portlands: waiting Concrete Geometry

The crispness is wonderful, making the viewer pay attention. The color cast, whether pink or lavender, conveys an early morning, pre-work, chugging one's coffee before day starts pause. And then the day starts.

Hi Jeff,

 

Thanks for the kind comments. This and the other photo were actually both taken in the last twilight of dusk but I share your impressions of calmness and also the idea that things are about to happen. What actually drove the creation of this image, though, were the strong geometrical lines.

 

Sorry for the late reply, I have been absent from PN for a long while now. I hope to find some more time here soon. I am currently finishing up turning these Portlands images into a self-published book. I post an update here and on my profile when it is ready.

 

 

I can identify with the lack of time. I have about ten minutes of alone time in the morning sipping my coffee before my kids wake up.

 

 

I like the smooth finish on this photo. Is it the result of a noise reduction plug-in or something else I should lust after?

Jeff, I can not think of anything I did to this that would have aided the smooth look particularly.

 

This is ISO 640 on my D300. I do not think I ran any noise reduction as I have gone back to the RAW file and it looks just about the same. I did a fair bit of colour and contrast work in Lightroom and some slight dodging and burning in PS.

 

I do not think I used it here, but, I also use a plug-in called Viveza from Nik software. It is very, very good at reducing the need to make complicated and time-consuming selections and masks when you want to locally adjust colour and tone.

 

With regard to noise and smoothness, if you're looking, I can recommend the newest version of Noise Ninja, it is very good when you take the time to hand-profile each image and adjust carefully the parameters of the noise reduction. I had any earlier version and the newest is quite an improvement.

 

Lastly, I can say that this was one of the worst images for which to prepare a CMYK conversion. Apparently, soft, glowing, colour-washed light is just about impossible in a four-colour press.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the info. I use Viveza, too, and I agree it's a great plug-in. I liked the glossy feel you captured here. I'm thinking about using Lightroom instead of PS for conversions. Do you think it's worth the cash? Or simply one more piece of digital clutter?

I love Lightroom and wouldn't live without it. If I had to give up either PS or Lightroom, I would give up PS.

1. I am not an organized person and Lightroom makes keeping and accessing my libraries easy. All the power of bridge and camera-raw rolled into one programme plus a lot of additional functionality.

2. The print engine in Lightroom is fantastic. Even if I work up a final few changes in PS, I always end up going back into Lightroom to print.

3. The 2.0 release's sharpening is good enough to avoid going to PS for that — except if you want to selectively sharpen only one area.

4. The web galleries are nice! I did my whole website from within Lightroom. I manage it with Dreamweaver. But, I created the basic pages entirely in Lightroom.

http://www.iancoxleigh.com

I used some templates from TTG (http://lightroom.theturninggate.net/).

___

I still use PS a fair bit. The dudge and burn tools are better because you can work the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows seperately – even compared to the most recent Lightroom local adjustments tool. The ability to create selections and masks is great. Noise Ninja does a much better job of noise reduction that what is in Lightroom. I do some channel swapping on my IR stuff. But, PS keeps getting less and less use as Lightroom improves.

Plus, it is very easy to export a TIFF to PS and then after working in PS, it automatically appears back in Lightroom where I can do a few more final tweaks before exporting a web-size version back into PS and put a frame on it.

Anyways, if you go the lightroom route, save an extra $40 for the Luminous Landscape video tutorials (7.5 hours). They are easy to watch and by the time you see it all, you'll have the whole programme down.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/videos/LR2.shtml