It’s been since October 2006 since I blogged about broadband internet and at the time I was thrilled to be going to satellite with download speeds of 512K. Well, Verizon finally got their butts in gear and are offering me DSL. It’s been ordered and will be here in time for my birthday next week. What a nice present they gave me.
My only hope is that I don’t have the same issues I did last time they offered my DSL. They said I could have it, then I couldn’t, then I could, then I couldn’t. Arg, what a nightmare.
Cross your fingers that next week I’ll be tearing up the internet with my real broadband connection.
Post Category: Experiences
February 5th, 2008 at 01:26pmphilpeck
There are multiple ways to create black and white images inside Lightroom. The first option for most is to use the presets shipped with Lightroom. These presets use the saturation slider to covert your image to black and white by lowing it all the way down to 0%.
The second option is to click on Greyscale on the HSL panel. This was my preferred option as you had the ability to control the luminance of each individual color once converted to black and white, allowing you to lighten or darken certain tones to add or reduce contrast.
But a month ago I took one of the images to the printer to have a 11×14 print made of my black and white portrait. I was really disappointed with the results. The print was very pixilated and splotchy in the bokeh areas. I first thought it might have been the printer, but coming back to my computer and zooming in on these areas, I saw that the image itself was splotchy. I couldn’t figure out what caused this.
Yesterday I was listening to the latest episode of The Digital Story Podcast and he shared a top he learned from Katrin Eismann. It was to reduce the saturation in the HSL panel of each of the colors, then adjust the Hue and Luminance sliders by color to tweak your black and white image. By doing this you were supposed to get a smother black and white image. I gave it a try, and my splotchy bokeh areas were gone. Very cool.
So, I created a preset to reduce the saturation of each color in the HSL panel and will probably be using this going forward instead of clicking on the Greyscale option.
Here are some 100% crops of an image that I adjusted using all 3 options so you can see the effects.
Full Image
Lightroom High Contrast Preset
Lightroom Greyscale
Lightroom Desaturated by Color
I really like the way the new method came out.
Hope this helps someone out there. Thanks to Derik and Katrin for the tip.
Post Category: Photography
January 11th, 2008 at 12:42pmphilpeck
Wow, thank goodness it’s Friday. What a long week. The time between now and Christmas is getting shorter and I’m starting to feel the pressure. I got one of the prints I had made back today. Man, does that make me want a bigger printer.
Here’s today’s pic.
Post Category: Photography
December 7th, 2007 at 08:16pmphilpeck
I stopped by a local print shop today to see about getting some larger prints made of some of my images and to test them out for printing of client work. Talk about small town business. They came recommended by a coworker, so we’ll see how they do. Nice thing is they sound like they’ll be fast, normally turning them over the next day. I’ll let you know how they come out. I’ve really wanted to print some of my shots large. I can’t wait to see the tests.
Still not making any progress on my Christmas shopping. Seems really tough this year. That’s not a good thing. Maybe I’ll get some done this weekend so I’ll have something to put under the tree.
Anyway, here’s my shot for day 6. I’m not the proudest of this one, but it turned out OK. Have some good ideas in my head, just need to get them into the camera.
Enjoy.
Post Category: Photography, Random
December 6th, 2007 at 01:48pmphilpeck
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