Today, I’m going to walk through some topics that have been inquired about by different users. It is quite likely that if one person is asking a question, many others are as well, so it seems in everyone’s best interests to shed some light on a few points.

I want to leverage XeL to create quality simulations of film and paper processes. To this extent there are a couple tips to get the best accuracy and appearance out of these presets.

When using XeL, we have noticed that there are two distinct users: those who are looking to accelerate their workflow, and create a replicable look. These users that the presets as they are and appreciate what they offer and use them to enhance their workflow.

On the other hand, there are many users who are truly looking to simulate the look of film. I am like these users; I want to leverage XeL to create quality simulations of film and paper processes. To this extent there are a couple tips to get the best accuracy and appearance out of these presets.

First, I want to make clear that these emulations are based off of rolls of film that I personally shot and processed. There is no tool for any image manipulation package that can offer 100% accuracy of any film emulation. Each batch of film is unique and personal shooting and development habits alter the results garnered from any particular film.

I tried to control the exposure process as much as possible to ensure response consistency from roll to roll. And I documented in the manual what developer I used for each emulation. All emulations were developed in a completely color corrected work flow, ensuring the best possible reproduction.

However, every camera is different and not all workflows are color calibrated, so we need to set everything up in Lightroom correctly to reproduce results similar to that which I garnered on the physical rolls. So let’s jump in with the big one.

Camera Profiles

The foremost tool to get the most accurate reproduction of film stock is camera profiles. All of the XeL film emulations were generated using a neutral calibrated custom profile, which is also the best tool to reproduce the emulation. However, suitable results can be garnered utilizing other profiles.

Camera profiles are found in the Camera Calibration tab of the Develop Module. Simply click on the Profile drop down menu to find and apply the desired profile.

The most accurate profile to use would be a custom made profile, utilizing your camera, a color checker chart, and Adobe DNG Profile Editor. Using these tools, and shooting the test shot in diffuse lighting will allow you to create a profile with neutral color, providing the best possible data to Lightroom for further manipulation.

In the absence of a custom profile, the Camera Neutral profile offers the most accurate results.

The second best profile to use would be the Camera Neutral profile provided by Adobe for your particular camera. If your camera model is supported, you should find a series of profiles in the Profile drop down named Camera Landscape, Camera Neutral, camera portrait, and so forth. These profiles are created by adobe and are averaged responses for your particular model of camera.

Simply choose the Camera Neutral profile. This will allow for gentle, neutral colors which will aid in accurate emulation. These are close to a custom profile, but by no means completely accurate. They are based on Adobe’s testing of cameras of the same model, but there are differences in sensors between cameras in each model. Custom profiles correct for this, but the Camera Neutral profile does not.

In the absence of a custom profile, the Camera Neutral profile offers the most accurate results.

A final fallback to consider is the ACR 4.6 profile. While not as neutral as I would desire, it produces good images, but not as accurate as I would desire. However it produces results much more accurate than the Adobe Standard profile. If for some reason you cannot create a custom profile and your camera does not offer a Camera Neutral profile, Adobe 4.6 would be the best profile to choose.

Now, I need to qualify these recommendations. Just because a profile offers the most accurate emulation, it does not mean it is the “best” option for any given image. Your personal taste matters much more than emulation accuracy. When dealing with important images, take some time to look at what the other profiles have to offer. Do not shoehorn yourself into always using Camera Neutral for accuracy, especially when Camera Vivid may produce a much more appealing image.

XeL is designed to accelerate your workflow and allow you to think in terms more along traditional film photography. It is designed to allow you to quickly and easily create beautiful black and white images. It is not designed to constrain your art.

Creating a Custom Profile

I highly recommend checking out our series Playing With Color –Camera Profiles, which covers the use of Camera Profiles in depth. But of importance here, we want to be sure you know how to create a custom DNG Profile. So I recommend starting with Part 2 of that series to jump into using Adobe DNG Profile Editor to make that custom profile for your emulation needs.

I attempted to make a DNG Profile Editor recipe to use exclusively with XeL presets, but I could not find a recipe that would be easily applied to all camera makes and produce reliable results. I found making custom profiles for each camera body was much more accurate than trying to reuse a recipe over and over. Each camera sensor is so different, and there is no one size fits all solution. So for best results, I recommend making the custom profile, and aside from that, shooting with the Adobe provided Camera Neutral profile.

My only big tip for creating custom profiles, which diverges from that in the article link above, is that when shooting the color checker for creating the profile, use good diffuse light and shoot the target with every camera you have available. This will ensure that the profiles created will be consistent from body to body. If you add another camera later, you will have to try to recreate the exact setup, or create new profiles for each camera.

Fixing Banded and Broken Images

Many of the XeL presets really push the Grayscale Mixer to reproduce the look of classic films. The results of really pushing images, especially high contrast images, can lead to images “breaking”. Breaking is when there becomes noticeable banding and borders around content in the image. It could appear as halos, color bands, hard lines or solid blotchy areas of white.

The first step is to try different camera profiles. The more flat and neutral the starting image is, the less likely contrast artifacts will occur. Also, limit use of Sharpening whenever possible. Edge sharpening will also increase the acutance of artifacts as well as edges.

There are a few ways to alleviate these artifacts aside from using profiles, the first being to reduce the overall image contrast. By reducing the contrast, we can hopefully reduce the local high contrast around content. Try slowly lowering the global Contrast sliders lowly and see if the artifacts start to reduce. If the reduction is not evident, or it alters the overall image in a distracting way hit Ctrl/Cmd + Z to undo.

Next try lowering Clarity. Clarity itself is a form of local contrast, and by reducing it you can often eliminate many of the artifacts. Again, slowly lower the slider to see if the artifacts are reduced. If not, then undo the edit.

If the preceding options did not help, and you are not using White Balance as an artistic tool, try setting the white balance at varying levels around the image. White balance actually compresses the range of your image, by setting the white point higher or lower. By setting the White Balance by using the eye dropper on the whitest portions of the image, you can often expand the range and eliminate some of the artifacts apparent between white and black high contrast areas.

Be sure to adjust the Blacks slider as well when using the White Balance adjustment. By setting a higher White Balance and lowering the Blacks slider, you can often eliminate contrast artifacts without changing too much of the overall image.

To be sure you are setting the White Balance to the brightest white point, turn on the highlight clipping alert (press j on your keyboard to toggle clipping alerts on/ff) and use the eyedropper to select areas that are red, denoting clipping. Apply the white balance and then click again on an area that is still red. Do this until there is little to no red visible from the clipping warning.

The final method, which is also the most destructive to your image and the emulations, is to use the eyedropper tool and the Grayscale mixer to shift the color response to colors present in the artifact infected area of the image. Click on an artifact with the eyedropper and move the mouse back and forth and see if there is any improvement. If so, keep it and repeat in a different area. If not, simply undo the adjustments with Ctrl/Cmd + Z.

Be careful using the Mixer Eyedropper, as you can easily create as many issues as you fix. Always take time to zoom and or pan around you image to see if you are creating problems elsewhere. Use a little of all the methods in unison to garner the best results.

Finally, when all else fails, If you are not adverse to grain enhanced images, a medium grain application can often alleviate the artifacts by obscuring them. However, this is often not something that is aesthetically or commercially viable, depending on the need or your client or your desires.

Shoot for Success

Keep in mind, that some images just will never look right when being pushed hard in Lightroom. Black and White conversions are especially hard on images simply due to the reduction of range, converting to color to monochrome. Sometimes you will have to balance your artistic desires with what the image and Lightroom will allow you to do. But you can alleviate the problems by shooting specifically for a Lightroom workflow.

The best way to ensure that you are able to fully manipulate your images is to be sure you are creating the most data possible at the time of capture. We featured an article a while back that covered some tips for making sure you take the best possible images you use in Lightroom, these tips apply as much to XeL as they do to Lightroom in general. I highly recommend reviewing Shoot for Success – Expose for Lightroom, and put some of these practices into place.

When you shoot your images for Lightroom, allowing for range flexibility for the Lightroom engine, you will find you run into these issues less frequently. Yes, following these tips will often lend to a bland image on import or on your preview image. But think of that preview or image upon import as an old roll of film. The image is there, just not developed. Complete the envisioned image in Lightroom. The lower contrast and added range garnered by following the tips from Shoot for Success – Expose for Lightroom will allow for a much larger range of adjustments before effecting image quality.

Final Thoughts

As I explained before, there is not 100% accurate emulation of any film stock or any darkroom process. We can only approximate in our emulation endeavors. No one, not X-Equals, Nik Software, nor Alien Skin will ever be able to say “This emulation is perfect” and that is because there is no perfect. Every batch of film, for every emulsion ever made, has been unique. Every developer, every development process, and all labs will produce a unique product when developing or printing out film.

Each of these emulations was based on sample rolls that I shot, developed and analyzed myself. While I used as much of my science and engineering knowledge as I could in the process, it all really came down to my color calibrated workflow and my eyes. I used as much objective technique as I could, but the final emulations were the result of subjective observation and application.

In other words, these presets emulate the response of a series of frames taken from a single roll of film. They emulate that specific result only, results I created. Every time an XeL film emulation preset is used, it is echoing results I garnered from shooting a test roll in my front yard in mid-Missouri. It does not recreate results you may have achieved in 1988 on a roll of Tri-X ran through HC-110. The paper emulations do not emulate a sheet of Fotokemika Varycon paper developed in Dektol 6 years ago. XeL is a result of result of my personal work, photographically and chemically.

XeL aims to breathe a bit of traditional photography into the digital world. It is a direct application of science to reproducing effects of art, and as such is imperfect. If you truly want results identical to Kodak Panatomic X shot at box speed and ran through D-76, you would have to actually shoot that film, develop it and print it out. This is hard now days, as Pan-X has been discontinued for over a decade and the remaining rolls aren’t getting any younger.

Each emulation sample I have taken has been stored with notes, so that I can always go back and revisit the emulations as technology, both in analysis and image software, improves. I hope everyone understands the scope of the project, beyond making emulations of classic films available, is to document and archive the results I personally garnered with each of these wonder film stocks.

Hopefully you find XeL useful to your personal workflow. Those who have purchased this collection of presets hves directly contributed to me hunting down films I have not had the pleasure of shooting and documenting them similarly – and I will continue my efforts to emulate said films. I feel it is important, and many of you find them useful for your needs. I hope today’s article will help you get better results from these tools.

Thanks for your support.

Michael W. Gray – X-Equals – Click. Download. Smile.

After a year and half of taking a break from doing workshops, I decided to hold one in Los Angeles this past April. It was so successful and so much fun, that I have decided to do two more this year. The group of people that attended last month’s Fashion Photography Workshop were incredible! Not only did they come thirsty and eager to learn, they joined forces with one another and really helped each other out to make it a thoroughly enjoyable working experience. I can’t say enough good things about that group of students! It warmed my heart to such an extent that I’ve decided, “what the heck, let’s do another one in Berlin!”

Photo by: Katy Winterflood – Workshop Student April 2012

So moving forward to Berlin, Germany, the next workshop will be held on June 16th and 17th. I know that I have a lot of blog readers in Europe who just can’t make the trip to the States for the weekend long workshops. And my good friend, and someone that I also mentor, Yoram Roth, has been kind enough to offer me his studio in Berlin which is also a BOXeight Studio just like the one we worked out of in Los Angeles last month. BOXeight was a beautiful space and the people behind BOXeight are amazing!

The format is going to be relatively the same with a few small changes. Saturday will stay absolutely the same. From 10 AM until 6 PM we will learn studio lighting. We will work with professional models, hair and make up artists and a killer wardrobe stylist. We’ll go through the different basic lighting set ups and then we’ll get creative with those set ups and learn how to play with lighting and break some rules! I’ll show you what modifiers I use to get the results I get and we’ll experiment with whatever you want to learn. It’s a fun and creative day and many students walk away with some portfolio pieces. At the very least, you’ll learn about lighting! Which is key to understanding and accomplishing photography!

Photo by: Dante Bell – Workshop Student April 2012

Sunday is where we are going to change it up a bit. Since I don’t do my own retouching, I am going to forego the retouching segment of the workshop. Unfortunately I don’t have the mad skills of Tyler Mitchell or David Skyler at my side when I will be in Berlin. So if the retouching segment was the only part of my workshops that interested you in attending, this workshop isn’t going to be the right fit for you. Instead of retouching in the morning on the second day (Sunday), we will go heavy with the business side of fashion photography. There will be a portfolio review in the morning where I will go through everyone’s work and critique your portfolios. I will tell you where your strong suits are and where your weaknesses are. It will be an open critique, where all students will be involved and learn from each other’s work. After we’ve gone through everyone’s work, we will break for lunch and then reconvene to learn about the business side of fashion photography and how you can market your photography business. The same things I have taught in the past will be taught on this day: marketing and promoting, estimating and budgeting a job, approaching modeling agencies and advertising agencies and magazines.

Photo by: Eli Dagostino – Workshop Student April 2012

You’ll need to bring a good DSLR camera, at least a 50mm and 85mm lens and any other gear you want to use. Plus for Sunday, bring a notebook and be prepared to take a lot of notes!

So for those of you who live in Europe or anywhere else in the world and want to attend my Berlin workshop in June, go to this link for the details!

Berlin has become one of the most interesting places in Europe to visit. With its fast growing artistic community and incredible night life, I am SO excited to be visiting Berlin. I also plan to do some shooting while I’m there! Europe 2012 is going to be a blast! Hope to see some of you there! xoxo

Note from the Editor

Graham Douglas is one of my favorite new Guest Writers. I totally love his new piece on using the Lightroom Book Module – hopefully you will feel the same. As always, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Now … on to the knowledge bomb!

Working with the the Lightroom Book Module

I love picture books. For me, it’s just not a photograph unless it’s been printed and either hung on a wall or bound into a book. I’ve made a few books of photographs using Blurb’s BookSmart software, so I was rather excited to see the new Book module make an appearance in Lightroom 4.

The problem with using BookSmart was always one of keeping the images synchronised with the Lightroom originals. This was ameliorated somewhat when Blurb brought out their Publish plugin – finally I didn’t have to keep manual track of which images I’d recently changed. There was still the issue of having to swap between apps, and being confident that BookSmart had picked up the latest version, but, well, life needs its little hardships.

The Lightroom Book module is capable of producing perfectly adequate books and, for many purposes, it’s all you’ll need.

But now we can create a Blurb book right inside Lightroom: no app switching, no worries about picking up the right version, no need to remember to hit the ‘Publish’ button. But how does it stack up against BookSmart as a way of constructing a book? I already knew that you can’t edit or create custom templates, but how much of a problem would that prove in real life?

To test this out, I decided to try re-creating a book (here) that I’d made about a year ago as part of a project for my college photography course. It’s a fairly simple book, less than 40 pages with only a couple of pages of text and it mostly uses standard BookSmart page templates, so it seemed a good choice for a first dive into the murky realms of the Lightroom Book Module.

Before we start

This is not a tutorial. For that, I can heartily recommend Julianne Kost’s excellent 3-part video series over on Adobe TV (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). What I will be doing is recounting my experience of trying to put together a book based solely on having watched Julianne Kost’s videos and poked about with the Book module a couple of times. As such, I’ll have made mistakes, gone down blind alleys and not have done things in the most optimal way – but that’s part of the learning experience and also a function of the effectiveness of the user interface.

Let’s dive in

For reference, this is the book in BookSmart, showing the book’s cover.

Since I’ve already made the book, I have a collection inside Lightroom containing all the images that I want:

so, I select the collection and enter the Book module.

(At this point Lightroom will, by default, ask you if you want to autofill the images. Personally, I don’t see the point in doing that right at the start, so I had already turned the preference off):

This preferences dialog can be found under the ‘Book’ menu when you’re in that module.)

What type of book?

The first thing to consider is the size and style of the book you’re creating. I already knew that I wanted a Standard Landscape, soft cover, Premium Lustre paper (I was a poor student – it needed to be cheap, OK?). And here comes the first deal-breaker: no soft cover option. I could have Hardcover Dust Jacket or Hardcover Image Wrap, but no Softcover option was available.

On the plus side, though, it does give you an estimated price right up front: something you don’t get with BookSmart.

Laying out the book

So now it’s time to get the pictures into the book in something approximating the final order. I had a couple of things to consider at this point

1. The collection contains more pictures than would eventually be used in the book
2. There are two ‘sets’ of pictures – a main ‘narrative’ set and a ‘details’ set.

What I would like to do is to use Auto Layout to put the narrative set in place, and then add the detail images manually. Easier requested than done, though – Auto Layout uses all the pictures in the film strip, even though I had selected the ones I wanted to put in. I think Adobe have missed a trick here: Auto Layout is potentially a time-saver, but without a little bit more control you could end up wasting as much time as you’d saved undoing some of the things it’s done.

Still, in this case it’s simple enough to correct, since all the pictures I want to remove are consecutive, so I click on the first page and then shift-click on the last page. That didn’t do what I wanted, though – it only selected the two pages that I clicked on.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on here: you have to be careful not to click on an image or text cell, because then you’re selecting cells (for which range select doesn’t really make sense). Unfortunately, Auto Layout had used a full-bleed template for every page, so it’s impossible not to click a cell if you click anywhere on the page thumbnail.

The best way I’ve found to ensure that it’s pages you’re selecting is to click on the page number under the thumbnail. That way, range select works just fine.

This still left another issue: I couldn’t find a way to autofill using a specific template: no matter what I tried, it always created new pages using a default, full-bleed template. I assume that I’ll find out how if I dig a bit deeper, but I’d just like it to be more obvious, if there is a way to do it. Anyway, it’s simple enough to select all the pages and apply a new template that’s more like the one I want.

So, the book now looks like this:

Time for a break…

At this point, I felt that I needed a break. Before sloping off for a nice cup of tea, though, I thought I’d better just save the book and get rid of that distressing ‘Unsaved Book’ label at the top of the page. So I clicked ‘Create Book’, gave it a name in the subsequent dialog and clicked ‘Create’. If only I’d spotted that check box lurking, I’d have saved myself another minor annoyance a bit later on…

So, back to the book. To recap, I’ve got the basic narrative pictures in place; now I have to tidy up the layout and insert the detail pictures, add the text pages and fix up the cover. As reminder, this is what the book looks like at this stage:

It’s looking OK, but all the pictures are in the middle of the page – in the original, I had moved them to the right and slightly down to break up that symmetry and give a bit more ‘life’ to the page. In BookSmart, this is quite easy – you just select all the images and apply ‘Align Right-Bottom (don’t crop)’. This will fit the image and align it to either the right or bottom edge of the cell, depending on the relative aspect ratios. But there’s no such option in the Book module.

At this point (given hindsight) I made a possible mistake – I started looking around for a layout template that put the image more to the right of the page and eventually found a two-picture layout that seemed to work. (This image includes the effect of padding as described below.)

It’s worth pointing out here that, just because you want to put only one picture on a page, doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to looking only in the ‘1 Photo’ layout section.

So, I’ve got the pictures over to the right, but they’re still in the middle vertically. Now I remembered what I should have remembered before: namely, that you can adjust the padding around the picture within the cell.

By deselecting the ‘Link All’ checkbox, you can control the position of the image. Here I’ve added some padding to the top to move the image down in the cell to the position I want. I could have moved the image around in the original layout, by adjusting the left and top padding and saved myself the task of applying another layout. That would work, but it would have made the image smaller and may not have looked quite right. As with so many things, there are multiple ways of achieving an end, and you may need to experiment to find the best one in any given circumstance.

One thing I found that surprised me slightly is that copying and pasting a layout (select a page, right-click and choose ‘Copy Layout’ – or Cmd/Ctrl C, select another page, right-click and choose ‘Paste Layout’ – or Cmd/Ctrl V) inserts a page in front of the second one you selected. My initial feeling was that pasting a layout on a page should change that page. To change a page layout, you have to click on the down arrow at the bottom-right of the thumbnail and choose the layout you want – this works across a multiple selection, by the way.

Finishing the main section

Given what I had learned from the previous attempts, it was a fairly simple matter to add the rest of the pictures in their correct places and move them into the positions that I wanted.

One minor annoyance cropped up here, from the point where I had initially created the book – it only copied over those images from the original collection that I had already added to the book. Remember that the Create Book dialog has check box that I missed first time around:

It meant a quick round trip to the old collection to transfer the remaining pictures to the book collection – a small thing, but something to remember for the future.

Adding text pages

This turned out to be the simplest process so far – it was just a matter of looking for a template that had a text box in approximately the correct position, and then using the justification controls (seen at the bottom of the Type control panel) to position it to my liking.

Headers and footers

This is a feature that I wasn’t able to replicate exactly. The original book had page numbers at the bottom and the book title at the top of the page. The Book module allows you to add a page caption at the top or the bottom but not both, so I could have either the title or the page numbers.

Add to that that there doesn’t seem to be a way of automatically inserting the page number, and we have another potential deal-breaker.

The book cover

This was the trickiest part of the book to reproduce, and the least satisfactory, since there was no template that was at all close to the original layout. The best I could come up with was this layout:

To get the long, thin image, I made a virtual copy of the ‘real’ image, cropped it to the appropriate aspect ratio, and positioned it within the (full-bleed) cell using the padding controls as before. The image for the back cover was near enough, so I didn’t change it. Front cover text was easy enough to add, but I could not replicate the positioning of the original.

I should add that I could have used the ‘whole page picture’ trick that Julianne Kost describes in one of her videos (basically, construct the page as an image using something like Photoshop, and just add it to the book on a full-bleed template). Yes, that would have worked here, but as a general solution, it’s not really practical if you have more than a few pages to mock up this way.

Conclusion

The truth is that I like the Book module, but I’m not going to be ditching BookSmart in the foreseeable future.

The Lightroom Book module is capable of producing perfectly adequate books and, for many purposes, it’s all you’ll need. If you want more control over your layout, though, you’re going to find yourself going back to BookSmart or InDesign.

I should also point out that this review is based on a little bit of poking about after viewing Julianne Kost’s tutorials, in addition to the project described here. If any of this article sounds negative, that’s probably more to do with my unfamiliarity than any real failings of the module. I’m sure that, if I tried to do this with another book, it would all go much more smoothly, and with possibly better results.

That said, there are things missing that could make it into much more serious contender for being the go-to tool for creating serious books.

My suggestions for things I’d like to see in the Book module in future releases:

1. Editable templates, please!
2. More automation for things like page numbering, book title, author.
3. The ability to export the book so that it could then be imported into BookSmart or InDesign. That way, you can get the bulk of the book done in Lightroom and tweak it in a more powerful editor (not unlike tweaking photos in Photoshop after developing them in Lightroom).

Of these, the ability to export the book would probably be the simplest addition that would cause me to use the Book module by choice every time: it shouldn’t be under-emphasised that staying within Lightroom whilst creating the book is a great boon. To be able to quickly switch to the Develop module to tweak a picture or to be able to quickly add a photo from anywhere in your library really is a time-saver.

I want this module to be great. It’s not there, yet, but it’s early days and it’s certainly well on the way.

Graham Douglas – Grey Dog Photography

All XeL Presets are 100% Lightroom 4 Compatible!

We’re so amped to bring you another chance to get the complete XeL Toolkit for Lightroom at a sweet price.

Purchase XeL:Black and White for Lightroom now and get XeL: Local Adjustments for FREE.

What’s included in the download?

First off, we’ll start with Xel:Black and White

XeL: Black and White is a massive collection of over 300 presets, consisting of:

• Antiquated process emulations
• Over 50 classic film emulations
• A selection of digital color filters, emulating the use of filters in film photography.
• A full range of presets simulating variable contrast paper effects
• A selection of toning presets, to add that special touch.
• Solarization, custom tone curves, basic B&W color mixes, and ND filters
• Special graphic arts effects, including 2-Tone and Reduced Tone images.

Unlike other black and white toolkits, XeL:Black and White is not a stand alone application or a plug-in, but rather a collection of finely tuned presets that support a completely nondestructive workflow, while retaining all the benefits and flexibility of working in RAW.

Sample image from XeL: Black and White Curve Kick

Grab the XeL:Black and White User Guide and take a peek.

Here’s a full copy of the XeL:Black and White User Guide, which includes installation details, some sample workflows, samples of the Presets included in the download, and tips on their usage!

Second, you’ll also get XeL:Local Adjustments for free.

XeL: Local Adjustments represents a new paradigm in the use of Lightroom presets in a photographer’s workflow. XeL takes the X-Equals Preset Platform concept to the next logical evolutionary step, reimagining presets as tools to be used in symphony to quickly perfect a photo.

Dig in and use some of our XeL: Local Adjustments Tips and Techniques. They’re fun, easy, and EFFECTIVE.

Want to learn more about the XeL Platform? … we’ve got a complete overview for you right here.

Here’s a full copy of the XeL:Local Adjustments User Guide, which includes installation details, some sample workflows, samples of the Presets included in the download, and tips on their usage!

Here is a taste of the XeL: Local Adjustments Presets included in the free download.

XeL Dodge

This preset locally lightens an area of your image by increasing Exposure. The ideal brush for single stroke application seems to be a Feather of 33, Flow of 75 and Denisty of 75. Flow and Density can be decreased if you are planning a layered approach. Feathering is important to using XeL Dodge, as if it is used without Feathering it will create a definitive line around the area of adjustment.

XeL Focus Softly

The lightest of the Softening presets, Focus Softly applies a subtle softening to your image. Like the other Focus presets the brush is designed to be applied with at Flow and Density of 100. Also, you can layer applications of Focus presets to further control the level of image softening.

XeL Blushing

XeL Blushing’s purpose is to apply a reasonably natural blush to your subject. For best effect I recommend starting out with a Brush using a Feather of 30, Flow of 50 and Density of 50. For more controlled blush response, lower the brush settings even more and layer the effect with 2-3 stacked local adjustment brush masks.

Of course … everything is Lightroom 4 compatible – so get into the XeL platform now and drop us a line if we can assist you!

Thank You!

All of us at X-Equals welcome your feedback and comments as we continue to focus on delivering no-nonsense advice and innovative products to keep you inspired!

My personal thanks goes out to you for taking the journey with us.

|Brandon Oelling – Editor in Chief
X-Equals – Click. Download. Smile.

This fine shopping experience is brought to you by E-Junkie. They rock, and are the only group we trust to deliver you quality X-Equals goods!

Shot and Edited by: Marty Martin

I’ve done plenty of white stories over the years, but I always sort of compromised here and there because whoever I was shooting for didn’t want to go exactly in the direction I wanted to take it in. In the end, I was always a bit disappointed in the results. But not this time. This shoot, I’m fairly pleased with.

Again, I collaborated with Rodney Burns from Church Boutique in Hollywood, California. I can’t even begin to describe how amazing it is to work with Rodney. He’s on my DVD, I write about him all the time, and yet every time I work with him it feels so magical, as if it’s the first time we’re collaborating and I can’t believe my eyes! He’s THAT good! He pulled these pieces from designer Furne One that truly blew my mind. And he coordinated the clothing to compliment the pieces. I trust his eye completely and just KNOW that my shoots are going to rock because of his amazing taste.

I wanted two blondes for this shoot. I’ve worked with Sarah Deanna before and she’s just amazing. She’s as beautiful on the inside as she is on the out! She also is publishing a book soon called Model Skinny. She writes about her healthy secrets on how one can get skinny and stay skinny the healthy way! I love a girl who gives back to our industry in a positive and loving way! I thought Jennifer was a good match for Sarah Deanna because, well ,she’s a stone cold fox as well! Both girls were on point and really knew how to emote for the story. James from Photogenics helped me cast this shoot. It was nice to work with “the old team”, so to speak.

I worked with make up artist Camille Clark from AIM Artists. I’ve worked with Camille many times when I lived in LA and she’s a very talented make up artist. I was excited to work with her again and ended up using her on 3 out of 4 editorials that I shot in LA. Hair stylist Jonathan Mason came on board that day. This was actually the first time I worked with Jonathan and that day we sort of bonded to the point that now when I am in LA, he’s my go to hair stylist. Thanks again to Timothy Priano, owner of Artists by Timothy Priano, for making that introduction!

I used window light and Christmas tree lights behind a silk against a backdrop  as my lighting sources. That’s it! I know, I’m sorry I don’t have some great big lighting set up to break off for you. This is my lighting and how I see fashion shot and I never have liked seeing things over-lit. I’ve said that numerous times. Over and over, I’ve reiterated how I use one light, or “less is more” or keep it simple. Well, I’ve gone even more simple now, using available light from a window or the continuous light from the room we are shooting in as my key or main lighting source.

Of course, I used the Nikon D3 and my 85mm lens for the shoot. I also used my 24mm lens and a 50mm lens as well. I think what makes this shoot really work is the amazing styling from Rodney and the emoting from two very professional models, Sarah Deanna and Jennifer. And me staying true to my vision! More to come and excited to continue to share with you my vision! Keep it real! xoxo

Shot and Edited by: Marty Martin

I’ve done plenty of white stories over the years, but I always sort of compromised here and there because whoever I was shooting for didn’t want to go exactly in the direction I wanted to take it in. In the end, I was always a bit disappointed in the results. But not this time. This shoot, I’m fairly pleased with.

Again, I collaborated with Rodney Burns from Church Boutique in Hollywood, California. I can’t even begin to describe how amazing it is to work with Rodney. He’s on my DVD, I write about him all the time, and yet every time I work with him it feels so magical, as if it’s the first time we’re collaborating and I can’t believe my eyes! He’s THAT good! He pulled these pieces from designer blah blah that truly blew my mind. And he coordinated the clothing to compliment the pieces. I trust his eye completely and just KNOW that my shoots are going to rock because of his amazing taste.

I wanted two blondes for this shoot. I’ve worked with Sarah Deanna before and she’s just amazing. She’s as beautiful on the inside as she is on the out! She also is publishing a book soon called Model Skinny. She writes about her healthy secrets on how one can get skinny and stay skinny the healthy way! I love a girl who gives back to our industry in a positive and loving way! I thought Jennifer was a good match for Sarah Deanna because, well ,she’s a stone cold fox as well! Both girls were on point and really knew how to emote for the story. James from Photogenics helped me cast this shoot. It was nice to work with “the old team”, so to speak.

I worked with make up artist Camille Clark from AIM Artists. I’ve worked with Camille many times when I lived in LA and she’s a very talented make up artist. I was excited to work with her again and ended up using her on 3 out of 4 editorials that I shot in LA. Hair stylist Jonathan Mason came on board that day. This was actually the first time I worked with Jonathan and that day we sort of bonded to the point that now when I am in LA, he’s my go to hair stylist. Thanks again to Timothy Priano, owner of Artists by Timothy Priano, for making that introduction!

I used window light and Christmas tree lights behind a silk against a backdrop from Fashion Backdrops as my lighting sources. That’s it! I know, I’m sorry I don’t have some great big lighting set up to break off for you. This is my lighting and how I see fashion shot and I never have liked seeing things over-lit. I’ve said that numerous times. Over and over, I’ve reiterated how I use one light, or “less is more” or keep it simple. Well, I’ve gone even more simple now, using available light from a window or the continuous light from the room we are shooting in as my key or main lighting source.

Of course, I used the Nikon D3 and my 85mm lens for the shoot. I also used my 24mm lens and a 50mm lens as well. I think what makes this shoot really work is the amazing styling from Rodney and the emoting from two very professional models, Sarah Deanna and Jennifer. And me staying true to my vision! More to come and excited to continue to share with you my vision! Keep it real! xoxo

As a photographer in the modern era, the Web is your best means of having your work seen and thereby growing your audience. Lightroom provides various means of publishing your work to the Web, either using the Web module to roll your own galleries or using Publish Services to upload your work to online services like Flickr and Facebook. These tools are easy enough to use, but the Web is a wild, rambling place, and there is a difference between using the tools and using them well.

Output for Web is usually the final step in a Lightroom-to-Web workflow; it comes after organizing your images, tagging your images, processing your images … but it’s something you should be thinking about all the way through the process. As in anything, intent makes for a stronger impact; it pays to be thinking about and making provisions for Web output from the start of your photographic workflow.

The Web can read, but cannot see

Before working on our images, it helps to understand the nature of images on the Web. It’s this understanding which will fuel much of our workflow.

It’s often said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” On the Web, that’s just not true. The Web is based almost entirely on textual content, and that puts photographers at an immediate disadvantage. Photography is a visual medium, not a textual one, leaving search engines and other underlying Web technologies with no way of interpreting your images. We can overcome this by pairing our images with words, and an image online is worth only as many words as you can give it.

… it pays to be thinking about and making provisions for Web output from the start of your photographic workflow.

Many social photo sites allow you to tag, title and caption your images within their database, associating keywords and textual context to your image to represent its visual content. On your own website, you’ll want to leverage image file names, HTML alt and title attributes, and page context as means of bolstering your images’ presence with keywords and descriptions.

Your Library and the Web

All workflows begin in the Library, and there is much can be done in your Library to better prepare your images to lead productive lives online. File names, metadata, collections all have their part to play and we’ll tackle each in turn. So, wherever you are in Lightroom, press G now to return to the Library’s Grid view.

File naming for Web

File names provide the most direct connection by which to associate text with your images. First and foremost, always rename your images. The worst thing you can do is publish your images with their default file names from the camera; if you don’t believe me, do a Google image search for “img_0001.jpg” and just see what you get.

Beyond the simple importance of renaming your images, it’s good to establish convention for consistent file naming throughout your image library, and it’s also important that you take Web publishing into account when establishing this convention. A few tips for file naming best practices follow.

Ideally, we should like that the file names of our images online are a match to the image file names in our Lightroom library. To that end, we should avoid using spaces or punctuation in file names, as these things do not translate well to the Web. The only safe exception to this rule is the underscore (_), which is a Web-safe character for file and folder names. It also makes an excellent substitute for spaces.

Hyphens (-) are also frequently used online, but should be used with caution. There are circumstances within Lightroom in which hyphens may be replaced by underscores during export, such as when exporting from the Web module in Lightroom 2 and 3. In Lightroom 4, the Web module honors hyphens in file names. Nonetheless, hyphens are less a sure thing than underscores, so you may wish to play it safe and avoid them.

You can easily setup character replacement in Lightroom’s Preferences. Under the File Handling tab, setup your File Name Generation with the following rules:

Under the External Editing tab, we also need to change the -Edit tag that gets added to files edited in external applications like Photoshop; we’ll have Lightroom use an underscore instead of a hyphen:

When including dates in file names, it’s best to render dates in the format YYYYMMDD. This format rids us of extraneous separators, helping to keep file names short, and presents the date in a format which allows computers to order files in proper chronological sequence.

Do not begin file names with numbers. Many image galleries will use your file names as HTML id or class values within the gallery source code. When id or class attributes begin with numbers, they are considered to be invalid, which can damage search ranking and may have other ill effects on your page or gallery. This can present a problem, though, when you wish to name your files by date for chronological ordering. I will present a solution shortly.

Always include descriptive keywords in your file names, as the file name is the most direct way of associating keywords to your images. Just don’t go overboard; try to limit yourself to two or three important keywords, broadest keyword first, most specific keyword last.

Use four-digit sequential numbering for images from a shoot. Why four? If you’re shooting a wedding, good odds you’re going to shoot more than 999 images and less than 9,999 images. And we want to avoid situations where sequential numbering would give us 1, 11, 12, 2, 22, 23 … What we want is 0001, 0002, … 0011, 0012, … 0022, 00023, etc.

My own naming convention takes all of these rules into account, and looks something like this:

[ My Initials ]_[ Date ]_[ Keywords ]_[ Sequence # ].jpg

So, a photograph from Venice, Italy, captured April 30, 2012 might end up as:

mc_20120430_Italy_Venice_0001.jpg

Because my initials are unlikely to change, beginning file names with my initials identifies me as the photographer, prevents file names beginning with numbers, and still allows me to sort my images by date. Keeping the broadest keyword first ensures that related images will sort in a way that makes good sense.

This is a file naming scheme that serves me within my Lightroom library, when browsing files on my hard drive, and when my images go to the Web. I am able to identify an image by glancing at the file name, and search engines are able to associate textual identifiers to the image. In a studio setting with multiple photographers, images will always glom together by the photographers’ initials, making it easy to determine who shot which image, even when combining images from multiple shooters for a single job.

Within Lightroom’s Library, select any files you wish to rename, then press F2 to bring up the renaming dialogue. You can design and save a naming present for regular use, like this one:

Metadata

Image metadata plays numerous roles online, all of them important.

Images should always be exported with full metadata intact; this will add a few bytes to your image file size, but the size increase is negligible while the benefits are huge.

On export from Lightroom, image metadata gets baked into your image file. Wherever that image goes from there — to your website, to Flickr, to Facebook, to the desktop of an unauthorized downloader — the metadata will identify you as the owner of that image, will provide a connection back to you and/or your website, will designate copyright and licensing status for the image, and so on. Anyone who looks at the metadata will know who you are, how to get in touch with you, and what needs be done if they should wish to license that image for legitimate commercial use.

When uploading images to blogs, the blogging platform will often transfer metadata into the image’s database entry for use. WordPress, for example, is capable of reading images’ captions and titles. Likewise, this information is often read and used by social networking sites like Flickr.

Many other types of web applications are also capable of extracting metadata from image files for use in identifying your images or rendering them onscreen.

Finally, when using Lightroom’s Web module, the Image Info control pane allows metadata to be pulled from each image in your gallery and then displayed on the page as image title or caption, or may embed that information into the image’s alt or title attributes for use by search engines and various devices.

All told, it’s hugely beneficial to provide a full range of metadata for every image you publish online, and Lightroom’s Library module makes it a snap to apply that metadata to your images on the front-end of your workflow.

Save time by designing a metadata preset containing your copyright and contact information; apply the preset to all images on capture or import:

Do be wary, however, of what information you put into your metadata. For example, if you do not wish your telephone number or home address to be accessible to public eyes, you should omit this information from your image metadata. An email or web address is usually sufficient for public contact information.

Using Collections and Output Creations

Lightroom’s Collections panel is an excellent way to organize images for your website. There are a number of ways you can integrate the Collections panel into your workflow, but this is how I like to do it when using the Web module.

I keep an empty folder in my Library, as this allows me to navigate Lightroom quickly, without any images selected; having no images selected means that modules load faster, as they don’t attempt to render images on entry. I typically front my empty folder with zeroes so that it always floats to the top of my folder list, making it easy to find and keeping it out of the way.

With my empty folder selected, I move to the Web module.

Within the Web module, I select a web engine for use from the Layout Style list on the left side of the screen. Lightroom will load the engine, then render the Web preview without images.

At this point, I may wish to customize my gallery’s colors or layout. The process of customizing the gallery goes much faster when there are no images to load. When finished, I save a template to the Template Browser; this allows me to recall my customizations for later use and application to different collections of images.

In the Collections panel, I press the ‘+‘ button and choose Create Collection Set. I name the set “My Website”.

I press the ‘+‘ button again, and this time choose Create Web Gallery. I create a gallery for each gallery I wish to appear on my website: Portraits, Landscapes, Weddings, etc. I assign these galleries to the My Website collection set. Each gallery will be created with 0 images assigned.

I then navigate back to my Library by pressing G for the grid view and begin to populate my newly created collections with images by dragging images from my grid to each collection.

Now, when I return to the Web module and select one of my collections, my gallery settings saved with the collection will be recalled and loaded into the preview along with any images now contained within the collection. I may continue to customize each of my galleries with titles, descriptions, etc. or I can export them to publish. If I later wish to update my gallery with new images, I simply add those images to the collection, return to the Web module and export a new copy of the gallery to replace the old.

Watermarking

Photographers employ many methods to protect their images online, but most of those methods are ineffective. From the perspective of standards-compliant web-design, disabling the browser’s context menu to prevent image saving is ill-advised; otherwise, it’s like wearing a bikini to prevent sunburn — skimpy protection at best.

Covering images with transparent GIF images is also easily defeated, and severely restricts your options for the presentation of images, as it necessitates a very specific page design.

Embedding metadata into your images is definitely helpful, but not everyone looks at metadata, and metadata may easily be stripped from images by anyone who makes the effort.

The most reliable and secure method of protecting your images online is to watermark them, and the only way to defeat a watermark is to irrecoverably damage the image by cropping it or retouching the watermark out of the picture (which, depending upon the size and placement of the watermark, is often impossible).

Effective watermarks not only identify you as a photographer, but also provide an avenue back to your business. A bad watermark might be:

© 2012 Matthew Campagna

I know for a fact that I am not the world’s only Matthew Campagna, and so this watermark does little to help people find me if they want to get in touch, or if they want to report to me the illegitimate use of my image someplace. A more effective watermark might be:

© 2012 Matthew Campagna, http://theturninggate.net

Not only does the onlooker know my name, but they also know where and how to get in touch with me. It’s the contact information that is most important in my watermark, and so it’s also important that my watermark be legible.

Lightroom 3 and 4 provide excellent tools for watermarking images on export from the Library or from the Web module, allowing you to apply text-based watermarks on-the-fly or graphical watermarks designed in Photoshop or similar graphics applications.

Extend Lightroom with Plugins

Finally, powerful as Lightroom may be, there are many third-party plugins available to make it more powerful still.

To extend the Web module, check out plugins from my own site, The Turning Gate, from Sean McCormack’s LRB series, and Timothy Armes’ Photographer’s Toolbox series. Slideshow Pro for Lightroom is also a popular Flash image gallery plugin.

For those wanting to use Lightroom’s Publish Services, check out Jeffrey Friedl’s export and publish plugins, and check in with your favorite photo hosting services to see whether they provide or can recommend tie-in plugins for Lightroom.

Visit Adobe’s Lightroom Exchange for additional possibilities.

Coda

And that’s a high-level view of a Lightroom-to-Web workflow, the tools Lightroom puts at your finger tips, and some of the best ways to use those tools. To sum it all up, your workflow should look something like this:

1. On capture and/or import, name your files according to good convention and apply metadata presets.
2. Flesh out your metadata with titles, captions, and other information not filled in by your preset.
3. Process your images using the Develop module, geotag your images in the Map module.
4. Whatever images you wish to publish to the Web, organize them into collections for output.
5. On export, apply your watermark to each image as a means to protect your work from unauthorized use or claim of ownership.
6. Always export your images with full metadata intact unless you have good reason to do otherwise.

Most of all, have fun publishing your images to the Web, getting them out there for all the world to see.

Matthew Campagna – The Turning Gate

Matthew Campagna may often be found where the worlds of photography and web-design collide. A professional photographer and web-designer at large, Matthew operates from The Turning Gate, where he creates plugins for Lightroom’s Web module and helps his fellow photographers carve out niches for themselves in the online world.

As a photographer in the modern era, the Web is your best means of having your work seen and thereby growing your audience. Lightroom provides various means of publishing your work to the Web, either using the Web module to roll your own galleries or using Publish Services to upload your work to online services like Flickr and Facebook. These tools are easy enough to use, but the Web is a wild, rambling place, and there is a difference between using the tools and using them well.

Output for Web is usually the final step in a Lightroom-to-Web workflow; it comes after organizing your images, tagging your images, processing your images … but it’s something you should be thinking about all the way through the process. As in anything, intent makes for a stronger impact; it pays to be thinking about and making provisions for Web output from the start of your photographic workflow.

The Web can read, but cannot see

Before working on our images, it helps to understand the nature of images on the Web. It’s this understanding which will fuel much of our workflow.

It’s often said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” On the Web, that’s just not true. The Web is based almost entirely on textual content, and that puts photographers at an immediate disadvantage. Photography is a visual medium, not a textual one, leaving search engines and other underlying Web technologies with no way of interpreting your images. We can overcome this by pairing our images with words, and an image online is worth only as many words as you can give it.

… it pays to be thinking about and making provisions for Web output from the start of your photographic workflow.

Many social photo sites allow you to tag, title and caption your images within their database, associating keywords and textual context to your image to represent its visual content. On your own website, you’ll want to leverage image file names, HTML alt and title attributes, and page context as means of bolstering your images’ presence with keywords and descriptions.

Your Library and the Web

All workflows begin in the Library, and there is much can be done in your Library to better prepare your images to lead productive lives online. File names, metadata, collections all have their part to play and we’ll tackle each in turn. So, wherever you are in Lightroom, press G now to return to the Library’s Grid view.

File naming for Web

File names provide the most direct connection by which to associate text with your images. First and foremost, always rename your images. The worst thing you can do is publish your images with their default file names from the camera; if you don’t believe me, do a Google image search for “img_0001.jpg” and just see what you get.

Beyond the simple importance of renaming your images, it’s good to establish convention for consistent file naming throughout your image library, and it’s also important that you take Web publishing into account when establishing this convention. A few tips for file naming best practices follow.

Ideally, we should like that the file names of our images online are a match to the image file names in our Lightroom library. To that end, we should avoid using spaces or punctuation in file names, as these things do not translate well to the Web. The only safe exception to this rule is the underscore (_), which is a Web-safe character for file and folder names. It also makes an excellent substitute for spaces.

Hyphens (-) are also frequently used online, but should be used with caution. There are circumstances within Lightroom in which hyphens may be replaced by underscores during export, such as when exporting from the Web module in Lightroom 2 and 3. In Lightroom 4, the Web module honors hyphens in file names. Nonetheless, hyphens are less a sure thing than underscores, so you may wish to play it safe and avoid them.

You can easily setup character replacement in Lightroom’s Preferences. Under the File Handling tab, setup your File Name Generation with the following rules:

Under the External Editing tab, we also need to change the -Edit tag that gets added to files edited in external applications like Photoshop; we’ll have Lightroom use an underscore instead of a hyphen:

When including dates in file names, it’s best to render dates in the format YYYYMMDD. This format rids us of extraneous separators, helping to keep file names short, and presents the date in a format which allows computers to order files in proper chronological sequence.

Do not begin file names with numbers. Many image galleries will use your file names as HTML id or class values within the gallery source code. When id or class attributes begin with numbers, they are considered to be invalid, which can damage search ranking and may have other ill effects on your page or gallery. This can present a problem, though, when you wish to name your files by date for chronological ordering. I will present a solution shortly.

Always include descriptive keywords in your file names, as the file name is the most direct way of associating keywords to your images. Just don’t go overboard; try to limit yourself to two or three important keywords, broadest keyword first, most specific keyword last.

Use four-digit sequential numbering for images from a shoot. Why four? If you’re shooting a wedding, good odds you’re going to shoot more than 999 images and less than 9,999 images. And we want to avoid situations where sequential numbering would give us 1, 11, 12, 2, 22, 23 … What we want is 0001, 0002, … 0011, 0012, … 0022, 00023, etc.

My own naming convention takes all of these rules into account, and looks something like this:

[ My Initials ]_[ Date ]_[ Keywords ]_[ Sequence # ].jpg

So, a photograph from Venice, Italy, captured April 30, 2012 might end up as:

mc_20120430_Italy_Venice_0001.jpg

Because my initials are unlikely to change, beginning file names with my initials identifies me as the photographer, prevents file names beginning with numbers, and still allows me to sort my images by date. Keeping the broadest keyword first ensures that related images will sort in a way that makes good sense.

This is a file naming scheme that serves me within my Lightroom library, when browsing files on my hard drive, and when my images go to the Web. I am able to identify an image by glancing at the file name, and search engines are able to associate textual identifiers to the image. In a studio setting with multiple photographers, images will always glom together by the photographers’ initials, making it easy to determine who shot which image, even when combining images from multiple shooters for a single job.

Within Lightroom’s Library, select any files you wish to rename, then press F2 to bring up the renaming dialogue. You can design and save a naming present for regular use, like this one:

Metadata

Image metadata plays numerous roles online, all of them important.

Images should always be exported with full metadata intact; this will add a few bytes to your image file size, but the size increase is negligible while the benefits are huge.

On export from Lightroom, image metadata gets baked into your image file. Wherever that image goes from there — to your website, to Flickr, to Facebook, to the desktop of an unauthorized downloader — the metadata will identify you as the owner of that image, will provide a connection back to you and/or your website, will designate copyright and licensing status for the image, and so on. Anyone who looks at the metadata will know who you are, how to get in touch with you, and what needs be done if they should wish to license that image for legitimate commercial use.

When uploading images to blogs, the blogging platform will often transfer metadata into the image’s database entry for use. WordPress, for example, is capable of reading images’ captions and titles. Likewise, this information is often read and used by social networking sites like Flickr.

Many other types of web applications are also capable of extracting metadata from image files for use in identifying your images or rendering them onscreen.

Finally, when using Lightroom’s Web module, the Image Info control pane allows metadata to be pulled from each image in your gallery and then displayed on the page as image title or caption, or may embed that information into the image’s alt or title attributes for use by search engines and various devices.

All told, it’s hugely beneficial to provide a full range of metadata for every image you publish online, and Lightroom’s Library module makes it a snap to apply that metadata to your images on the front-end of your workflow.

Save time by designing a metadata preset containing your copyright and contact information; apply the preset to all images on capture or import:

Do be wary, however, of what information you put into your metadata. For example, if you do not wish your telephone number or home address to be accessible to public eyes, you should omit this information from your image metadata. An email or web address is usually sufficient for public contact information.

Using Collections and Output Creations

Lightroom’s Collections panel is an excellent way to organize images for your website. There are a number of ways you can integrate the Collections panel into your workflow, but this is how I like to do it when using the Web module.

I keep an empty folder in my Library, as this allows me to navigate Lightroom quickly, without any images selected; having no images selected means that modules load faster, as they don’t attempt to render images on entry. I typically front my empty folder with zeroes so that it always floats to the top of my folder list, making it easy to find and keeping it out of the way.

With my empty folder selected, I move to the Web module.

Within the Web module, I select a web engine for use from the Layout Style list on the left side of the screen. Lightroom will load the engine, then render the Web preview without images.

At this point, I may wish to customize my gallery’s colors or layout. The process of customizing the gallery goes much faster when there are no images to load. When finished, I save a template to the Template Browser; this allows me to recall my customizations for later use and application to different collections of images.

In the Collections panel, I press the ‘+‘ button and choose Create Collection Set. I name the set “My Website”.

I press the ‘+‘ button again, and this time choose Create Web Gallery. I create a gallery for each gallery I wish to appear on my website: Portraits, Landscapes, Weddings, etc. I assign these galleries to the My Website collection set. Each gallery will be created with 0 images assigned.

I then navigate back to my Library by pressing G for the grid view and begin to populate my newly created collections with images by dragging images from my grid to each collection.

Now, when I return to the Web module and select one of my collections, my gallery settings saved with the collection will be recalled and loaded into the preview along with any images now contained within the collection. I may continue to customize each of my galleries with titles, descriptions, etc. or I can export them to publish. If I later wish to update my gallery with new images, I simply add those images to the collection, return to the Web module and export a new copy of the gallery to replace the old.

Watermarking

Photographers employ many methods to protect their images online, but most of those methods are ineffective. From the perspective of standards-compliant web-design, disabling the browser’s context menu to prevent image saving is ill-advised; otherwise, it’s like wearing a bikini to prevent sunburn — skimpy protection at best.

Covering images with transparent GIF images is also easily defeated, and severely restricts your options for the presentation of images, as it necessitates a very specific page design.

Embedding metadata into your images is definitely helpful, but not everyone looks at metadata, and metadata may easily be stripped from images by anyone who makes the effort.

The most reliable and secure method of protecting your images online is to watermark them, and the only way to defeat a watermark is to irrecoverably damage the image by cropping it or retouching the watermark out of the picture (which, depending upon the size and placement of the watermark, is often impossible).

Effective watermarks not only identify you as a photographer, but also provide an avenue back to your business. A bad watermark might be:

© 2012 Matthew Campagna

I know for a fact that I am not the world’s only Matthew Campagna, and so this watermark does little to help people find me if they want to get in touch, or if they want to report to me the illegitimate use of my image someplace. A more effective watermark might be:

© 2012 Matthew Campagna, http://theturninggate.net

Not only does the onlooker know my name, but they also know where and how to get in touch with me. It’s the contact information that is most important in my watermark, and so it’s also important that my watermark be legible.

Lightroom 3 and 4 provide excellent tools for watermarking images on export from the Library or from the Web module, allowing you to apply text-based watermarks on-the-fly or graphical watermarks designed in Photoshop or similar graphics applications.

Extend Lightroom with Plugins

Finally, powerful as Lightroom may be, there are many third-party plugins available to make it more powerful still.

To extend the Web module, check out plugins from my own site, The Turning Gate, from Sean McCormack’s LRB series, and Timothy Armes’ Photographer’s Toolbox series. Slideshow Pro for Lightroom is also a popular Flash image gallery plugin.

For those wanting to use Lightroom’s Publish Services, check out Jeffrey Friedl’s export and publish plugins, and check in with your favorite photo hosting services to see whether they provide or can recommend tie-in plugins for Lightroom.

Visit Adobe’s Lightroom Exchange for additional possibilities.

Coda

And that’s a high-level view of a Lightroom-to-Web workflow, the tools Lightroom puts at your finger tips, and some of the best ways to use those tools. To sum it all up, your workflow should look something like this:

1. On capture and/or import, name your files according to good convention and apply metadata presets.
2. Flesh out your metadata with titles, captions, and other information not filled in by your preset.
3. Process your images using the Develop module, geotag your images in the Map module.
4. Whatever images you wish to publish to the Web, organize them into collections for output.
5. On export, apply your watermark to each image as a means to protect your work from unauthorized use or claim of ownership.
6. Always export your images with full metadata intact unless you have good reason to do otherwise.

Most of all, have fun publishing your images to the Web, getting them out there for all the world to see.

Matthew Campagna – The Turning Gate

Matthew Campagna may often be found where the worlds of photography and web-design collide. A professional photographer and web-designer at large, Matthew operates from The Turning Gate, where he creates plugins for Lightroom’s Web module and helps his fellow photographers carve out niches for themselves in the online world.

-Marilyn Manson

2012 started with an upheaval of change. Painful, gut-wrenching, seismic change. From January 1^st, my life began a new journey. Part of that new journey was my reconciliation with the way I see. The thing is, I’ve always been a little weird. I’ve been told my work is “edgy” since my college days. “Dark, mysterious, seductive, depressing, edgy, suicidal, achingly beautiful, tortured, cathartic”…..these are all words I’ve heard over the years describing my work. So I tried to conform, to shoot in a style that wasn’t mine but would appease the masses. I shot freckled girls in denim jeans on white backgrounds holding puppies and smiling toothy grins of teenaged innocence. I’ve shot long legged girls in itsy-bitsy bikinis on pearl sanded beaches with come hither eyes. I’ve shot commercially acceptable, masses approachable, clean, honest and totally sans “edge” fashion photographs.

But it hasn’t been my vision. This work was not mine! So with the upheaval of change that this year forced upon me came the renewed sense of my own Self, facing me again, asking myself, what’s it all about. I came up with this: if I can’t shoot what I love and how I see, what’s the point.

I flew to my hometown, Los Angeles, on January 9^th and I threw myself into work. I know, ironic right? I leave NYC land of fashion uberness to go to tacky LA to throw myself into work. I find it very odd that NY’ers hate LA people but LA people LOVE NY’ers. I think when you’re laying in the sun on January 15th in the backyard sipping on a mojito planning the menu for your outdoor barbeque that evening, there’s really nothing for an LA person to hate on  a NY’er. But that’s just one theory. Any way, back to me going home: I shot 4 editorials and 2 video commercials in 6 weeks. I collaborated with my dear friend Rodney Burns who styled all the shoots. Ben Trovato being one of them.

The technical specs on this shoot can’t be any simpler. I shot with no artificial light. I used a large window to the right of the set as my key. That’s it. I shot with the Nikon D3 with my 85mm at 1/160^th of a sec at about F4. I shot anywhere from 400 to 1000 ISO. I was inspired by a picture I found of Keith Richards. One picture. That’s all it took. What really tied the shoot together for me was shooting the story on a Fashion Back Drop. I have mentioned my friend, Sedi Pak, in previous posts. Her back drops are amazing and really embellish my shoots! You can view the full editorial on Ben Trovato here.

I look at the results, the final pictures, and I’m pleased. But the feeling goes beyond being “satisfied”. I’m home. If that makes any sense. Shooting what I love and how I see fashion. My greatest wish for myself is that I can stick to this and not listen to people anymore telling me I must conform and change to shoot in a style that isn’t mine. I guess we’re all going to find out together if I can stick to my guns and stay true to my vision now.  I’ve shed a lot of baggage so far this year. A lot of negative, heavy, cumbersome baggage. And I’m continuing to shed more. The excuses to NOT stick to my guns are getting fewer and fewer. Since my blog is very public (haha….understatement of the century) you’re all along on this journey WITH me…….so as I like to say…..stay tuned.

The Video

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time now, you know that it’s no secret: If you want to get ahead in this industry, you need to be located in a major fashion market.  If you’re not, you need to find a way to get there.  But what to do in the meantime? Not everybody has the capacity to uproot themselves and move across the country or the world.  Don’t fret.  There’s still a lot you can do to get the ball rolling.

You can start building a portfolio right where you are now.

If you live in or near a medium to large sized city, chances are there is a modeling or talent agency you may be able to get started with.  It may come as a surprise, but not every great model comes from Europe or Brazil or New York or Los Angeles.  Lindsey Wixson is from Kansas. Karlie Kloss grew up in St. Louis.  Arizona Muse hails from…. you guessed it, Arizona.  But apparently she grew up in Santa Fe. Doesn’t matter because many great models get started at smaller agencies that often wind up placing them with larger agencies in the major markets. Call ‘em up. Let them know you live in their area and are looking to test with some of their models.  Testing with these smaller agencies is a great way to start building your book and working with better models. The other potential benefit is a result of your local agency placing models in larger markets. Chances are the booker in your city may place their next best model in a major market and perhaps if you build a solid relationship with them, they will be willing to connect you to other agencies in the cities you are interested in pursuing.

Shot on Location in Dallas

Forgo your poolside vacation in Cancun in favor of a
week of tests in a major market.

So you’ve been shooting tests with some of the local models and you’re starting to put together a book? Ready to take the next step? It’s time to put yourself out there.  Try planning a short trip to New York, Los Angeles, or maybe Miami to do some shooting for your portfolio. But how do you go about booking models in another city? Same as back home.  Call the agencies. Email them.  Reach out and tell them you’re going to be in town and are looking to shoot a few tests while you’re there.  Before I took my first trip to LA, I called every agency I could think of.  Some said no. Some never even responded. But a couple said yes. And there’s the foot in the door.

Attitude is everything.

In my experience, how you approach people will heavily influence the outcome.  My first agency experience started from a “what can I do for you” standpoint.  If you walk in the door making demands and expecting the booker to cater to your wants and needs, you’re probably not going to get very far.  Being from a non-market, you’re already starting out in the hole.  Don’t make it worse by having a bad attitude.  Ask them who they have that need pictures. Does he or she need a new headshot for his or her comp card? Does the model need a cute smiley picture? Is her book too heavy on a particular style and lacking in another? Don’t get me wrong. What works in a model’s book may not be the best thing for yours, but there has to be a trade off.  Get that simple, clean headshot out of the way so the booker is happy; then shoot something that’s going to look great in your portfolio.  They’ll love you that much more. And maybe for your next test, they’ll send you a package with more experienced models. Win-win situation. I highly recommend doing this in every major market if possible. This will give you a better feel for which city might be the best fit for your style and for you personally when the time comes that you are ready and able to move.  Yes I know travel can be expensive. But if you plan well, maybe you can go to a different city a couple times a year and cram several shoots into a week or even a long weekend. And if you’re good at bargain hunting, it’s definitely possible to do it fairly cheaply. And when you leave, stay in touch with the agency so they don’t forget you.

Worry about what you can control.

It’s easy to get discouraged about things out of your control, especially when you’re first starting.  Yes, it’s hard to gain access to good models and good wardrobe, particularly for an unknown from the middle of nowhere. But if you continuously push yourself and your pictures get better, you will eventually gain access to these things.  Good stylists want to work with good photographers.  Keep working relentlessly on YOU and the rest will come with time.  During those times when you’re not visiting your soon-to-be new home, you can still shoot and improve.  Maintain the relationship with that local agency.  Find a model in your hometown and try out some new lighting ideas.  Constantly building up your skill is only going to make you that much better prepared for the day you can finally move.

Recent Tests

Show your book as often as possible.

Every time you visit an agency or meet someone, you should be showing your book and graciously accepting criticism. You’re going to have to develop thick skin. It’s never easy being told something isn’t good, but it’s going to happen. Get used to it. Get to a point where you thrive on it.  Take the feedback, make the changes, and go back and see what they think about the changes you’ve made.  But seriously, show it to anybody that will look at it.  Other photographers. Bookers. Editors. The models. Always take the critique, but don’t take it personal.

A few final thoughts.

These are merely my thoughts on what it’s like to try and get started as a fashion photographer when you don’t already live in a major market. I’m not shouting from the mountain top either. I’m on the same journey and what worked/is working for me may not work for everybody because there is without doubt, no set path to success in this business.  Times are going to be tough. Trust me. But don’t get discouraged. Keep pushing yourself to get better, and if you want it bad enough, it’ll happen.  And trust me when I say, this is me telling myself these things as much as I’m telling all of you.

This post was written by Denver based photographer Dana Pennington who studied photography at Metropolitan State College of Denver and The Art Institute of Colorado.

All Images are Property of  © Dana Pennington Photography 2012