Photo Taco Podcast

More than 60 hours of testing different ways to have your Lightroom Classic catalog and photos stored on external drives proves that four features are 50% faster with your photos on an external SSD.

A checklist photographers can use to make sure they give themselves the very best possible chance of creating tack sharp photos.

Learn how to do stunning water droplet photography from Don Komarechka, one of the world's leading experts in macro photography!

Learn about neutral density (ND), graduated nuetral density (GND), circular polarizing (CPL), and ultra-violet (UV)filters for camera lenses. We explain what they are, when to use them, and recommend a best value brand for all types of photographers.

Learn why photographers new to composite photography should use a white background instead of green

Jeff and Aaron Nace give advice on how to take the intimidation out of Photoshop so that it can become the tool they need to achieve their creative vision.

Learn what the new Texture slider added to Lightroom in May 2019 does, how to use it, and how it is different from Clarity and Sharpening.

Jeff talks with world renowned macro photography Don Komarechka about how to get started with macro photography.

Jeff talks with concert photographer expert Steve Brazill about the tips, tricks, and techniques photographers should know about getting into concert photography.

Jeff Harmon explains what the new Enhance Details feature introduced by Adobe in the February 2019 release of Lightroom and Photoshop does and when photographers should use it.

Jeff explains why photographers should choose their top ten image annually and what benefit he saw from doing that for 2018.

Jeff and Greg Benz discuss the what, why, and how of RAID for photographers. What Is RAID Storage? RAID is a way to make a few hard drives work together to look like they are all one drive to your computer that can be very fast and more reliably than a single drive. We try hard here on Photo Taco to take a deep dive into technical topics and explain them in terms that are easy for beginning photographers to understand.  We have quite the challenge set out in front of us to make that happen here with RAID because it is incredibly technical and can be extremely complicated. RAID has been around since the early days of spinning hard drives.  Those spinning drives have two problems. They are really slow and they are prone to break.  I feel like I break everything. I think I have had no less than 5 hard drives crash on me. You think that as computers continue to improve that someday we won’t have to worry about these kinds of things but that just doesn’t seem to really be happening. Hard drives are like ticking time bombs.  They will fail. Period. Not a matter of how well you care for them.  They are going to fail. You need to plan for it and be ready for them to fail. Engineers a while ago figured out that you can solve these problems by chaining them together.  The speed part is pretty obvious, putting a whole bunch of drives together you can see where if you pull data from all of them at once that is faster than asking a single drive for data. The redundancy piece is maybe not as obvious.  RAID systems can be configured so that your data files are copied to multiple drives so that if/when one of those drives fails you won’t lose your data.  You don’t have to suffer through any downtime either because a single drive can fail and everything can go on as normal. As you configure RAID you sort of have to choose between how much storage you are going to have vs how much redundancy there is in the system so that you can survive a drive failure. You can think of RAID as a system that kind of auto-backs up your data across multiple drives so that a single drive failure doesn’t mean you lose any data.  However, this is NOT a replacement for backup. You still have to implement a 3-2-1 backup solution and you should think of a photo being on the RAID system as being only a single copy of your photos. What Does a RAID System Look like? A raid system is a hardware device, called an “enclosure”,  that is large enough to plug in four or more 3.5” desktop hard drives.  It is designed to be in an office, nor something that is portable. RAID devices connect to your computer.  They are generally the size of a shoebox. They are kind of big and heave and not really intended to be mobile in any way.  There are some small types of RAID systems out there, like the Drobo Mini where the enclosure is meant for smaller and lighter SSD drives, but most are fairly large and intended to be put in an office space and left there. These things will usually have a little bit of heat around them because when you have multiple hard drives powered on they produce some heat.  A good enclosure will deal with that heat with some cooling usually with fans sending it the back. Not only are the enclosures really built to stay in an office space, the drives you put them are not really designed to be moved around on a frequent basis. As we are talking about RAID systems here for photographers, even if a photographer is frequently out and about creat...

Greg Benz joins Jeff to answer the question of “What is Luminosity Masking?” Episode Sponsors: Squarespace has beautiful templates to make your website look great and 24 hour support if you do happen to get stuck.  Head over to squarespace.com/improve for a free trial and when you are ready to launch use offer code IMPROVE to save 10% off the purchase of your first website or domain! Episode Resources: Lumenzia 6: https://gregbenzphotography.com/luminosity-masking/lumenzia-v6 (use offer code TACO25 for 25% off 11/12 through 11/19/2018!) Greg’s blog: https://gregbenzphotography.com/ What Is Luminosity Masking? Luminosity masking is a way to tell Photoshop which parts of an image you want to adjust by means of selections based on brightness and darkness Greg, the phrase “luminosity masking” itself sounds really scary and complicated.  I think a lot of photographers hear that term connected to doing really good photo processing on the computer but it sounds so difficult that they give up thinking it is too hard.  I want to give listeners and readers a simple one or two sentence definition of what luminosity masking is, hopefully something that will make it less scary and help them feel like they can do it.  With that in mind, give me a one or two sentence answer to what luminosity masking is. Greg: Luminosity masking is one of those more advanced things you can do in Photoshop.  At least it can be. Luminosity masking is way to tell Photoshop what you want to adjust in a very smart way.  Putting the photographer in the driver’s seat to target their adjustments. The naming of the technique is a little unfortunate because luminosity masking is more about selections than it is masks.  Selection tools are the secret language to talk to Photoshop. If you want to make the sky more colorful, Photoshop doesn’t know what pixels in the photo make up the sky.  Someday that might come, but for today selecting pixels based on how bright and dark they are is how you tell Photoshop what portion of the image is the sky. It comes from the image itself.   Luminosity masks let you select what you want to adjust in Photoshop without hard edges.  Hard edges are the things that make images look like they have been Photoshopped. You get artifacts like halos too.  With luminosity masking you can make selections of the image based on the luminance values and it selects it in a way that is feathered so that the adjustments you make aren’t nearly as obvious. Luminosity Masking is Like Lightroom Adjustment Brushes Jeff: I can imagine a day when Photoshop might be able to tell what in the image is the sky with artificial intelligence and machine learning.  In fact, I think Adobe is one of the most well positioned companies in the world to make that happen. Someday we may be able to talk to the computer and ask it to select the sky or even say something like brighten or darken the sky and it will know what we are talking about.  Until then, making selections of the photo based on the brightness of the pixels is the best way to tell your computer how to do what you want to do. Luminosity masking is a little bit like the idea of adjustment brushes in Lightroom.  With adjustment brushes in Lightroom the photographer editing a photo can paint adjustments on the screen and control where the adjustment goes.  Target the adjustment to a specific portion. As humans we can see where the sky is in the photo and paint over it with the brush in Lightroom and then adjust the brightness, darkness, colors, noise, etc. That technique feels much easier because is it so a...

Chris Marquardt talks with Jeff about everything you need to know about digitizing prints and negatives/slides using scanners and cameras. Episode Sponsor: Squarespace We love squarespace and are sure you will too for showing off your best work.  Head over to squarespace.com/improve for a free trial and use offer code IMPROVE to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain! Episode Resources: Tips from the Top Floor website: https://tipsfromthetopfloor.com/ Methods to convert color negatives: Photoshop https://www.iamthejeff.com/post/32/the-best-way-to-color-correct-c-41-negative-film-scans Color Perfect Plugin: https://www.colorperfect.de/colorperfect.html Manually (layers method) https://www.filmshooting.com/scripts/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24780 LED light table: https://amzn.to/2IgskKg Negative holder: https://pixl-latr.com Beginning Tips For Digitizing Prints Chris, a while back you answered a question on your show about digitizing photos that really struck me.  I think at the time I had a few listeners asking a similar question in our Facebook group and this is something I don’t personally have a lot of experience with.  I loved the advice you gave in few minutes on your show and thought it might be good to have you come on Photo Taco and go into more depth on the question. I reached out and you were so kind to agree to be on the show, so thank you for that.  It took a little work to get our schedules to line up but here we are. The idea of Photo Taco is to dive deeply into a topic, starting with tips and information for photographers closer to the starting end of their photography journey and then building forward to things that might help photographers a bit further down that path.   With that in mind, what tips and advice do you have for photographers who have a digital camera and let’s assume a basic understanding of exposure for getting started with digitizing old photos or negatives?  Maybe a less expensive approach. Chris: There are two ways to scan prints.  A flatbed scanner, which is fundamentally different from using a camera.  Then there is a much faster way using your awesome digital camera. So much resolution it works well, can even use a smartphone. You need a physical setup.  A tripod to hold things still and point the camera straight down.  Be aware of the direction of light. Make sure there aren’t weird reflections.  Could be uneven light too, better to get away from natural light or other light sources. Can use glass from a picture frame to keep the prints flat since they may want to curl.  Have to be very careful of the light. Use lights sources at 45 degrees on either side of the print, put some lamps there.  Do it in the evening to avoid having extra light reflecting off things like the ceiling. You also want to go as close as possible with the camera, don’t want to waste any pixels and crop in post.  Fill the frame with the photo. Probably can use auto exposure. Jeff: What about a tripod that goes straight down then?  A lot of tripods can’t do that, so what do you do then? Chris: Makeshift setups are fine.  Use a chair, a stack of books. Really anything.  It is about the result and not how you get there.

Jeff is joined by good friend of the show, Victoria Bampton (better known as the Lightroom Queen), to talk about the new desktop and mobile features of Lightroom CC 1.5 released in August 2018.