Modified Light Diffuser 86
Processing <strong>Focus</strong> Stacks Lightroom and Photoshop I don’t want to get too technical here, but it might be useful for you to get a visual idea <strong>of</strong> how your stack <strong>of</strong> photos is processed, so here is a quick run through. I use adobe Lightroom 2.6 to not only catalog all my photos but also to develop and touch up photos. It really is a great program, a comfort to use. But to stack photos I use Adobe Photoshop CS4. Luckily Adobe has seen to it that these two programs work seamlessly together so that I can send two or more photos from Lightroom to Photoshop and back with no trouble. I will show you how I do it, but you, <strong>of</strong> course, will come up with your own favorite methods. After I input my photos to the Lightroom catalog I go through them to find the stacks and mark them, so that I don’t mistake a stacked series <strong>of</strong> photos from just a standard shot or two. So I go through my new photos and mark the beginning <strong>of</strong> each stack with a green border which tells me this is a stack that runs from the green photo until the next different shot. Here is a screen shot from lightroom on the next page. As you can see, near the upper left-hand corner, I have marked a photo with a green border as the first in a series <strong>of</strong> four photos. In this case the photo is <strong>of</strong> a dying tree trunk that has been drilled out by one <strong>of</strong> Michigan’s Pileated Woodpecker, a bird with a body about a foot and a half long! You can see the stack <strong>of</strong> photos both in the main grid view and in the loupe view running along the bottom <strong>of</strong> the screen as well. <strong>The</strong>re are some other stacks following this one that are visible. Lightroom and Photoshop are the trademarks <strong>of</strong> Abobe S<strong>of</strong>tware, Inc. Archiving Photos I take lots <strong>of</strong> photos and their individual size keeps getting larger, what with sensors with more megapixels, like the Nikon D3x, etc. What to do with them? How do I protect them from… whatever? It is good to have as many copies <strong>of</strong> your photos as you can manage, and stored in different places at that. I have my computer set up so that when I copy a new set <strong>of</strong> photos from a flashcard they are written simultaneously to two separate hard drives. This is accomplished through RAID formatting which always keeps two copies <strong>of</strong> all files, separately. <strong>The</strong>refore, if one disk goes down, the other (hopefully) is intact. In addition, I also copy all the files to a third disk for even more protection. I use Adobe Lightroom to keep track <strong>of</strong> my photos, as well as to do most developing tasks, like light-balance, tone, sharpening, and so on. I store each day’s photo shoot in a separate folder by date, in the format “YYYY-MM-DD” so that they can appear sequentially and be sorted by date. Lightroom has strong keyword capability and attributes you can tag a photo with, such as “Keep,” “Reject,” plus five colors and five star ratings. As for keywords, you can enter almost anything and find it later. I use the color, five-star rating, keep & reject attributes all the time, but tend to fall behind on writing out all the keywords. I do tag my “Keepers” in red, so a search for all red-bordered photos let’s me find the most important ones quickly. I like to browse through my entire collection from time to time, just because I <strong>of</strong>ten find photos I have overlooked for one reason or another that now I have a use for or can touch up to make them useful. PC or Mac Computer I have both a Mac and PC and work with images on both machines, although I do more video work on my MacPro and still-photo work on the windows-7 PC. Both computers can handle 64-bit applications. As for monitors, I have used two monitors for years and find the extra room indispensible. Lately, I have switched to a single 30” monitor. 87