sharing sites like Flicker, and how to export your original RAW photo. Chapter 8, "Jumping to Photoshop," examines how to move between Lightroom and Photoshop. This includes how to get there and back again, how to add Photoshop Automation to your workflow, stitching panoramas by using Photoshop, and working with High Dynamic Range images in Photoshop.

Chapter 9, "Gorgeous B&W," begins by showing how to determine if a photo would look good in Black and White. Then you will see how to do it yourself, how to tweak individual areas, how to add a split tone, and how to create a duo tone image. Chapter 10, "Slideshow," begins with a basic slide show and quickly moves to customizing your show, adding music, picking preferences, and finally how to email the show.

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onOne Software have released over 100 free customized presets for Adobe Camera RAW 4.1. Created by Photoshop Guru and Instructor Jack Davis, the presets are designed to help ACR users quickly and efficiently process their RAW digital camera files. onOne Software’s customized presets for Adobe Camera RAW 4.1 are available for download now.

onOne Software Press Release

Visit onOne Software at Photoshop World Booth #515

onOne Software Announces Availability of More Than 100 Free PhotoPresets for AdobeВ® Camera RAW

Free presets created by Photoshop Guru and Instructor Jack Davis

Las Vegas, NV – September 6, 2007 – onOne Software, Inc., announces today the availability of over 100 free customized presets for Adobe Camera RAW 4.1 (ACR) created by Photoshop Guru and Instructor Jack Davis for onOne Software. Just like the 85 presets previously released by onOne Software for Adobe PhotoshopВ® Lightroomв„ў, these new Adobe Camera RAW presets are designed to help ACR users quickly and efficiently process their RAW digital camera files.

“We are pleased to offer this collection of easy-to-use presets for Adobe Camera RAW users in conjunction with Jack Davis,” said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software. “We’ve received hundreds of emails from users of Adobe Camera RAW asking us to make the same Photoshop Lightroom presets available for them. Thanks to Jack, not only do we have the same presets but there are some additional ones as well that are sure to enhance their production workflow.”

About PhotoPresets for Adobe Camera RAW
Jack Davis is a Photoshop educator, designer, photographer and author of the award-winning and best-selling series The Photoshop Wow! Books. This groundbreaking book was the second book ever written for Adobe Photoshop users and has over a million and a half copies in print worldwide in 12 different languages. Jack has spent over 20 years perfecting and streamlining his Photoshop technique and workflow and these presets are just an example of the work Jack has done.

The new ACR Presets are organized in a way that most users approach the development process. First White Balance, then Tone Control (including over 20 options for fine tuning the customization of setting the Black and White points), Vibrance, Custom Hue/Saturation/Luminosity adjustments, Black & White conversion, Enhancing – which includes Split Toning, Vignetting and Antiquing; and finally Sharpening.

Just as with the previously available onOne Software Lightroom presets, when the user comes up with a combination that they like, they can fine tune it themselves and save it off as their own preset for future use, synchronize the adjustments to other images within ACR, or copy and paste the develop settings right from within Adobe Bridge to as many images as desired – without even opening Adobe Camera RAW again.

onOne Software’s customized presets for Adobe Camera RAW 4.1 are available for download at http://www.ononesoftware.com/ACR .

About onOne Software
onOne Software develops time-saving software solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers. onOne Software solutions have been created to help photographers spend more time behind the camera taking pictures instead of the computer workstation. Such solutions include a wide range of easy-to-use plug-ins for AdobeВ® PhotoshopВ®, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Lightroom.

onOne Software delivers the highest quality software products to users by working with a broad range of industry experts and continue to develop in-house technologies for the photographic industry on both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Founded in 2005, onOne Software is a privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. For additional information, visit http://www.ononesoftware.com or call 1-888-968-1468.

With the release of DxO Optics Pro v4.5, DxO Labs became the first company to have a photographic software application that builds a common work flow with Adobe Lightroom. Pioneers in establishing compatibility with Adobe technologies, they found out early that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom would be an important platform for photographers and are now taking advantage of it.

So just what is DxO Optics Pro? According to DxO Labs, it is "The Next generation automatic image enhancement." It can perform image corrections to your photos without human intervention; but once you have the skills you can take control. In fact they have three different levels; Auto, which automatically adjusts your images, Guided, which takes you by the hand and lets you choose which corrections to implement, or Expert in which you handle everything.

So what kind of corrections does DxO Optics Pro do? First it will eliminate distortion, vignetting and lens softness. It does this by requiring you to enter in the kind of camera and lenses that you are using. In fact you should check out which cameras and lenses that are supported by which version before purchasing the product.

Second, it will remove camera noise and chromatic aberration; that purple fringing that is sometimes seen on photographs, especially when enlarged. Third, it fixes exposure and contrast problems without degrading the image. It does this by using local correction techniques. That is each area of the image is treated separately so that the image is fixed where the image needs to be fixed. A lot of other products try fixing the whole image as one. DxO Optics Pro does it without seams or halos.

Fourth it has Advance color control and adjustment. It does this by incorporating all new color functions that include Color Rendition Profiles through Color Modes and DxO Multi-Point Color Balance to give you more flexibility and control. Color Rendition Profiles let you switch from one camera body to another as well as between film looks. It even allows you to achieve color fidelity when developing RAW files. Multi-Point Color Balance allows you to exploit the full range of available color space for RAW or JPEG files. As seen in the picture below, you can see the before and after image side by side to compare.

Fifth, DxO Optics Pro v4.5 gives you the ability to correct perspective using the Auto-Crop feature. This is a keystoning correction feature that fixes a perspective problem when a picture is shot; usually when shooting a building up at an angle, the top of the picture appears wider than the bottom. Previously this could only be corrected by having a specialized "shift" lens or other technical camera.

Sixth, it allows you to make the best optical, lighting and noise corrections on RAW images including a tight integration with RAW applications that support the DNG format. There are some cameras that this RAW engine support is not available for. Please check with the DxO Labs website for current information on product support.

Finally the seventh major feature is Highlight recovery. This happens when one or more of the color channels are maxed out. If only one of the channels is clipped, DxO's Highlight Recovery can correct this when working with the RAW image.

Ok, this is what you got if you bought version 4 of DxO Optics Pro. Version 4.5 has been just released and what new features do you get with it. You get integration with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This version has an exclusive plug-in that you can send your Lightroom images to DxO Optics Pro for processing and once processed they can be sent back to Lightroom. This can be done from either product.

Next there is the Flickr plug-in that will allow you to send your DxO Optics Pro processed images direct to a Flickr account. Then there is the Auto-Crop tool that can automatically crop a batch of images that have been corrected for horizon alignment or perspective. There is also the fact that this version is 25% or more faster than before, it is a pretty ambitious upgrade.

There are things that I haven't covered like the fact that DxO Optics Pro also has the ability to build projects and organize your photos. You can work with images as a project in which you can prioritize your photos by giving them star rankings. You can stack related images together for processing. You can also remove and rotate your images as well. This would be handy if you did not have Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or similar product to handle these tasks. It could then be as simple as pressing Process.

One point to make is that with using DxO Optics Pro, you need to begin with original camera files. If you do a bunch of editing of files; especially if it affects the EXIF data, DxO Optics Pro may not be able to process the file properly.

This program works so well because the people at DxO Labs test every camera/lens combination to make sure that it is accurate. They measure and test for each camera and lens that the product supports so that the software can apply the corrections as seamlessly as possible.

There are three versions of DxO Optics Pro; Starter, Standard and Elite. The Starter version does not include the DxO Raw Engine and supports only non-DSLR, high end digital cameras and lists for $79 USD. The Standard version supports all of the Starter level features along with the Raw Engine as well as amateur and expert amateur DSLRs and their lenses and lists for $159 USD. Elite supports the Standard level features as well as the high-end professional DSLRs and their lenses and lists for $299 USD. All can be purchased from DxO Labs Website.

If you take your photography seriously and you want a professional image correction product that will analyze your images and apply corrections; whether manually or automatically, then DxO Optics Pro will make a fine addition to your tool chest.