Photo Media Stock Seminar

August 26th , 2010 → 9:06 am @ Yorgo Nestoridis // No Comments

1 Photo Media Stock Seminar Information
1.1 Adobe Lightroom 3
1.2 Camera Calibration

Photo Media Stock Seminar Information

This week-ends Photo Media Seminar has a busy schedule like all Ycademy Seminars and to anticipate some of the issues I would like to invite participants to prepare the following:

Adobe Lightroom 3

We will introduce and work with Adobe Lightroom 3. There are some amazing features and improvements of the software which will make our work easier. Amongst the improvements you will find:

Superior Noise Reduction
Support for DSLR video file formats
Improved Image Watermarking
New Image Importing Interface
Perspective Correction
Tethered shooting
Lens Correction
Improved Slide-shows with Music

and more.

Please download and install the 30 days trial version from Adobe: Click HERE.

DO NOT install unless you have attended last night’s session.

We will install and custom configure the software at tonight’s Ycademy call.

Camera Calibration

As far as I am aware of, all participants use cameras which out-put jpg format images, compared to RAW formats. We will therefore do an empirical calibration based on what we see. For this reason, we work with a few images shot with our camera as follows:

3 images daylight, normal conditions
3 images low light conditions
3 images flash (indoors, party, rooms,…)

Please load the pictures to a blog post or a page as wide as your column allows (for most 460 pixels).

Example before and after:

iPhone 4 Photos as shot:

Syros Ferry

Everybody knows the Vodafone red …. for my taste the above is too warm, too orange tinted.

Blue and White

Same here, the white is yellowish and the blue drifting off to a hazy warm blue.

Syros Ermoupoli

Again very warm and yellow …

iPhone 4 Photos after Calibration

I have used the above iPhone 4 Photos to create a calibration preset in Lightroom 3. Then I re-loaded the images again and applied the preset to obtain the following results:

Syros Ferry Calibrated

Purified mid tones and cooler tonal range, a bit of sharpening and the photo looks pretty much as I remember the scene.

Calibrated iPhone 4 Photo

The cooling provokes ‘blueish’ shadows … still better than yellow. The white on top of the image is closer to the real white.

Calibrated iPhone 4 Photo

Cooling helps a lot here; the countryside in the background has its real color. The walls of the buildings on the foreground are yellow in reality and dominate the color range. We are here pretty close to reality.

I have taken a similar photo with my P&S Leica V-Lux-20:

Syros with Leica V-Lux-20

You may notice that this Photo before editing is better than the edited version of the iPhone Photo … or a more zoomed version:

Ermoupoli with Leica V-Lux-20

As unreal as it may appear, these blues really stick out. However calibrating this camera, I would rather reduce the blue impact and create a preset which is less cool.

Note the church on the last image is also visible on the third iPhone Picture. The two pics have been taken from about the same location and distance. The optical zoom of the Leica provides a smashing result considering that we are talking about a camera about of the size of a box of cigarettes.

Size

You like this picture? Pretty sharp huh … that one has been taken with a credit card size Leica C-Lux-3 Point and Shoot camera. Nice details … you see all the dust and finger prints on the cam and the iPhone.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics.

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