New Year’s Pseudo-Resolutions

Fiery Sunrise, First Flatiron. Boulder, Colorado, 2014

While I am here at the computer monitoring the backup of the last of this year’s images onto two separate portable hard drives, I thought I’d make a list of goals for the coming year.

My photo organization is OK but, hells bells, I have Lightroom 5.7 on my computer and I am not yet using it, so my method has been basically manual up to this point (using Windows Explorer).

Utterly shameful, I know.

Even worse, if you were to look over my shoulder at my Camera Raw-to-Photoshop work flow, you would almost certainly roll your eyes into the rear of your cranium. I do know how to use Photoshop layers but, once I am done with an image, it has been my bad habit to leave it as a flattened TIFF–I figured my post-processing skills  were changing so quickly (not true, as this year they mostly plateaued) that I could and should just rework the original RAW file if I wanted a better version.

Yep. Yet another shameful admission.

So here is what I plan to put into practice in 2015:

1) Use Lightroom. And really use it as it was intended, with smart collections, keywords, sorting, labeling, flagging, and so on. Furthermore, it has basically the same “Develop” module motor as Adobe Camera Raw but with a couple of useful extra tools I really like (the brush, for instance).

2) Keep my worked images as PSD files, with all the relevant layers, and only convert to other formats when ready to print or put on the web.

3) Really use the layers in Photoshop–including, for example, more sophisticated ways of controlling local brightness and contrast using channel selections and the various blending modes.

4) Really be selective about what I consider to be images worth working and keeping (the “flagged” files in Lightroom). I am a lot more experienced now in judging what constitutes a decent image, so it’s time to get with the program and cut the wheat from the chaff much more aggressively.

5) Create images with more of an eye for how they might fit into a specific project or portfolio.

I think that is plenty to munch on for now. For #1 and #3, I am already working my way through some pretty good videos that are starting to torque my little gray cells uncomfortably–meaning the learning curve should start back uphill again after almost a year cruising along the Colorado “Plateau”.

Happy New Year, everyone!

P.S. As a farewell to 2014, check out these 29 images from NASA: the Best of 2014. They are absolutely spectacular and might very well provoke within your heart some philosophical meanderings as to the meaning of it all…ah, the eternal question.