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f your looking for ways to help you with your image editing, you’ve come to the right place here I hope to offer some of my Lightroom Presets and Photoshop Actions plus a few other things. At the moment they will be free to download. So watch this space I will be adding some examples very soon.

I have new posted some of my Lightroom Presets for downloading there are nine in total and range from Split-tones sepias to auto correction Presets. They are listed below and can be found on the Workflow page.

PGI Vignette-mid50

PGI Twilight Storm.

PGI Mocka.

PGI Gangster-Light.

PGI Gangster-Dark.

PGI Emerold Forest.

PGI Coffee & Cream.

PGI Autumnal.

PGI Auto-juxta.

Please do leave a comment if you use any of these as it would help to develop more.

Outdoorgames in Chamonix

In mid-February, Chamonix Mont-Blanc will again host the best Extreme Sports athletes for a unique competition.
There will be mountain sports, but above all, the Outdoors Games will be a festival of
film and photography. The concept will bring together seven teams.
Climbers, skiers, snowboarders, paragliders and BASE-jumpers will join up with professional cameramen,
photographers, editors, and producers.
They will all have 5 days to produce a short film of 5 minutes, and 20 still pictures.
The Aiguille d’Or, trophy will be awarded to the best production during the ceremony on Saturday
night in the centre of Chamonix. The decision will be made by a jury made up of specialists in the
areas of sport and audiovisuals. They will also hand out an award for the best photograph.

See all the infos and program on the Outdoorgames
official website

Petzl will be part of the event and will organize the Ice climbing initiation in Argentière. Free for the public :  in the Outdoorgames village, down town Chamonix.There will be also professional demos of ice climbing and drytooling, during the evening.For this event, Médéo (the production crew who made the corporatemovie), will join Guillaume Broust and Bertrand Delapierre, as well as several athletes from the Team Petzl.

Tony Lamiche will be the special photographer. The story will be around his passion of photography.

See below the final cut of Outdoorgames by Médéo. Directed by Guillaume Broust this film was made during a previous years event very cool all but a little cheesy in places. I love shooting in snow and the moutains I must say this sort of thing would be a dream job for me, I will have to keep dreaming for now. I hope you enjoy the movie checkout the link for the Outdoorgames official website for more movies and images.

I recently had a this comment on another post.

“Hi Paul, have you found any way to create a true auto levels PRESET which clips the ends of the white and the black ends of the curve on the histogram ONLY in LR2, as AUTO does not work. cheers

Wayne”

It got me thinking this would be a useful tool and you could set it to apply  on images as you import them, so I had a play and after a lot of false starts came up with a PRESET that works on a set of variables based on a ToneCurve and auto tone as well as a couple of settings I apply 99% of the time. It is designed to be a starting point to get near to where you want to be, hence the name Auto-Juxta, Juxta meaning near in latin. If you would like to try the PRESET click the download link at the bottom of the post and do please come back and comment on how it did or didn’t work for you.

before and after auto-juxta preset

T

his is an animated film I made some time ago, as I mentioned it in the last post I thought I would post the film itself. A combination of digital film and stop frame animation tells the story of the egg brought to life only to meet a dramatic demise. This video was placed first in a local video camera club competition.I wanted to achieve the effect of moving around the egg whilst it was falling similar to the “bullet time” technique where camera movements are done in such a way that it looks like time stands still (bullet time as in freezing a bullet in mid air). The technique had it’s beginnings in the first Matrix film – used in the scenes where Carrie-Anne Moss jumps up for a kick and the camera spins around her and where Keanu Reeves leans back and the bullets fly over him.

The technique most often utilizes a large number of still cameras set to fire in rapid sequence around a subject, the images are then stitched together to make a video sequence, very expensive anyway you get an idea of what I wanted to achieve although its a bit to quick.

Click on the Google logo to see a larger veiwer.

MUTO is a short film by Blu an animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche). This is basically evolving graffiti art using stop frame animation, I presume, I would love to know how long this took to capture. I have done some animation and it can get very laborious. If you like this there are a few more by the same artist and others @ http://www.blublu.org/ be warned some of this artwork could be classed as disturbing.

Its about time I put this blog to good use.

 

So you lightroom users out there, still wanting more from this great app! With the advent of Aperture plug-ins such as Noise Ninja 2.0.2 some of you LR users may feel left out,don’t be LR 2 has some secrets up its sleeve. There are a few people talking about using Photoshop Droplets to run there Actions when you export your images and even exporting to a watch folder so the edited images are brought back into LR (here) but what if I told you you can run a PS Action directly from LR and have the edited image saved back to LR the same way it is when you edit an image in PS from LR, interested?, read on………

So before I tell you about this amazing discovery I should point out this will work in LR 1 but only one Action can be used without first changing some settings. LR 2 on the other hand,  all your Actions in your workflow arsenal could be available with a click of a button (well two clicks).

This all works with the fact that PS Droplets are essentially a mini application, so yes you guessed it, you can define an Droplet (Action) as an external editor and with LR 2 the number of external editors is limitless so how is it done. Follow the steps below and start thinking of all the possibilities.

Step One

Create your Droplet if you have not got any already made, I put mine all in a folder on my desktop.

Note: if your Action have saves in the process duplicate it and toggle the save or save-as off them rename it maybe add ‘LR’ to the end.

Step Two

In LR goto Lightroom\preferences click on the External Editing tab and where it is marked Additional External Editor click the choose button to the right of Application.

Lightroom 2

Browse for one of your Droplets and select it.

OSX 10.4.11

If you are using LR 1 then your job is complete and you can right click on any image and select your Action to run by clicking Edit in (name of Action).

Lightroom 1.2

Step Three

If you are using LR 2 then you can save your Action as a Preset (not the same kind as the Develop Presets).

Click on Preset above your Action in the dialog box and select Save Current Settings as New Preset. Here you can name your Action.

Lightroom 2

You can now choose another Droplet and save that as a Preset and so on.

To use your Actions right click an image and click Edit In then click the action to to be used.

Lightroom 2

The default file name for an edited image is the original name plus Edit you can change this in the External Editing dialog box.  To make it easy to sort External edits you could set up a Smart collection with the rule of filename contains Edit or whatever you have changed it to. This will place any edits you make in a collection automatically.

So there you are think of all the time you could save. Please let me know if this has helped or if you are already using this method.