The Home of the Hybrid Photographer

Months ago, I reviewed a fine piece of Web Gallery Engine for Lightroom from The Turning Gate, the one-man creation of Matthew Campagna. That piece of software, TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, made creation of high quality, attractive galleries simple. Plus, the added benefit that these beautiful galleries can be generated and uploaded directly from Lightroom.

TTG Pages is a complimentary product to TTG Highslide Gallery Pro. However instead of creating galleries, TTG Pages lets you create elegant websites, easily, right from Lightroom. Now understand, these are not Dreamweaver masterpieces; but solid, simple, elegant websites. TTG Pages is a great front end for the varying TTG Galleries. TTG Pages makes it easy to create specialty websites, such as weddings, online exhibitions and even your online portfolio. TTG Pages is the go to software for quick design, creation and deployment of small, custom sites directly from Lightroom.

Installation of TTG Pages is a simple affair, although if you are not familiar it can seem intimidating. Web engines are not a simple menu click affair like importing presets, you have to manually move the files directly into your Lightroom settings folder. Instructions for installing Web Engines can be found on The Turning Gate site. Along with the Web Engine, the TTG Pages download includes a number of preconfigured Web Templates, allowing a quick redesign of the elements that make the web page with a simple click. Installation instructions for the template again can be found at The Turning Gate.

Once the installation is complete, just fire up Lightroom. Select a few photos you want to use to decorate you webpage and click on the Web Module. From here, simply click on TTG Pages in the Web Engine palette on the right tool panel of the Web Module.

Give Lightroom some time now, as it is prepping your selected images and rendering a web page viewable in the preview panel. From here you can select from a selection of pre-made web templates for TTG Pages, or mosey on over to the right tool panel and start scrolling through your options.

TTG Pages provides a myriad of settings to help create the perfect website for your needs. Everything can be adjusted from the right tool panel, leaving you no HTML that you have to deal with. Not saying you can’t tweak the resulting web page, it is just that you don’t have to. It will be fully functional on export.

What is tricky is text. In most tools, not designed for Lightroom, you would simply type text onto the web preview. Formatting already would be applied. However, due to limitations of Lightroom’s design (I mean, Lightroom is not really a webpage editor) you cannot format paragraphs on you pages. However, Matthew found a nice way around that and has separate text boxes on the tool palette for up to five paragraphs on a page. Most times this will be all you would need.

TTG Pages automatically generates a number of pages automatically. The bare basics are a front page, an about page, a gallery page and a contact page. From here you can also add hotlinks for linking to other pages and TTG Pages even has an easy to use contact form for the contact page that can forward comments and questions directly to an e-mail account.

The gallery page automatically takes one of your selected images and creates a link to a gallery. TTG Pages does not create galleries; you would need to use another TTG gallery engine such as TTG Highslide Gallery Pro. However, TTG Pages is designed to automatically link to galleries you produce when you follow the simple instructions on the TTG pages site.

I am really just touching the tip of the iceberg here, TTG Pages is a powerful tool and used in conjunction with TTG Highslide Gallery Pro it was to be the quickest way to create stunning websites to show off your images. Once you finish you website you can either save it locally to fine tune and upload, or you can directly upload your new site directly from Lightroom.

This review is rather brief, as I do not want to go too in depth, as I am working on a complete tutorial walking you through the use of TTG Pages and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, from start to finish, to make a “boutique” website, such as that for a wedding or portfolio. It is shaping up to be quite in-depth in both applications, but quite easy to follow. So if this does not generate interest in TTG Pages, I am sure the walkthrough will. In fact I am working on my own special project currently utilizing both of these tools.

Here is a sample site, created with TTG Pages. I did not fill out the page at all, used the standard design and did not upload galleries. Since there are no galleries in the gallery folder, there is no previews shown in the Gallery Index. This is just a sample to play around with, and is only temporary, as I will link my project I am working on here to show exactly what TTG Pages can do.

Overall, I found TTG Pages to be a well-rounded piece of software. It is fast, simple and create fine website. Using TTG Pages on its own has limited appeal, but in conjunction with another TTG product or two you have a complete design solution for quick and elegant websites. If you already have a TTG gallery product installed, TTG Pages is a must have. TTG Pages makes it easy to create an great frontend to present your galleries.

TTG Pages is available at The Turning Gate for $25 USD.

Later,

Michael

P.S.

US Legal BS: I was provided with a review copy of the software and received no other form of compensation for this review.

In a departure from the past few articles, today I am going to focus strictly on Lightroom today. The manipulations of the preset files can be accomplished in ACR as well, but for clarity’s sake I am going to focus on Lightroom. I will address ACR at a later date, or if you need help in ACR feel free to ask in the comments, and I will address you issues. The past two posts got rather long and disjointed, and I feel focusing on one application at a time will help clear the articles up and make the article easier to read.

Jumping right in…

So, you know how to install and create presets in Lightroom. Wonderful, but now you have another situation. The preset you just made is not working right. It is manually setting the basic tone controls, when you wanted it to leave them be. Now you could just save a new preset and delete the previous, but that is redundant. Lightroom gives you the option to update existing presets, changing the problematic settings. Updating a preset is useful when designing presets for others to use, allowing you to make the preset, use in on other images, and alter and update the preset as you move along. Updating allows you to revise your existing work.

Let’s learn how to do an update… go ahead and open an image in LR and apply the preset you wish to modify. If you want to make alterations to any of the sliders, do so now, as any alterations will be saved when you run the update. Once you are ready to update the preset, head over to the presets tab in the develop module.

Find the preset you wish to update and Right-Click (Control-Click on Mac), to bring up the contextual menu:

Click on “Update With Current Settings” option.

This brings up the Update Develop Preset dialog box, which is identical to the New Develop Preset Dialog.

Now enable or disable any sliders that you need to adjust. Remember, disable any tools your preset does not need to use, this will facilitate in stacking and combining presets down the road. Plus, it is just good design.

Once everything you need to have saved in the preset is selected, click the “Update” button.You have now updated your preset with the new adjustments. The same preset name is used, however when clicked, it will apply the new settings.

Another task you may want to do is modify a preset you frequently use. When using a preset designed by someone else, you will often discover that you may need to make minor adjustments to the preset to make it more suitable to your needs. You have two different options here; updating the existing preset or creating a new preset based off the original. If you choose to update, follow the steps above. I recommend that you create a new preset based off the original; you may want to use the author’s original preset still, plus it is good to keep the original around to compare to while you fine tune your new version.

This will be short and sweet, since we already know how to make a new preset. Choose an image you want to play with.  Apply the original preset you wish to modify, go ahead and make the changes you desire. Now make a new preset from your current settings, if you don’t know how to do this jump over to Part 1 of this series and follow the instructions for making a new preset. The steps are identical; just make sure to give the new preset a name that connects it to the original preset, so you don’t forget.

When you do modify another designer’s preset, do not release it as your own work. Check to see how the original designer licensed their preset, follow the rules. If they did not include a license, contact them before you release your modification. Make sure they are cool with it. Then give credit where credit is due.

Finally, you will often find that you want to combine the effects of two or more presets into one, stand-alone preset. When combining presets, at least one of the presets must be properly configured, changing only the settings needed. It works best when both presets are well-made, but if a preset is poorly designed, or simply a global preset, you want to apply that to the image first. After you apply the global preset, you will apply your second preset.

In the following instructions, I will combine a Kodak Gold 100 Curve preset and a 110 Frame preset, creating a 110 Kodak Gold preset. Since the Kodak Gold 100 Curve effects more sliders and is the primary effect, we will apply it first.

After it is applied, we will add in the 110 Frame preset; adding in a pseudo-frame with vignette tools.

Now both presets are stacked; the overall color adjusted by the film preset and frame applied with the frame preset. If you create a new preset at this point; you can save the effect of both presets into a single preset. Go ahead and save it as a new preset:

Once you get the New Develop Preset Dialog, make sure to select the tools used by both presets. If you are unsure what the presets actually alter, refer to Part 1 and “read” the presets in a text editor. In my example the 110 effect is in the Post-Crop Vignette; the rest of the tools are used by the Kodak Gold 100 preset. Here is what my New Develop Preset dialog looked like before saving:

Click Save, new preset is ready…follow up with Part 4 to find out how to export your new preset to share with the world.

Here is a download of the 110 Frame and Kodak Gold 100 Curve preset with the final 110 Kodak Gold 100 preset. You can play around and make your own 110 style presets.

Tomorrow will be fun, as I have been working with Brandon over at X= on a new preset. Check out x-equals.com/blog tomorrow for a new preset release I created for his site, then come back here tomorrow for some new presets I created using the new preset from X=. The new preset is an effect preset, enhancing an image for a particular look. It is designed to stack and to be combined with other presets…especially my LIDF Film Emulations. I will have two new presets on the table here tomorrow…so after you get the new release from X=, come back and get my new creations.

Until then,

Michael

Again, apologies to my regular visitors, and all of you who already know the information I am about to regurgitate. There will be a new preset release soon, as in tomorrow, so please bear with me. If you are new to Lightroom, then go ahead and read on.

Okay, so you just downloaded some new presets, and you can’t wait to take them for a spin. First you will need to import them into your application of choice, be it Lightroom or ACR. We will walk through the process for both applications. Then I will show you how you can look inside a preset and see what it does, without even running it in your application.
So first, place your preset files (Extensions of .lrtemplate for Lightroom, .xmp for Photoshop) into a folder on your desktop. Name it whatever you want, as it is just holding the files for now. If you downloaded an archive, such as the .zip files I use here, make sure you unpack the archive before moving on.

First we will look at the method for Lightroom. Simply fire up Lightroom and get into the Develop module. Once the module loads, look to the left panel, and scroll down to the Preset tab, if you don’t already see it. Make sure to expand the tab if it has not already been opened by clicking on the small triangle on the left.

You should now see a folder entitled Lightroom Presets, which are the presets included with Lightroom itself. Beneath it is a folder entitled User Presets, bring your cursor next to it and right-click. Up pops the contextual menu with the options of “New Folder” and “Import”.

Click on “Import…” Once the dialog box opens, point the explorer to the desktop and open your folder you made earlier. Inside, highlight the .lrtemplate file you wish to import.

Then click “Import” and your new preset will be installed in the User Presets folder.

Now your preset is installed and ready for use. However you will rapidly make your User Presets folder a catastrophic mess. So you need to organize a bit. Let’s go ahaead and make a new folder.

To make a new folder, right click again by the User Presets folder and choose “New Folder”.

Name it whatever you choose.

This will create the new folder in the presets menu.

You can then drag the imported preset to the new folder or right-click next to it and import another preset into the new folder.

Pay attention to how you organize your presets in Lightroom, as they are a pain to sort after you have amassed a large amount. This is since Adobe only allows 1 level of folders in the presets menu. Hopefully in future releases Adobe may endow us with nested folders, and if they do it will drastically improve organization of presets.

Installing presets in Adobe Camera Raw nowhere near as elegant or user friendly, however it is quick and effective. In fact, to install the presets, you do not even have to open Photoshop, let alone ACR. To install presets into ACR, it is easiest to do it via your operating system. So open up Finder in Mac or Explorer in Windows, and point it to the following path (I believe Vista should be the same as Windows 7, but I am not sure. Vista users try it both ways):

Macintosh: /Users/UserName/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRawFolder/Settings

Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Windows 7: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Please insert your user name for your system into the respective path where you see UserName. If your system is installed normally, this path will place you right into ACR’s preset folder. Here is a screen from my system:

Now all you have to do is copy the .xmp presets for ACR right into this folder.

Close the folder and start Photoshop. Open a RAW file to bring up ACR.

Once ACR opens, click on the presets tab.

Almost magically your presets are ready to go, no other work needed. I strongly recommend only keeping presets you frequently use installed in ACR, as there is no method by which to sort them.

This is not to say that this is the only way to install presets in either program, but they are the most straight-forward in my opinion. Likely most all of you already know how to do this, but I felt that I should cover it anyways. Now onto a topic some people I know are not aware of… how to see what a preset does without loading it into Lightroom, or “Reading” a preset.

To read a preset, simply open the .lrtemplate file in any text editor. In Windows, you can just open Notepad and drag the .lrtemplate onto the empty Notepad window. This will open the preset in plain text. Although it can appear to be intimidating at first, take some time and look it over. You will start to see correlations between the text and the sliders in Lightroom. (Click the image below to view larger):

If you look at a presets text dump, I am sure you will start to see the correlations from the text file to Lightroom. A preset automatically configures your Develop Module tools for you, that is all they do. By looking at the text dump of any preset, you can see exactly what it will manipulate in Lightroom before you use it allowing you to know what to expect. It just takes a little time to get used to a tools internal name in the preset compared to the label on the slider in Lightroom. With a few reads and comparisons to the Develop Module you will get a quick understanding. You may not look at a preset’s text dump often or at all, but when you are away from your Lightroom computer, like at work, taking a peek inside a preset can tell you a lot, especially when you get familiar with Lightroom.

Also, it is possible to convert Lightroom presets to ACR. I have a tutorial up on X-Equals that explains the method to accomplishing that. Jump on over. Also, the presets I installed during this process were from Brandon’s excellent collection of presets that can also be found on the X-Equals blog, click to be transported to his list of great presets. Don’t forget to check out my article on sharpening in Lightroom over there too!

Hopefully this might help someone. If not, I just wasted a lot of my time writing, well not too much time. But again, I felt I needed to cover these tasks if I am to move firther into discussing presets in Lightroom and ACR.

Back again soon,

Michael

Small Stroll 2, originally uploaded by GrayImaging.

Okay, so as you can tell, I enjoy my black and white photography. The majority of my presets were B&W at first. To that extent I have spent quite some time making monochrome images in Lightroom. So now I will share what I have learned. This is not a step-by-step tutorial and I will be assuming you are familiar with all you develop tools in Lightroom (or ACR…the tools are pretty much the same).

1] Color Mixer

To me, the most important tool in a monochrome conversion is the Grayscale Mixer. In this panel you adjust the intensity of each color channel represented in the black and white image. A slider to the far left renders the color channel very dark, all the way to the right, very bright. You want to manipulate these sliders to get the right look for your image.

Of particular interest for photos with people in them are the Red, Orange and Yellow channels. These three color channels control the skin tone of people, regardless of skin color. The orange channel wields the most control over skin tone, adjusting the overall tone. Red comes in second most influential, effecting blushing and blemishes. Yellow really only effects highlights. Balance these three to get the desired skin tone.

As far as the other colors are concerned, simply adjust them as needed to complete the look. Always adjust slowly and incrementally, allowing yourself time to view the changes. Avoid over adjusting, as it will lead to unbalanced image tone and possible artifacts in the image.

If you are using my film presets, try to avoid adjusting any color slider more than absolutely needed, as any alterations to the color mixer change the tone and therefore change the effect. I recommend only altering the orange channel to save skin tone whenever possible. You shouldn’t have to adjust much as I spend extra time making sure skin tones look good.

2] Tone Curve and Contrast

Contrast is of the utmost importance in monochrome images. Too much and the picture gets muddied up, too little and the image gets too thin. You are looking for a happy medium with both dark blacks, bright whites in the image and smooth transitions between them. You have two tools at your disposal for this, the Contrast slider and the Tone Curve.

The Contrast slider adjusts the contrast in the image globally, and is the easiest method by which to adjust contrast. However it is a bit simplistic, not allowing for fine control over the image.

Where you really tweak the contrast is the Tone Curve. Before making alterations to the curve itself, look below it for the Point Curve. It will be set to one of the following; Linear, Medium Contrast or Strong Contrast. Select between the three setting looking for the one tht gets you closest to what you are looking for. It won’t be dead on normally, but one of the three will give you a good starting point.

After adjusting the Point Curve, start manipulating the curve itself. You have two options here, to adjust the region sliders or to drag the curve to where you like it. The region sliders refer to different areas of the tone curve graph. Across the bottom of the graph you see a bar with three adjustment points with four sections varying in shade. The far left is the shadow ( darkest parts of the image), middle-left is the darks, middle right is the lights and far right is the highlights (brightest parts of the image). If the highlights are too bright or blown out, you can drag the highlight slider to the left or click & hold on the tone curve line on the right side of the graph and drag it slowly down. If you move the line you will notice the slider automatically moving; I much prefer dragging the curve myself as opposed to manipulating the sliders, but move it the way you like.

Tweak the tone curve until it fits. You will notice when dragging the line Lightroom imposes some limits on how far you can move it. Try to avoid laying right on Lightroom imposed boundaries, it crates bad images in my opinion. You can lay the shadow and brightness to that edge to get absolute black and absolute whites when needed.

When using my film presets, I do not recommend adjusting the Tone Curve any further that altering the Point Curve setting. Doing so changes the desired response for the film being emulated. Changing the Point Curve is fine as it changes the size of the curve, not the basic shape. Feel free to use the Contrast slider with my presets as it will allow contrast changes whilst staying inside the confines of the simulated film’ tone curve.

3] Local Adjustments (Brushes and Gradients)

Bring back some of the old darkroom magic with local adjustments in Lightroom. Dodging and Burning are time honored techniques in the darkroom and are easily simulated in Lightroom. Say the image is too dark in parts leading to loss of focus on the subject. This was the case in the photo at the top of the post. My son’s shadow merged with his pants after I applied my Neopan Acros preset. So I simply clicked on the adjustment brush, selected the shadow and increased its exposure, lightening the shadow to differentiate it from his pants.

You can bright and darken by this method. You can locally adjust contrast and brightness. Most importantly to me you can locally adjust clarity. Most of my film presets crank up clarity to get the sharp look of film, however this may not be desirable in photos of people. If this is the case, locally select the face and drag the clarity down. This will reduce the detail level in the face, allowing you to soften their look to make it more appealing. You can even bring clarity down into the negative range to create a soft focus effect, blurring out fine detail whilst retaining normal detail. In other words, fade away wrinkles, freckles and so forth…plus negative clarity makes skin glow, and you can make it look almost surreal.

Local adjustments with the adjustment brush allow you to really fine tune your monochrome image, but do not forget to use graduated filters when you need them. Drop a grad filter across a bright sky and bring the exposure down a bit to bring out detail and balance your image. Play around with you local tools, as they let you bring back the old darkroom techniques that were used to create prints. As any old school B&W photog will tell you, making the picture on film is only part of the process, putting it on paper is the rest. Dodging and burning to bring added depth to a print, sometime even from a flat negative.

4] Image Details (Sharpness, NR and Vignettes)

Don’t forget about sharpening and noise reduction either. It is often easy to forget to do so when working in monochrome. Sharpen you image for you desired output, be it screen or print. Sharpening ca also be used to accentuate noise in the image, which is desirable if you are emulating a high-speed film such as Neopan 1600. Work the noise reduction sliders to either smooth out the image or allow more grain to shine through. These tools allow you to give your image that classic film look about as good as you can in Lightroom. Hopefully one day they add a grain control also.

Although I am not big into vignettes, the look great in monochrome. Play around with getting those corners darker, sometimes it unlocks a feeling in an image that you do not get otherwise.

5] Toning

Finally if you want to tone your monochrome image, play with split toning. You can choose either the highlight or shadow split tone and give it an orangish-red to create a sepia image. You can even set the highlight and shadow to different hues and saturation levels and adjust the balance slider to get a nicely balance duo-tone image. Play around, try sepia, blue and green tints. Toning is another way to really kick up an image.

Obviously these are just a few of the tools at you disposal to create beautiful monochrome images, however these are the area I work the most with and I figure I would share it with everyone. Sorry there were no screen shots, but this is a fairly long post and I wanted to get it up before I went to sleep. If you are familiar with Lightroom you get what I was saying. In the same right these tools are also in Adobe Camera Raw, so those of you with just Photoshop are not left out either.

These steps work if you are making a monochrome from scratch or utilizing my presets or those of others. Just take some time and explore each of these areas in Lightroom deeper and you will be making great black and white images in no time.

Oh, a new preset up tomorrow!

Until then,

Michael

[This article has been rewritten and published at x=blog 01192009]

I recently stumbled upon a method by which you can import Lightroom develop presets into Adobe Camera RAW for use with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’m sure someone has written this up before, but I have never seen it, as I discovered this by chance. In retrospect this seems overly obvious and many of you may know how to do this already, but if not read on.

As a die-hard Lightroom addict I personally never had the need to deal with Adobe Camera RAW. All my trips into Photoshop were initiated from the context menu inside Lightroom. However, I recently finished touching up a RAW file for a colleague and I wanted to have my edits saved with the file. Knowing she does not use Lightroom, as she is an Apple fan running Aperture, I needed to save the Lightroom edits to be rendered in Photoshop. I exported my edited file as a DNG she could open in ACR, then I hopped into Photoshop and opened said file. As I suspected all my edits were intact, they should be as ACR and Lightroom use the same RAW engine. Life was good.

However, looking at my fully edited file in ACR I realized that I could save these develop settings as a preset in ACR, opening the presets I design to a whole new audience. If you follow the steps below, you too will be able to convert any preset you use into an ACR preset.

1. Open Lightroom, and edit any RAW file in your catalog by applying the preset that you wish to convert over to ACR.

2. Once image is satisfactory, right-click (Windows) to bring up the context menu. Choose “Export” in the menu and then the “Export…” option. This brings up the export menu. Setup the export for “Files on Disk”. Choose your export location, set naming for custom name and give the file the name of the preset you are exporting. Most importantly, in the File Setting section, change the format to DNG. This will rewrap your RAW file into DNG and include any modifications currently done to the image (the applied preset).

3. You can now close Lightroom. Open up Photoshop (or Elements), and open the DNG file you just made. ACR will pop up showing your exported file with all edits intact. Take this time to run through ACR’s options and make sure everything looks right. If so, move on to the next step.

4. Now look at the ACR window. To the right, just under the histogram is the buttons controlling ACR adjustment features. Look for the one on the far right with the three sliders depicted on it. Clicking this leads to the Presets menu. Now simply click the small icon in the right corner of that window, it has 3 lines and a small arrow. It opens a menu, in which you will choose “Save Settings”.

5. This will open a dialog with all the controllable options for the preset, and is much like what you see in Lightroom when making or editing presets. Place a check by every option you want the preset to adjust. Uncheck any boxes you want the preset to leave alone. If you check “Apply auto tone adjustments” or “Apply auto grayscale mix” then the preset will override any of your Lightroom edits in those areas. I would not use it unless you know what you are doing.

6. Once done, click on “Save”. Then you are offered a Save dialog box with the filename of the DNG in the window. If you named your DNG for your preset, just click “Save”, if not change the filename and click save. Your preset is saved to the presets dialog in ACR. Open another RAW file and test it.
Now you can use your favorite Lightroom presets inside of Photoshop, or make a preset for a friend with Photoshop but no Lightroom. Let them see what they are missing.

Another benefit I have found to exporting my Lightroom preset to ACR is that I can store them on a USB drive and use them on anyone’s machine. You can copy your ACR .xmp files from this path:

C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Copy the .xmp files to your USB drive. You can them manually apply any preset off the drive. Just click on the menu icon in the presets tab, choose “Load settings…” and point the file browser to your usb drive. Click and go.

I hope this helps anyone who was curious as to how to carry out this process. Hope it helps you and your workflow.

Until next time,
Michael