Merry Christmas Everyone

Hi Everyone,

I hope that everyone has a great Christmas. We are visiting family in RI and will back Sunday Eve.

James

Sunday Eve? That would be Saturday.

Leave it to the cat guy to be a smartypants.

Merry Christmas and safe travels!

Travel safely, James. They are predicting snow for your return trip. This year, everyone is coming here today. Linda and I cooked for 4 hours yesterday and watched the dogs drooling for 4 hours outside of the kitchen . Merry Christmas everyone.

Jim

Merry Christmas everyone!

Hey Everone,

Did we get anything photography related? I officially became a 4/3 photographer today!! Chanthee purchased me a P-E2! I was shocked. I had not planned to purchase until March/April when the prices usually drop.

James

Merry Christmas!

Congrats on the new toy James! And drive careful! The Cape and RI are supposed to be hit worse than Ct and Ny

I hope all of the friends I've never met here at NWP had a joyous Christmas and wish you all a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2011.

James, congratulations on your newest photography acquisition. I'm sure you will enjoy it a lot.

In response to your question about any photography related Christmas gifts, my wife gave me Adobe Lightroom 3. Her timing is excellent. Up to now, I have been using Photoshop Elements 6. However, I recently upgraded my computer and, although I backed up my Catalogs on an external hard drive, I was unable to transfer them to the new computer. So, I lost my cataloging and key wording. I think LR will make cataloging and key wording my pictures a lot easier.

Jim

Hope you all had an amazing Christmas day and you are enjoying all your special gifts. James, cannot wait to see what you create with your new toy. Jim, I am curious how well you like Lightroom.

I think today I will spend the day reading one of my gift books "I Remember Nothing" = Okay not photo related but humor can make it easier to read the how to manuals!

LOL, you are right on the money, Peggy. Well, our trip ended at about 6:30PM. We left at around noon hoping to get in before the blizzard occurred, starting at about 3 PM. LOL, that sure did not happen. The trip usually takes about 3 hours with a stop. Today, we witnessed 12 - yes 12 - accidents on the road. Fortunately, we were in none of them. I will give the some real props. We never felt out of control even once. We were watching cars and trucks sliding all over the place and we just kept chugging.

I got in, finished the last Wyoming article. I need to start on Julie's next. We have had some family issues that have delayed things a bit. Fortunately, they have cleared up.

Cheers
James

Quote:

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Hope you all had an amazing Christmas day and you are enjoying all your special gifts. James, cannot wait to see what you create with your new toy. Jim, I am curious how well you like Lightroom.

I think today I will spend the day reading one of my gift books "I Remember Nothing" = Okay not photo related but humor can make it easier to read the how to manuals!

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Hi Peggy!

I'm not a pro shooter -- in fact my goal is to some day work my way up to being an adequately skilled amateur -- so my comments come from that perspective.

I haven't started the process of reorganizing and re-cataloging my images in Lightroom yet, but I have been playing with it a bit. I've also started working my way through Scott Kelby's book and have been watching several of the myriad of online tutorials.

So far, I've found a lot that I like about it. As I said in my post above, up to now, I had been using Elements 6 for all of my processing, organizing, and viewing images. I have been shooting RAW + highest quality jpegs, but I had yet to master the art of post processing RAW files, so I would end up doing minimal, if any, adjustments to the jpegs and then saving the edited version either in a version set with the original or as a copy. Mostly shadow/highlights adjustments, some contrast & saturation adjustments, & occasional color correction. Was never able to do any effective sharpening or noise reduction.

Here's what I like so far:

The overall design and organization of LR seems to facilitate a systematic work flow approach to processing images.

The easy to use presets and ability to use them to make global adjustments to all images on import and/or select a batch of images and have the same adjustments made to all of them. Like Ty indicated in the Lightroom vs. CS5 thread, up to now, I have been laboriously tweeking jpegs one at a time.

The noise reduction in LR is much easier and more effective.

In the "Organize" module of Elements 6, it would show each image twice -- RAW and JPEG. With LR you just see it once.

It integrates well with Elements 6.

For the time being, it is safe to say that I expect it to have a dramatic impact on the way I shoot and process images. For one thing, I will probably stop shooting RAW + JPEG and just shoot RAW. I also plan to follow Roman's lead and sign up for a year's worth of access to Kelby online training.

Jim