English readers: this blogpost announces my Dutch book on Lightroom 3

Vorige week konden jullie op deze blog de cover kiezen van mijn nieuwe boek over Lightroom 3, Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd. Jullie stemden massaal voor Cover 1, en ik ben dan ook  blij te kunnen zeggen dat de finale versie van het boek, met de cover die jullie gekozen hebben, vandaag naar de drukker gaat.
Er is door de uitgeverij, de redacteur, de vormgever en mezelf keihard aan gewerkt om er een boek van te maken, dat zowel voor beginnende als gevorderde gebruikers een ideale compagnon is voor het beste fotoworkflowpakket out there: Lightroom 3.
Hieronder een overzicht van de belangrijkste features van het boek. De belangrijkste nieuwigheden van Lightroom 3 zelf vindt u in de vorige blogpost.

1. Het boek is volledig up to date voor Lightroom versie 3.0, inclusief een grondige bespreking van Lens Corrections.
2. Geschikt voor zowel nieuwe gebruikers als upgraders: de handige kaderstukjes ‘Nieuw in Lightroom 3’ maken upgraders snel vertrouwd met nieuwe en gewijzigde features.
3. Maar liefst 47 praktijk-cases, gaande van hoe u uw foto’s best organiseert over hoe u sneller kunt werken tot en met het maken van wenskaarten in Lightrooms Print Module. Om de leesbaarheid te bevorderen, staan de praktijkgevallen voortaan op het einde van elk hoofdstuk.
4. Who says size doesn’t matter? Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd is 30% dikker dan zijn voorganger (voor dezelfde prijs!) en bevat nu nog meer tips, trucs en praktijkcases.
5. Een volledig hoofdstuk behandelt de relatie en samenwerking tussen Lightroom en Photoshop.
6. Lightroom als open systeem. In het boek bespreek ik niet enkel Lightroom zoals het ‘out of the box’ geleverd wordt, maar hecht ik aandacht aan interessante plugins en uitbreidingen die extern voor Lightroom ontwikkeld werden. Wist u dat u met de juiste plugin voor een habbekrats een volledig werkende website in Lightroom kunt maken? Of dat u foto’s automatisch van randen, kaders en andere info kunt voorzien? Het boek toont u de weg.
7. Geschikt voor gebruikers van de Nederlandse en de Engelse versie van Lightroom.
   De screenshots in het boek zijn van de Engelse versie, maar achterin het boek zit een woordenlijst Engels – Nederlands die alle termen netjes vertaalt.
8. Aandacht voor fotografie. Omdat het oog ook wat wil, is er extra aandacht besteed aan de vormgeving en de foto’s in het boek.

Het boek kost 29,90 €. U kunt het boek vanaf nu al bestellen via MoreThanWords.be. Tot eind juli bedragen de verzendingskosten binnen België slechts 2 € (5 € naar Nederland, andere landen op aanvraag). De eerste 100 voorbestellingen via deze blog ontvangen samen met het boek bovendien een gratis DVD met méér dan een uur Lightroom-training over de meest uiteenlopende onderwerpen.

Interesse? Voorbestellen kan via deze link of door een mail te sturen naar boek[@]lightroom[dot]be. U ontvangt dan een mail met de praktische bestel-info.

Beste bloglezers, jullie hebben massaal gestemd en de winnende foto heeft een verkiezingsscore neergezet waar de gemiddelde politieke partij op 13 juni alleen maar kan van dromen. Maar liefst 72,7 % koos voor…

Uit de inzendingen koos een onschuldige kinderhand (eigenlijk de functie ‘randbetween(x,y)’ in Excel) drie winnaars die elk het boek ‘Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd’ en het boek ‘Door de lens van professionele fotografen’ toegestuurd krijgen. De gelukkigen zijn:

• Niko D.
• Harry De Rooij
• Kris Jacobs

Proficiat! Voor degenen die nu niet wonnen: blijf de blog volgen! Misschien valt er binnenkort nog eens iets te winnen !

International readers: this Dutch blogpost allows my blog readers to choose the cover of my upcoming Lightroom book (in Dutch). Have a look at the English version of the poll.

Ondergetekende is ijverig aan het werken aan zijn nieuwe boek ‘Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd’. Voor de cover doen de uitgeverij en ikzelf graag een beroep op u. Geen gedoe met vakjury’s en publieksjury’s: vandaag bent u beide!

In tegenstelling tot al die televoting-toestanden, kost stemmen hier geen geld, integendeel: u kunt er één van de drie boekenpakketten (bestaande uit ‘Door de lens van Professionele Fotografen’ en ‘Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd’ ) mee winnen!

Laat ons weten welke cover u het meeste aanspreekt!

Klik hieronder op uw favoriete cover om uw mailprogramma te openen en klik gewoon op de send-knop. Werkt u met web-based email (G-mail, Hotmail, Yahoo, …), dan kunt u uw keuze bekend maken door ‘Cover 1’, ‘Cover 2’ of ‘Cover 3’ door te mailen naar cover[@]lightroom.be.

Verkiezingen… Waren ze maar altijd zo eenvoudig!

Alvast bedankt om deel te nemen,

Piet

P.S. U kunt stemmen tot en met maandag 31 mei. Op 1 juni kondigen we aan welke cover het meeste stemmen kreeg. Wanneer Lightroom 3 zelf uitkomt, dat weten alleen God en Adobe! De ongeduldigen kunnen alvast aan de slag met de tweede publieke beta van Lightroom 3.

Reglement:

• U mag slechts één keer stemmen.
• Stemmen kan tot en met maandag 31 mei.
• Door te stemmen maakt u automatisch kans om een van de boekenpakketten te winnen: u hoeft dus niet op de winnende cover gestemd te hebben.
• De winnaars en de winnende cover worden bekend gemaakt op deze blog op dinsdag 1 juni 2010.
• Prijzen zijn niet inruilbaar tegen geld en zullen aan de winnaars opgestuurd worden van zodra het boek ‘Lightroom 3 Ontmaskerd’ beschikbaar zal zijn.

The rest of  post will in Dutch as it announces the new dates for the Lightroom 3 Workshops. I’m also available for English Lightroom workshops & 1:1 training, in Belgium or abroad. Contact me if you’re interested.

Nu er een tweede publieke beta van Lightroom 3 aangekondigd is, mogen aangepaste workshops rond Lightroom 3 niet ontbreken. * Er is opnieuw de keuze tussen een ééndaagse en een tweedaagse workshop. Daarnaast is er ook een extra datum van de Masterclass rond digitale zwartwitconversie, ‘From Megapixel to Mono Print’ ingelast. De workshops gaan door in Gent. Wilt u met een aantal geïnteresseerden een workshop in uw buurt inrichten, contacteer ons dan. De tabel geeft u een overzicht van de volgende cursussen. Daaronder vindt u een gedetailleerde uitleg per cursus.

1) De ééndaagse Lightroom 3 Training

De volgende ééndaagse opleidingen gaan door op zaterdag 29 mei en maandag 31 mei in Gent: op één intensieve dag, van 9u tot 18u…

• maakt u kennis met de de vijf modules van Lightroom 3 en hun onderlinge samenwerking,
• leert u de mogelijkheden kennen om rechtstreeks vanaf uw Camera in Lightroom te fotograferen (Tethered Shooting)
• leert u hoe u foto’s bewerkt en naar Zwart-Wit omzet in Lightrooms Develop Module
• maakt u kennis met een aantal tijdsbesparende plug-ins
• leert u de samenwerkingsmogelijkheden tussen Lightroom en Photoshop kennen
• leert u hoe u Lightrooms Print Module kunt gebruiken om contactafdrukken, fine art prints, originele wenskaarten, bedankingskaarten of uitnodigingen te maken
• leert u hoe u zonder kennis van html of flash uw portfolio online kunt zetten via de Web Module
• maakt u kennis met de ongebreidelde mogelijkheden van de nieuwe ‘Publish Services’

De workshop kost 179 € inclusief BTW. Een broodjeslunch, cursusnota’s en zoveel Nespresso’s als u op kunt zijn inbegrepen. Het aantal deelnemers is beperkt tot 5 per sessie. Inschrijven kan via de link in de tabel hierboven. Uw plaats wordt dan gedurende één week gereserveerd, zodat u het bedrag kunt overmaken op rekening nummer 068-2474381-35 op naam van Piet Van den Eynde. Nog twijfels? U vindt hier enkele reacties van vorige deelnemers.

2) Tweedaagse Lightroom 3 Workshop

De training wordt in een uitgebreidere vorm ook gespreid over twee dagen aangeboden op maandag 7 en 14 juni (kostprijs: 349 € voor beide dagen). Het verschil is dat u op de tweedaagse training gebruik maakt van oefenbestanden, zodat u de zaken onmiddellijk in de vingers krijgt. Bovendien hebt u tijdens de week tussen beide trainingsdata de mogelijkheid om te oefenen, zodat u aan het begin van de tweede sessie uw vragen kunt stellen.

3) Masterclass Digitaal Zwartwit

‘Zwartwit is het nieuwe kleur’, wordt wel eens gezegd. In deze workshop maakt u kennis met oude en nieuwe technieken om tot indrukwekkende zwartwit-prints te komen in Lightroom en Photoshop. Meer over deze cursus vindt u op hier.

4) Privé & in-company training

U kunt ook op ons beroep doen voor privé –training (Lightroom volledig of specifieke deel-aspecten zoals Photoshop-integratie, inpassen van Lightroom in uw workflow, …) en op maat gemaakte in-company trainingen.  Voor meer informatie mailt u ons.

5) Nieuwe projecten

We zijn ook druk in de weer met het voorbereiden van nieuwe Lightroom workshops voor gevorderden en een paar andere Lightroom & Photoshop gerelateerde projecten. Wilt u automatisch verwittigd worden van nieuwe initiatieven, schrijf u dan in op de mailinglist. * P.S. De Lightroom workshops worden in het Nederlands gegeven aan de hand van de Engelse versie van Lightroom 3. Naargelang de beschikbaarheid, zal dat ofwel de tweede publieke beta, ofwel de finale versie van Lightroom 3 zijn.

I’ll be doing a couple of short (well, 45 minutes is short for me, anyway…) Dutch (or Flemish, I should say) Lightroom demoes at Professional Imaging in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands this Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

• Sunday, march 7th: 12h – 12h45
• Monday, march 8th: 12h – 12h45
• Monday, march 8th: 18h – 18h45
• Tuesday, march 9th: 12h – 12h45

There’s also a small exhibition of sixteen of my favourite Portraits Of Asia pictures that have been craftfully printed with a Durst Epsilon printer on Kodak paper by Fred Smit from Wiegers & Smit. Fred has almost 40 years of experience and it shows: the B&W prints are truly B&W and the amount of detail is just amazing.

On the picture at the top of this blogpost, it was the first time that I noticed that there was another car in the scene and that there’s a carpet standing about in the middle of nature. Only in Iran… Come and see them for yourself

When I’m not talking myself, you’ll find me listening to questions at the Adobe stand. And if all of those reasons are not good enough to motivate you to come: this year’s keynote speaker at Professional Imaging is the one and only Scott Kelby. Mister Photoshop himself! I wonder if I can get him to sign one of my books…

This picture  of a rickshaw driver in Fort Cochin, Kerala, India was converted to Black & White using Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software. I subsequently added the old-school film border (they’re sometimes referred to as ‘sloppy borders’) with Photoframe from OnOne Software. Of course, as I point out in my book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ (which, by the way, makes for a great New Year’s gift (as long as the one you’re giving it to speaks Dutch ), you could also use a scan of a sloppy border, and apply it in Lightroom as an Identity Plate in the Print Module. But that’s not the actual tip. The actual tip is about Lightroom’s filtering capabilities.

In Lightrooms Filter Bar, one of the metadata criteria you can filter on, is ‘Treatment’. That criterium can be ‘Color’ or ‘Grayscale’. Say you want to submit a picture to a B&W photo competition, and you want to use the Filter Bar to only show your Grayscale (btw, they’re called B&W as from Lightroom 3) pictures, you’d choose that option. However, if you look closely at the screenshot above, you’ll notice something wrong: there are at least two pictures that definetely are B&W, yet the Filter Bar doesn’t seem to find them. It categorizes them all as ‘Color’.

The reason is that the ‘Grayscale’ criterium only recognizes photos that have been converted to grayscale in Lightroom itself. If you use a plugin, even if you call it from Lightroom, as I did with Silver Efex Pro, the picture is not recognised as a B&W. Not even if you convert it to an 8 bit grayscale  image (Image > Mode > Grayscale) in Photoshop. The solution is to ‘fool’ Lightroom by actually ‘converting’ your already grayscale pictures a second time to grayscale by hitting the Grayscale button in the Develop panel or hitting ‘v’, which is the shortcut for ‘Convert to Grayscale’. This will not change the look of your pictures, but it will make the Filter Bar recognize the pictures as B&W, and they will show up in your search results as the screenshot below shows.

Many photographers use two (or more) cameras while on a photo shoot (e.g. a wedding). In those cases, it pays to make sure before you go out shooting that you’ve synchronised the clocks on both cameras. That way, when you later import the pictures into the a folder in Lightroom, all you have to do is sort them by Capture Time, and you have a chronological account of the whole day. You can even choose to rename the photos coming from your two cameras. You can enter the Renaming Panel by hitting F2 in the Library Module or choosing Rename Photos from the top menu. It’s advisable to use a comination that includes at least the date (preferably the YYYYMMDD format) and an increasing number, and maybe some kind of short description in between. Something like 20090913_Dave_Mary_001.NEF. If later, for whatever reason, you would want to distinguish again between the two cameras, you can always use the Filter Bar to temporarily separate the shots taken with either camera.

But what if you a distracted, clumsy photographer like myself, and you return from a wedding, only to realise that you’ve not followed your own advice, and the timestamps of your two cameras don’t match?  Then, it’s ‘Edit Capture Time’ to the rescue. You can find this feature in the Metadata Menu of the Library Module.

These photos were taken with two cameras (a Nikon D700 and a Nikon D300) without having synched the time settings. I only realised importing, when I found that the different places where I’d photographed weren’t all nicely grouped together in Grid View.

I made a test shot, at the same time, with each camera. This showed me that the time difference between the two was 8 minutes.

In Lightroom, I selected all the pictures that were made with the D700 (I used the Filter Bar to select only those pictures). I chose Metadata => Edit Capture Time and adjusted the Corrected Time by 8 minutes.

The dialog box also caters to other needs, such as shifting date stamps by a certain amount of hours (Shift by set amount of hours (Time Zone Adjust)) which is, as you might guess, handy if you’ve forgotten to change your time settings when on holiday.

This article was adapted from my Dutch-language book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’, that is loaded with tips and tricks like these. The book is published by Easy Computing and available in bookshops across Belgium and the Netherlands. Also available online at www.easycomputing.com or www.hcw.be.

This week’s question is about the use of Keyword Sets in Lightroom. This of course has to do with the broader topic of keywording in itself, so let me rant about that for some time before moving on to the actual topic at hand .

From the Lightroom Workshops I regularly host, I know that a lot of people don’t give the Library Module, and especially the Keywording Panels a lot of attention. Because, let’s face it, we all want to rush asap to the Develop Module and start shaping our pictures in a creative way, don’t we? And so a lot of people wind up using Lightroom only as an – albeit sophisticated – raw converter, which is just not doing this incredible piece of software, nor your own pictures for that matter, enough justice!

It is my firm belief that any time spent in the Library Module is time very well spent, especially when your Catalog starts growing. Library tasks such as arranging your folders in a logical way, flagging, rating and keywording your pictures may not seem of much use at the start of a Catalog (Does the phrase ‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll just remember which folder that picture is in!’ sound familiar?), but when you have a Catalog filled with thousands of pictures, you will be very happy that you’ve gone through the trouble of properly, or at least basically, keywording everything.

The whole keywording process opens up a window of opportunities for later use. Let’s suppose you take pictures of your children, and you do so for a couple of years. After a while, there will be hundreds of pictures of your children on your harddrive and in your Catalog. Now say one of them is having his birthday and you want to make a special birthday card (for example by using the template we discussed a couple of blogposts ago). If you haven’t properly keyworded and rated the pictures, chances are you will not make any birthday card at all, because the process of going through all those pictures looking for the good ones of that specific kid is way too time-consuming. Instead, you will rush of to Walmart and buy a generic 99 ct birthday card. Doesn’t your kid deserve better?

Ouch, this is a bit cruel of me: measuring your parental skills by how much time you put into keywording in Lightroom But you get the picture, I’m sure.

If, in between changing diapers (which is actually a far better measure of parental skill) you make a habit of just, upon every import, quickly keywording your pictures with elementary information such as the names of the kids appearing in the pictures, and maybe even go through a quick rating process, giving the best pictures a five star rating or a ‘flagged’ status (there are as many rating procedures as there are Lightroom users), you would be able to filter the best pictures of that particular kid in no time. Couple that selection to the print template we made earlier and… voilà, a cool and personalised birthday card, in no time!

Lightroom, as always, is trying to help you as much as it can to speed up the keywording process so you can return to more exciting tasks such as developing pictures in the Develop Module or… changing yet another diaper!

One of those tools are Keyword Sets. You can store up to 9 frequently assigned keywords in one keyword set for later use. Lightroom comes with a couple of keyword sets, but you can easily create new ones. The advantages are twofold:

1. you save time by not having to manually keyword everything
2. you reduce the risk of misspelling keywords in between keywording sessions

I use keyword sets for a lot of things:

I have a keyword set ‘Family’ and a keyword set ‘In-laws’. Whenever there’s a party or a family gettogether, I keyword the pictures of that event by using my keyword sets. If you have a big family, you might even want to make two keyword sets (‘Family Core’ and ‘Family Extended’, for example): it might mean you will have to go through your photos two times (once for every keyword set) but that will still be quicker and more consistent than doing it manually!

I also have a keyword set ‘Intended use of pictures’: this consists of 9 possible ‘ends’ that I can use the specific pictures for. The keywords in this set are things as ‘Blogpost’ (I might use the picture in a blogpost) or ‘Lightroom Book’ (I might use the picture in an upcoming version of my Lightroom book) or ‘HDR’ (this picture has yet to be made into an HDR) or ‘Workshop’ (this picture is good for illustrating something about Lightroom in one of my workshops). Whenever I’m short of pictures to put online, I quickly search for ‘Blogpost’ in the Filter Panel and Lightroom immediately comes up with suggestions I have deemed interesting enough to put online at the time of keywording the pictures.

Now that I’m cycling through Bali, I also have a keyword set ‘Bali Places’. This is one I set up in advance with the places we’ll be visiting on this trip. At night, when I import the pictures, I only have to select the Keyword Set and go through the places. When a shot is taken in some small village in between places, I assign two keywords to it (the names of the two cities in between which the photograph was taken).

I will leave you with a final example of how Keyword Sets can be used in a highly demanding, professional environment. The example is taken from my ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ book.

Say you are a sports photographer, and you are assigned to shoot anything from the Olympics Eighth Finals and up. Minutes after your pictures have been taken, they should already be on your editor’s desk, thousands of miles away.

One way of using Keyword Sets would be to make a keyword set for every Olympic Discipline you have to shoot. In the first eight fields, you carefully put the names of the participants on that Eighth Final. These are known some time in advance, so you can prepare this in advance. This leaves you with one place for… the discipline itself. Guess whose pictures will be the first to land on the desk of the editor? Yours, or the ones of your colleague that still has to keyword everything, maybe misspelling the name of the Ugandese sprinter in his rush to get the pictures out as quickly as possible.

Keywording. It’s important. I rest my case

P.S. Next episode: How to set up keyword sets…

First of all, I want to apologize to my native Dutch speaking readers for the fact that this blog turned to English-only overnight. I have considered offering the blogposts in both English and Dutch, and have even done so for a while, but it just proved to be too time-consuming.

So, after doing a quick and all-but-scientific poll with some Dutch-speaking workshop participants and colleagues, an overwhelming majority said they would not mind that the blog would become an ‘English-only’ blog. Or ‘Kind-of-English’-only, because I am fully aware that my English is far from perfect. But then again, neither is my Dutch and that did not stop people from reading these pages.

The decision proves to be the right one: since the switch to English, the number of readers has quadrupled (thanks Matt Kloskowski from the exquisite-as-always Lightroomkillertips.com and Adobe’s very own John Nack for pointing to the site) and the blog is now followed in over 29 countries, from Australia to Zimbabwe (well, actually not Zimbabwe, but I needed something starting wit a ‘Z’). So, from Australia to Zwitserland, which is, as you might guess, Dutch for Switzerland! I hope that this increase in visitors will lead to more fruitful discussions and – as already has been the case – people helping each other out in the comments section.

And, if I can trust the statistics (can you ever?) there are now even more Belgian and Dutch people reading the blog than before.

For those of you that do mind: I sincerely apologize: there’s still the Lightroom book (that is over 200 pages of Dutch-only) and the Lightroom Workshops where Dutch is the main language (although I am available for workshops in English as well). And of course you can still contact me by mail, where I will gladly reply in Dutch!

Whereas the main blog page might be English only, the other blog pages (About, Lightroom Book and Workshops are now bilingual. They used to be Dutch only, but I have added an English translation. So that you people from New Zealand, Russia, USA, Singapore and South-Africa have a better idea of who you’re dealing with!

You can find the English ‘About’ page here.

The English page on my workshops can be found here and some English info on my (Dutch) book on Lightroom can be found here.

Or, alternatively, just go the the section headers at the top of the blog and choose ‘English’ under the Language button.

Those of you who have followed this blog and the sister blog PortraitsOfAsia.be, know that I’m a big fan of good, oldfashioned Black & White. Probably stems from my darkroom days. What can I say?

When I changed over to digital, getting a good Black & White print proved to me the most difficult aspect of the whole digital photography scene. Before Photoshop CS3, getting the right B/W conversion was something akin to digital alchemy, with different methods, such as the famous Russell Brown’s double Hue Sat Adjustment Layer technique or the Channel Mixer approach.

And even if you had finally, after long hours of fiddling with sliders, come up with a good B/W conversion, you could be sure that your printer would mess it up. Printers, up until five years ago were all aimed at colour printing, and only a few manufacturers, led by Epson, realised the importance of Black and White. But even then, the first so called ‘Optimized for B&W’ printers still left a lot to be desired: issues such as bronzing and metamerism made it hard to turn that good-looking screen version into an equally astonishing print. Some turned to dedicated B/W ink sets, but, judging by forum entries on sites as LuminousLandscape.com, not everyone was equally satisfied with the results or the cumbersome maintenance process.

Now, with Raw files, Photoshop CS3/CS4 and Lightroom, conversion to B/W has become easier, although that ease might be a deceptive one: underneath the simplicity of adjusting the sliders still lures a swamp of complexities (clipping, noise issues, dynamic range) where many a Black and White conversion gets dragged into.

Likewise, new printers such as the latest Epsons, or the HPZ3100, which was the first printer I really enjoyed for B/W printing, and an overwhelming array of papers, have expanded the range of B/W possibilities. A heaven of opportunities for some, the agony of choice for others.

And now there’s even a new tool available for digital B/W enthousiasts (in fact, it’s been out for a while, but only now have I had a chance to work with it). It’s called Silver Efex Pro and uses Nik Software’s patented U-point technology to enable you to create beautiful and realistic B/W conversions. Since my main worfklow revolves around Lightroom (as you might know by now), I’m very happy that this software is available as a plugin for Lightroom.

Just like Lightroom in version 2, Silver Efex enables you to apply local corrections to files. There are two main differences, however: Lightroom works non-destructively on your Raw-files, whereas Silver Efex works on a 16 bit (if you set it up that way) rendered Tiff  file. The second difference is the way you make selections: in Lightroom, you do so with the adjustment brush or the graduated filter tool; in Silver Efex you add Control points that have four sliders: one for the size of the point (limiting the effect of the other three sliders), and then one for brightness, contrast and structure (which is something like Lightroom’s Clarity). The U-points intelligently define the selection, making sure it is as seamless as possible.

For me, the power of Silver Efex lies in its integration with Lightroom (there is also a Photoshop plugin which offers Smart-Object-like non-destructive editing. I hope to report on that later). I tried Silver Efex Pro on this picture of a Balinese boatsman.

There were several ‘issues’ I wanted to address in this picture:

• Darkening the hotspot on the left (from the viewer’s perspective) wooden outrigger
• Intensifying the sky
• Brightening the rather dark zone in the bottom right quarter

I first chose one of the presets (you can save your own settings as a preset): High Structure.

Then I started adding Control Points for the different ‘Problem Areas’. Each Control Point allows you to specify a radius (as indicated by a circle, not however that the resulting selection is not a plain circle, as Silver Efex calculates the actual selection automatically and intelligently) and, for that range, allows you to alter the Brightness, Contrast and Structure. You can toggle between the ‘simplified’ view of the selection or seeing the actual selection itself.

If your Control Point starts to unwantedly affect other areas of the picture, you can do two things:

• either decrease the range of the Control Point
• or, and this is very well thought of indeed, add another – Control Point with default Brightness, Contrast and Structure settings in the area you wish to protect.

Furthermore, you have the ability to experiment with color filters, to change the look of your conversion. Under the Stylizing section, you can add two kinds of vignettes. I chose not to do this for this picture, but instead turned to the ‘Film Types’ Panel, where you can add a very realistic grain. The Silver Efex grain engine is different from just overlaying a noise layer in Photoshop in that it uses the actual pixel data to create the grain. The result is a very natural and realistic looking grain structure. If you choose one of the film presets, you Silver Efex will not only mimic the grain, but also the tonal response and contrast of that specific film. I chose Ilford HP5, because that’s the film I used to use in the darkroom, but, since I had already defined the contrast and the look earlier on in my Silver Efex workflow, I zeroed out those aspects of the film simulation, leaving only the grain. (Alternatively, I could have chosen ‘Neutral’ from the Film Types dropdown list, and only adjust the grain level).

Back in Lightroom, I exported this picture to Photoshop via the Edit Original command and subtly used the Liquify Filter to slightly reduce the size of the fisherman’s feet (an unwanted side-effect of the Ultra Wide Nikon 10-24 used at 10 mm).

You can download a 15-day trial version of Silver Efex Pro over at Nik Software’s site.