Tit (Tips) for TAT...

Sandia Sunset
© Joe Bridwell
Several years ago, I shot a Sandia sunset as a point-and-shoot JPEG. Highlights seem blown out; the blue sky is pale.  As software capabilities progress, it often pays to revisit such shots.  Let’s see how the Target Adjustment tool (TAT) from Lightroom 2 can enhance clouds.

With advent of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and CS4, there's been lots of hype in the online video tutorials world about local, nondestructive gradient filter and adjustment brush tools.  For landscape digital photographers who love Magic Hour, this translates to the gradient tool and adjustment brush which can create truly spectacular sunrises and sunsets.  So, you might ask, "Did Adobe hide any other really neat tools somewhere?"

Yes, they did; it's called the Targeted Adjustment tool.  Or, as Scott Kelby says, "TAT, for short."  The TAT is that little round target-looking icon on the top-left corner of the Tone Curve panel in the Develop module.  It looks like the TAT portion of this image.  When you move your cursor over it, two triangles are added to the cursor cross - pointing up and down.  The cross samples the image portion; the triangles modify the Tone Curve.

When you click on that little target icon, your cursor changes to the cursor seen here.  This remarkable tool lets you interactively adjust the Tone Curve by clicking-and-dragging it right within your photo.  The crosshair is actually where the tool's change is located - the target with triangles is there just to remind you which way to drag the tool.  This chosen point is also reflected in the Tone Curve itself as a circle.



TAT really strengthens your ability to make subtle Tone Curve adjustments.  When you look at the tone curve, you'll see two things:
1.    A point on the curve were the tones you're hovering over are located.
2.    The name of the area you're adjusting appears at the graph bottom.

For example, consider a shot where captured clouds have little emphasis.  To darken these clouds, just click on them with TAT and drag straight downward.  Or, if clouds are dark, drag straight upward to lighten.  You might say, "This is a super neat way of adjusting contrast!  Thanks, Adobe (and Joe)..."

But that's not all... scroll on down to the HSL panel in the Develop module.  Once again, you'll see the TAT tool.  Here, TAT adjusts Color, instead of Contrast.  Dragged upward to increase or downward to decrease saturation.

Several years ago, I shot a gorgeous sunset over the Sandia's as a point-and-shoot JPEG.  In intense light orange regions, while highlights were not blown out, I used Tone Curve’s TAT to reduce those regions to a more apt color.
With all deeply rich color in the clouds, the blue sky was slightly under saturated.  A second application of HSL’s Luminance TAT is to darken just the blue sky.

Tips (Tit) for TAT... now you can easily add or subtract drama and/or passion from remarkably photogenic sunsets which truly complement regal landscapes!

Kelby’s Exciting Lightroom 2 Workflow Book…

New Adobe software tends to come out without supporting learning tools. Select individuals, operating under nondisclosure agreements (NDA), have beta software access. With a proven track record for writing books or doing videos, they try to time production of learning tools near the software release date. Several times now, I've had software with untimely reading or video tools to learn about it later.

So when Scott Kelby's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers finally arrived, I was very eager to dive into it. Saturday afternoon about three, FedEx pulled up ~ by 10 o'clock Sunday evening I pretty much had a good idea of some of Kelby's in-depth tricks for using Lightroom 2. As owner of Adobe Photoshop CS3 and a newbie at Lightroom 2, I also have the outstanding Bruce Fraser Real World series on CS3 and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Kelby's new book was like icing on the cake! I suspect my quick assimilation of Kelby benefited by learning from Fraser. BTW, each book is available in the Brain Food section of this blog…

Neat Tips

With a sound basis in CS3 and ACR, I'm quite pleased with what can be done with the new, local brush tools in LR2. In his clear fashion, Kelby gives a blow-by-blow review for neat LR2 tricks. I particularly like the following workflow in the Library module:

1. Importing - getting photos into Photoshop Lightroom 2 p. 1.

2. Sorting photos using Collections p. 42.

3. Organizing multiple shoots using Collection Sets p. 54.

4. Make finding photos easier by adding specific Keywords p. 60.

5. Moving photos and how to use Folders p. 82.

6. From laptop to desktop: Syncing catalogs on two computers p. 92.

Then there's the fascinating Develop module:

1. Setting White Balance p. 130.

2. How to set overall Exposure p. 135.

3. Adding "punch" to your images using Clarity p. 141.

4. Using Tone Curve to add contrast p. 143.

5. Virtual Copies - the "no risk" way to experiment p. 154.

LR2 really shines at Local Adjustments with new Develop brush tools:

1. Dodging, Burning, and Adjusting individual areas of your photo p. 170.

2. Fixing skies (and other stuff) with Gradient Filter p. 182.

3. Removing dust spots p. 199.

4. Fixing backlit photos (using Fill Light) p. 205.

5. Sharpening photos and Lightroom p. 207.

6. Using Camera Profiles to match the look of the LCD image p. 213.

7. Travel Workflow ~ my step-by-step travel photography process p. 399.

Mind you, these are just my present highlights! I'm sure you'd find a different series according to your knowledge and needs. To quote MacArthur, "I shall return..."

While watching LR2 videos, I've seen Kelby say his workflow is now 75 LR2 and 25 CS3. Jeff Schewe, Fraser's sidekick, indicates 90 LR2 - 10 CS3. Looks like there's a tidal shift in pro workflow...

I think the real strengths of LR2 simplify to handling all photos in a catalog, making local, nondestructive adjustments, a very smooth transition to additional requirements if you need to use CS3, and a marked workflow speed up.

Shortcut Tables Missing...

Jumping into LR2, you find it's a real slow go using the cursor to switch in and out of various panels. Kelby handles this for each instance of digital development by including specific shortcuts in each step as he explains how to do development.

Unfortunately, Kelby left several significant elements sadly lacking. One index entry suggest a shortcut icon at 227-228. I would expect to see an extended list of all shortcuts for each of five LR2 modules Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web ~ but they are nonexistent. I think this is a rather serious, if not fundamental oversight; it forces the reader to laboriously annotate each book page to remember the complex keystroke sequence. The reader would prefer a well prepared index, a combined shortcut page, memorizing it, and moving on rather rapidly.

Nevertheless, Kelby's LR2 book is a provocative way to definitively aid digital photographers in speeding up their workflow.

My Thanks to David Lyons, eXacteXposure.com, for many discussions on these points…

"Pay Me Now, or Pay Me Later..."

You might say, "What's Michael Phelps got to do with Lightroom 2?"

Pay Me Now…

It's wrapped up in the pay me now side of this equation... Michael went to Beijing with lots of training under his belt. If you don't believe so, just look at those awesome abs!

Have you trained for digital photography’s terrible gigabyte data onslaught?

What's a gigabyte onslaught?

It's those thousands of images you get to look through to decide which ones you need to work on to create award-winning images or quickly pick out images for your client. It's also the gigabytes and eventually terabytes of external, off-line hard drive space which have a pristine backup of your original image. And, it never ends as long as you want to take pictures...

As long as you've got enough CF cards and backup capabilities, you can wander around anywhere and take digital pictures to your hearts content for as long as you like. That's what I did for four years, from point-and-shoot to prosumer DSLR as I grew into digital photography. Unfortunately, early software and my laziness contributed to a pay me later attitude.

With advent of Lightroom 2, Adobe has a slick way of importing images, adding site-specific metadata, adding keywords, and reviewing to see which images are important.

Pay Me Later…

A newbie to this due diligence workflow process, I had some 21,000 images. At a minimum, they needed copyright and site-specific metadata. At the max - quickly find all time favorites. I needed to be able to easily and quickly view them to roughcut the goobers (Texan for get rid of the crap).

It's a mind boggling process.

I can only sit hunched in one position so many hours a day staring at a calibrated screen, doing visual compares between lousy, good, better, and best as well as adding preliminary keywords. Fond of bracketed HDR panoramas, some of this job was exceedingly repetitious. Slowly learning what not to shoot, much early work wouldn't fit the exacting criteria for award-winning photography.

The first job was to import a folder full of raw images with basic copyright metadata. I had pre-grouped folders containing thousands of images into years. With 138 GB of images, I started in a folder for 2004. Many of these landscape images are New Mexico; so I used a keyword format nm_place. The nm_ format could apply to any state in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States (co_, ut_, az_ …). As they appeared, I would coin other key word formats for specifics. At the least, this was only a preliminary cut.

I found five hours a day was about all the concentrated attention I could give such as mind-sapping project. Yet, doggedly, I continued for seven days - finally paring down the image count from 21,000 to 13,000. And... Phase 1 was done

Then, thanks to the bright software designers at Adobe, I discovered I still had some 3300 images without keywords and cleaned up that problem. Never fear; although you can't directly delete images when you're looking at Without Keyword in Collections, LR2 lets you perform a Show Folder, which opens the specific folder where the individual images occur. Reopen your external hard drive (My Book E), open this folder, and go through the delete process.

Here's the Windows XP folder structure for my main Lightroom 2 catalog (Lightroom 2 catalog.lrcat and preview folder Lightroom 2 catalog previews.lrdata) when this taxing job was done... 13,000 images take 4.2 GB of space where's a catalog takes 0.13 gigabytes.

Fortunately, LR2 is very good at letting me look at each image in Loupe space, with an adjacent keyword panel open for metadata creation. If I didn't like an image, simply hit X and it would be rejected. At the end of any particular folder, Ctrl-Backspace would allow me to delete the rejected images. If I saw a whole sequence I didn't like, I could choose Delete Photos and throw them away. Or, I could choose Shift X and walk through a sequence before using Ctrl-Backspace. It helps to keep Filmstrip View open - you can see what you're rejected.

The really nice thing about Lightroom 2 is the transportable catalog; in one place on your main drive, you compile previews, metadata, keywords, and other aspects of your digital photography. This catalog can be transferred to your laptop or vice versa. Because it compiles previews in a database, you can actually look at a picture while you add metadata although external hard drives which created that picture are either off-line or a studio. If you've been on a long shoot, just take the revised catalog from your laptop and put it on your desktop. Then, either update with new image information or catalog revisions from your daily grind.

In other words, get a lot of your work done on your laptop during the day, then shoot that next exciting batch of award winners at dawn and dusk.

Hey, did you forget about Michael?

Nope...

Michael is the most highly awarded gold medalist ever to attend Olympics. He got there because he was determined, trained hard, performed well, and won.

May I suggest you do the same with digital photography workflow! Use Lightroom 2, import your images and create a copyright. This copyright will carry forward to all subsequent images. Sort them later and add distinctive keywords.

That way, when you get home, with your deliberate workflow steps, you can quickly rank and pick winners for further work, with brilliant new adjustment tools from Lightroom 2. Or, when available in the next month or so, the panoply of additional digital development features in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Train yourself, enjoy a dutiful workflow, and you too, can have award-winning images and happy clients!