Did I ever mention that I hardly ever carry a tripod with me? That for getting a shot I’d rather stabilize the camera another way? Such as leaning against something, propping the camera up on a rock or using a beanbag? And that I frequently use the bust trick?

The burst trick is an easy method to increase the chances of getting a hand-held shot at a long exposure time without camera shake. You simply set the camera to rapid fire mode and fire away a burst of two, thee, four or even more shots. Then you select the one shot from that burst that has the least amount of camera shake, or preferrably none at all.

Easier said than done. Personally I’m used to delete the shaky ones directly on my camera, but depending on the camera and its display (or simply depending on how much time I’ve got during the photoshoot), it’s not always possible. That’s why I have recently switched to doing this in Lightroom.

Here’s my step-by-step guide:

1. Import all images, creating 1:1 previews (You’ll need them at 1:1 in order to be able to reliably spot the shaky pictures, and it’s much faster later on if you already have the previews created. Depending on the amount of pictures and your computer, this will take some time. Get yourself a cup a joe)
2. Add a keyword to the images during import that is clearly different from all the other tags in your catalog. (I typically use asdf. This is only temporary)
3. Create a Smart Collection with the following parameters: a) Keywords contains asdf, b) Pick Flag is unflagged. (This way the collection will only display images that have your special keyword and that are not flagged at all)
4. Zoom in to 100% by hitting the space bar, use the mouse to move the image to an in-focus area if necessary.
5. Use the left and right cursor keys to quickly go back and forth between the pictures of an individual burst. If you see one that has more camera shake than another one, hit the x key to mark the image rejected. (Thanks to having the 1:1 previews already rendered, the going back and forth is a very quick process. Thanks to the way the Smart Collection is set up, the flagged pictures will instantly vanish from your view, leaving only the unflagged ones.)
6. Remove the asdf tag from the remaining images, you won’t need it anymore.

After having finished the shakey images removal, I give the remaining images a second pass (this time not at 100%, but on full view) and x out all of the other images that I don’t like.

At the end I go to the All Photographs view and hit COMMAND-backspace (Mac) or CTRL-backspace (Windows) in order to delete all images marked for rejection.

Do you have any cool Smart Collection tips and tricks of your own? Share them in the comments!

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But only the effective combination of both, mouse and keyboard will take your Lightroom editing skills to the next level.

The good thing is that you’ll only need to remember 5 of those shortcut keys to help you blaze through your image editing and have your friends lower their eyes in your presence and address you as “Oh Great Lightroom Master” from now on.

(Psssst! If you haven’t seen part 1 and part 2 of the Lightroom workflow series, this would be a great time to go have a look)

The Five Shortcuts:

#1: X them out! (aka the x key) - This will mark an image for deletion by adding the black flag of doom, errrrrm I mean by marking the image as rejected.

Bonus: the images are not deleted right away, which gives you time to think about things. As soon as you have decided to delete he marked images, just hit COMMAND-Backspace (Mac) or CTRL-Backspace (Win) to really delete them.

#2: It’s full of stars! (aka the 1 thru 5 keys) - Rate your images by pressing 1 for one star, 2 for two stars, and so forth. 5 is the highest rating.

Bonus: to remove the stars, press the 0 key and they’re gone.

#3: Get me home! (aka the g key) - This is the key I press when I’m lost. It takes me back to the grid view in the Library module and makes me feel very warm and cozy and at home.

Bonus: use e instead of g, Lightroom will take you to the opened version of the currently selected image in the Library instead of the grid view.

#4: Develop (aka the d key) - This opens the currently selected image right in the Develop module to allow you to do such fancy things as correct exposure, work on vibrance, tone curve, colors, and so on.

Bonus: if you do a lot of landscape photography and want to quickly add an ND Grad filter to your image, just press the M key while in the Develop module and you can quickly add one to any image with the drag of your mouse.

#5: Round and round (aka the r key) - Press this key and you can quickly rotate and crop an image. Essential to me, as I can’t seem to hold my camera straight at times.

Bonus: while in crop mode, Lightroom will show you a thirds grid by default. Hit the o key repeatedly for a little surprise!

These are obviously only a few of the essentials, but having this hand full in your repertoire and ready when you need them will go a long way and save you real time.

A few more of my favourites are: f (for those times you need more space on your screen, toggles between different screen modes), TAB (or shift-TAB, gives you even more space by hiding and unhiding the side and top/bottom panes), l (makes the background go dark to fade distracting user interface elements away), w (summons up the white balance tool to let you click on a neutral gray area in your image), n (shows you multiple selected images in the Compare view) and j (used in the Grid view will toggle between different thumbnail display modes)

Eager to learn more? Press COMMAND-/ (or CTRL-/) to bring up a shortcut overview for each of the Lightroom modules. (If your keyboard language is other than English, use the Help menu to find out what the shortcut is on your keyboard)

What are your favourite Lightroom shortcuts? Let us know in the comments!

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Winning photo by Heinrock

As Chris can’t seem to remember to announce the winner, here’s a quick little show to tell you who won. Maybe Chris can take a few minutes on the next show to tell you why he liked this image.

Thanks to all the listeners, pixies, and helpers for a great year!

 -Release Pixie

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Main topic today: Why isn’t it possible to present pictures on Flickr on a non-white background. Yes, slideshow presents on black, but both of those are such strong contrasts that they really take away a lot off the image viewing experience. Chris presents a workaround using the Flickr Enlarger website by Jay Williams (link below)..

Welcome the new TFTTF Pixie Johannes Schriewer! He’s helping with the editing the Tech Guy segments, so please give him a warm welcome in the comments, because without him, you wouldn’t get your weekly fix of the Tech Guy from now on.

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Show Links:

• The Checkershadow Illusion - find out how easily your eyes are fooled!
• More eye foolery at the laboratory of Dale Purves, M.D.
• Put your pictures on a non-white background with Flickr Enlarger by Jay Williams
• Johannes Schriewer, our new Pixie (make sure you leave him a welcome comment!)
• Sign up for the workshop mailing list

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Whenever I talk about Lightroom on my workshops, I inevitable get a question along the lines of: “When I import RAW pictures into Lightroom, they look great for a few seconds and all of a sudden, their preview switches to a much duller version. What’s happening here and how do I get them back to where I had them originally?”

The answer has to do with the fact that what your camera shows you on its display is not the RAW image, but a JPG preview. And that preview is typically embedded in the RAW image. And it has your camera’s processing settings applied to it.

Those processing settings (sometimes called profiles, not to be mixed up with ICC profiles) are different for different cameras. My Canon EOS 5D calls them “Picture Styles” (Nikon calls them “Image optimization presets), and they are presets for sharpness, contrast, saturation, tone and potentially a few more things behind the scenes that we don’t really know about. In my camera’s case those styles/profiles/presets are called Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral and Faithful (Nikon’s are called Normal, Portrait, Vivid etc.) and they apply to JPG images produced by the camera as well as to the previews that are embedded inside RAW files. The very previews that my camera shows to me on its display.

The reason it does that is that you can’t just display a RAW image. You have to develop it first. In this case ‘develop’ means some form of interpretation of the image. Software like Aperture or Lightroom make this a very transparent process by showing you something right away, but what you see always going to be some form of interpretation depending on what you set all the sliders to.

Now when you import those images into Lightroom, it will try to give you an as pleasant as possible user experience, i.e. it tries to get a preview of the image up on the screen as fast as it can. And using the embedded preview from the RAW file is much faster than reading the whole RAW file, interpreting it and then building the preview from that. But that’s what we’ll eventually work with, so while we look at the preview in all its glory and contrastiness and colorfulness, Lightroom secretly reads the full RAW file and builds the real preview. In the background and out of your sight. This takes a second or two (or ten, depending on your computer’s oomph), and as soon as it is finished, it will replace the original preview with the real one. And that is typically duller, less contrasty, less colorful. That’s just the way RAW files are supposed to be. This gives you more room to work with, to boost contrasts to your liking, and so forth. What it does not always do is please your eyes. That’s simply because RAW is part of a workflow and typically needs more work. The reward is that you can typically get so much more out of a RAW image than out of a JPG.

But you might still want to use what you saw on your camera as a starting point. And here is the point where Lightroom’s new camera profiles come in and make a great entrance. Select one of your pictures, hit the ‘D’ key (for Develop), then in the right-hand pane scroll all the way down until you reach Camera Calibration and - voila - there they are, your camera’s built-in profiles.

Let’s say you shot the image on Portrait setting. Just select that from the Profile pulldown and your image will look pretty close to what you expect. And of course you can apply that setting to any other images by using Lighroom’s Sync feature, so here’s my piece of workflow around this:

1. After finishing my image imports and all the rating and sorting, I select one of the images and hit the ‘D’ key to see it in the ‘Develop’ view
2. I navigate to the ‘Camera Calibration’ pane and select the according camera setting from the ‘Profile’ pulldown menu (not to be confused with ICC profiles)
3. I go back to the library grid (’G’ key) and in addition to the just modified image, I select all other images that were shot with the same camera preset (or picture style, etc.)
4. I hit the ‘Sync Settings’ button and select ‘Calibration’ as the only thing on this list
5. I hit the ‘Synchronize’ key and have a big smile on my face while watching the selected pictures in the grid magically change.

Here is some more in-depth reading on the subject of Adobe Camera Raw Calibration.

Do you have additional tips around using this feature? Leave a comment!

TFTTF made it to the iTunes Store home page in both, Switzerland and Norway. Mind you, not the iTunes Store Podcast home page, but the top home page that has all the music and stuff on it.

Big YEY, thank you iTunes, and thank YOU all for keeping TFTTF up there by leaving reviews on the iTunes store!

Any other TFTTF sightings I’m not aware of? Leave a comment!

Update: Apparently this presence extends to more countries. In specific we’re right now up on the iTunes Store home pages in Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Sweden, .. that’s a whopping 10 out of 62 countries!

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See part two of the talk and find out how to balance different light sources to get a more even white balance. Chris talks with Leo Laporte and Amber McArthur at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas.

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• Leo Laporte
• Amber McArthur

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Earlier this year Chris was invited to talk tech and photography with Leo Laporte and Amber McArthur at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas.Watch the first of two parts and find out if Chris manages to crash Leo’s Tricaster again.

Show Links:

• Leo Laporte
• Amber McArthur

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Lightroom is my personal mouse wheel of photo management. And of a lot of post processing. And of posting to Flickr. And of sending images out via email. And and and..

90% of my images will never see any photo-related software other than Lightroom. The rest will be opened in Photoshop out of Lightroom and once I’m finished working on it in Photoshop, it’ll automatically show up in its edited form back in Lightroom.

And before you email me, yes, Aperture can do all these things too. Maybe with different keyboard shortcuts and maybe in a slightly different way, but this post is about Lightroom.

With today’s massive amount of images (I just shot 318 pictures in 2 hours and that’s not really a lot) most of us need help. Help with the workflow. Some actually first need to understand that a somewhat defined workflow is key in making sure you get the best out of your thousands or tens of thousands of images.

I get a lot of questions about what my workflow looks like, so I thought I’d take you by the hand and show you my own personal version:

1. Imported 318 pictures into Lightroom, making sure to use an import preset to stamp copyright info and add keywords.
2. Assign a profile to all images (Develop/Cam Calibration) to make them as close as possible to what I saw on the display. If you don’t have profiles installed in your LR, you can find some good ones here: http://is.gd/8ybB. Despite the fact they say DNG, they work with RAW too. On to initial selection round now…
3. Initial round, select pictures as picks (P key) or rejects (X key) - auto-advances to next pic with CAPS lock on. Swift. I select those pretty fast, maybe 2-4 seconds per picture.
4. Quick review of the rejects. I’ve set up a Smart Collection for that that only shows me the pics with the reject flag on
5. DELETE the rejects from disk. Pooof, gone. In this case 184 out of 318. Still too many picks, but man it’s hard to choose
6. Now that I’m left with only flagged images, I rate them with stars. * = “hmm, not sure I wanna keep that”, ** = “kinda good, needs work”, *** = “high potential, I want to work on that!”. Shortcuts: keys 1-5 will rate, CAPS lock on gives you auto-advance again. While rating the pics, I found some more to reject. All rated now.
7. Set up a Smart Collection that shows all pics with 3 stars and matching keywords. Call it “TBWO” (To Be Worked On)
8. Now AFTER deleting them, I add additional keywords to some of the pics (maybe a person’s name or other detail)

(This list was first published on twitter.com/chrismarquardt)

This was the import and image organization part of my workflow. The rest pretty much depends on the actual images and where they will end up.

What does your workflow look like? Tell us in the comments!

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Show Links:

• Interview part 1
• Laboratorium home page
• Laboratorium MySpace page
• Robin Preston
• 101 Essential Tips (Photography) by Michael Lanford

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Oh nooo, Twitter is down. twitter.com/chrismarquardt that is … so I guess instead of aimlessly wandering about the studio, I better put the unexpected chunk of time to good use and calibrate my monitors.

If you want any sort or certainty that what you see on your screen is what others see on theirs, or that you get a print-out that gets close to the image on your monitor, then screen calibration is the single most important thing you’ll have to think about.

And before you say “but how about the printer and the camera and and and…” - yes, there are other things that make sense (and are even necessary) in a color-managed workflow, but we’ll have to start somewhere. And making sure the colors and contrast of your screen are where they should be is pretty central to the whole complex.

Speaking of complex.. don’t worry, this is much easier than you might think.

Simply explained, calibration is a process in which a measuring device (a colorimeter) looks at your LCD or CRT screen. If there are discrepancies between what the monitor shows and what the colorimeter expects, a corrective table (an ICC profile) will be created in the process to help your monitor show the right colors.

Sounds complicated? This is typically a pretty well automated process. All you’ll have to do is hook up the colorimeter to your computer’s USB port, run some software and follow the on-screen instructions. The whole procedure usually takes less than 5 minutes.

Where to place the monitor?

Before we calibrate, we’ll have to go one step back and look at this very important detail: How we perceive an image on the screen always depends on what is around it in terms of brightness and color.

Is your monitor placed in front of or next to a window? Do you edit at different times of day? Sometimes with incandescent light on in the room? Sometimes with sunlight pouring in through the window? Do you edit at different brightness levels in the room?

If you answered any of those questions with yes, you might want to reconsider the placement of your computer screen. It’s generally better to edit somewhere where the light conditions don’t change too much. Professionals in the photo and print business sometimes even have windowless rooms painted in neutral grey with lights that have a well-defined color temperature and light density at the working place. I’d consider that overkill for most of us, but at least a bit of that will help get more consistent results.

Tips and tricks? Have some black cloth ready!

Even though the actual calibration is an easy process, there are still two minor stumbling blocks, one being the colorimeter’s suction cups that are supposed to hold the device in place during calibration, the other being stray light that can render a measurement invalid. Both are easy to handle.

The problem with suction cups is that they typically don’t stick very well on matte screens. If your screen is glossy, you should be fine. If not, the easiest way to make sure the device stays as close and perpendicular to the screen as possible is to a) tilt the screen back and let gravity help, and b) put a piece of cloth over the screen while calibrating to help hold the device on the screen. Please note: Don’t manually press the device onto the screen during calibration if you calibrate an LCD monitor. If you (carefully) touch an LCD, you might notice temporary changes in color. Not good for calibration.

The problem with stray light is that it might fool the calibration process and end up giving you an ICC profile that has nothing to do with your actual light situation. There are several reasons why stray light can interfere, one is that the colorimeter might not sit well on the screen during calibration, another one is that matte screens might reflect some light coming from the side back into the colorimeter and with some newer screens, for example the 2008 glossy Apple iMacs, there is a bit of a gap between the protective screen and the actual LCD, which might also allow some stray light in. All of those are easily amended by the use of a piece of black cloth and again: gravity. Flip the monitor back and simply drape the cloth over the monitor during calibration. This will help properly hold the colorimeter down on the screen and it’ll keep stray light from all angles out.

Repeat offense

Calibration is not a one-time process. Hardware ages and changes. Many professionals re-calibrate their screens weekly or every other week. For home use I recommend you refresh calibration at least every 2-3 months.

Which colorimeter to buy?

If you’re starting off with managing colors, Pantone’s Huey Pro or Datacolor’s Spyder2express are good choices and they typically range below $100. If you want to go a bit higher, I suggest looking at x-rite’s I1 Display 2.

Visual calibration (or: I have eyes, I don’t need a colorimeter)

Any calibration is better than no calibration. There are utilities on the market (and part of some operating systems) that let you perform visual calibration by moving sliders back and forth until some color fields match. This is better than nothing, but our eye is not a good measuring device. And it’s certainly not calibrated to a standard. Its perception is also easily influenced by what else it sees, so it can almost be expected that a visual calibration will be off in some way. And in fact, most visually calibrated monitors tend to display colors with a much more bluish tint than if a calibration is done with a colorimeter.

Conclusion

Get in on the color management game. It’s never too late, and working without seeing what you should see will in the long run give you inferior results. Not only is it important to make sure your computer screen doesn’t lie to you while you edit images, it’s also an easy and automated process and you can start off at far less than $100. This is a small investment that you will benefit from every single time you edit an image and suddenly see details in the shadows and highlights where you only saw solid black and white before.

Beware of taking this step though. When I first calibrated my screens and subsequently revisited some of my old images, I ended up spending a weekend of re-editing pictures, because all of a sudden I saw flaws that I had never seen before.

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Show Links:

• Robin Preston
• Ravsitar’s Photo Contest

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Show Links:

• Chris’ pictures from today’s excursion on Flickr
• Monika’s pictures from today’s excursion
• PodcastAwards - Voting ends Nov/6 - Vote Now!

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Today on Tips from the Top Floor: Have a glass of wine with Chris and learn to take great group shots. Also on this episode: Ravsitar’s photo contest (yes, you can win a Gorillapod!) is almost over, hurry up if you want to participate! If you want to find out more about next year’s workshops, go to www.discoverthetopfloor.com and sign up for the notification list to be among the first to find out about new dates and events!

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Links:

• Vote daily for your favorite shows at PodcastAwards.com! Voting ends Nov/6, and every vote counts!
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• Details for Ravsitar’s Cookie Contest are available here.
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Chris Marquardt and Boris Nienke spent a week in Cologne to cover Photokina 2008, the world’s biggest photography trade show for their German photography podcast Happy Shooting. Here are a few impressions for you.

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Show Links:

• Chris’s Photokina coverage
• John Miller’s The Rest of Everest
• Want to know what Chris is planning for workshops in 2009? Check out Discoverthetopfloor.com
• Newest modern dance theater in Denmark: Archauz
• Be sure to check out Chris on the Experts Tour in Germany.

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• Interview with Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera
• Drobo Interview
• HP Consumer Products

If you speak German, go to see the full Photokina 2008 coverage here.

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Photokina 2008 is over and Chris sums up the show for us.

Show Links:

• Chris’s interview Steven Sasson inventor of the digital camera
• Check out Chris & Borris on the Happy Shooting Podcast (German)
• Drobo backup drives
• The Monochrom Subjektiv lens
• Kodak Image Sensors
• Lasolite lighting equipment
• Canon 5D Mark II
• Nikon D90
• Lomographic Society International
• Crumpler camera bags
• Pentax Cameras
• Kodak OLED Digital Photo Frame
• Panasonic’s Micro 4/3rds system

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Watch the video interview at Happy Shooting.