I took the following series of photos of Fawn Lillies with my D2X, 85/4 and closeup extension tubes this afternoon. Thanks to Andreas for selling me the 85/4 - a gorgeous lens ideal for this type of photography.
Returning home, I completed the processing, including the web preparation, entirely in Lightroom - mainly to see if I encountered any problems. Here are the steps I took.
So, what did I sacrifice by staying in Lr the entire time? I would have liked to run a mild noise reduction on a couple of the photos - that is about it. It certainly is a pretty painless workflow. When Lr gets improved sharpening and noise reduction and localized editing this will really rock.
If you are unfamiliar with Ditto, you can find out more at http://members.shaw.ca/hillrg/ditto/. Please note that Ditto is not ready for CS3 yet. I will be putting documentation on my site in the near future on how to use Ditto with Lr.
So, here are the results:
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Returning home, I completed the processing, including the web preparation, entirely in Lightroom - mainly to see if I encountered any problems. Here are the steps I took.
- I ingested into the Lr library, renaming my files to a YYYY-MM-DD_####.NEF format and applying a develop preset that sets sharpening, noise reduction and CA for ISO 200, which is what I used for most of the shots. I also added keywords, copyright, IPTC data (including a default title) at ingest. At the same time, I copied the NEF files to a second, backup drive.
- I made a global WB adjustment based on a shot of a WhiBal card in the field. I also made a global adjustment to remove one dust spot from all the files using the clone/heal tool.
- I reviewed the images, pressing X, U or P with the caps on (auto proceed to next photo), to select the picks and rejects. I deleted the rejects (X) and then ranked the remaining as either 2 or 3. I filtered on the 3 and higher.
- I adjusted exposure and the tone curve for a few of the shots. Most shots I just left the way they defaulted in Lr.
- I cropped some of the shots.
- I made a final selection of 6 shots for export by pressing 6 to set a red color label for each selected photo. I then filtered on red and selected all the reds.
- I exported to jpg, using a Lr post processing directive to run Ditto. I have created a photoshop droplet that runs my Ditto photoshop script. I placed the Ditto droplet in the Lr Export Presets folder, which resides in the docs and settings application data > adobe > lightroom area.
- The Ditto script created two subfolders (desktop and pbase) where the jpgs were processed for desktop size (max dimensions 1500 high and 2500 wide) and for pbase at a maximum dimension of 800 pixels.
- I zipped the resultant Ditto formatted web jpgs and uploaded to my web site.
So, what did I sacrifice by staying in Lr the entire time? I would have liked to run a mild noise reduction on a couple of the photos - that is about it. It certainly is a pretty painless workflow. When Lr gets improved sharpening and noise reduction and localized editing this will really rock.
If you are unfamiliar with Ditto, you can find out more at http://members.shaw.ca/hillrg/ditto/. Please note that Ditto is not ready for CS3 yet. I will be putting documentation on my site in the near future on how to use Ditto with Lr.
So, here are the results:
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View attachment 89791