Making Water Wet

It's been a while since I posted to this blog, by "a while" I mean more than a year.  Lots of reasons, but I'll skip those and get right to the subject of this post: Making Water Wet (in Lightroom).

Why in the world would I need to make water wet, it is that way naturally, isn't it?  Looking at raw images, apparently not always.  Water in a RAW image can look flat and dull.  For that matter sometimes pavement or rocks would look better with a bit of a moist glisten. 

I just picked up a technique courtesy of Scott Kelby in one of his videos that literally can make water (or stones, or pavement) look wet. 

(tl/dr summary) -- Use local adjustment brush and set contrast and clarity to 100 (yes, pin to the max) and brush on the adjustment.

Enlarging Techniques

I just bumped into a nifty page on enlarging techniques published by AdoramaPix.  I think it is worth a read and may come in handy in the future, so I'll link to it:

AdoramaPix: Going Big

Using Adoramapix Referral Link

Opening an AdoramaPix account using a referral link can be confusing, even frustrating, based on the reported experience of some past travelers.  I'm writing this post as a fairly detailed, step-by-step how to page, for someone wanting to order a BarrettPhoto book.

The first step is to follow (click) a referral link to go from my web site to AdoramaPix's where an account can be created.  I include a referral link in the text describing each book and often through other means.

Please note, that I have tried to be detailed and complete, AdoramaPix may change their site at any time.  Also, some people have seen a different first screen.  I believe they always have a Join Us or similar option to create a new account which should lead to the process I outline below.

Navigating the SmugMug Gallery

BarrettPhoto images are primarily shared through our web site hosted on SmugMug.  SmugMug is wonderful and all, but the gallery pages can be a bit confusing.  It has a lot of controls to access various pieces of information.

The image at right shows a typical gallery view with all of the controls as presented on the web site.

This post attempts to clarify what the controls actually due.

EXIF Image Rating

Image ratings are essential to my work flow and management of my Smug Mug photo galleries.  Using that data in a consistent way is important to me.

EXIF is short for EXchangeable Image file Format and can be used for storing quite a bit of text information with or inside of a data file. EXIF typically stores image capture time, identification of camera and lens and many other optional fields.  This posting delves into my use of the Rating field.  Which is really nothing more than a very short integer limited to values of 0 to 5.  Those values are often represented as a count of stars (⭐️) to show a rating.

Yellowstone White Balance and Exposure

A lot of the images captured on our recent trip to Yellowstone have a nasty blue tinge.  Many of those that don't have the nasty blue tinge have really grey snow.  Both of those issues are artifacts of digital cameras, typically running in auto mode trying to take great pictures under lighting conditions that are anything but great.

Through most of our trip we had heavy cloud cover which fools many cameras into shooting at much too low of a color temperature (the variable controlled by white balance).  This results in a very blue image.  Here is an example (not a great shot, but a good example).

Image as shot: Yuck!

Preparing for a Photo Expedition (Pre-Build Smug Mug Page)

I'm blessed to be able to go on one or two pretty significant trips each year.  I always depart with the intention of building a set of pages on my SmugMug site that will host images captured by me, my family, and when I am lucky fellow travelers. Sorting, rating, post-processing and ultimately posting the images to my site takes a fairly large amount of time and effort.  Having the images appearing on the site as fast as possible is useful, having some of them appearing during the trip encourages other to participate making it even more important to me.

My desire for speed combined with my natural inclination to laziness has spurred me to create a cookbook for pre-trip prep to make posting of images faster during and after the expedition.  This post lays out the steps I go through to setup my working environment for a trip, your milage, will of course, vary.