Living in Sound: Lightroom 3

So I've been trying to get used to Lightroom 3, which we just installed late last week. So far, I'm really impressed! I started by watching about 10 youtube videos on how it works, but it just takes some getting used to, so I figured no better way than to just dig in!

Tanya called me the other day to ask about taking a family photo. Well, here's a great example of setting up the tripod and using the timer on your camera. All you need is some good light and an overflowing laundry room that just makes you want to find more important projects to occupy your day!

Here's my before shot, cropped and color balanced:

This is after applying a very simple bleach bypass preset:

I'm really impressed with how Lightroom was created with workflow in mind. It is very easy to import, catalogue, and edit photos. What I really love is how systematic you can be about cataloging your photos, which will be really handy when trying to search for specific shots among thousands of pics. I can give each photo a star rating, color tags, keywords, and all kinds of metadata that can attach to the photo. It makes me feel like I actually know a little about photography, ha! In my last post I was able to batch edit that group of photos of Andy swinging Colin around. It took about 2 minutes to make all the color corrections and export them as a group.

Here are a few shots I was playing around with. These are mostly using the Presets with a little crop/rotation and tone/color adjustments. On the shot of my piano student at our Rectial on Saturday, I actually went in and erased all these chords that were hanging down from the piano so it would look cleaner. Then I colored in the red spots on her dress.