A question professional photographers hear constantly.
A quick answer is that if I didn’t use any program to adjust a photograph, then how would it transfer from the camera – magic wand?

The reality is that pros now shoot in raw format, which is a digital negative.
Do some research and see how many of the great photographs of our time, shot on film, were ‘adjusted’ in the dark room.
Using chemicals, the experts in the darkroom could enhance the image to suit their vision.
The choice of film and film speed used in the camera produced different results too.
An example – look in Photoshop for ‘dodge and burn’ – the name comes from darkroom techniques.

So what if you shoot with an automatic setting, saving as a jpg?
Well – you’ve just given the camera manufacturer the gig to interpret the photographic scene, make adjustments, and throw away much of the data to compress the file.
Your negative just got trashed. Jpg is what we call a ‘lossy format’. That term says it all.

There are many processes that professional photographers perform, or pay other professionals for.
These include colour correction, and blemish removal.
Colour correction example – remove the yellow tinge that an old fashioned light has cast on your lovely white gown.
Blemish removal – well, we can remove EVERY blemish if you wish to look like a CGI model.
Or just a little to smooth your skin, same as a little makeup touchup.
Not honest – if you really want honesty, go and throw out all your makeup, perfume, hair colour etc etc

Please remember that professional photography is not ‘hit and miss’.
We’ve spent many years honing our craft and deserve to be paid fairly for our art as well as our skills.

While I’m on my soapbox – if your camera is set on ‘auto’, don’t call yourself a professional.

Importing your user templates from Lightroom 2 beta to the full version.

Lightroom2 includes some awesome flash gallery templates. When I was trialling the Lightroom 2 beta version, I created some fantastic web galleries and saved their settings for later editing/adding etc. You can view one here. BUT, my beta version expired and I was busy with Indesign work, so I didn’t purchase the full version for a few weeks.

Imagine my annoyance when I opened my shiny new Lightroom 2 and my User Templates were GONE…

Typical geek, I searched for a solution online – no luck. So I tried to find my own solution.
I found where Lightroom stores the user templates and had a peek, and voila, my creations were there.
So, I went back to Lightroom and created a new user template. Like magic, all of my templates appeared, listed with the new one.

YAY!