George Jardine on Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Digital Photography

Just A Few Seats Left For My Catalog Management Class, February 6…

by George on January 31, 2013

Photograph © George A. Jardine

This month’s series of workshops at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center has been great! Everything else sold out, but we do still have a few seats left for next Wednesday evening’s class.

This class on Lightroom Location Workflow & Catalog Management will help those shooting on location or organizing particularly complicated libraries, master their photo library structure and organization. If you need to better understand how Lightroom catalogs work, merging catalogs, and working with XMP, this class is for you. Class is from 6 – 9 PM.

The classes are $60 each, with a member discount available.Click here for registration details.

This class will be held in the Colorado Photographic Arts Center Gallery “Belmar”, in Lakewood. Click here to see the map to the workshop location.

Hope to see you there!

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A New Article For Digital Photo Pro Magazine…

by George on January 8, 2013

Photograph © George A. Jardine

Which is better: a video tutorial, or a magazine article? If I’ve learned anything selling online video tutorials, it’s that there seem to be two distinct types of learners out there. Those who learn best by reading. And those who would rather watch video. How do I know this? Because it never ceases to amaze me how the group that purchases video tutorials, never, ever, read the instructions! :-)

But that’s another story. Anyway, a few months ago I cooked up a new video tutorial on the new 2012 Process Version Highlights & Shadows controls. The video is a bit dense, and I was never really sure if it clearly communicated what I wanted it to. If you haven’t seen it, you can find the original posting and links to the free video, here.

In any case, I had another shot at it this month, only this time in written form. Trying to adequately describe a subject this complex in 1500 words is a totally different kind of challenge, but one that I gladly took on. Writing articles for Digital Photo Pro Magazine is one of my favorite things to do. You can find a list of all the articles I’ve written for them at the bottom of my “free stuff” page, here.

If you’d like to go directly to the new online version of the article, click here.

As always, comments are welcome. I’m especially interested in your thoughts comparing the two if you’ve both watched the video, and read the article.

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Russell Brown Makes Me Look Good!

by George on December 19, 2012

Photograph © George A. Jardine

Russell Brown has posted a GREAT, new video tutorial on merging panoramas and using Photoshop’s new Adaptive Wide Angle filter. You can find the new tutorial here, on Facebook.

After my latest ICP workshop in Italy, I took a day to visit Milan—my first time visiting that city. The Duomo was stunning. We had good weather, but I’m still kicking myself for not taking my tripod and pano gear, because this quick, off-the-cuff handheld pano turns out to be one of my favorite photos from the entire trip.

Click the image above, to see a large version. I did not use Russell’s super tips to fix all the panorama distortions that he shows in the video, but I think you’ll find the detail in the larger version interesting. You’ll have to scroll the image horizontally in your browser, to see the entire image.

Click here to see a few photos from the workshop.

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5 New Denver Lightroom Workshops at CPAC…

by George on December 18, 2012

Photograph © George A. Jardine

For those of you living in Colorado, I’m offering 5 new Lightroom workshops coming up in January, at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. These are hands-on, evening workshops that will cover the entire Lightroom Library and Develop workflows.

To adequately cover Library and Develop Basics, we are splitting each module into two, 3-hour sessions. Library 1 covers building your library, digital asset management, importing, file naming and more. Library 2 will cover everything else in the Library module: keywords, collections, searching with metadata, and all of Lightroom’s editing methods.

Develop 1 will give you the tools you need to make your pictures look great with the basics of image correction. Develop 2 expands on Develop 1, and rounds out your knowledge of the entire Develop module.

Finally, my new series on Lightroom Location Workflow & Catalog Management will help those shooting on location or organizing particularly complicated libraries, master their photo library structure and organization.

Workshop Dates and Registration Links:

•   January 9, 2013 — Get Your Pictures Organized! The Lightroom Library, Part 1: Importing & Organizing

 

•   January 16, 2013 — Find Your Best Pictures! The Lightroom Library, Part 2: Collections, Keywords, Star Ratings & Editing Methods

 

•   January 23, 2013 — Make Your Photos Look Great! The Lightroom Develop Module, Part 1: Image Correction Basics

 

•   January 30, 2013 — Understanding RAW Processing, The Lightroom Develop Module, Part 2: Advanced Techniques & Color Correction

 

•   February 6, 2013 — Location Workflow & Lightroom Catalog Management

Indivudual classes are $60 each, with a member discount available. Also a special bundle price is available for those would would like to sign up for all 5 classes.

All classes will be held in the Colorado Photographic Arts Center Gallery “Belmar”, in Lakewood. Click here to see the map to the workshop location.

Hope to see you there!

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Time Zone Offset Feature…">Misdirection For Using GPS Tracklogs And Lightroom’s Time Zone Offset Feature…

by George on November 14, 2012

GPS: 46°2’42″ N 9°21’23″ E

Photographs © George A. Jardine

Getting comfortable using GPS when I travel and shoot has been creeping up on me for several years now. It is a slightly peculiar beast, and putting your finger on the exact purpose GPS serves in photography can be a bit tricky. Combine that with the somewhat obscure nature of how timestamps work, and you’ve got a subject you can sink your teeth into. (And just as quickly, you can get it wrong. Which unfortunately, is what I found today in a tutorial on the esteemed AdobeTV.)

Ever since the early versions of Lightroom, we’ve had an innovative feature that linked GPS metadata to Google Maps, and it was that feature that first prompted me to purchase a GPS unit and start working with it. But you still had to encode your images with GPS metadata before you could do anything with it. At the time, geocoding photos was not nearly as easy as it is today. Looking around for a little help, one of the engineers on the Lightroom team recommended that I try a program from Houdah Software, and that got me moving in the right direction. (HoudahGeo is still my favorite way to pull .gpx tracklogs from my Garmin GPS unit, which surprisingly, Lightroom does not yet do.)

GPS: 39°41’49″ N 104°58’9″ W

Early Frost

With Lightroom 4 we now have the Map module, which adds its own special twist to the mix. The Map module lets you drag photos directly onto the map, embed GPS metadata, reverse geocode location information, filter and select photos within any visible map area, and all sorts of other cool tricks. And in general, they’ve made it all pretty easy to use.

But there is one, small fly in the ointment. When I first started sniffing down this path, I was having a bit of trouble figuring out how to use Lightroom’s Time Zone Offset feature. And it goes back to that timestamp thing. The heart of the problem is that a timestamp is just a timestamp, and can only tell you what time a photo was shot, in some local time. Most cameras do not store the time zone that it was in at the moment of exposure. And if they do, it’s stored in a proprietary metadata tag that is not readable by most software. So the timestamp is completely ambiguous.

From what I understand, this incredibly inelegant situation is not the fault of Adobe software engineers, or of Japanese camera manufacturers, or anyone else you might think to point your finger at. But rather, timestamps are what they are because the EXIF specification simply does not allow for a local time zone entry!

GPS: 33°49’32″ N 116°32’49″ W

Are you kidding me?

Some cameras do allow you to set a time zone on the menus, but really that’s just a red herring. There is still no context recorded in camera metadata to give the timestamp meaning. (Nothing in EXIF, anyway, that is used by Lightroom. See Manfred’s comment below.)

GPS units take a slightly different tact on the problem. They ignore the crucial idea of context too, but they do that because they can. GPS units simply record all timestamps as if they were in one time zone that never changes: UTC. (UTC = Coordinated Universal Time. Same as GMT or Zulu time, whatever you want to call it.) Sure, it’s true that you can set a time zone on your GPS unit, but that’s just so that you can read a local time on the GPS display that makes sense. This time zone setting has absolutely nothing to do with how the GPS understands where you are, or how it records that position into the tracklog. It simply records everything in UTC. Which makes sense. After all, it is a global system.

GPS: 42°56’45″ N 122°10’9″ W

Crater Lake, OR

Given all of that, the problem should be coming into a bit better focus now. In order to match up the timestamps created by your camera to the timestamps recorded by your GPS unit, your computer needs more information. It needs to know what the timestamps in your photos mean, or… put another way, it needs to have the context that comes from the time zone.

HoudahGeo has a very straight forward way of obtaining that bit of info. The moment you try to load any photos into it for geocoding, it pops up a small dialog and simply asks for it. It also provides a starting point (an assumption), by looking at your computer clock, and pulling the local time zone from there. And it puts the assumption right in front of you for your approval. The text in the dialog says “Camera time zone:”, and there’s a pop-up menu, conveniently set to your local zone. Or whatever time zone your computer is currently set to.

GPS: 36°53’7″ N 104°25’59″ W

Not My Motorcycle!

So it’s unmistakable. HoudahGeo is asking you to verify the time zone of the photos you’re loading, the moment you try to do anything with it. There’s no escaping it. If you’re sitting in your hotel room in China, and you’ve been diligent enough to set your computer clock to the local time zone, (and… you’ve set your camera’s clock to the correct local time, before you started shooting) then geocoding is a slam dunk. You just load the photos, then load up the .gpx tracklog from your GPS device, and HoudahGeo matches them up for you, calculating the offset from the unit’s GMT-based timestamps to your photo’s ambiguous EXIF timestamps.

But then we come to Lightroom. Once you’re in the Map module and you’ve loaded up your tracklog, if you’re still in the same time zone that the photos’ timestamps are in, Lightroom’s Auto-Tag feature will work perfectly for you. My trouble with it is that there’s not a hint anywhere that Lightroom is making the same assumption as HoudahGeo, but that’s exactly what it does.

Now, I agree that the software has to start somewhere. But there are two major problems here. First, Lightroom doesn’t give you a clue that it’s making an assumption about the time zone, or that you might need to match these two things up. (Especially for beginners, that’s a problem. HoudahGeo asks you to verify the camera time zone every time you use it.) Second is that, in general, when I’m traveling and shooting, I don’t want to be thinking about GPS metadata and time zones. I want to think about those things once I’m back home.

After doing a bit of thinking on the subject of timestamps, and after polling dozens of my friends and customers who regularly shoot with GPS, I found that I was not the only one. Most photographer’s would rather worry about this stuff when they get home. Which means that Lightroom’s assumption about where to get a useful time zone will nearly always be wrong.

This means that if you want Lightroom to auto-tag your photos to a tracklog, you’re going to have to tell Lightroom where the photos were taken relative to the computer’s current time zone. Thus, the Time Zone Offset feature, which is not exactly self-explanatory. (Also confirmed by my poll.)

Now, I’m not writing this to point fingers at the UI designer or the engineers. There are lots of other aspects of Lightroom that will ensure my job security as an educator. But I’m writing it because just this morning I watched one too many video tutorials that got it so utterly wrong, I couldn’t stop myself.

GPS: 38°48’51″ N 115°17’46″ W

Desert Love

This feature is not that complicated, and it deserves to be understood because it’s incredibly useful. It’s just been hindered by a really bad user interface, and further obscured by tutorial jockeys who won’t take the time to do a little research. The easy way to think about it is that you have to tell Lightroom how many hours apart the time zone of the photos is (or was), from the time zone your computer clock is currently set to, before auto-tagging will work. And rather than show you a step-by-step here on the blog, I’ve taken 6 minutes out of tutorial #7 from my Catalog Management series, that shows you exactly how to do it.

It’s a free video, and you can watch it by clicking here.

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Does Library Folder Organization Matter?

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