Stimulating Pixels

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about getting back into weddings again. This is a topic I flip-flop on a lot. I won’t be able to really do anything about it till we get past the new year due to the amount of stuff going on at work. After that though, I think I’m going to take a run at it again.

The digital thing is a big factor and another is Adobe lightroom. After using it a little, I think it’s a great way to run the preliminary wedding edit. The first wedding that I did all digital, I was using Photoshop and Bridge on my old ass computer and it took forever. While the process itself is decently time consuming, the real issue I had was the amount of time that I was waiting on the computer. I’ll get around to building a new computer before too long. If I haven’t done it before my next wedding, I’ll definitely do it at that point just to make sure I can get thru the edits in a reasonable time.

Anyway, about the business cards. I went to a Halloween party last night as Peter Parker. The reason for picking that character was so that I could fit my camera in as part of the costume. Did the same thing last year when I went as a Playboy photographer. It’s great because for a while no ones sure if you are really taking photos or if you are just pretending as part of the costume. After it became fairly obvious that I really was shooting, I talked to two couples about shooting their weddings and a couple other folks about some photography in general. All of them, of course, asked for cards. So, I guess it’s time to get some made up.

I’ve been batching up some photos to get ready to post and was using Adobe Lightroom to resize them down to the proper dimensions. Surprisingly, Lightroom isn’t actually very good at that. Even with all the sharpening turned off, I kept getting halos around areas with high contrast. I couldn’t figure out what was going on because if I export the image full size form Lightroom and then do the reduction in Photoshop, it looks fine. I’ve done some digging around and according to this pote it appears, this is just the way Lightroom does it, and there is no override.

Here’s hoping they work on this to make it better. As a commenter mentions, Lightroom is supposed to reduce the number of steps in the workflow.

I’m still looking for a soft focus effect in photoshop that I like. The latest one that I’m working with that I quite pleased with so far is to run a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 9.0 pixels on a full size image from a 5D then fade it out to 45%. The effect reminds me a lot of my old glass Nikon soft focus 1 filter that was a favorite of mine.