Tones Adjustment in Lightroom for Fashion

Here is a video to show you how to adjust Tones in Lightroom for Fashion Photography

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To view more visit The Photo Formula on Youtube.

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Photo-Editing Tips Photoshop Lightroom

A series of small adjustments in A series of small adjustments in Photoshop Lightroom can result in big improvements to images.
I was tweaking a photo for a friend’s antiques store Web site the other day, experimenting with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust the color and add a subtle vignette. I like Lightroom because it doesn’t have the arduous learning curve that Photoshop does, and it’s designed specifically for photographers and photographs.

But I don’t have many tricks in my Lightroom photo-doctoring bag. In fact, everything I was doing I had learned from a brief demonstration by Tyler Stableford, an outdoor sports and adventure photographer who uses Lightroom to make his photos just a bit more dazzling.

So I called Mr. Stableford and asked him for his best (and easiest) tips to make small adjustments that result in big improvements to images. He gave me the following 10 tips that photographers of every skill level will appreciate. (Note that these adjustments are described for RAW images; settings for JPEGs will vary somewhat.)

1. Boost blacks to +5 points or so (in the Basics panel, under Color). Deepening blacks will add richness to the image.

2. Add a vignette to the image (in the Effects panel, Post-Crop Vignetting). Take the vignetting down to -15 to darken the corners of the photo and guide the viewer’s eye to the center (assuming that’s where you want the eye to land). Alternatively, you can apply a +15 vignette to lighten the corners in a fall foliage shot or a wedding photo. This technique will add a bright, airy feeling.

3. Use a graduated filter to add weight to the lower portion of a photo. Select the Graduated Filter tool, and set the exposure to, say, -33, then click on the bottom of your photo and drag the tool up through the bottom half. This will subtly add a natural foundation and ground the image with a bit of density.

4. Adjust the shadows in the Tone Curve panel. Set shadows to -10 and the darks to +10. This will boost richness, as well as add subtle contrast to the overall image.

5. You can tone down a too-bright blue sky by adjusting luminance. Click the HSL panel, then luminance. Next, click the Adjust tool at the left of the panel (it looks like a bulls-eye) and position it at the top of the sky and drag downward. This will give you a natural-looking, rich blue sky.

6. Black-and-white images have lost a bit of character in the digital age. While Lightroom has a one-click button to transform color images to monochrome, you can get a subtle and more interesting effect by adjusting vibrance and saturation. In the Basic panel, set vibrance and saturation to -75. The resulting image will look like it’s monochrome but will retain just a hint of color, which adds an unexpected wink of life. Black-and-white images often benefit from additional contrast, so try boosting clarity to 50 or 75.

7. Use clarity (in the Basic panel) to adjust skin tones in portraits. To add a bit of masculine roughness, increase clarity. To soften skin tones, decrease clarity.

8. You can add grain to give your image, a pre-digital texture that counters the “plastic” look that many digital cameras create. Under the Effects panel, bump the grain slider to 5 or 10 points.

9. If you want a very rich image but don’t want your children in the photo to have sunburned pumpkin skin, remember that it’s effective to increase vibrance more than saturation. That’s because vibrance, in general, works with cooler tones like blues and greens, while saturation is more effective with warmer tones like reds and yellows. If you increase saturation too much it will wreak havoc on skin tones. So crank up the vibrance two or three times more than saturation. For instance, you might push vibrance to 20 or 30, while boosting saturation to 10.

10. For portraits, use the Spot Removal tool (in the top panel, second tool from the left) to soften blemishes. Set the brush to the Healing Tool (rather than Clone) for a speedier, cleaner result. And consider using 80 percent opacity (rather than 100 percent) to leave a suggestion of the blemish for a more realistic effect.
Read full article here: Ten Photo-Editing Tips From a Pro – NYTimes.com. Photo by Tyler Stableford can result in big improvements to images.
I was tweaking a photo for a friend’s antiques store Web site the other day, experimenting with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust the color and add a subtle vignette. I like Lightroom because it doesn’t have the arduous learning curve that Photoshop does, and it’s designed specifically for photographers and photographs.

But I don’t have many tricks in my Lightroom photo-doctoring bag. In fact, everything I was doing I had learned from a brief demonstration by Tyler Stableford, an outdoor sports and adventure photographer who uses Lightroom to make his photos just a bit more dazzling.

So I called Mr. Stableford and asked him for his best (and easiest) tips to make small adjustments that result in big improvements to images. He gave me the following 10 tips that photographers of every skill level will appreciate. (Note that these adjustments are described for RAW images; settings for JPEGs will vary somewhat.)

1. Boost blacks to +5 points or so (in the Basics panel, under Color). Deepening blacks will add richness to the image.

2. Add a vignette to the image (in the Effects panel, Post-Crop Vignetting). Take the vignetting down to -15 to darken the corners of the photo and guide the viewer’s eye to the center (assuming that’s where you want the eye to land). Alternatively, you can apply a +15 vignette to lighten the corners in a fall foliage shot or a wedding photo. This technique will add a bright, airy feeling.

3. Use a graduated filter to add weight to the lower portion of a photo. Select the Graduated Filter tool, and set the exposure to, say, -33, then click on the bottom of your photo and drag the tool up through the bottom half. This will subtly add a natural foundation and ground the image with a bit of density.

4. Adjust the shadows in the Tone Curve panel. Set shadows to -10 and the darks to +10. This will boost richness, as well as add subtle contrast to the overall image.

5. You can tone down a too-bright blue sky by adjusting luminance. Click the HSL panel, then luminance. Next, click the Adjust tool at the left of the panel (it looks like a bulls-eye) and position it at the top of the sky and drag downward. This will give you a natural-looking, rich blue sky.

6. Black-and-white images have lost a bit of character in the digital age. While Lightroom has a one-click button to transform color images to monochrome, you can get a subtle and more interesting effect by adjusting vibrance and saturation. In the Basic panel, set vibrance and saturation to -75. The resulting image will look like it’s monochrome but will retain just a hint of color, which adds an unexpected wink of life. Black-and-white images often benefit from additional contrast, so try boosting clarity to 50 or 75.

7. Use clarity (in the Basic panel) to adjust skin tones in portraits. To add a bit of masculine roughness, increase clarity. To soften skin tones, decrease clarity.

8. You can add grain to give your image, a pre-digital texture that counters the “plastic” look that many digital cameras create. Under the Effects panel, bump the grain slider to 5 or 10 points.

9. If you want a very rich image but don’t want your children in the photo to have sunburned pumpkin skin, remember that it’s effective to increase vibrance more than saturation. That’s because vibrance, in general, works with cooler tones like blues and greens, while saturation is more effective with warmer tones like reds and yellows. If you increase saturation too much it will wreak havoc on skin tones. So crank up the vibrance two or three times more than saturation. For instance, you might push vibrance to 20 or 30, while boosting saturation to 10.

10. For portraits, use the Spot Removal tool (in the top panel, second tool from the left) to soften blemishes. Set the brush to the Healing Tool (rather than Clone) for a speedier, cleaner result. And consider using 80 percent opacity (rather than 100 percent) to leave a suggestion of the blemish for a more realistic effect.

Read full article here: Ten Photo-Editing Tips From a Pro – NYTimes.com. Photo by Tyler Stableford

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My Little Henry

My little partner in crime! He's watching you ;)

I'm in the process  of transitioning from WordPress to Blogger. I can't really figure out what it is... but I like blogger much better.

PS This blog is Under Construction....

Thanks
Arturo

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THE EDUCATION OF GOOGLE’S LARRY PAGE

Larry Page is surrounded. On one side, Google’s (GOOG) chief executive officer confronts Facebook, the social networking phenom that is about to go public. On his other side isApple (AAPL), which has moved the playing field off the desktop computer—Google’s fiefdom—and onto smartphones and tablets. Thus Page, who became CEO of Google a year ago, has the task of steering the company he co-founded through territory defined by two rivals while fending off accusations that his brainchild has become yet another lumbering monopolist or, worse, a follower.

Sitting for an April 3 interview at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., Page bridles at any suggestion that Google isn’t the destiny-defining innovator it once was. He’s wearing geek business casual—fleece jacket, logo shirt, jeans, black Converse sneakers. “Producing the best [products] we possibly can for users is our paramount thing,” he says. “I think we have demonstrated that over a very long period of time, with a whole variety of different issues we’ve faced around the world.”

Page isn’t the first founder to reassert himself as leader of the company he helped to create. There was Howard Schultz’s return to run Starbucks (SBUX), which has worked out well, and Michael Dell’s reclaiming the reins of his eponymous PC maker, which has not. For a still-young tech entrepreneur such as Page, Steve Jobs’s triumphant homecoming at Apple in 1997 is the most obvious benchmark of success. Their situations aren’t totally analogous—unlike Jobs, Page never left the company he founded. Though the comparison is apt in one important way: In the 1990s, Apple needed a more sophisticated operating system to navigate changes in the computing landscape, and so bought Jobs’s company, NeXT. Today, Google also needs to figure out a new world, in which its users increasingly see the Web through the lens of their friends, instead of a cold, calculating algorithm. Although Google started social networks such as Orkut in the last decade, Page acknowledges that the company underestimated the power of friending. “Our mission was organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” he says. “I think we probably missed more of the people part of that than we should have.”

Google’s tardy embrace of social networking and its other moves, such as the strict terms it dictates to licensees of its Android operating system, have opened the company up to the kind of criticism it rarely encountered during its days as a mere colossus-in-the-making. Antitrust authorities in the U.S. and Europe are investigating whether Google gives preference to its own content in Internet search results instead of being a neutral arbiter. Privacy watchdog groups are calling Google out on changes to its privacy policies, charging that it has abused its users’ trust. Bloggers now routinely wonder if the company is doing evil, a caustic play on Google’s famous dictum in its 2004 initial public offering prospectus. A recent headline on the technology site Gizmodo hyperbolically summed up the stew of distrust: “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil.’”

Page smiles at the charge. Google, he insists, has not really changed at all. “Our soul is the same,” he says. “What we’re about is using large-scale technology advancements to help people, to make people’s lives better, to make community better. If you look at the river of things we’re doing, like automated cars and things like that, those things are fundamentally about [using technology] to help people. And I think there is still a huge amount of that to be done.”

With Sergey Brin, Page founded Google in 1998 at the age of 25. By any measure, the company is among the most remarkable in the history of Silicon Valley, growing from a research project at Stanford to a multibillion-dollar global behemoth in a little more than a decade. Yet by the time Page took command last April, Google had grown unfocused and unwieldy. A freewheeling atmosphere of invention and curiosity spawned countless unpolished, unsuccessful products. (Take Google Buzz. No, really, take it!) The previous CEO, Eric Schmidt, was spending much of his time on the road, focusing on the company’s mounting problems with antitrust and privacy regulators and dousing controversies such as the interception of home networking data by Google’s roving, camera-equipped Street View cars.

An ongoing discussion among Google’s leaders about refocusing the company around key product lines precipitated Schmidt’s decision to step aside. Now Google’s executive chairman, Schmidt is still the public face of the company at industry conferences and government hearings. Brin, Page’s co-founder, works on futuristic technology products, such as augmented-reality glasses. As CEO, Page handles the day-to-day decisions—and takes the blame when things go wrong. “He’s probably working harder than anyone at Google right now,” says Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of the group that makes the Chrome browser.

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