Friday, June 29, 2007

Lightroom 1.1

LR 1.1 was released this week. I have been waiting for this for a while as I thought the initial 1.0 release was bit undercooked.

Well, first impressions are good. Very easy installation and transition for my library. My old workflow remains intact with the benefit of much improved performance.

New things I like:
1. Develop improvements - clarity, sharpening, noise reduction, CA removal.
- will save many trips to photoshop.

2. Right click option to get to folder that the image lives in.
3. Catalogs.
4. Keyword painter
5. No change in colour from develop to library mode.
6. Ability to turn of subfolder items
7. Heirarchies for presets
8. Better search and metadata browsing.
9. Select by star/colour/pick.
10. View virtual copies/masters only

Things I wanted but still not available:
1. Stacks in collections
2. Local colour labels
3. Ability to edit metadata such as lens.

Dislikes:
None yet - though it seems lots of people on the forums are having major dramas.

Still exploring. All good so far :)

Monday, June 11, 2007

Bubbles galore


, originally uploaded by Kev.yong.

I took this one on the weekend in my backyard. The sun was behind him producing a lovely rim light on his hair and shoulders. I used a large white reflector to light his face.

I was tempted to use f/1.8 on my 85mm to narrow the DOF. Glad I stopped down to f/5.6 - this allowed the bursting bubble and face to be in focus at the same time (a fair bit of luck here to capture the burst). The background is still nicely blurred because the focus distance is quite short.