Happy Mothers Day to all those Moms out there, especially the one my little girl calls Mommy! We went out for dinner then to a nice little frozen yogurt joint we just found, after that we walked around to find a few places to take some pictures, I like the way these two came out. All processed with Nikon NX2, exported to Tiffs, then into Adobe Lightroom to add one of my presets and up-loaded to Flickr using Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent LR to Flickr Plug-in.
Me and two of my friends competed in this years Hard Court Bike Polo Tournament down in Tempe. It was a realty blast and way different then the grass bike polo I am used to playing. The guys who put in on did an amazing job and teams from around the country showed up to play, 17 in all. I took the camera out on Sunday and tried to get some shots in between games, I also grabbed some audio for a slide show and I’m working on that too. Despite the rainy start we had some awesome competition!
All images taken with the Nikon D200with the 70-300 and the 16-85, processed in Lightroom.
WOW, after watching a few of the Apple Aperture movies about the new Aperture 3, I am totally sold! Especially the ability to create multimedia content with-in Aperture, it handles both sound and video now! Now I am sure it’s not set up to do all the high-end stuff you could do with Final Cut but how cool is that!!! I have been a user of Lightroom since it’s early beta days, I love Lightroom but Aperture simply takes the lead with this new version. Check out the movies and see for yourself.
Apple – Aperture – In Action – Jim Richardson
Whats new in Adobe Lightroom 3. Digital Imaging Evangelist Julieanne Kost goes over the new features in Lightroom 3. You can find all three parts here:
http://tv.adobe.com/show/what-s-new-in-lightroom-3-beta/
And here’s the first part:
Lightroom Beta 3 is out!
I really enjoy using Lightroom 2, but recently I have been using it primarily for images that I have exported to targa after developing the NEFs with Nikons Capture NX2. I just find I get much better results using Capture and it’s way faster on my old 2003 MAC. In order to handle this sort of workflow I have two directories set up, identical directory and sub-directory structure but one fo strictly for NEFs which is where NX2 and Nikon View look, and the other is strictly for Lightroom 2 to use. I never liked having all those sidecar files Lightroom writes out so I avoid this by never importing NEFs into it, just exported TGAs and JPGs. I know it’s a bit more work but I feel its worth it. All though when I come home from a family vacation with 2000 JPGs they go right into LR and stay there!
Adobe Labs – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
OK, if you read my earlier post about Capture NX2, how much I enjoy using it, and the long dark and lonely journey it took to get there, you’d know I promised a second part. Well, this is it! As I mentioned in the earlier post I really like how NX2 processes my NEFs, and in my opinion it does a better job then LR2. Well, that could all change with the news of specific Nikon and Canon profiles you can load into LR2. These are profiles created to match the camera manufactures processing and output of their proprietary RAW files!!! Now, what exactly does this all mean, well, camera manufactures generally keep their “secret sauce” recipe for their RAW files quite, and 3rd party RAW processors like Adobe have to reverse engineer how they think these files should be processed, which they do a pretty darn good job of I must say! However, it’s not the “secret sauce”, and if these camera manufactures are anything like my Aunt Millie, they will take their recipes to the grave with them…and some how know and haunt your dreams when you try and dig her up to get said recipes but that’s another story… Anyway, I guess what I am saying here, is this may be the closest thing to the camera manufactures processing you can with-in LR2 right from he start, which in my opinion, is pretty darn exciting!
Now all of this excitement started when I check a site I go to often which is Photoshop Lightroom™ KILLER TIPS, with Matt Kloskowski, and the other day he posted this;
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/video-camera-profiles-for-lightroom/
Then, a few days later he posted this;
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/presets-camera-profile-presets/
Matt lists them on his site but you can also get the profiles from the Adobe Labs site here;
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_cameraprofiles
So go to his site, watch the awesome video, download the awesome profiles, and make awesome pictures! And remember what Kung Fu Panda says, “There is no charge for AWESOMENESS!”
*NOTE: There are actually two different things to download here, the actual profiles and Matts pre-sets. He created the presets so you don’t have to navigate to the Camera Profile section in the develop module every time, and this way you can apply then to and entire set of photos or on import, brilliant, thanks Matt!!!
My Instapaper articles External Comments
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
