owen_s

<p>You really only need to fix the brightness, saturation (really vibrance to cure over sat areas) and white balance, it's best if you can see and then hit the brightness on whole bunchs of images at a time like in grid mode of lightroom's library mode<br>

<br />Then some exposure leveling gradients to keep the exposure even accross the frame.. especially if the bride has on white, and the groom has some other light absorbing color</p>

<p>f4 - f5.6, you do realize that wont be sharp till around f7 or f8, you will be very sad, why not get a 28-70 f2.8 (straight thru) from tamron? you'll be able to at least also use it on a full fram if you ever decide to get a used 5d</p>

<p>the real problem here is that prints are not backlit! so set your laptop screen britness to 80% of the max or down 2 on the brit levels to get closer to what things will lok like when they print..<br>

<br />sending in image files that are in the wrong color space (prorgb, or adobe rgb, when the machine wants srgb, or it's own special profile) will give you very dark contrasty images as well.<br>

<br />try to avoid convertig to a different color space, and bit depth more than once to print.. it's like a vcr tape, the more generations of a copy, the worst the signal to noise becomes</p>

<p>whatever you do, do not post these photos with people in uniform, with militay looking equipment, on a web portfolio thats viewable via the internet, without a password required, at least while you are stil in the military, as you will eventually be told to remove them... they are cracking down on this at the d o d<br>

your gonna want to use f12 to f16 to get everyones head in focus... so that means plenty of llight, or borrow a few light stands from the kind of unit that uses them</p>

<p>photoshop elements 6 or 7 will do it for you</p>

<p>yes, but you can't focus on nothing, as the mirror is up!</p>

<p>get the technique perfected with flowers, then move up to wannabe fashion models..  it helps to have the sun near the horizion...</p>

<p>I have to believe that IS, causes soft images, so avoid it like the plauge</p>

<p>get a canon XS, or XSi body, their pretty much exactly the same , other than the fact the XS has a lower continus frame rate, and has a few less megapixels on the sensor...<br>

lenses, you can go with the 18-51, but turn the IS off and never use it, or get one of the most popular lenses ever sold from tamron the 28 -75 f2.8.. but be sure to check the 100% crops to be sure it is as sharp as it is supposed to be.<br>

get a use a 440exII flash with a big difuser over the head</p>

<p> </p>

<p>open both, get them onto layers in the same document by cutting and pasting the selected area in the other one, then hit the crop tool and expand the dimensions (yes you can do that!), and use the move tool to move one to the bottom half</p>

<p>well what you really should do, is open your 16 bit file as a smart object in a new photoshop window, and convert that to 8bit (be sure to convert to adobe rbg first, as pro photo rgb has too many colors for 8 bits), and figure out what colors are causing the white imbalance, and then us a HSL layer back in the original image.. to mimic what you did in variations</p>

<p>get a wacom bamboo, it's like $69 at amazon, try it out... <br />works great for doing anthing in lightroom, except moving the sliders.. a touchpad mouse is best for them, as you can roll the tip of your finger on the mousepad to get the exact effect you want, and make it stick, when you take your finger off... (the pen keeps moving it, till it's 1/4" off the tablet</p>

<p>in lightroom, make a virtual copy and crop each to be half the photo.. work on them as you please, then either combine them in the lightroom print module and send to a jpg, or have lightroom open them as layers in photoshop, and hit the crop tool, and actually make the image twice as wide, (yes you can do that...) and save as tiff, keeping the color space and bit depth...</p>

<p>my prior comment is about the PC version, the apple version does not have the memory leaks, or so I heard</p>

<p>yep it has a nasty memory leak, which made me so angry... especially as I could not go back to the lower version which did not have said leak, as it would not read my camera's raw files....</p>

<p><br />v2.2 had huge memory leaks, when you put <strong>any</strong> local adjustments on an image</p>

<p><br />v2.3 leaks memory like crazy when you put <strong>alot of</strong> adjustments, or paint a large mask encompassing more than 50 percent of the image (15 meg raw files)</p>

<p><br />I'm hoping v2.4 will finally get rid of the tiresome memory leaks on the adjustment brush</p>