Rob Sylvan

I can’t hardly believe it, but I’m about a week away from my dream photography trip! One week in Alaska teaching Lightroom and photographing wildlife and amazing landscapes! We’ll be based out of Anchorage, but will day trip to Redoubt Bay, Brooks Falls, and Whittier. I’ll also have a day to myself where I hope to rent a car and drive down the Kenai. One of the great things about a trip is getting ready for that trip!This will be the furthest I’ve taken so much gear, and it’s quite a challenge to pare down to just what I think I will need. One bit of gear I’m most excited to bring with me is my GPS. My plan is to embed the GPS coordinates from each day’s shoot into my photos, import them into Lightroom, and then upload them in a Lightroom gallery I modified to turn the GPS data into links back to GoogleMaps.Here’s what is required:

1. GPS device that produces a tracklog. 
2. Software to embed the GPS data into each photo’s metadata (I’m using ImageIngester).
3. Lightroom.

Here’s a sample gallery.

Since I am eating, sleeping and drinking Lightroom these days I’ve decided to migrate all my Lightroom related content to a new domain:

Lightroomers.com

In the course of my duties as NAPP’s Lightroom Help Desk Specialist, writing my Under the Loupe column for Photoshop User and writing my first Lightroom book (Lightroom For Dummies) I’ve got a lot of Lightroom information to share. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think.

I really enjoy spending time around the house and in the yard. One of the biggest reasons I moved to the Northeast was because of the full-on change of seasons effect. Each season is so markedly different from the next. Each with its own delights and nuances. So many photographic opportunities await and the scenery is always changing.

With the 1.3 update for Lightroom came the welcome integration of Airtight’s AutoViewer, PostcardViewer, and SimpleViewer galleries. So, here are some postcards from my own backyard across the changing seasons.

Well the color has past, but I did want to share my favorite image from this season. I thought it was one of the most colorful foliage seasons we’ve had in years.This photo was taken a couple miles up the road at a waterfall I cross every day. It was a quiet foggy morning, perfect for flowing water shot.

Except, it isn’t actually one shot, but rather 5 different shots. Each with a different part of the image in focus, and then all combined using a program called Helicon Focus. By combining 5 different shots into one the entire image is in focus from foreground to background.I’ve made 16×20 prints of this image on canvas and it really is quite stunning to see so much detail throughout the image.Here’s how I did it.First, you’ve got to get the shots. I was standing in the middle of the moving water, so tripod, cable release and mirror lockup we’re all used to keep the camera as steady as possible for the series. Camera was in Manual so that I could keep the same exposure through out (1 sec at f/22). I also used a polarizer filter to reduce the reflections on the water.After importing the images into Lightroom I brought the 5 photos I wanted to use into Develop. I used the Auto Sync function to process this series:

• select multiple images, hold Ctrl/Command and Sync button becomes Auto Sync, click Auto Sync
• set white balance using White Balance Selector tool (click a light gray where the RGB values are in the 60-70% range)
• tweak Exposure,Recovery and Blacks as needed
• (optional) give it a little punch with Clarity and Vibrance

To make it a more seamless transition to Helicon I placed a shortcut to Helicon in Lightroom’s Export Action folder, so that once the images exported Helicon would launch and the images would be ready for the next phase.

My “Under the Loupe” tutorial on using an export action to create a custom watermark for the web galleries is finally out in Photoshop User magazine (Sept 07, pg 84). Here’s the nutshell version:

1. Create watermark action in Photoshop
2. Turn action into a droplet and save in Lightroom’s Export Actions folder
3. Configure Lightroom’s Auto Import function so that images saved from the droplet are automatically imported
4. Select images in Lightroom that you want to watermark, click Export and select your droplet as the “After Export” action
5. Bring all the auto imported watermarked images into the web gallery
6. Upload to your web space

Pick up the September 2007 issue of Photoshop User magazine for the detailed steps!

UPDATE: You should also check out an alternative method I find even better! See how I watermark photos in Lightroom 2 on my Lightroomers blog.