Photo How To

About four years ago, Alvanas, a photographer, filmmaker, educator, digital artist, and postproduction retoucher, was attending a week-long advanced printing workshop at John Paul Caponigro’s studio. “The first day of portfolio review featured lots of prints of grand vistas from big film cameras—4x5s and 8x10s,” Alvanas says. “I showed on the second day, but I digitally projected my images.”

Camera technology these days is amazing; it’s practically magic. The problem, though, to my way of thinking and photographing, is that the magic offers a very wide and deep comfort zone—you might call it a zone of automatic decisions, and it’s probably best not to spend a lot of time there, certainly not if you want to create individualistic images.

Achieving accurate results during the editing process is sort of like rolling the dice if not you’re not working with a correctly calibrated display. In fact, you’re probably better off with a cheap monitor that’s properly calibrated than with a high-end display that’s not.

Are you familiar with Lightroom’s easy-to-use Camera Calibration capability? If not, after watching the video below it just may become your best friend.

The idea here was...well, there were a few ideas. First, I wanted to do photography that was bright, cheerful, colorful—and different. With times being a bit harsh and stressful for many, I was looking for something light-hearted and, frankly, far from reality. Dreamy and summer-like came to mind. 

Experienced portrait photographers often shoot outdoors with natural light when conditions are right for soft, even illumination. Other shooters, on the other hand, avoid supplemental light at all costs because of a misconception that the technique is too difficult to master.

A solid understanding of Lightroom's powerful masking tools is essential if you want to edit outdoor photographs for maximum impact. Unfortunately, some photographers spend far too much time getting the job done because they overcomplicate the process.