Film emulation software company VSCO has added another offering to its lineup of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw plugins. VSCO Film offers the same high-end film emulation power as Film 01 and 02, except it’s designed for mimicking the look of instant films rather than standard color and black-and-white film stocks.
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Photoshop guru Scott Kelby has high praise for the overhauled Develop Module that’s coming in Lightroom 4. In a recent post titled “Why I Think Lightroom 4 is Going To Sell Like Crazy“, he writes,

Your photos look better processed in Lightroom 4. Period. [...] The improvements in Lightroom’s Development module are so significant, and so much better than what we’ve ever had before, that I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find most anyone still using Lightroom 3 in just a few months from now. In fact, if they didn’t add another feature, it would still be worth the upgrade just to get better looking images.

You can watch a walkthrough of new the new module here, or play around with the new engine yourself by downloading the free Lightroom 4 Beta release. This is also great news for Photoshop users: the same engine is coming to Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Camera Raw.

(via Scott Kelby via John Nack)

Here’s a cool sneak peek at some of the new features coming to the next version of Adobe Camera Raw. The adjustment brushes will have powerful new options for local adjustments, including temperature, tint, and noise. We also get to see the new dark interface that’ll come by default with Photoshop CS6.

Although the new, rewritten processing engine for ACR7 isn’t available to the public, it’s the same engine found in Lightroom 4, which just became available as a free public beta download a couple weeks ago.

(via 1001 Noisy Cameras)

There are plenty of presets out there that attempt to make your digital images look like they were shot with film, but VSCO Film by Visual Supply Co is different: it’s a Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW add-on that uses film profiles to change how the RAW files are interpreted rather than simply perform standard adjustments on the images. The video introduction above shows some examples of what the various options can do. This patent-pending method of film emulation doesn’t come cheap — it costs $120 each for Canon or Nikon profiles, and $200 for both.

VSCO Film (via Jeremy Cowart via John Nack via Wired)

Here’s a helpful tutorial by Tutvid that teaches how to give your photographs dramatic colors using only Adobe Camera Raw. If you’ve started shooting RAW but haven’t played around too much with ACR, this video is also a great primer for becoming familiar with the different panels and sliders.

(via Fotografia)

My friend recently had two stray kittens randomly walk up to her doorstep. I was called over to see them, and carried my 5D and 24-70mm along. There wasn’t much light to work with, and I didn’t bring a flash, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO for any chance of capturing a sharp image of the energetic kittens. I haven’t done a walkthrough post for quite some time (opting to post guest posts instead), but here’s a quick walkthrough of how I post-processed one particular image of a kitten. I used Adobe Camera Raw (comes with Photoshop CS4) with my adjustments, but you’ll have the same settings in Lightroom, Aperture, etc…
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Tom Hogarty, the Lightroom product manager over at Adobe, has posted a sneak peek at the automatic lens correction technology that will be included in Lightroom 3 and Adobe Camera Raw 6 (included in CS5).

Using profiles for lenses that are either included or added by the user, the feature can automatically correct the distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting characteristics of particular lenses, helping you to “normalize” how your work looks across your various lenses.

John Ncak, the Photoshop product manager, writes on his blog:

With the introduction of killer new noise reduction, demosaicing algorithms, and sharpening plus sophisticated lens correction, the Lightroom/Camera Raw duo put even more distance between themselves and the competition, and I’d expect them to keep mopping the floor with Aperture among pro photographers.

As you can see from this quote and from recent events, Adobe and Apple absolutely love each other.

Here’s a pretty interesting sneak peek video showing you the lens correction technology in action:

I just purchased Adobe Photoshop CS4 last week for my Macbook after being unable to transfer my CS3 student serial for PCs to a Mac version. Adobe’s phone customer support leaves something to be desired. Spent an hour’s worth of cell phone minutes listening to their elevator music, and finally hung up without talking to anyone. It’s pretty absurd that they put you on hold for so long even when you’re calling to make a purchase. They could learn a thing or two from Zappos.

While I was in the student store, I was thinking about also purchasing Lightroom 2. A lot of my buddies use it for their photography, but I always used Photoshop since I needed Photoshop for web development and thought Lightroom’s functionality with be redundant. However, Lightroom definitely had some features that I wish CS3 had, but was pleasantly surprised to find included in CS4.

One such feature is the new adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw:

I actually didn’t know they added this to CS4 before I purchased it. Prior to CS4, Adobe Camera Raw only allowed you to make changes to the image as a whole, while Lightroom had tools that allowed you to do local adjustments just like you would be able to in Photoshop. Now you can do local adjustments right in ACR.

Those of you who got CS4 a while ago have probably been using the adjustment brush for a long time already, but for those of you with a previous version of Photoshop and who shoot Raw, this is a pretty darn good reason to upgrade.

Now, if only Adobe would include better methods for comparing the before and after images in ACR…

Today I’ll be doing a post-processing walkthrough with the following photograph I took about a week ago:

It was taken with a Canon 40D + 16-35mm at 35mm, f/2.8, 1/500s, and ISO 800.

The composition is pretty ordinary. The basketball hoop is placed along one of the rule-of-third lines, while the lines of the ground create interesting angles in the photo.

In terms of exposure, I didn’t want to properly expose the foreground and blow out the sky, nor did I want to properly expose the sky and end up with too dark of a foreground. Thus, I ended up exposing it somewhere in between, causing both the ground and sky to be a little “muddy” in appearance.

Now, opening up the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, here were my initial adjustments:

White Balance: I upped the temperature a bit, since the original photograph is too cool, or blue. See how the gray backboard looks bluish-gray.
Exposure: We begin tackling the “muddiness” of the photograph by increasing exposure a little. The photo begins to look more properly exposed.
Recovery: Increasing the exposure blew out certain small areas of the photograph. Increased recovery by twenty to recover the detail in these areas.
Fill Light: Added a tiny bit of fill light to brighten some of the darker areas of the foreground without affecting the sky.
Blacks: After the previous steps, we lost a lot of true black and ended up with a whole lot of gray. Increase black a little to turn the darkest of the gray points into black points.
Brightness: Increased brightness by 10 from the default of 50 to brighten the foreground a little more without affecting the sky too much.
Contrast: The photo became pretty “uncontrasty” through the previous steps. Increased contrast to +70 to regain the lost contrast.
Clarity: Increased this to +50 to make the hoop stand out a little more against the bright sky behind it.
Vibrance: Increased by 20 to give the less-saturated colors in the photo a little more color.

After making these changes, this how the resulting photograph looks (hover your mouse over it to compare it to the original version):

See how the photograph became less “muddy” in appearance?

Next, we can deal with sharpness and vignetting. In my opinion, this is a photograph that vignetting benefits a lot, as it can help draw the viewers eye to the subject (the hoop). For this photograph, I made the following changes:

Sharpness: +75.
Lens Vignetting: Amount -60, Midpoint 40.

The following photograph results (hover to compare):

That’s all the changes I made to the photograph in Adobe Camera Raw during the RAW to JPEG conversion step. I could be done with the photo at this point, but notice how there’s a distracting crack in the ground in the bottom left corner of the photograph. I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop to get rid of this crack.

Here’s the final, post-processed photograph (hover over it to compare it to the original photograph before post-processing):

What I really liked about this photo was how it looks like a film photograph in certain ways. If I had stepped a little further back so that the hoop was smaller, I might have cropped the photograph to look more like a medium format photo.