The weekly Creative Critique—Live continues this week with our 4th webinar this Thursday, April 23rd…
I had the pleasure of giving another presentation at the B&H Photo Event Space last week to a full room, and it was fun and enjoyable. This was a part II of my original talk on creative developing in Lightroom, and I really wanted to focus more on advanced uses of the Develop module including local adjustments and tonal control. I think many photographers are not totally aware of how much potential there is in Lightroom to edit images on a local basis, and I wanted to give some examples of what’s possible.
I also want to re-emphasize that it’s only when you understand the essential elements of strong composition that you can truly take advantage of the tools in Lightroom to interpret your images. That’s not to say you can’t use them effectively otherwise. But the better your understanding of composition and visual design, the closer you will get to conveying your intent and emotions with your photography.
No part of photography works in isolation, each component adds to the next to build up a work that gets closer to meaning and relies less on subject matter and location. That enables the photographers vision to be seen and felt, which is what we should all be striving for.
Enjoy the video, and feel free to leave any questions and comments below. thanks for watching!
Oh, Robert, aren’t you wonderful and generous, thank you so much! You must have read my mind after what I said the other day about still not being 100% convinced about LR. What you say about no part of photography working in isolation reminds me of what the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, who was also a very great orchestrator, wrote, I guess in his Treatise on Instrumentation: “You can’t orchestrate well what has been badly composed.” There’s definitely a parallel there. As a musician yourself, you undoubtedly can relate.
Yes absolutely love that quote – reminds me of so many other quotes by artists in different genres. Ansel said “there’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept.” Maybe the cliche “garbage in…garbage out” gets to the root of the matter best.
thanks for the feedback!
RR
Robert, how wonderful to see this. I was so looking forward to it, B & H had told me it might take 3 weeks, great to see it today. I will watch it often to learn these techniques. They are exactly what I tried to learn on the Moab workshop. I even recognized a couple of the shots in the video. You are a superlative instructor.
Many thanks Carol, really appreciate it. Like anything else, practice is the key to improving…
RR
Great video- A masterful job on a program that is quite sophisticated. Many books, and video tutorials on lightroom on the internet. For me, what you have done SO well, is turn the product into a tool and demonstratd with purpose and clarity how you use it with some great results. Terrific practicality! Thank you
Glad to be of help Rolf, and thank you for the very kind words. And yes I always try and emphasize how important having a vision is to editing and interpretation.
RR