A Peek Over My Shoulder
My longtime friend Mike Clark from The Pragmatic Studio recently went to Hawaii on vacation and, of course, took his camera. During his trip, he captured a great photo of a green lizard. Yesterday, he sent me an email asking for any comments or criticism about his photo and what I might do to it in Lightroom. Instead of trying to communicate vaguely through email and a couple of static photos, I pulled out ScreenFlow (which I’ve been meaning to play with sometime) and kicked out a fast little screencast of me in Lightroom talking my way through processing his image.
Mike really responded to this video in a positive way. With his encouragement and help, I’ve decided to put this up for the world. Here it is, assuming my movie embedding fu is up to the task.
The clip should play either in place your browser or maybe pop open into its own window if you’re in a feed reader. Firefox doesn’t seem to be cooperating as much as I’d like, though it is degrading half-way decently. Hopefully. If, for whatever reason, my embedding fu isn’t up to the task, click through here to go directly to the movie in your browser. As to the results, here’s the image after I was done with it. If JavaScript is enabled (or hasn’t been stripped by whatever you’re reading this in, like Facebook), then you can mouse over to see a before/after comparison that mimics what I see when I compulsively hit the '\' key in Lightroom’s develop module.
Now that you’ve watched the clip and seen the results, I should note that this is just a quick experiment. It’s raw and rough around the edges. It’s certainly not scripted. But, I kind of like it that way. As I go, I try something with a vibrance adjustment, then rethink that adjustment after working on the tone curve a bit. It’s has that feel like the viewer is looking over my shoulder or sitting right next to me as I go through my process.
Also, please note, there will be differences in how this movie displays colors from the original image, depending on your display, the compression, and the phase of the moon. Full color management in QuickTime will rock.
What do you think? Worthwhile? Would you like to see more like this where I take other images and walk through how I’d approach them in Lightroom? No promises as to anything like that happening, but this was really fun to make and I wouldn’t mind getting feedback and sorting out if something useful could come of this sort of thing.
25 Comments
This is definitely worthwhile. I would love to see a series of "Over the Shoulder" tutorials like this. It gives a great sense of the 'why?' Something that is missing when a series of steps are simply related. To my mind it is a much better style of tutorial it's educational, rather than learning to parrot a process.
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I agree with Ryan - seeing a process is incredibly useful to me, and I'm assuming to others as well, as I attempt to nail down my own process. Rather than giving a series of steps for one photograph that are difficult to generalize a video like this starts more general, using a single image as an example but letting newbies see possible reasons why decisions may be made or changed.
I'd love to see more if you get the time to make them, but even this one is a good start and has a lot of good info. Thanks.
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Excellent. Nothing earth-shattering, but I do like the 'over-the-shoulder' style. Seems helpful and intimate.
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very Interesting!
Something like this could stand alone or be a companion feature to Tack Sharp.
T.
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This is the kind of stuff I look for. The help files tell you the mechanics, which sometimes isn't particularly helpful.
The out loud thought processes really help pick out which mechanics you should be tinkering with :)
Rob
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Very useful. Even us Aperture users can gain something from sessions like this.
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Go for it, if time allows.
It's always helpful and there's something to learn from these types of videos to incorporate into ones workflow.
Shared this post to my bro, he'd love this.
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Very useful for me too! I'd love to see more of this type of "how to"s.
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Really useful to hear the thought process and not just "how to do it." My only thought for improvement would be to announce the Lightroom keystrokes/comands you hit (in passing) to help us learn those. Skip cmd-Z/shift-cmd-Z, 'course. ;)
Would love to see an over-the-shoulder 'cast on picking and sorting a thousand images from a conference shoot - I don't really have a good workflow process for deciding how to group/collect, sort, flag, rate, etc. This weekend I'm planning to try Scott Kelby's approach in his Lightroom book.
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What I forgot to say: THANK YOU!!
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Yes this was awesome and very very useful. I'd like to see some stuff on more marginal pictures too.
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Fantastic to see the process. Thanks James!
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I notice that all the Basic tools in Lightroom are zeroed out - do you begin by zeroing out all the default adjustments/levels with your RAW image files, or is this just because you are beginning with a 'baked' JPEG?
I am a visual learner, so examples like this are invaluable. Post as many as you want :)
Thanks!
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This is a great idea. This is the part in my own workflow where I am often at a loss for what to do. Would really enjoy being able to "look over your shoulder" to see how you handle adjusting other photographs.
Definitely helpful!
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Very nicely done. A little quick in places, which was probably fine for Mike (since it sounds like he knows Lightroom) but I agree with Josh - definitely helpful.
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Definitely helpful, thanks. I'd love to see more if you can find the time.
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Very useful for me, too, and would definitely love to see more with a variety of different images and problems that need solving to get a really good looking finished photo.
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Great screencast! Very helpful. It's nice to get an insight into how others approach photo editing.
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Thanks. The commentary really adds insight on what to look for when using the tools in Lightroom. I'd like to see more of these!
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That. Was. Awesome. When did you say the book and companion DVD are coming out? ;-)
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This is great -- I'd love to see more of these (even though I'm an Aperture user), especially how you process RAW images. Thanks for sharing!
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This makes me want to try Lightroom again. I tried the beta when it first came out, but I'd invested so much in Aperture I was not excited to spend more $$ on yet another processing app. But Aperture still has performance problems that are very annoying. I still see the beachball way too often. Lightroom looks snappy, on the other hand.
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Fantastic, thanks. It's priceless to be able to see a pro at work.
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Really helpful, I'd love to see more of these, thanks.
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Lovely to watch, Duncan - only just got around to it. It was nice to see how closely somebody else's Lightroom habits match my own, especially when it comes to working down the tool panel, and always great to see how somebody else's eye translates into image adjustments.
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