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A Guest Post by Lynsey Peterson.

Nothing freaks me out like props.  Every time I see a picture of flower girls holding an empty frame that is outlining a bride and groom kissing in the distance, I die a little inside.  

Whenever I am subjected to a photo that attempts to bring in a letter jacket and a football and a casual I’m-just-hanging-out-here-in-my-letter-jacket-holding-my-football expression, I try to remember that I am terrible at making coffee and therefore cannot give-up photography immediately and go get an application at Starbucks.  We have come to a place where portrait photography trends are natural and candid and while you would think that means we are leaving all props behind to die a formal, posed, and staged death, we just can’t help ourselves from wanting to put a little extra something in there.  

Something personal.  Or themed.  Or fun.  As a photographer, the logistics of getting something personal or themed or fun in an image and having it look natural are overwhelmingly complicated.  Often leading to overwhelmingly complicated images.  But if done right, a little extra something adds…….a little extra something.  Photographing people with props comes down to one basic thing: how can you make this interact with that?

Make it Natural

This shot doesn’t scream A PROP WAS USED HERE, though it was.  This bride did not provide me with a “must have” shot list, which of course makes her my favorite bride ever, but she had one simple request: one picture of her drinking a can of PBR in her wedding gown.  

Now admittedly when she told me that, I wanted to pass out from the biggest eye roll that has ever happened because……….how on earth was I going to pull that off?  The goal was a tongue-in-cheek stylish effort that didn’t come across as a classless snapshot.  

Had there been any posing or obvious mention of the can, it could have easily gone from sweet and funny to tasteless and tacky.  Instead it’s a near romantic take on a candid moment at a reception.  It’s rare that making a joke out of the prop or drawing obvious attention to it generates a beautiful and interesting portrait.  Since it’s already on the losing side of “one of these things is not like the other”, there is no need to point it out.

Make it Different

When it comes to props in portrait photography, chances are good that it’s been done before.  So do it different.  Photography is just storytelling and a prop is just another subject in your cast of characters; how many lines it gets is totally up to you.  High school seniors tend to be the group most interested in including a prop.  Which is often sports equipment and getting creative and unposed with things like sporting equipment is not an easy task.  Step out of the intended purpose and treat it like an object.  

A soccer ball doesn’t have to go at the feet, a letter jacket doesn’t have to be worn, a lacrosse stick doesn’t have to……do whatever it is that lacrosse sticks do.  The image is about a person—the viewer knows what the intended purpose is of a practical use prop.

Make it Simple

Including a prop adds another level for the eye to process, so clean up everything else as much as you can.  A tight frame, a clean background, and minimal distractions are all your friends.  Stick with them and they won’t do you wrong.

Make it Meaningful

As props go, the easiest of the bunch are the ones people want included because they are highly personal and mean a great deal.  Wedding rings, special stuffed animals, maybe their cat (tip: avoid this one if you can).  The interaction here will be easier, so the key is highlighting the connection between the person and their special prop.  

The book in this photo was written by their great-grandmother and has obvious family importance.  Before this shot I took dozens of them just holding the book, wanting badly to document the entire cover.  Finally it dawned on me that the the story here was about kids having something so significantly personal and historic still able to generate their interest.  Great images are never about the prop, but the people it connects to and why.  

Make it Timeless

Props have a way of dating a photograph.  Take a moment to consider what the image you are about to take will feel like in 10 years.  Or 20.  Or 50.  If there is anything that can be changed, deleted, or moved so that in a decade this image will have every bit as much relevance as it has today, do it.  

These kids had on screen print t-shirts featuring cartoon characters that most of us likely won’t know in a few years.  T-shirts, messy faces, lollipops, and two boys makes for a complicated snapshot.  Colorful props, interaction, and sweet expressions makes for a timeless portrait.  

Make it make Sense

In my opinion, there is no tougher prop than a costume.  And when these sweet girls showed up in tutus at a suburban park, I had no idea how PINK TUTUS and grass and dirt were going to mix together.  Seemed a little like onion flavored ice cream.  If you take it apart piece by piece, it’s easier to vision it as a whole.  

I knew I wanted to show off the tutus full glory so the girls had to be standing.  I wanted the relationship of the sisters to play a huge role.  And I wanted it to have a feeling of magic.  Much like how I feel when I go to the park in my own pink tutu.

With enough creativity, almost any prop can make an image fun, personal, and interesting.  Unless someone shows up with their cat and lacrosse stick.  Then you’re on your own.

Check out more of Lynsey Peterson’s work on her website.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Props Are Evil: How To Use Them For Good

Source: dps

Canadian photojournalist – Ted Grant – is quoted as saying:

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

This quote often comes to mind when talking about portraiture and I thought it might make an interesting discussion starter.

Do Ted’s words resonate with you?

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

DISCUSS: When you Photograph People in Black and White, you Photograph their Souls

Source: dps

A Guest Contribution by Anotherphotograpbynoob.com.

What this tutorial will show you
In short: how I made the photo on the right become the photo on the left.

In this tutorial, we will cover basic tools of the free photo editing software GIMP.
Here is a quick rundown of the features covered in this tutorial:

• Crop a photo in GIMP
• Increase contrast with the Levels panel
• Make the colors pop with the Hue & Saturation panel
• Adjust colors with the Color Balance panel
• Add a color filter to boost the warm colors in your photo.

Sound hard? Don’t worry. I’ll guide you through the whole process, step by step.

Resources

First of all, you need to have GIMP installed. Click here to download GIMP, and then follow the instructions provided with the software.

If you want to follow along with me in this tutorial, the original photo can be downloaded here. I shot the photo myself last year. The sportscar is a racing green Volvo P1800, just like the one Roger Moore drove in The Saint – yep, my dad tells me the story every time we ride in that car.

You are free to use the photo for whatever you may want, as long as it isn’t illegal of course.

If you are interested in the specifications of my camera, it is:

• Nikon D3000
• Nikon DX AF-s NIKKOR 35mm 1.8G
• Shot at f/3.2, 1/200 seconds and ISO 100
• The exposure compensation was set to -2.7

Enough with the anecdotes; let’s start editing.

Start it all Up

After you have started up GIMP, open up the image you want to edit. If you have chosen to follow along and you haven’t changed too much in the standard layout in GIMP, it should look like this.

Fixing the Composition

The first thing I want to fix is how I composed the image. I don’t like the license plate showing in the original photo. Ideally, I would like to see no license plate and at the same time as much as possible of both the car and sky.

The easiest way would be just cropping off the right of the photo until the license plate is gone.

But…

I know my mother will most likely print this photo – just as with all the other photos I’ve sent her. In order to make the process of printing the images as smooth as possible, I need to keep the proportions of the image in tact (I don’t want the print service computer system to decide how the photo is cropped).

With that in mind, choose the Crop tool from the toolbox on the left (Shortcut Shift + C).

To make sure proportions are kept, check the box labeled Fixed. From the drop-down menu, you should select Aspect Ratio and the value should be set to current. Like this:

Now you can drag out the area you want to keep. You can adjust it by dragging the corners around the image. When you are satisfied, hit enter and your photo is cropped.

So far, so good. The image is still dull, I know. Let’s get moving.

Quick Tip – Duplicate the Background Layer

When you open up a photo in GIMP, a background layer will be created automatically. Don’t edit directly on that. Instead, you should make a copy of the layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + D (Mac: Cmd + Shift + D).

Now you have the original background layer for reference while editing, and no matter the mess you make, you can easily start from scratch.

And now we must go back to the sports car!

Use Levels to Increase Contrast

The first thing I want to do is increase the contrast. This is mainly to darken the ugly details on the back of the car, in order to let the more shiny parts sparkle.

First, open op the Levels panel Color > Levels:

I’ve made a simple move. I just increased the darks by 10 and kept the whites at 255. I kept the whites at 255 to ensure most details are preserved in the sky; we’ve now set the best base for boosting the color of the image.

Work the Colors

The first panel I use in this process is Adjust Hue/Lightness/Saturation.
Go to Colors > Hue-Saturation:

I won’t be explaining every panel I use in detail. Instead, I’ll focus on the settings I needed for this tutorial. I’ve only adjusted the master channel in this panel.

Hue
I’ve increased the hue a little. Six steps up isn’t a lot, but you’ll easily notice the difference. Increasing the hue removes the slight magenta shade in the sky.

Lightness
Even though I adjusted the Levels before, I want an even more warm and dark feeling. Almost like a classical sunset-silhouette – just keeping the details in the photo.

By decreasing the Lightness, I darken the photo and turn up the colors even more in the sky. The Volvo P1800 even starts looking right with dark green colour (the actual name is British Racing Green – another dad anecdote).

Saturation
The final step in the Hue-Saturation panel is increasing Saturation – a lot! I’m putting the pedal to the metal now. All in on sunset.

The Color Needs more Attention

This is much better. But, I want to adjust it a little bit more. Next stop: the Color Balance panel.

Go to Color > Color Balance:

Again, I’m not going into detail on all functions. Just the ones I altered. In this case, it’s the Color Levels of the Midtones.

Cyan Red

Everything got a little too blue when I boosted Saturation – especially the car. The first step is decreasing Cyan (by increasing Red). Now the car is getting warmer.

Magenta Green

One step down is not doing much, but I really think it helped. It needed some compensation after increasing Red and Yellow.

Yellow Blue

Let’s add even more color to the sky and some warmth to the chrome on the car.

Adding a Color Filter is the Last Thing

I still don’t like the blue shade on the chrome. The last step is to add a color filter. It’s really simple.

First, add a new transparent layer. Just go to Layer > New Layer (Ctrl + Shift + N).
Name the layer “Warm Color Filter.” Choose a transparent layer and click Ok.

Now select the foreground color and set it to #F4B905. Actually, I just went for a warm orange and landed on this. Not freakishly important. Just go for a warm orange color.

Select the Bucket Fill Tool (Ctrl + B) and fill your new transparent layer with warm orange.

This should turn your entire image warm orange. Looking great, ay?

Ok. Now change the layer opacity to 10%, and set the blend mode to Dodge.

The result is a nice and warm feeling to the overall photo. And it also got us rid of that blue trouble in the chrome details. Nice.

Saving is now Exporting

As you may already know, GIMP does no longer save in JPEG. But don’t worry, the good people working with GIMP has just moved the function a bit and it is now called Export (Ctrl + E) and Export As (Shift + Ctrl + E), if you need to rename the file.

The Final Result

My mom actually ended up printing all the photos of my dad’s sports car. If you want to check out the rest of the sports car photos and even more GIMP tutorials, head over to my blog at http://anotherphotographynoob.com.

More specifically, the images of the sports car are here: http://anotherphotographynoob.com/sportscar/

And all my tutorials for GIMP are here: http://anotherphotographynoob.com/gimp-tutorial/

Anotherphotographynoob is a European blogger and photo enthusiast, blogging daily at Anotherphotograpbynoob.com. It all started as a simple blog posting a photo a day, but recently the blog has moved to a self-hosted solution and now tutorials are being written on a daily basis to help other photo nerds.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Make your Photos Sparkle with GIMP

Source: dps

Today Joe Decker shares some tips on wide angle photography.

One of the first lens purchases aspiring landscape photographers typically made is a wide or super-wide lens, anything (in full-frame 35mm terms) from 24mm on down, and with good reason, wides offer photographers the ability to capture the sweeping vistas of the natural landscape. But they can also be a challenge to use effectively, it’s all to easy to end up with a wide-angle shot that lacks the power and grandeur we felt when we were shooting. In this article, I’ll explain why that’s so often the case, and provide a few tips for working around those challenges, showing you how to use wide-angle lenses to create dramatic, effective images.

Nordenskjöld Lake, Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile. Image Copyright Joe Decker

1. Get Close!

Because wide-angle lenses take in a bigger angle-of-view than other lenses, using a wide-angle lens at the same distance from your subject will render that subject smaller than it would otherwise. To compensate for this, you’ll have to move closer to your subject. Don’t be bashful about getting close, particularly with super-wides&mash;it’s almost impossible to get “too close” to your subject with a 14mm lens. This emphasis in size that wide-angle lenses give nearby objects means that …

2. It’s All about the Foreground

Contrary to what you might expect, this means that the most important element of your wide-angle landscapes is the foreground. While wide-angle lenses do capture the wider landscape, they also (almost inevitably, because of their wide field-of-view) capture quite a bit of foreground as well, and this foreground is emphasized by the wide-angle perspective. As a result, if your foreground isn’t interesting, your photograph won’t be interesting. This leads us naturally to the Josef Muench idea of the near-far composition, an image which uses a wide-angle lens to not only show a broad vista, but also to show one detail of that landscape in an up-close, intimate way. When you’re photographing wide, be sure to spend some time looking for the most interesting foreground available to combine with your grand vista.  (If there isn’t an interesting foreground, you might want to consider using a longer lens to leave out that less interesting foreground.)

Fallen Redwoods, Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith State Park, California. Image Copyright Joe Decker

3. Watch those Verticals!

Wide-angle lenses tend to bend and distort verticals, as you can see in the tree trunks near the top of Fallen Redwoods. Now, you might decide you like that effect, or that you hate it, but it’s important to be aware of it and to make a conscious decision about it. For some images it’s fun to embrace, but more often I find myself having to work to avoid it or correct it later.  Avoiding it can be as simple a matter as composing so that there’s only a single obvious vertical (and that that’s vertical), alternatively, using shift movements with a tilt-shift lens can correct some of this distortion in-camera. Post-exposure, Photoshop’s “Lens Distort” filter can also save the day.

4. Leading Lines

Compositionally, lines (such as streams or railway tracks) leading from the bottom corners of an image towards the center often have a particular magic for guiding the viewers eye through the picture, making for strong images, and this is particularly the case for wide-angle images. Hot Stream is a great example of this, the viewers eye tends to wander from the corner  back through the image along the stream. As the stream moves back into the image, the stream gets smaller (in terms of inches on the printed page) quickly due the wide perspective. This quick fade (in width) into the distance creates a real sense of depth in the image.

Hot Stream, Húsavík, Iceland. Image Copyright Joe Decker

5. Filter Woes

Shooting wide creates two problems for those of us who use filters. Polarizers are a specific problem, the effect of a polarizer on a blue sky varies across the sky so greatly that wide-angle images including the sky are left horribly unnatural, so leave off the polarizer unless you know there’s no blue sky in your scene. Screw-in filters are a separate problem, it’s all too easy for the filter edges, particularly if you’re stacking more than one filter on the same lens. Filter systems, such Cokin’s P-series filters (with the wide-angle filter holder), can help you avoid these problems if you must use filters.

Dwarf Arctic Birch, C. Hofmann Peninusla, Greenland. Image Copyright Joe Decker

6. Focusing

One of the things I enjoy most about working with wide-angle lenses is the ease of focusing them. As you move to wider and wider focal lengths, the depth-of-field at a particular aperture gets deeper and deeper. This allows you to make great use of the concept of hyperfocal distance, that is, the nearest distance you can focus a particular lens at a particular aperture and get “good focus”. At 24mm, by focusing about six feet out from the camera you’ll capture everything from about three feet to infinity in focus—even at f/11. At 17mm, focusing at the right point at f/11 will get you everything from infinity down to 17 inches away. Find (using a web site like this or any of a number of other sites, software tools or printed tables) and write down the hyperfocal distance for a couple of your widest lenses at a couple of your favorite apertures, and you’ll have an easy way of bringing the entire scene of near-far compositions into critical focus.

Using wide-angle lenses can certainly be tricky, but I love them all the same. Used well they can allow the photographer to create images that immerse us in a world with both small, intimate details and bold, dramatic vistas.

Joe Decker is a professional nature photographer and writer for Photocrati’s Photography Blog He also offers nature photography workshops and coaching around the western United States.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

6 Winning Ways to Work Wide

Source: dps

This week – as a follow up to our article Composing with Curves – your challenge is to take and share an image on the theme of ‘Curves’.

Read Composing with Curves, choose one of the types of curves mentioned (‘C Curves’, ‘Arches’, ‘S Curves’, ‘Circles’ or ‘Implied Curves’) and go out and try to capture some of them.

Once you’ve taken your ‘Curves’ Photos – choose your best 1-2, upload them to your favourite photo sharing site either share a link to them even better – embed them in the comments using the our new tool to do so.

If you tag your photos on Flickr, Instagram, Twitter or other sites with Tagging tag them as #DPSCURVES to help others find them. Linking back to this page might also help others know what you’re doing so that they can share in the fun.

Also – don’t forget to check out some of the great shots posted in last weeks Headshots challenge – there were some great shots submitted.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

Curves: Weekly Photography Challenge

Source: dps

I had noticed this lighting scheme earlier in the song and missed it, focusing elsewhere. But when guitarist Brendt Allman went into his solo, I waited to see if it would happen again. Sure enough, it did. EOS-1D Mark IV, EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. ISO 3200, 1/200 f/2.8.

A few years ago, I managed to start working with one of my favorite groups of musicians, a progressive heavy metal band from Pennsylvania called Shadow Gallery.  This has led to me collaborating with them in a number of ways.  I did some publicity photos for them, shot a music video (in another first for me) that ended up getting play on MTV in Europe, and in what I consider a career highlight, shot my first concert performance- which also happened to be their first concert performance.

Having never shot a live performance, I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew the venue was a small local place, so I had no idea what the lighting would be like. I came prepared with two lenses, an EF 24-105 f/4L and EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II, as well as a 580EX II speedlite. I wasn’t sure the speedlites would be allowed, and even if they were, felt they would limit my shooting since I’d have to wait for the recycle. I used two cameras- a Canon EOS 7D and a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. Both are capable of relatively high ISO’s, which I knew I’d be using in a dimly lit concert venue. By raising the ISO, it minimized how hard the flash would have to work.  I experimented starting at ISO 800, and finally settled on ISO 3200 a song or two into the show.

The great thing about musical performances is the lighting is generally pretty

This shot was early in the show, and I was experimenting with flash for my exposures. I used the built-in flash on the EOS 7D, and set the flash exposure compensation to -1 so as not to overpower the ambient. The result was good fill on his face, while the stage lighting created a nice backlight. The slower shutter speed of 1/100 allowed some motion blur in the hair, but that adds to the energy of the image. ISO was only 800 here, as it was the first song and I was still experimenting.

interesting, if not all that bright.  What I wanted to do was figure out, when the lights were at their brightest, what my exposure should be.  I had the luxury of an opening act to shoot some tests. In addition, I wasn’t limited to just three songs like you might be with more well-known performers. I had an entire two hour show, so I took the first two songs to really nail my exposure down.

Even when using flash, I wanted to balance the flash with ambient light, not overpower the ambient lighting.  To do this, I shot in Manual mode.  I set my aperture wide open at f/2.8 or f/4 depending on the camera.  I wanted a shutter speed fast enough to stop any movement on stage, so I ended up settling on 1/200 for the most part. Knowing the 7D would be a bit noisier at the high ISOs due to the smaller sensor, and that the lens I was using was a stop slower, I put the 24-105 on that camera and shot it at 1/100 at f/4 to give it an extra stop of exposure.  That allowed some motion blur to creep in, but for the most part I lost very shots due to motion blur.

The constantly changing lighting meant that some shots just vanished as I pressed the shutter button.  The lighting was frantic and pulsing and constantly changing. But after a song or two, it got easier to predict the patterns, as well as see where the band members liked to stand so I could plan for a shot. After a time I ditched

the flash and opted to shoot sequences at 8 and 10 frames per second to be sure I caught a good expression or peak action. In some cases, I’d catch great lighting for an instant, and then wait to see if the lighting sequence repeated and I could catch it again.

Overall, it was a great experience, one I hope to repeat again some time. It was the perfect combination for me- great music and photography.

After a while I turned off the flash and raised the ISO up. Shooting using only the ambient light created some dramatic lighting situations. EOS 7D, EF 24-105 f/4L IS/ ISO 3200, 1/100, f/4.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.

My First Concert: Lighting Craziness

Source: dps

Introduction

The following is an excerpt from the SLR Lounge Lightroom Workflow System Workshop on DVD, a system designed to increase your post production speed by 5 to 10 times! Click here to learn more.

In this article, we are going to talk about creating a develop preset that you would like to apply to all of your images when they are first imported into Lightroom.

Although Adobe’s RAW image processing is extremely powerful, one common complaint is that your images may look flat and colorless at first. Often photographers will lament how beautiful their colors looked on the back of their camera.

Well, in an effort to fix this problem and make our images automatically look a little more crisp and vibrant when we first bring them into Lightroom, we’re going to create a “Standard Import” preset.

For this tutorial we will use the following image as our example:

Basic Adjustments Panel

The goal for a standard preset is twofold:  First, to simply help every image look a little better overall, of course. Secondly we also want to apply default settings such as a personal blend of sharpening, lens corrections, or other calibration-related things.

First, let’s tackle the Basic Adjustments.  Open the Basic Adjustments panel in the Develop Module and apply the following settings:

The idea here is that you want to keep detail in any bright highlights or deep shadows, but do it without making the image look flat overall.  This is why we bring down the highlights to -20 yet push the Whites up to +10, and the same with the Shadows and Blacks. The image gets a little “punch” to it, without blowing out any highlights or clipping any shadows.

To enhance that subtle punch a little further, next we’ll boost both the Clarity and Vibrance to +15.  Note that we leave alone settings like Saturation and Contrast, because for the most part those adjustments are too strong for them to be applied to every single image.

Of course, YOU should tailor the adjustments to your own personal style!  Usually however we advise that going too much further than subtle editing should be saved as a separate preset that you use part of the time, but not necessarily 100% of the time.

The goal, of course, is to minimize the amount of editing you have to do to the majority of your images.  If for example you find that 80-90% of the time you wind up adjusting some of these settings even further, or less, …then you might as well create your Standard Import preset that way because it will minimize the amount of editing you have to do later, even if you have to undo one or two settings just 10-20% of the time.  See how that works?

To be avoided, however, is using a standardized preset to cover your habitual mistakes.  A good indicator for this is is if you feel like you ought to adjust your Exposure slider in your standardized preset.  Unless you have a very good reason; you’ll probably want to simply work to meter and expose your images better in the first place!

Detail Panel Adjustments

In the Detail Panel, we are going to apply our own special blend of sharpening that we apply to 99% of our RAW images.  These settings are shown below:

Sharpening is definitely one of the most subjective aspects of post-production, however this “recipe” is our tried-and-true blend for RAW images, and we use it for all types of images from general portraits, weddings, and details.

So adjust the settings to your taste, however just remember that your goal is for these settings to become the foundation for all your images!  Try out these settings on many different types of images, and settle on something that works best for all of them.

Lens Correction Adjustments

Another common issue on DSLR cameras and lenses these days is vignetting.  By default, we prefer to correct for a slight amount of vignetting by dialing our Lens Corrections’ “Manual” tab to the following settings:

Again, if you commonly shoot with certain lenses that have less vignetting, or more, then feel free to adjust these settings slightly.  Or, of course, if you actually utilize vignetting in your personal style, then feel free to zero-out this adjustment.

If you followed our adjustments approximately, then your final image will look something like this:

To see the real difference in the processing, let’s zoom in a bit:

Again, the goal here is not to make the image over-the-top contrasty or colorful, just to und0 the “flatness” that you initially see in your RAW images.

Saving the Standard Import Preset

If there are any other settings you would like to add to your “Standard Import” develop preset, do that now.  For example certain cameras may need adjustments in the Camera Calibration section, to correct for faint hues or tints in the shadows or highlights.  There are also Camera Profiles that attempt to emulate specific in-camera colors, (“Faithful”, “Neutral”, Landscape”, etc.) …however in our opinion the “Adobe Standard” profile is the best.

When you’re ready to create a preset, open the Develop Module’s left-hand panel and click the little plus sign on the Presets tab:

In the New Develop Preset window you can select which adjustments become part of this preset.  You may wish to only select a few parameters, such as for the specific tabs which we adjusted, however consider selecting “Check All” so that this preset can be used to reset images entirely.

Name this preset “00 Standard Import”, and be sure to put the two zeros at the beginning (or a similar code) so that this preset shows up at the top of your list of presets for easy access. Similarly, you may want to create a new folder and give it a numerical name so that all your presets show up at the top of the Presets panel, instead of below the (annoyingly un-deletable) Adobe-included Lightroom Presets.

Applying the Preset During The Import Process

Now that you have saved this new preset, you can apply it any time when you’re working on images in Lightroom.  However there is another awesome tool that we can utilize which will help us automate or workflow overall.

When you get back from a photo shoot with images that are ready to be imported into Lightroom, you’ll be able to apply this preset to all your images during the import process!

Open the import dialog box by either clicking on the Import button at the bottom of the left-hand panel of the Library module, or simply type the hotkey “Ctrl + Shift I”.

On the right-hand side of the import panel, you will see “Apply During Import” and the first option will be for develop settings.  Find your Standard Import Preset and select it.

By default, these options will remember themselves the next time you import images, so don’t forget this in case you want to change or stop using presets during the import process.

One of the main advantages of setting up your workflow this way is that, by applying a preset such as this during the time of import, combined with the option tell your computer to render previews after it is done importing, (in the “File Handling” section above) …you can tell Lightroom to import an entire photo shoot, apply a preset to every photo, and then render 1:1 previews all at once!

At the end of a long photo shoot or wedding day or whatever, this allows you to simply download and backup your photos once, then commence the Lightroom import workflow and go to bed.  By morning you’ll have your entire Lightroom catalog full of images with the preset and full previews ready to go!

Conclusion

It takes time to fine tune your own “Standard Import” preset and get it to work on the majority of your images, but once you develop it you can save hours and hours of post-production time.

Once we have created a standard preset for all our images, theoretically in post-production we will mostly spend our time just editing certain settings on an image-to-image basis, such as white balance and exposure.  Even these settings can be adjusted in batches though. (This is why we did not adjust the settings for White Balance and Exposure in the Basic Panel for the “Standard Import” preset.)

The SLR Lounge Workflow System Workshop on DVD

The SLR Lounge Workflow System Workshop on DVD takes everything that we taught in the Lightroom 4 A to Z Workshop on DVD and builds by teaching you how to maximize your shooting and post processing efficiency and workflow. This 7 hour DVD covers data safety procedures, file management, culling standards and overall develop techniques to increase your post production efficiency by up to 15x! In fact, using this Workflow System we can cull and edit over 1,500 images per hour! Don’t believe us, watch the teaser video! The Workflow System is also available as a part of the Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection. To learn more, click this link.

Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.

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How to Create a “Standard Import” Preset in Lightroom 4

Source: dps