Here’s a quick video of Adventure Photographer Tyler Stableford and how he’s using Lightroom 3 beta 2 in his photography of an ice climbing expedition. Hopefully it gives those of you looking at Lightroom 3 a bit of an insight into what it has in store for you.

I’m hearing about it more and more.

One maker of Lightroom presets accuses another of stealing their concoctions and selling them as their own.

A Photoshop actions artist claims that another website’s actions were actually dreamed up by them.

In this age of digital thievery where photographers are still only just forging a way ahead with inventions like the Digital Economy Act of 2010, is the world ready to also deal with the issue of who owns “Vibrance=20, Clarity=50, Temp=6750″?

Just a little education in case you don’t know what we’re talking about:

Lightroom Presets

Presets are one-click pre-set Lightroom adjustments for photos. You can buy them, download free ones or make your own.

They are made up of different combinations of adjustment sliders like exposure, brightness, clarity, contrast, etc. There are also sliders which turn the greens more blue, mute out the reds and add vignettes.

This is a tricky one to get a handle on. Lightroom presets, although sometimes complex, are quite simplistic compared to things like actions. They really are nothing more than a combination of slider settings at the end of the day.

Can anyone own ‘vibrance=20′?

Photoshop Actions

Actions are Photoshop’s ‘version’ of presets. They are one-click action sets which run a series of pre-determined edits to a photo. They are far more detailed and specified than presets and, indeed, these do seem to be extremely well-thought out and crafted pieces of work. The more highly specified and heavy-laden action sets could easily be recognised by their creator like the back of their hand.

Watching an action run can sometimes make your think your computer is having a fit. The layers panel fills up with adjustment layers which quickly flatten and make way for a texture layer here and a masking layer there. What you’re left with is a photo that can make you wonder “HOW did it do that?!”

Textures

Textures are a bit of a side-step of the question “can a setting be owned?” but I think they should still be included in this conversation. Textures are layers which can be laid over your images in Photoshop and blended into the photo in a multitude of ways.

They are images in themselves and I am extremely surprised to find how many people out there actually have the nerve to buy an artist’s textures and then turn around and sell the sets verbatim. Without even trying to alter them! These can be easily tracked down, especially when a texture maker has an army of fans who let them know when they find something suspicious.

Last year, Matt Kloskowski of Lightroomkillertips.com opened himself up for criticism when he posted Mike Wiacek’s newly written program called the ‘preset extractor‘. This little program simply accepts the URL of an image on Flickr and spits out the LR settings used to achieve the look. It even gives you the file to import into your presets panel! There was much controversy over this little ditty and it was removed from the web. And then put back a few weeks later. And it’s still there!

That week, Matt K. wrote a very well thought out post on his blog called “Is it wrong to steal Lightroom presets?” Personally, I think if you have to call it ‘stealing’ then, clearly, it’s wrong. In the post, he later goes on to refer to it as ‘lifting presets’ which makes a lot more sense if you’re of the idea that LR settings can’t be owned in the first place.

A Guest Post by Dev Wijewardane.

Usually, to produce a well lit image of an object, photographers will need to use multiple artificial light sources. These light sources can be costly and may not be easily accessible for amateur photographers. However, in many cases, a single flash can be used to achieve the same results.

Things you will need

• A flash (it is most effective if you can use it off camera)
• Any light modifiers which you require – snoots, gobos, grid spots etc
• A tripod
• Post processing software

The Process

The first step in the process is to secure the camera to the tripod and compose the image. Once the image is composed, the tripod should NOT be moved until all the required images have been captured.

The first image to be captured should be the “base” exposure. In this example, I used a canon 430 EX …

A Guest Post by Andy Briggs.

One of the challenges of landscape photography is that it’s so dependant on the changing weather. This is particularly true when shooting sunrises and sunsets. You can travel for hours to get to the perfect location, only to find a dull sky, nothing like the image you had hoped for. I found myself in this position last summer, when I visited Eilean Donan castle in Scotland. I had only one night to capture an image of this iconic landmark, but the colours of the sunset were really nothing special. As you can see from the raw photograph, something more was needed to make this into an interesting picture.

One solution to this is Adobe Lightroom’s Split Toning tool. Split Toning is technique that originated in film photography which transforms the

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One complaint about Lightroom 2 is its lack of a feature enabling you to add copyright watermarks to your images as you Export them. There are workarounds that make use of the Identity Plate option in the slideshow and print modules but these are cumbersome at best. In Lightroom 3, at last, watermarking is built in to the Export module (and available in the Print, Slideshow and Web modules).

To see this new feature at work, make sure that you have downloaded Lightroom 3 Beta 2 from labs.adobe.com – this is the most recent beta. Select one or more images in the Library module, right click and choose Export > Export. In addition to choosing options such as the export location, file name and file type and sizing an image you will find the new watermarking option near the bottom of the dialog.