Johan W. Elzenga

Cape Town photo gallery

Johan W. Elzenga — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:58:49 +0000

I still needed to add a full Cape Town photo gallery. That’s now done. The gallery contains twenty photos of our last trip to this beautiful city.

TIPA photo contest

Johan W. Elzenga — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:13:59 +0000

TIPA has launched an online photo contest, with 10,000 euro in prize money. Amateurs can win 4,000 euro for the best single picture, professionals can win 6,000 euro for the best series of three images. More information at the TIPA website.

Photoshop Tip: Synchronizing adjustments in Camera RAW

Johan W. Elzenga — Sun, 13 May 2012 21:20:23 +0000

Most people use Adobe’s raw-converter Camera RAW with one image at a time, but did you know you can use it with a series of images and synchronize the adjustments from one image to all the others? That saves you an enormous amount of time if you need to adjust many similar images, especially if you need to remove a few dust specks as well. Here’s how you do this. Select multiple RAW images (using shift-click or Ctrl-click / Cmd-click) in the ‘Open…’ dialog of Photoshop, or select them in Bridge and then choose ‘Open in Camera RAW’. You’ll get the Camera RAW dialog as always, but with a film strip on the left side showing all the images. Make your adjustments on one of the images, then click the ‘Select All’ button and then the ‘Synchronize’ button. You’ll get a dialog asking you which adjustments you want to synchronize.

Indoor panoramas

Johan W. Elzenga — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:06:13 +0000

I’ve added a page about 360 degrees indoor panorama photos. 360 degrees panorama photos are a great way of showing the inside of a hotel or lodge room, but they suffer from the same high contrast problems as normal photos of interiors. If the interior is correctly exposed, the rooms are completely washed out and do not show any detail. But not anymore.

Buying a camera isn’t a soccer match

Johan W. Elzenga — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:22:49 +0000

The web seems to be full of comparison tests of the latest Nikon versus the latest Canon camera, almost like it’s a soccer game and we need to know who wins this year’s championship. For a small number of photographers, those who spend more time debating the superiority of their brand in the camera forums of Dpreview than being out in the field making pictures, this contest may be interesting, but for most photographers it’s not. Let’s take all those Nikon D800 versus Canon EOS 5D Mark III tests for example. I would think that more than 95% of all potential Nikon D800 or Canon EOS 5D Mark III buyers already own several Nikon or Canon lenses, so for them there isn’t really a choice between Canon and Nikon. They already made that choice quite some time ago. I’m puzzled why all those camera testers don’t understand that the “Should I upgrade?” question is far more relevant than the “Is this Nikon camera better than that Canon camera or is this Canon camera better than that Nikon camera?” question. Test the D800 against the D700 and test the EOS 5D Mark III against the EOS 5D Mark II if you really want to give your readers information that is relevant for them.

Lightroom Catalog back-up

Johan W. Elzenga — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:09:03 +0000

During my Adobe Photoshop Lightroom seminars I’m often asked how frequently one should make a back-up of the Lightroom catalog, as can be set in the Catalog Settings. My answer may surprise you, because it is “never”. Of course I do not mean that you shouldn’t make back-ups of your Lightroom catalog, but I don’t think it’s very useful to do so via the built-in mechanism of Lightroom itself. If you let Lightroom make a back-up, it will do so in the same folder where the original catalog resides. That means that you will lose your catalog back-ups together with the catalog in case of a hard disk failure. It may be useful if you open the catalog and it appears corrupted, but it is far from safe if this is your only back-up.

The reason why I’m not in favour of applications making their own data back-ups, is that this makes it less likely that the user sets up a good overall back-up system. Yes, your Lightroom catalog is important, so you certainly do need to make back-ups. But so are your financial data, your email databases and your address book data. If you keep your Lightroom catalog on your internal hard disk, use a general purpose back-up program to back-up the entire hard disk, not just your Lightroom catalog. If you use a Macintosh, use Apple’s Time Machine, it’s already installed on your computer. If you use Windows, there are also plenty of options. And remember that the catalog does not contain the original images, so do make a back-up of those images as well if they are on another hard disk (best is to back-up immediately when you import them, this is an option in the Lightroom Import dialog).