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196 Playa Desert On Film – Wallowa Solitude – Editing In Luminar
0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.
0:23
I really love this image of a shot on film no shot on a Nikon 80 with with a decent lens, but a pretty basic one. And I just love the crisp way it comes out the texture on the playa. And the the warmth that you get off the sun is that sort of crests over the the horizon and the distance that super flat horizon is you see that the top of the skyline there but all the images just that dark, kind of crackled texture of the playa I really like how crisp it is, I think I racked iraq the F stop up on this up to around 16 or 18 or so so they could get most of it in focus. But you still see a good bit of the vignetting around the side and you see just how it starts to sweep out of focus down at the bottom. Really like that part of the image. And really, in fact, this is I think, maybe my favorite photograph from the outboard desert while we were there just really shows how flat and expansive it is how there’s really nothing. And it just goes on and on and on. But that was as far as the eye could see nothing but that on the outward.
1:31
You can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo calm, you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think if you look at Billy Newman under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism on camping, you cool stuff over there.
1:54
Thinking about a couple of the photo things that I’ve been trying to put up I just posted one earlier, it was a backpacking photo that I’d taken when we were out in the willow mountains up in the ego cap wilderness. And that’s a really cool spot. I’ve talked about it a ton of times before but but it really is a special location as it goes even for Oregon, which is really blessed with a lot of very nice, very approachable photographable locations. But the will our mountains have always been something that stood out to me as one of my favorites. And I’ve heard that that region has a lot of stuff like that, like as you move further over into Idaho into the sawtooth mountains in the hell’s Canyon, there’s a lot of really peculiar spectacles to go see in that area. And it’s really interesting how it’s laid out, I appreciate it. And I loved kind of getting to go through the whole area. But the allow mountain specifically have something kind of special to him, especially when you get up into the Alpine area, and you get away from people, even as it goes when you get to Joseph, you’re significantly away from people. But as you leave and kind of pushing further into the ego cap wilderness,
2:57
the number of people just drops down to less than a dozen by far. And, and even less than that, you know, as you move into the more remote areas, it’s sort of interesting, there’s a threshold of where people are like, if it’s under so many miles of a hike, there’s gonna be a lot more people they’re just sort of evolution, maybe it’s our you know, it’s it’s just a natural selection, right? It’s, it’s where people would naturally select their interest to be closer to the main road, and then further and more competitive at a farther distance. And so it’s interesting, like, if you go to a lake that’s six miles in, there’s gonna be more people there than if you went to the lake that was nine miles and it just people kind of pull out first or they pull out to the, to the route of the trail, it’s going to not be as much it seems like, but also on top of that, really. And I blame myself for this specifically, it’s way busier now. This decade, just generally, it seems like the Rei or the the whole outdoor industry, this whole outdoor media industry outdoor adventure industry, it just seems like it’s double what it was 20% up from what it was a decade ago. That might make sense. And the reason that I would say that is it just seems like there were so many more people filling the parking lot of the area than there were in the years past. They know the reason I say that the reason why that’s that’s qualified information maybe is that it’s after Labor Day. Now what the trick used to be when I was doing a lot of the photo trips that I do, as I kind of travel east trim here and kind of do a big loop in the fall to take photos is after Labor Day, where you really notice is that a lot of these state parks a lot of the managed locations where there’s a park coast or something like that those will get shut down for the winter. It’s closed off unless it’s like a bigger, higher volume National Park kind of area. But all of these remote locations like the walala wilderness or the alvord Desert that we went to, these are places where there would likely be no people especially no people. If it were off hours off season, sort of stuff, sort of visitation. But what we noticed when we were there is that the parking lot was filled up, like, you know, it was 5060 7080 cars deep, they all just kind of Park in a line up above the trailhead, and that’s, you know, you kind of visually just are impacted by Wow, there must be this many people from all these cars up in the mountains right now. And in the past, like when I was there in 2011. And then again, in 2012, and 13, there would be no car like there was five cars in the parking lot. It was me, I pulled up right to the very front. And I mean, even when we went this last time, it was a mid week trip. It wasn’t it wasn’t, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And even still, with that midweek trip, there was more traffic up there. So we went to our noid Lake, I believe. And that was an area that was I think, like six miles and so a little bit of what I was talking about before about natural selection of the hike, you’re going to go on that day. Six miles was is less of a hike. I think the other one icelake is nine miles maybe the other one is 10 1213 miles and you know, somewhere in there, but it just got to progressively goes on from about six there’s about one every two miles or so if you know if you kind of put you know, you’ve got so many more miles after that. There’s this next one, so on and so forth, as you can imagine, but a lot of people go up to this like for like a lunch day hike, which sounds like a blast not having to actually carry all the heavy stuff with you or, you know, all the equipment, all the overnight stuff that you’d have to deal with. But it was fine. It was it was cool. We went up to our North Lake, we camped up there for a night. And we did a lot of photo stuff. But it was kind of tough because I think I mentioned on the last podcast where the we were prepared, but the weather would kind of get twisted on us more often than really what I wanted it to. But the weather would kind of spin out on us a little bit. So the first night we were there, it was nice and decent. And temperature and weather as we were hiking up to the location where we’re going to camp there’s only one other couple camping up there I think was like a mom and a daughter team that were they were camped out at a site and then so we pulled away from them on the lake and you know, it’s just the whole lake to us, which is really cool. It was fun. So we shot around there for a while but there’s rain that picked up was probably one of the first rains of the season. A while at least for me or for us or for that area but it seemed like it kind of built up over the mountains you know like how you see storm systems kind of build up over the mountaintops sometimes seems sort of like it was that like it was some kind of weather pattern that was about the allows it seemed like it was nice everywhere else. But it just seemed like it wasn’t very nice there. So we camped there for the night. We got through some rain. It was nice. The next morning, we took a lot of photos that morning a lot of photos through the day, we kind of walked around the lake you know, it’s interesting, I guess way back before it was before it was a wilderness area. Before whatever kind of legislation went into effect in the 60s I think was the Nixon era. You know, a Nixon had just gotten in and what was like 68 and they pushed for the Wilderness Act to the wild and scenic act are brothers a bunch of stuff before that. But from way back like 100 years ago, like before, these regulations existed on what could and couldn’t happen in wilderness areas. I guess it was a bot area next to that lake and they built like six or seven cabins up there. Like we just cut down wood and build these cabins so you got there and I think they’re still owned as private property was sort of grandfathered in. Once the whole wilderness thing was established, there’s a lot of those private land facilities that were grandfathered into that system because they’d already existed there. So these are all like undeveloped them maintain things that I guess you can you can pay someone to, to hike up all the way there and then camp there if you’d want to. It seemed a little dilapidated. To me though I don’t know if I’d want to put out some cash for that after especially after hiking all day, I might as well just take my tent or hammock or sleeping pad or something, you know, if I’m doing that, but it was cool to go check out and it was kind of cool to spot something a little different up there. That was really fun. You know, honestly, I don’t like the cabins because really what I want to go to the flowers for is the wilderness experience is the getting away from the cabins, the private property, the signs that say you can’t go here, someone else owns this sort of thing. I’m trying to get away from that and go to public land and go to places where I have access where I get to do things. And so if it’s in civilization, like downtown, and I see private property or whatever it might be, or you know, this is ours, it’s not yours. I say, Alright, fine, that’s okay. Because that’s the that’s the negotiation we’ve made here and civilization, but when we go way out, when we’ve hiked in miles and miles under our own discipline and accord to get somewhere to spend time there, and then there’s some sign some indication that we’re not supposed to be there, or we’re not supposed to be a part of it, or we’re not supposed to, whatever, when we’re supposed to respect their private property. And it’s a big open field that is a place that everyone gets to hike to, that’s just the big lake that’s a tourist destination. Now, I’m not respecting that rule. I’m going wherever I’m going to do whatever That’s your business to get a can’t post to discipline not mine so that’s might be a leg that I don’t go to anymore or that we won’t really hike out to again I think mostly you know photos were fun it was fine other than like not really getting the the light and the opportunity you know running into a storm roll the rest of it that kind of took away a little bit but really there’s there’s just not as many
10:28
How do you say like priority landscape features at that at that location there’s a pretty Lake it’s very nice it’s very Alpine looking and you know in its presentation but it just didn’t really have one of those those triple A titles to photograph when you get there there’s not like a lake and then this really cool perspective of a mountain it’s just sort of a big Ridge that runs along this this glacial lake cool really pretty beautiful shouldn’t take away from it but but when your goal is just kind of to get to a specific kind of thing and then get a photo in the can as they’d say in the biz or you know when you get to finish it it’s done it’s already locked off and it’s already captured you’ve got what you want then you can move on it just didn’t really feel like we got their allocation in the allow amounts but it was super fun being there it was cold at night Oh man made mornings bad that’s the thing that sucks about morning photos at night. You get the sun to heat up the earth all day and then you get to go out and take photos of it in the morning though it’s just been cold the whole time especially as we move into fall as we move into winter like that cold just really starts to peak it seems like well you know we’re getting really close to the freeze I’m sure it was already freezing up there above the Alpine level like we were 7500 feet something like that. So that’s a lot from coming down here oh man and the altitude not altitude sickness, altitude fatigue it just drew on me Marina to she really noticed it but you know, as you go around, it’s like one o’clock that next afternoon you’re just trying to you just trying to have energy to sit and eat lunch it seemed like it seemed like you know, if you’re really pumped up and you really got to hike in or something you could struggle through it, but just that that native energy that you’d have to go do something to just was really zap that might be just from sleeping on rocks for four days beforehand, and then try to hike or something like that. But it’s but it’s, it’s weird. I don’t know, I remember a couple other times he was you kind of backpack and you climb up in elevation, it just can be really fatiguing. So we made it through it, I posted a photo up to Instagram today it’s hitting Facebook and Twitter and whatnot this afternoon. I’m also trying to run through and find a good video clip like a good behind the scenes video clip of us kind of walking through a run around up in the flowers as we’re hiking and I know I have a bunch of those of us backpacking and trying to put in some work to get to a spot to take some cool photos so
13:01
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13:41
But some of the stuff has gone up on Instagram. It’s a photograph of the alvord Desert, it was one of those I was working on in luminar. And that was from a raw file that I had from the a seminar when we were out in the desert, on the island or back in September. And there’s like a couple photos from there that I’ve been trying to work on a bit more. But through the software called luminar that I was telling you about. It’s like luminar 2018. It’s this update to some software that’s been around for a long time. And it’s kind of Well, I don’t know, a couple of years. It’s a newer software. And it’s it’s definitely got like that modern Mac OS interface system, kind of like you know, I was showing you some of the stuff in the new Final Cut. And there’s some of those button interfaces.
14:28
Yeah, looks really similar in the layout.
14:30
Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that’s similar and just sort of the way that it operates and hide certain features. But, but it was kind of interesting. It’s a lot like the Lightroom system, like in Lightroom. Right now we have the develop module. It’s really a lot of the features that we’d see in the develop module, but really not the type of categorization system that we’d have in the library module of Lightroom. And that’s the thing, some of the stuff that luminar is really lacking in right now. Where luminar really does succeed is like a lot of the options in photo editing and And like kind of specific, are sort of unique editing filters that you can add to the develop module on the side for some of the adjustments that you can make like just some of the ways you can add luminance or brightness or soft glow or, or just different pieces like that. The software is kind of able to provide a lot of different different ways to add adjustments and stuff to the photographs. And there’s been some really interesting stuff that I’ve been trying to make, or you know, like, kind of kind of coming up with different edits of some of the old photographs that we had just kind of gone through in Lightroom.
15:33
That’s great, man checking it out. I haven’t spent any time and yet, you’re doing like a 14 day trial.
15:38
Yeah, picked up. Yeah, from the website, you can go and get a 14 day trial for the software. I think in the Mac App Store, you don’t really see an option for that. But I think you see, just a first sale, I think it’s like 5999 or 6999. There’s probably a sale going on for cyber monday or Black Friday. But it’s been interesting software. And it’s you know, it’s been cool to use I’ve been kind of, I mean, curious to see what other things besides Lightroom are gonna pop up. And so we see like Affinity Photo, we see luminar we see Pixelmator You know, there’s Capture One, and there’s a few other kind of, kind of pro options out there. A lot of them though, outside of Capture One, a lot of them are lacking, like the the content management, or the digital asset management side of it.
16:29
Oh, right. I can’t remember if it was luminar, or a different one that you had shown me. But yeah, it seems more like, like Photoshop almost where you like you take the file and you process the file, but it doesn’t store your set of photos that you’re working. Yeah,
16:44
yeah, it doesn’t seem like it was it was for batch editing, or, you know, like take taking effect, you know, kind of like, there’s a little bit of batch editing stuff, but it still seems clumsy in comparison to the to the tool set and workflow that you have in Lightroom. So really, it seems like you would, you would still need Lightroom in some capacity to sort of organize some of your photographs, in a way at least right now
17:06
My room is really great for that. Yeah, but right now
17:09
for the version that I have, right now, I’m still way way way happy with the workflow that I have for the time being. So I have no need to like upgrade to the Creative Cloud version, that’s that’s the current one, that’s causes problems. So I’m happy to keep the old version of Lightroom. And then in some capacity, like update some of my raw processing stuff on the outside of that to luminar, where I get to kind of take advantage of some of the more modern processing techniques that are available and something like luminar, something like Pixelmator, or something like affinity like some, just the different preset packages and mess around with some of the new creative stuff that’s kind of new and modern for photography in 2018 is it’s gonna be it’s kind of, it’s cool to be able to test that out. But it’s also nice to really be able to keep Lightroom around in the background. Yeah, and, and just have that have that data organized enough, like even just like what I was talking about, if like this big project ahead of you know, kind of trusting it to transfer 600 gigabytes of photographs through the computer, and then onto a second hard drive, and then categorize those under a file name by by day, date and year, I just wouldn’t really trust like software like luminar. To do that it’s not capable of anything like that, like you were talking about, they can just take one graphic file at a time, process it and then save that out as a graphic file. But it’s not even like that same kind of non destructive system where you, you work on it for a while, and then you just leave the program and it save those edits, those adjustments to the photograph are saved non destructively to the file. It’s still non destructive editing, but you start you have to save it as like a project file. So like ultimately, instead of like just a single catalog, where you go through a lot of images, if you were working in luminar more exclusively, you’d have a folder of your photographs or photo projects, let’s say and you would have a photo like a Photoshop file, but iluminar file there was the image with the adjustments set aside to it. It’s a really big file too. It’s like with these like 4550 megabytes a seven hour photos. It’s like a 70 megabyte file. It’s huge. Yeah, yeah, so my poor little 100 gigabyte hard drive is is choking. So it’s I don’t know it’s okay. But the luminary stuff it’s been cool cool to work with. I’m gonna try and do some screen capture stuff with it. And with that, just kind of thinking about doing screen capture stuff, it’s been making me think about screen capture stuff. I try to figure out how to do it and I didn’t really know how to do screen capture work before. And pretty quickly I just figured out like from people you never work saying that you can just use Quick Time The QuickTime player on the Mac to do that. And it works really well like I pulled up quick time. And then you go like file, start new screen capture. And then you click on the monitor that you went to start recording and you can kind of set some commands around if the if it’s going to show mouse click or mouse capture at all. And so it was able to do that. And I was able to practice a couple times to make some screen captures. And I want to try and transition that over to some of the stuff that we’re talking about of like, similar to this right now like record audio, like we’re doing in the podcast, but then run a screen capture on the background, while we’re working on something like luminar, while we’re going through one of the photographs that we have from, you know, someplace that we were at. And then we can show some of the adjustments and some of the ways of working in luminar, and making adjustments and then saving a file out, and then we can put that up as content on YouTube or, you know, yeah, YouTube, that’s why Facebook or some to, you know, they take videos.
20:37
Yeah, that’s really cool. You figured out the screen capture stuff, that’s awesome. It’s so easy. Yeah, you know, it will be easy for us, or at least this kind of screen
20:46
capture. Yeah, I’m hoping that I can try and put some work into it and make some of the stuff you know, sort of basic, but the kind of easy to put together. And if it’s as easy as this, like, you know, just doing the podcast and do it in the studio and having the audio stuff running. Now should be a good way to put together some, some good image editing pieces for something like luminar, I was I was scanning around on YouTube. And there’s really a pretty limited amount of good, have good introductory videos are some of the stuff. There’s some that the company itself has put out. And those are pretty good. But some of the stuff on the outside of it, just the photography and the advice and the direction editing and stuff around luminar or ad affinity. Some of the training tutorial videos I saw around it are just kind of goofy, and you don’t really see like what’s going on. Or you just kind of end up with some kind of crazy image. That’s just sort of some kind of quick
21:36
Oh, sure, not how to, not how to do real editing. But just, if you crank this tool, this is the part that it’s affecting. That’s
21:43
what I’ve seen, like they ended up showing, I understand the idea that like when you’re you’re screen capturing and trying to figure out how to make something artistic, doesn’t really go together so well. So you kind of have to do it like Martha Stewart a little bit and have the two ovens go on at the same time. So as soon as you put the pie in the oven to bake, then you pull out the pie that’s already cooked, right? Like seriously, you have to have a couple pieces already done in advance bits. But yeah, it was kind of it was kind of funny watching some of this stuff is it just doesn’t seem like it’s really developed yet. So yeah, I want to try and put together some of the stuff around the our cool photos are our outdoor photos. Yeah, it was cool to get into do some landscape tutorials or something. If I can figure out how to edit, it might be just good practice for me to learn how to edit some photographs. I don’t really edit it enough. I don’t do enough retouching. You know, to like really practice my skill like hone, a craft the retouching. I don’t know how it was for you like doing a bunch of the wedding stuff. Like it’s a lot of retouching to do by just like the advancement of like, getting better at retouching or
22:48
my retouching skills are something that I’ve definitely improved other kinds of editing that I want to get into. Or just the more the more stylized way of putting it not not in a gross way. Yes. I don’t know, I don’t know exactly what I’m really thinking about. But I’m trying to just get more, more refined. And yeah, and I’m putting my photos together. But retouching specifically, pretty good. wedding photos are great.
23:19
Yes. Oh yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure you get like a ton of practice in that. But I’m going to try more to and that’s what that’s why I’m missing out with luminar. And but really, there’s so much I can do in Lightroom. So you know, it’s just kind of practicing retouching and kind of working toward doing a better job at putting the files together and making them nicer going back over some of the old ones. And I want to try and do a little bit more to like, rough draft photos, or you know, like, Oh, this is well just like this is a rough draft of the Edit. So I could go through and
23:48
I do like your first set of editing and I need
23:50
Yeah, then I look at it and then I should edit it kind of redline it a little bit, you know, see, like, Oh, this is good. This is bad. I see this, I see this grading. This light doesn’t look natural. So some of that sort of stuff is the thing I should work on.
24:05
Yeah, I noticed that that helps me a lot to go to kind of come back to things a few times before they’re done.
24:13
I’d like to try and do that a little bit more. I should try and take it more seriously like the editing part editing and publishing part I want to try and jump on more. it’s wintertime now I got to put in more time for studio hours more studio hours is what I got to do. Way more editing time.
24:29
So for for the luminar stuff that you have gotten to do. How is it editing compared to Lightroom? Like for for the parts of it that would be similar or comparable tools? Like do you notice one seeming like it’s better? Or do you notice what like is Lightroom still just the best thing that there is?
24:52
Yeah, an older version of Lightroom is still the best that there is Yeah, an old version of Lightroom I think that’s it’s really what it feels like right now. I mean Apparently there’s some stuff in 2018 that’s supposed to handle more, like,
25:06
a bunch of stuff coming out.
25:07
Yeah, that’s it’s the Digital Asset Management part that’s not really built yet. Sure. And that’s the thing that’s going to be built, I guess, in 2018 coming out by some of these software companies. Yeah. And that’s when we’re going to be able to see like, which one might be better. But really, as it stands right now, it still seems like light room
25:26
for a lot for like, the actual photo editing part. Or what I what you’re able to do. Yeah. Not so much organization for the
25:35
Yeah, that’s a big part of it. And going through there, there’s, there’s interesting stuff that you can do.
25:43
And now it’s a new tool to learn. Also, so there’s probably an amount of just getting used to it.
25:49
There’s that part too you know, when in 1992 93 were Photoshop first came out, you see, like, you see the art from from that the photography art from them. And it was just like these insane rasterized images that didn’t make any sense. Since some pretty freaky pictures. Yeah, it was just like, all the colors were like transposed into like these weird, super hard, like greens and reds and yellows. I remember lots of yellows Did you just if you cranked if you cranked everything to one side, and it was just like, we got it blue, that was just the crazy just because you didn’t know what to do with it yet. So they did the most with it. Sure, and it was bad. And then like, since then they like pull back a lot. And so now like, it looks like real life, or they’ll get like their buildings of the digital to look real, you know, it’s like that artistic part of its back where you just kind of, you’re just using the same thing to try and lay in the same type of artistic principles that you would anywhere else. So part of that is to say in the same way, as we’re coming into these new tools, and people are learning these new tools, like like HDR was back in 2007, it’s like too hard sometimes. So similarly, with some of this stuff, it’s a little bit too hard on the editing side. And I noticed that with Lightroom for years, like you know, mitering came out with my own photos, when I that it was just like the there’s just too much, they’re just a little too much pressure, like a little too much gain or something, it was like it was just about the breakup. That’s what it felt like sometimes. So I don’t know, that’s just sort of like the immaturity of the photographer, myself, in this case, and then kind of how to understand how to use the tools. But as it goes, the final answer of it is that any of these tools can really result in the same outcome of great work. You know, like what you would know, too, it’s like, it’s just the artistic side of learning how to use some of these really basic tools to make more simple and refined adjustments to some spots that make the image a little bit more powerful. I tried to do basic stuff like crop or color correction, or, or like a little bit of tone curve stuff, you know, like make it brighter and give a little bit more contrast II that’s about all you can really do. I think there’s there’s different layers and there’s different heavy amounts of presets and hue grading, like the whatever that stuff is that the the forest to photos with no green, there’s that I guess, that you can add. But I really think that like a lot of it should be pretty slight adjustments that are there to try and like add to the photo in some way. And I think that those you can do in any of these softwares you know, in any control panel of adjustments on the side, you can you can export to anything that like would really that would work pretty well. But in the same way, it’s just like a new flavor of the thing to do, or it’s a new workflow that kind of breaks up some of the old crusty habits that I’ve had in the past. Yeah. Like that’s how it is with Lightroom trying to go from Lightroom to luminar or you know, and just just messing with it Capture One Not a chance it was way too complicated way too clingy of an interface system there and maybe for a pro that was really into that system, they could do it. I’m not required to I’m not tied down to it at all. So it just seemed like this would be a waste of time ultimately, for me to like really put a ton of pressure into if it’s really not a more productive tool for me to get something done. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like this just seems like hard and complicated. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit I don’t have a capture one or don’t have the phase one medium format camera. You know, yeah. And if I dropped got a, you know, some insane camera dropped off. I guess I try and mess with that software more, you know, because it’s proprietary to it. But outside of that, you know, now I don’t need it and I didn’t buy the Pro software either. So I guess you know, the the decision was made for me. As it goes Oh, with that using like, Lightroom and luminar. I don’t know, the editing stuff. It works really well. I’ve been diggin the luminar stuff because it’s a little bit of a way to break up some of the editing choices that I was making in Final Cut, or sorry, in Lightroom continually. And so changing that part up has been a good way to do stuff. Like I like the photograph that I that I put together the outboard desert over here, from one of the raw files that we shot out in the alvord with the a seminar. And it was like during sunset, and I was able to kind of pull in some of the warmth, the original photo is kind of great, you remember the day out there, the average was a little bit gray, it was a little low on color, and low on warmth and stuff, I was able to pull a lot of that back into, to the raw file, image it to the image when I was editing it, I kind of I just liked the way that some of it came out. So
30:41
I really liked how that one came out. The colors look really nice and natural. Yeah, yes, yes. That’s well put together. Yeah,
30:49
as as photo editing software did that goes, it did find it works nicely. It goes together, you know, pretty well. So I was happy with that. But yeah, some of the batch editing stuff, it’s got a long way to go. Some of the resizing stuff, it did fine. Or, you know, like I just just setting up kind of the export file, the export system of what you can do to the file on the way out, that’s a little bit reduced from some of the bigger options that you have in Lightroom
31:15
has a ton of option variations.
31:20
Yeah, so like the workflow that I have at work, like outside of an artistic workflow where you’re trying to take a choice image, and then make adjustments to it to make it its best, and then export that it’s like a piece of art, outside of that kind of workflow, like what I do on the production side of taking a few hundreds stock photos, of equipment, and trying to process that like batch process and batch export it, this sort of software would just be no good, because you’d still you kinda can do batch processing, but it’s real clumsy. It’s nothing like what you’d really expect if you’re trying to do it efficiently or, you know, properly. And that’s kind of a tricky thing. So I don’t know, we’ll see, like, what they kind of develop over time, but like, I would never want to switch over from Lightroom to something like this, if I were trying to do batch processing and exporting of all the production work that I do, it would never work is that you know, like, yeah, cuz like to take to grab 30 photos, and then export those and have the export, resize all 30 of those to whatever long width of it and whatever file type into whatever directory of a folder, it just I don’t have the option to do that. And some of the luminar stuff I can like edit the photo, sort of like you were talking about, like edit the photo in Photoshop, make some adjustments, but not really any Healing Brush adjustments you can kind of get by with healing brush. But like the Healing Brush stuff, it works way better in Photoshop, like the Content Aware healing way more effective, then probably I mean, it’s just Adobe, they’ve been doing it for 30 years trying to figure out how to do that technology. And they’re way better than probably anybody at the algorithm that that does the cloning tool stuff. I’m amazed like some of the stuff that can do so you can you can kind of get by in luminar if you need to, like clone something out. But it’s still tough. It’s like it’s it’s still a little patchy.
33:12
Yeah, I remember like the cloning out tool that Lightroom has or that like really basic one. Like, oh, you just started Yeah, good.
33:21
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was bad.
33:25
It was really bad. I remember it being frustrating. Yeah, that’s the only always had to use Photoshop.
33:32
I always had to bring it into Photoshop. Yeah, one time just to do a little bit of work
33:37
chat piece. Some little tiny things. Oh my gosh, yeah, I totally forgot about that. My workflow is completely different. I really just only use like room. Yeah, I was never, like I did a lot of basic, but by NASA necessary, like retouching and stuff for wedding photos. Yeah. And just make stuff on skin and stuff. Or like things in the background and really like it gets the textures of thing and the colors or like the the shading just in the patch. Yeah. So so well. Now, it’s really impressive that you can do so much with retouching just in Lightroom. And I used to, I remember, I used to had a friend who was a makeup artist, and I used to help him with photoshoots for his projects. And I would do a lot of retouching for those shots afterwards. I always had to take them into Photoshop, because Lightroom couldn’t do like just a little basic skin retouching. Yeah, I remember that way. No, I
34:38
know, I could never do it. And yeah, it’s gotten much, much better, like the healing brush tool has gotten much better. So I’m sure it’s probably better even still, and like the more advanced versions in the few years old, the version of Lightroom that we’re running right now. And I hear that there’s other tools like a Pixelmator is really quite good for the healing system like that. And here was the One, I think it may be its pixel, it might be pixel meter by here that that’s, or maybe its affinity. But one of those software’s is the one to use for like your 3d images. Like you’re getting like 3d photos or something. You have one of those. The arms are not 3d, these 360 degree cameras. Oh, yeah, where are you recording like a spherical stitch it? Yeah, I guess you can stitch it in this program. And then you can do, you can do some of the Healing Brush stuff around, like the base of it where the camera is. But you know, like a 360 likes, so you were to look around, you can look up, like, but straight up, there’s gonna be like a dot, it’s gonna be a gray dot where there’s no data. And then like straight down, there’s going to be the same thing, where some of the data’s coming together. And so I guess like this, this is the software that works even better than Photoshop right now to work on these 360 image environments, where you can go through, and like pull the image around, and then use the healing brush on one of those spots, and then have it, close that out. And then you can render that out as a as a 360. Like, file to what I don’t even know what file type that is. And then, and then edit it for you to work on it and use it from there. But that sounds like they’re producing some of these files.
36:10
Interesting. That’s cool. I want to try and learn a little bit about
36:13
that like, and also like, and how that 360 stuff relates to the stock photography market. I was looking at that a little bit, like, when you look at a stock photo, or storyblocks, which takes like video and audio and photo. And then there’s like Pon fi there’s a handful other like stock photo systems out there. But a lot of stock photography sites, they’re talking about a need for these 360 environments for like people that are doing VR development, that sort of thing. So they need these five these, these stock files to build their VR environments with like, good produce, or, you know, well produced 360 images. I was trying to figure out. Yeah, I’m trying to think like, Oh, I wonder how like, we could do that sort of on the side of doing other landscape stuff, but you know, go out to places and then do get, like 360 footage, and then edit or, you know, like do just like some of the simple production stuff of it, and then put it up on some of the stock sites, where it’s like in need to get this type of 360 content. Yeah. Where there’s already so much of a flood of landscape work in stock as it goes. Huge. Yeah, so we like that. And I’m trying to think of like content and media work as sort of around, like, maybe we’re not going to get paid for landscape photos for a little bit. So but maybe we can make stock 360 photos. Yeah, and make a little bit of money because there’s not enough of those right now. And then and then use that as an excuse to go on trips out to Eastern Oregon and make photos of Fort rock or you know, somewhere cool in Lake County. But we’re making some 360 photos with some 360 content or something like that. That’s that, you know, goes up on one of the stock sites, but it’s just kind of a fun side idea. So in the springtime, maybe
38:05
that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. That was a part of the stock photography name. Now,
38:10
it seems like it’s coming into a lot of stuff around VR. Yeah, VR is really big. Yeah, yeah, a lot of stuff around VR and a lot of drone footage
38:19
of the drone stuff on a drone really badly this next year,
38:23
we should try and get an inexpensive drive, we should try and take it to some spots to get some good basic stock footage of some good stuff outside. Yeah, like the places that we go, you know, all that stuff would be great to get 360 and like aerial drone stuff, but you know, like, as I see is like, man, I bet we could run the business really, if if we just tried to book ourselves to do like even just stock chips to do like 360 and an aerial drone footage that goes up on the stock sites, as we like, populated it in like a pretty significant effort to produce produce produce. But yeah, one of the trips we made or something like that, yeah, we did that two or three days a week, wherever we were going. You know, and like, like we took off the you know, somewhere and you know, worked out of hotel for a couple of days and made some aerial shots and some 360 shots, sort of a thing and then edited them and put them up from you know, whatever you would probably be like some of the first people to make 360 and the aerial content of a lot of these outdoor places.
39:24
That’d be so cool. I’m really into that. Yeah, I think the three 660 stuff is a cool idea. Yeah, and yeah, I’ve been onboard the drones.
39:30
Oh, yeah, I know. I know. Yeah, we need a couple grand. We need Xbox. Yeah, but I really want to try and do that. Yeah, I was thinking like, Oh, yeah, we probably make some of the first especially under the scope of being like cinematography. Like there’s there’s probably a handful of things that have gone up but it’s probably not as much like shot or you know, like, like a photo photography level. Yeah, work and I think that we could probably sell them Pretty quickly if we were jumping in there, but first, we should get our toes wet. And this winter, we should try and put up like a portfolio of at least 100 of our images and try and go through and like learn about it, like put up the photos in a stock library. Try and tag them and title them and get them like in there, get our account going get our Gist, get it figured out
40:22
how their system works.
40:23
Yeah, and then see like, Oh, yeah, okay, this is the sort of stuff that we’re seeing in 360 video right now. But I know it’s probably going to be maybe not a fad. I think it’s really going to be like something content related to virtual reality. Virtual Reality is going to be really necessary. And that could be static photos like it’s been it can be like 360 video can be a lot of different things, but it’s kind of interesting that it’s just like a new thing that sort of opening up. So we shot that’d be fun. There’s probably like a need for it somewhere on the west coast. And I don’t know, maybe we can get paid for it someday. I’ll be cool. We’ll be so on the on the edge Marina. So we gotta do we gotta be on the cutting edge. Cutting Edge of Yeah. Man, sounds cool. We put it on a resume writing that we make. We’re VR content developers.
41:15
Yeah. Sounds great.
41:17
Yeah, it’s a good it’s a it’s gotta be real Marina. It’s the yokels are out here. They don’t know but we we now Marina. Yeah, said we got to stay ahead. We got to do it. But I think that’s probably everything I got going on for for this episode of this podcast. My man you Marina
41:41
thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some good links to other other outbound sources. some links to books and links to some podcasts like this. A blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy numina photo.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the back end. Thank you Next
196 Playa Desert On Film – Wallowa Solitude – Editing In Luminar