We'll Fix It In Post (a software thread)

I nearly cried when I tried to backup to a external hard drive. Then I just dragged the whole shebang (iphoto lib) to the disk and that was that. Yes, I actually did that. :-(

I still haven't found the right combination of Feather, Flow and Density to get the Local Corrections (K) tool in LR to do what I want, or what I used to be able to do (with much more effort) in PSE. I still end up with very artefacty border zones between areas I've "painted" with different exposure values. At least I've learned not to use Auto Mask any more, which is pretty disastrous when painting areas that are non-uniform in colour or texture.

Methods for organising photos? In order to subdivide things to a reasonable degree so I can drag chunks off to an external HDD when necessary, I have folders on the laptop based on camera model, year, then quarter (Canon EOS 40D/2009/[Q1]). I suppose I could just have one great dump of a folder and let LR sort it all out but I've not got to that stage yet. I'm also poor at tagging in LR. I don't much relish the idea of retrospectively adding "Ava" or "Tallulah" or both to 5,000 photos...

I've been moving a lot of pictures around tonight from drive to drive and to try and get them into order. Aperture has been a complete nightmare; Lightroom was a total breeze. I now have them all in it, with top-level folders for each year, and a sub-folder for each "job" inside.

This works well in LR, as it lets me drill down into a specific thing without having to go to the bother of tagging them all, but you can also completely ignore where they are on disk and do big searches across all of them.

Hey, that's what I was doing last night! It's what Fridays are for, right?

Taking advantage of the newly-ordered environment of the office/craft room/3rd bedroom (a bomb site for three years), I was inspired to do some virtual sorting on laptop/HDD and now everything is a bit more streamlined (and the LR catalog has been backed up for the first time in four months).

Problem is, in the bad old days, I'd use ZoomBrowser to take everything off the Ixus i/300D and I'd give a two-letter prefix for each import (so you'd get KX0001, KX0002... for 17/3/05 and then KX0001, KX0002... for 18/3/05, etc - which was pretty stupid). Fine if you're retaining that day-by-day folder structure, not so good if you want to merge (especially as external mass-renaming tools will only destroy LR's links). But I've discovered you can just jam a new prefix in the Filename field in Library mode (with a whole bunch selected) and all the pics just inherit that prefix, sequentially-numbered.

Our teacher says it's better to erase your cards once the card is full. So now I'll have about 1200 pics on my Canon w hich need to be sorted through. ARGHHHHHH! :-)

um, what else are you going to do with it once its full ?

Yeh deleting in drive and drabs is bad for flash memory, supposedly

Yeah, but I wonder how much longer you can use it. That said, tbh I always wait till it's full.

I'm nervous about wiping a CF card until the pix I've taken off it are also backed up elsewhere. I had three cards on the go last week, which meant, slightly annoyingly, overlapping filename sequences (the camera just picks up from the last thing on the card, even if it's used that filename on another card). Fortunately, LR prefixes the shooting date on the filename as it imports, so no duplicates yet...

does the 'erasing everything' rule come from the fact that files are never deleted only de-indexed? (because when a new file is created, it has to delete space first thus making the whole process slower)
if so, then not only do you need to erase but you need to full format.

or am i talking bollocks?

Deleting files just involves more writes than recreating the filesystem, and writes shorten flash life, which is orders of magnitude shorter than (mechanical) disk. (Flash is cheap, tho, so I dunno if this point is all that compelling.) If done on the camera, it uses more battery life, as well. Compound these issues with the fact that most cameras appear to use a very fragile filesystem (FAT12, I think, on my EOS?) -- pull the card while it's mounted on yr computer and you run a very high risk of losing all the unsaved pix -- and it just makes the most sense to rebuild the FS on the device that writes to it most often.

Yo! Hello ILP. Long-time... photo-taker, first-time poster. Yes.

I'm both pretty lazy, and also vaguely averse to computers, so as a result I shoot in jpeg, and do very little post-processing. I got a hooky copy of Aperture which i do use to tweak things occasionally, but I don't do much. I don't really archive my photos at all, either, which is probably bad, but I'm not at all precious; "arty" ones can always be retaken or replaced with a totally new arty image, and I've not got kids yet. Kitten photos are important, obv., but I'm not gonna die if I lose them, so... Basically Flickr is my archive. I still have the originals mostly. I should take time out and organise them better.

In terms of post-processing that I DO do, it's generally just little adjustments to exposure, contrast, and maybe saturation.

I rarely crop, unless it was an image taken really quickly that I didn't get to frame properly; say a dog suddenly emerged from undergrowth and I had to get him centre-frame cos that's where my auto-focus point was set and I didn't have time to change before he moved on - I cropped one picture like that to put the dog in the corner and make the story of the image much more interesting.

I straighten stuff up occasionally, especially if the sea / horizon is on there; unless it's deliberately off for a good reason, the sea just looks stupid if it's not dead level.

I've taken away blemishes a couple of times, but generally only work-related photos (removed some graffiti / marks from seminar room walls, that kind of thing).

On my travels around Flickr, I generally don't like images that are obviously heavily processed, so I don't do it myself.

So guys on a scale of 1-5 how photoshopped does this picture look? Is it an obviously bad job or would it only be noticeable if the original were available to compare it to?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2444/3607023511_c325840d3a_o.jpg

I like the photo a lot but the original is so washed out. The anemone should be bright, almost neon green, and the fish should be bright orange, and the original photo totally lets the colours down. I kind of feel like I've cheated by altering the colours and that anyone who looks at it will know it's been photoshopped!

with 1 being 'wouldn't know the difference' and 5 being 'you obviously photoshopped the shit out of that fish'

1 imo

1

Yeah, that's a 1. If you're shooting through glass under weird aquarium lighting, I think you can do whatever you like to get it back the way you saw it! It's pretty subtle.

Oh, ok, the fish isn't that subtle. But it still looks like a fish.

Sweet, thanks. Most of the colours in my other fish photos turned out just as vividly as they looked in real life, despite also taking them through weird aquarium lighting (here and here). For some reason the anemonefish just didn't want to appear orange in any of its photos.

I'm happy with the way a lot of these turned out though, given that I've never taken pictures of things in aquariums before.