These are big, bold, pictures showing an Ankor Wat already disappearing under the pressure of tourism and I would urge you if you are in Siem Reap to look at his work. You can also view it online via his website.

Bayan Temple Angkor Wat

I was looking at some color images I had taken around Angkor Wat (One of which is above) and I began to wonder whether I could create a similar effect in Lightroom, and a quick Google for Infra red and Silver Gelatin plugins brought me plenty of free options, (for the purists I am not suggesting that a quick Lightroom preset will have the same impact as a hand processed and printed IR/Silver Gelatin prints) and the two I liked the best are:

gantico.com/en
Digital Photo Buzz

Once you have downloaded them, then you can copy them in to your the Lightroom Developer presets folder (normally under /Library/Application support/Adobe/Lightoom/develop presets/ on a mac), then make sure you open/restart Lightroom. I found them both a little heavy handed and I wanted a little more grain in m images to mimic the hand processing, so I made a few little tweaks and then re-saved the preset.

Bayan Temple, Angkor Wat as an Infrared image

Each image will of course require some tweaking adjusting, probably some burning and dodging too using the fine adjustment brush, but you can create some pretty remarkable results just with the basic preset.

Have fun and let me know how you get on!

Some of you have asked me via Twitter, Facebook or this blog to go into more detail about the process I used in Lightroom to develop the images. Apologies to those that are using Aperture – I am sure much of what is shared he will also be relevant to you too!

The original RAW color image as shot in camera

We start with the RAW color image. My first decision was whether to use any presets including the default B&W conversion option in the basic panel. I chose not to because I want to have full control over every aspect throughout as we will see.

So I began to process this image as a desaturated color image, rather than apply a basic B+W conversion and then adjust. The reason for this is that if you convert to Black and White from the get go, you loose some of the controls in the Develop panel, and I like that extra flexibility.

As per Piet’s eBook, I first did the basic adjustments to the color image, knowing that once I desaturated it, I could come back and tweak things. I moved the exposure to +1.35, the fill to +10 and some minor adjustments to the brightness and contrast until the histogram looked correct. As I wanted strong texture on the stone and in the sky I pushed the clarity all the way up to +93.

Most of this felt like the image was become less moody and contrasty, but at this stage this was as much about getting a base image to a point where I could then make fine adjustments. In Black and White images there is an opportunity to exploit more contrast, so I knew I could use the tone curve later to recreate some of the mood that I had temporarily diluted.

The vibrance and saturation controls I left as they were at this stage. I then came back to them later after I had done most of the other processing to adjust these to some extreme values. I’ll explain later why. But if I had done this at this early stage the image who have looked mad, because at this stage, remember, it was still a color image.

My next step was to do the initial conversion to Black And White. As per Piet’s suggestion I went first to the Saturation panel in the HSL. I turned the saturation on ALL the colors down to zero and this gave me a black and white image.

From here I then went to the Hue panel. I wanted to make the grey-blue sky more rich so that the pink/white clouds would stand out more and the sky would look more dramatic. Since in reality my image is still color (just with the colors desaturated rather than converted), I took the Blue and Aqua sliders and played around with them until they gave the sky more depth. The final settings were Red-100 (this helped to bring out the white clouds), and +100 for both Blue and Aqua which helped to darken the sky. I then adjusted the Purple and Magenta sliders until it gave the effect I wanted on some of the stone, which had a slightly pink tint to it in the original color image.

Lastly on this panel, I went into the Luminance sliders and tweaked the red, orange and yellow colors. This had the primary impact of bringing the white clouds more to the fore. Much of this though is trial and error but you can see the final settings for each of the colors in the panel on the left.

Next I selected the Tone Curve panel.

Rather than adjust for the traditional s-curve shape that is so often what I would expect to use, I first played with the different contrast options (linear-medium- strong) before opting for medium. This gave me a good balance between the darks and lights.

Then I went back in and made manual adjustments to reflect the sombre, almost Hithcock, mood I wanted to create. I turned the highlights right down to -100, upped the lights and only adjusted the darks a little so that I kept the detail in the buildings and left the shadows pretty much as was.

Using the tone panel rather than the brightness and contrasts sliders in the basic panel gives me more subtle control over the final image and is a good way to improve the effect of different light sources in your image.

Having completed the Tone Curve panel, I made two further adjustment on two separate panels. On the camera calibration panel I selected the manual option and allowed Lightroom to select the lens form the EXIF data automatically.

Then I switched to the Effects Panel (left) where I applied a small post vignette of -14 to help draw the eye into the image and also opted to increase the grain fractionally to make the textures – especially the paving stone – more evocative.

With the base image now looking pretty close to what I wanted, I then turned to the fine adjustment tools to make some specific dodge and burns to really create the final effect. I applied two angled Gradient fills – one that went from the bottom right corner across the paving stones to the Archway and gate, and the other to the sky, angled slightly to cover as much of it as possible.

A screenshot of the sky gradient is shown below – you can just see the feint white guidelines of the gradient being implemented over the image. The settings for this gradient were: Exposure: -1.18; Brightness:-59 ; Contrast:-46 ; Saturation:-100; Clarity:+98 ; Sharpness:+100 ;

The settings for the ground gradient fill were:Exposure: -0.52; Brightness:+49 ; Contrast:+51 ; Saturation:-100; Clarity:+98 ; Sharpness:+100 ;

My final adjustment was on the buildings which were a little dark and needed a little more of the detail to provide more balance with the rest of the image. I selected the fine adjustment brush, made sure that the anti-alias box was ticked and dialed in the following settings, the result of which you can see in the image below: Exposure: 0.0; Brightness:+82 ; Contrast:+0 ; Saturation:+1; Clarity:+100 ; Sharpness:0 ;

Finally I went back to the basic panel and checked the exposure, brightness and contract again, as well as setting the vibrance and saturation levels up to +98 and +100 respectively, which helped bring out some of the foreground texture more.

This post – and the images within it – are all about the third of those pictures: the one we post process. SO let start at the end and show you the result of applying this to an old image (below).

The improved image of Pigeons at Jama Masjid Mosque Delhi India after full processing

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting recently, not just about the turmoil going on in my own life, but about finding a way to start to nourish and train this “new voice” that I blogged about in Koh Samui

I am not sure that the new voice will be significantly different from the old one – not in terms of vision anyway. I think I will probably continue to conceive the same images in my mind – but hopefully now see more of that “vision” in the end image. Maybe that vision will have a slightly more resonant tone – or at least I hope it will – but I am just going to let that particular aspect of my work develop without trying to push it or try too hard.

Nor do I think I need to change my gear. I know there are people out there for whom gear is everything, but I don’t think it will matter two hoots whether I shoot Canon, Nikon, Olympus or Zenith. I have all the tools of the trade, so I think this is one part of the argument that I will let lie. That does not mean I will not continue to work at my craft – pushing some of my technical skills with the camera, trying new techniques etc but only in as much as they help to give voice to the…ugh…voice!

I might just simplify things and shoot one body and one lens for a while to try and get back to grass roots, but I need to give this whole areas some more “noodling” time.

The original RAW color image as shot in camera

But one area that I do want to focus on is my post processing. The recent superb Craft & Vision book, “The Power of Black And White” by Piet Van den Eynde, inspired me to review how I look at both color and black and white images.

I went back to an image of pigeons dispersing against the morning sky that I had shot earlier in the year in Delhi of the Jama Masjid Mosque. The one above is the original mediocre color image as shot in camera. The one below was the black and white version I originally created before being inspired by Piet’s eBook.

The original crude Black and White Conversion

I reworked it from color, past the black and white version that adorns the masthead of this blog and can be seen above and in its full proportions in an earlier post and onto a more sophisticated version (the first image in this post), applying many of the techniques suggested by Piet Van den Eynde, including experimenting with a split tone (below)

Split tone of the same enhanced image of Pigeons at Jama masjid, Delhi, India

Lightroom is such a powerful tool, and I for one am guilty of thinking I know more than I do – skipping over passages or tutorials because I think I have it sewn up. From a mediocre image we have ended up with a powerful black and white image and a split tone variant both of which are so much closer to what I originally conceived of. In this case I narrowed the gap between the the 3 images to deliver the vision and voice.

But – and this is Dr Ryan’s prescription for this blog – this is not about “rescuing poor images”, as the original image was not bad to begin with. It is about using the digital darkroom properly to deliver the final image as close to the conceived image. In this case I achieved this just by slowing down, just by taking a more critical eye and being more selective and yet more adventurous with my Lightroom workflow. As a result I am excited about how suddenly a whole new body of work is beginning to appear.

Vocally it sounds and feels different. It seems to be more rounded, more resonant. More confident.

So have a think about the 3 pictures and your 1 voice. Can you work on each of those areas all at once? Probably not. Pick one aspect and make some changes. Experiment. Slow Down.

Maybe by looking at other photographers work and writing down what you like or dislike it will help you to mature your vision. Maybe it is by taking less images or focusing on composition, getting more familiar with a particular lens or technique or maybe – as in my case – it is as simple as slowing down and being more selective and more thorough with your post processing.

Good luck. Let me know how you get on.

Which is why we thank God for the likes of David duChemin.

He has managed to push us all (but especially us men) to a point where it is all about vision first and gear second. His mantra “Gear is good, vision is better” has become the hallmark of both his traditional books and his superb eBooks. To me these eBooks are everything I wanted when I was learning to take better images (and still learning). Highly compelling, visually rich, short books that inspire, that explain and that share the insights. It is almost as if they are written to that same mantra “compelling visionary images first, technical and craft explanations second”. Scratch that. It is exactly how they are written.

SAFARI, A Monograph is the second in the his wonderful series “The Print & The Process”, where he takes us on his personal journey as he shoots a series of projects and explains the process behind them.

This latest one is just breathtaking. The images captivate and engage. They transport you to the dry savanna, the equatorial heat and the languid lions watching bemused as another 4×4 of tourists winds it way through the Serengeti. It is hard to believe him when he says this is is first safari – irritatingly, it seems as if the man has no end to his talent.

He unpacks the images from a 10-day safari in Kenya earlier in the year, first letting the images speak for themselves then diving deep into the process behind the photographs. This eBook like his previous one on Venice, offers an honest discussion about the issues connected to the creation of what he called the monograph, including the gear used, the techniques employed, and the lessons learned.

It’s a 62-page PDF eBook that will provide you with inspiration amidst the details of the Why and the How. This is not so much about how to photograph your first safari, though you’ll learn that too; it’s a look at the lessons learned, and re-learned, by a photographer who is now 25 years into his craft.

And then if this is not enough, David also shares his Adobe Lightroom settings used for Serengeti Chocolate, the duo-tone look in which much of his SAFARI monograph has been styled, and a downloadable Lightroom Preset. These books are as “cheap as chips” as we say in the UK, and I for one feel like a kid waiting for the next installment of my favorite comic to hit the newsstand. I devour it when it arrives and the moment of elation is followed by the eager anticipation of the next one in the series.

SAFARI, A Monograph is a available now for $5, but as with all of David’s eBooks there is OF COURSE a special offer:

For the first four days only, if you use the promotional code SAFARI4 when you checkout, you can have SAFARI, A Monograph for only $4 OR use the code SAFARI20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST JULY 11, 2010.

Whats more, I am using an affiliate code for FOCUS FOR HUMANITY, so for every book that you buy you do some good and Focus For Humanity gets a slice. David generously gives Focus For Humanity a kick back for every one you order. Just click on the Craft and Vision image left or in the sidebar.

Most of the images that I took fell – deliberately for once – into one of 4 themes: motion, people, abstract or landscape. I had deliberately selected the motion and abstract categories because I really wanted to push myself to experiment and to try things differently. I’ll be posting some galleries of each category in due course.

The people category was well… it just would have been criminal to have spent ten days in Italy and to have ignored some of the wonderful characters, faces and sights that we saw every day. Rather than just look at my people shots as individual pictures, urged on by David, I decided to process them more as a collection, trying out split-toning as a way to create order out of a fairly disparate group of people pictures.

Below is part of the series – I am still not all the way through the images yet as my day job is somewhat all consuming at the moment and I am also building up to the launch of Focus For Humanity, a charitable foundation aimed at providing grants to photographers wanting to switch to full time and work with NGOs!

During one of the afternoon critique sessions, David took us through his Lightroom workflow, including the use of split toning. I think it is one of those things that you need to practice and to have an objective eye for so that you use it selectively, but I loved the idea of taking such a varied group of people pictures – different ages, locations and activities – and creating a link between them simply by turning them to black and white and then applying a split tone.

In this case I chose red for the highlights and green for the shadows –in homage to the Italian flag! It is fascinating to flick between the split tone version and the full color version and to see the marked difference the change makes to how you perceive the image.

So although I will not fall prey to the trap of split –toning every image or doing everything in black and white, I really enjoyed seeing how the images transformed, how the emotion and the story change or how the message received different emphasis just by a couple of different settings in Lightroom.

Let me know what you think!

Scott Kelby has written a detailed review on his blog, and both he and Matt Klokowski have put together a great series of videos looking at and explaining the features over at The Lightroom Learning Centre and also at Kelby training.

The key improvements – in no particular order are:

• Great Noise Reduction - finally Lightroom overtakes all the other options, with a pro level noise reduction capability, which is especially powerful as it works on the RAW images rather than th an 8 bit processed image.
• Watermarking tool – enhanced watermarking tool giving you increased flexibility over opacity a, size and placement.
• New Importing Capabilities – a much more intuitive and visual import process that allows you to see where your images are coming from and where they’re going
• Flexible publishing options – drag and drop capability with the ability then to publish direct to flickr, share with your iPhone etc.
• Film Grain Simulation - to enhance  your images and bring back that film look.
• Sideshow Audio – The ability to embed music into a slideshow, and for the music to be synch’d to the the length of the slideshow and then exported as a package either as video or as a slideshow.
• Imprvoed Vignetting - the main changes are to the post crop vignetting, which has been really enhanced.
• Improved Print capabilities – there is increased flexibility about how the print “grid” is laid out including the ability to have photos of different sizes in the same grid. You can also change the print background colour.
• Workflow improvements – they added the collections panel to the Develop modules meaning you no longer have to flick back and forth between the two.

Embedding Lightroom gallery

Those of you following this blog from the start will know that I had struggled initially to get multiple Lightroom albums and galleries to display correctly across multiple browsers.

If you go down the route of creating your own HTML page for your portfolio, and then linking to this from your WordPress blog, then you need to be incredibly careful about your HTML tags and your validation, as Firefox in particular will not display correctly if you have any errors there at all.

The good news is that there is an incredibly easy solution for users of WordPress, Adobe Lightroom and SlideShow Pro wishing to either create a post with a gallery/album in it, or a separate page. For example I created a page called Portfolio and then linked to this page from the menu, thereby embedding my portfolio in my blog’s look and feel. Simply install the free plug-in from Kimili, used to embed Flash objects.

1. Install the Plug-In
The first thing you need to do is to install the Kimili WordPress plug-in, which you can do simply by going to the “Add New” option in your Plugins panel within WordPress. Just search for Kimili Flash Embed plug-in. Don’t worry about the “might not work with WordPress2.8″ message. It seems to work just fine.

2. Create The Slideshow
In Lightroom, create the slideshow with which ever settings and dimensions you want, but if you are using the “wet floor”, when you write down the dimensions (you’ll need it later) then add a little bit. But don’t worry –  making a change later takes just a second, so you can tweak and adjust before you publish.

3. Upload the Slideshow
Upload the slideshow somewhere on your site. I prefer to keep all of my albums in a directory called /portfolio.

• Export your slideshow form Lightroom to a local folder on your MAC/PC. I called mine portfolio
• Upload with an FTP  or Dreamweaver this folder to your website. Its important that the loader.swf, js/ directory and all the files EXCEPT index.html get uploaded. So I now have a folder on my website called http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/portfolio.
• You can preview your gallery at this stage (although of course it is not embedded in the blog yet). Check mine out at http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/portfolio/loader.swf

4. Create The Post or the Page With The Slideshow

• Create the post or a new page as normal
• Switch to the Code editor (the HTML tab). Copy and Paste the following lines into your  page or post, remembering to modify the following lines with your website details and the folder where you uploaded your gallery AND being sure to take out the word REMOVE – I had to put that in otherwise WordPress would have tried to embed a gallery right into this post! Make sure that the text that begins kml_flashembed is right up against the square bracket, ie no spaces
• : [REMOVEkml_flashembed movie='/portfolio/loader.swf' height='500' width='500' base='.' allowfullscreen='true' wmode='transparent'/]
• You can use an absolute or a relative URL. On my website I chose an absolute URL, although above I have shown a relative URL.

That’s it. You can tweak the settings to fit a post (500 by 500 as above is good) or a full page wide (like my own portfolio). Now ensure you use Preview to check your post or page.

Lightroom Shortcut Keys app for iPhone

For those of you whom use both an iPhone and Adobe’s Lightroom, there is a great little new iPhone app that provides an aide-memoire to all the shortcuts for Lightroom.

Written like a series of flash cards, the app quickly helps you remember those combination of keys that help drive up your productivity and make  Lightroom such a “must have” tool for serious photographers.

You can get the app, LRKeys, for only 99 cents or 59 pence. Go on, you know it makes sense!