Month: August 2022

Today’s Question: During your presentation hosted by B&H Photo you demonstrated how you assign a red color label to folders that contain photos you still need to review. I was wondering if you use any other color labels for folders for different purposes in your workflow.

Tim’s Quick Answer: The primary color label I use for folders is the red label, which signifies a folder containing photos I still need to review. When I’m working on a project related to a particular folder or collection, I will sometimes use other colors to indicate the status in the context of the project.

More Detail: I assign a red color label to new photos being imported into my Lightroom Classic catalog to identify the photos I’ve not yet reviewed to decide if they are favorites or outtakes. To help ensure I don’t forget that a given folder contains such photos, I assign a red color label to the folder once I’ve imported new photos into a folder. You can assign a color label to a folder (or collection) in Lightroom Classic by right-clicking and choosing “Add Color Label to Folder” (or Collection) followed by the desired color.

As noted above, I use a red color label for a folder that contains photos I still need to review. When I’m working on a project involving particular photos I will often use a yellow color label to indicate that the project is in progress, and then a green color label to indicate it is completed. These color label assignments are a little more ambiguous, because I don’t often find that I need additional color labels for this purpose.

I do encourage photographers to consider how they might be able to improve their workflow by assigning color labels to folders or collections. If you find that you want to mark the status of a folder or collection or have something of a visual reminder that some work needs to be done within that folder or collection, the color labels can be very helpful.

I’m sure some photographers could find reasons to use perhaps all (or most) of the five color label options for folders and collections in Lightroom Classic. If so, you can come up with definitions for each color label to use for those purposes, so you’ll have a consistent approach to incorporating this helpful feature in your workflow.

Today’s Question: I understand your discussion about transferring photos from an iPhone to a computer, especially where you suggest deleting all the photos from the phone. I am wondering if it is possible to transfer photos from a computer to an iPhone. My thought is to transfer all the phone photos to the computer; delete, save, process them; delete them from the phone; and then copy a few back to the iPhone. Can that be done?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, this can be done. You could simply synchronize collections from Lightroom Classic so they are available as albums in the Lightroom mobile app, or you could synchronize folders that contain copies of selected photos directly to your smartphone.

More Detail: As I’ve addressed previously, I prefer to treat my smartphone as a normal camera in the context of my photos, and so I periodically download all photos from my iPhone, import them into my Lightroom Classic catalog, and then delete the source photos from the iPhone.

Naturally, I would like to have some photos available for sharing and other purposes on my phone, so I synchronize selected images for this purpose.

One option is to simply enable synchronization for the collections that contain photos you want to make available on your smartphone. To enable synchronization for a collection in Lightroom Classic you turn on the checkbox to the left of the collection name on the left panel in the Library module. That will cause the photos to be synchronized to your Adobe Creative Cloud account, so that they will then also be available as albums representing the collections in the Lightroom mobile app.

My personal preference is to synchronize folders of derivative photos directly to my smartphone. I export copies of photos as JPEG images at a reduced resolution to an appropriately named folder, with that folder used as the album name on my iPhone within the Photos app. I put those folders in the Pictures folder, which is the default location for synchronizing photos from a computer to an iPhone.

With folders containing the photos I want to synchronize back to my iPhone, I then enable those specific folders for synchronization. You could also enable the option to synchronize all photos in the Pictures folder, but I prefer to enable specific folders.

For Macintosh users you can find your iPhone on the left panel of a Finder window when you have your iPhone plugged in to the computer. Windows users can use the iTunes application. In either case you can then go to the Photos tab for synchronization settings and choose which folders of photos you want to have synchronized to your iPhone.

With this approach, whenever you add photos to one of the folders that has synchronization enabled those photos will be synchronized to your iPhone whenever you synchronize with your computer again.

Today’s Question: We recently attended your preconference workshop on Photoshop at the NECCC conference in Amherst. You told us about how to use the Pen tool to create and save a path which would then be used by the Healing Brush, a very useful feature especially for removing telephone lines. I understand how to create a path, but my notes are incomplete on how you saved and applied it for the healing brush. Do you have any instructions for that operation?

Tim’s Quick Answer: When you need to clean an area of a photo along a straight or curved line (such as for power lines), using the Pen tool to define a path that can then be stroked with an image-cleanup tool such as the Spot Healing Brush can provide an excellent solution.

More Detail: The Pen tool in Photoshop enables you to define a path comprised of straight or curved lines. After selecting the Pen tool from the toolbar, make sure the popup on the Options bar is set to Path. You can then click to define anchor points that will be connected with a straight line, or click and drag to add anchor points that will form a Bezier curve connected to the previous anchor point. When you click and drag the direction you drag will determine the angle that the curve exits from the anchor point, and the distance away from the anchor point that you drag determines how far down the curve the apex will be.

For image cleanup you will obviously want to define the path along the area that needs to be cleaned up. For example, you could click to add an anchor point where a power line enters the frame on the left side of the photo. You could then click-and-hold at the right edge of the photo where the power line exits. Drag with the mouse down to refine the curve so it follows the path of the line you want to clean up.

Once you have defined the path for your image cleanup work, you can use one of the image cleanup tools to remove the blemish defined by that path. I typically use the Spot Healing Brush tool for this purpose, with the Type setting on the Options bar set to Content-Aware.

Next, go to the Paths panel, which you can bring up by choosing Window > Paths from the menu. Select the desired image cleanup tool from the toolbar, such as the Spot Healing Brush tool. I recommend creating a new empty image layer to contain the cleanup pixels if you haven’t already been working on a separate image cleanup layer. Configure the settings for the cleanup tool on the Options bar as needed for the cleanup work.

You can then use the active cleanup tool to stroke the path you defined, so that the area of the image defined by the path will be cleaned up. To automatically stroke the path with the current tool, click the second button (the icon has a solid outline of a circle that is not filled in). The active tool will follow the shape of the path, which in this case will cause the area of the image defined by that path to be cleaned up. You can then delete the path by clicking the trash can icon at the bottom-right of the Paths panel.

Today’s Question: You recently addressed cropping to fit a standard print size. But how do you deal with a situation where the image isn’t long enough on one side and you can’t crop further? Is there an easy way to extend the image to fit the intended crop size?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can extend the frame of a photo relatively easily in many cases using a helpful technique in Photoshop. This involves duplicating and flipping an area near the edge of the frame, to provide a good match for pixels for extending the size of the image.

More Detail: As long as the edge of the image you want to extend doesn’t contain too many objects that would stand out if they were duplicated, you can use a very simple technique in Photoshop to extend the frame of an image.

Start by using the Rectangular Marquee tool to select an area on the side of the image that needs to be extended. For example, if you want to extend the left side of the image you would select an area on the left side of the frame that covers the entire height of the image. Make sure the selection is at least as big as the extension you need to create. When in doubt, make the selection larger than you need, as you can always crop the image later.

With the selection active, make sure the applicable image layer is selected on the Layers panel, which you can do by clicking on the thumbnail for that layer. In many cases, for example, that would probably be the Background image layer.

Now you can duplicate the selected pixels by going to the menu and choosing Layer > New > Layer via Copy. Because a selection is active, only those selected pixels will be duplicated to the new layer.

To get a (relatively) seamless match between the existing image and the new image layer, you want the pixels from the outer edge on both layers to align with each other. Since the new layer is going to be moved outward to provide an extension of the image, that means the layer needs to be flipped. In this case the image is being extended horizontally, so from the menu you can choose Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. If you are extending the image vertically you would choose Flip Vertical from that menu.

You can then select the Move tool and drag the new layer outward until the edges of the image match. In this example that means dragging the new layer to the left until the right edge of the new layer aligns with the left layer of the image, with the top and bottom edges lined up as well. At this point, of course, you won’t be able to see the new layer when it is dragged out of the existing image area.

After dragging the new layer into position, you can reveal all the hidden pixels by choosing Image > Reveal All from the menu. At this point you can obviously crop the image to get it back down to the specific output size you needed, if applicable.

You could certainly use other techniques, such as first extending the canvas with the Image > Canvas Size command. You could then create a selection of the added area and use the Edit > Content-Aware Fill command to fill in the new empty pixel area in an intelligent way.

However, I find that in most cases duplicating pixels in the image as outlined above provides at least a great starting point. You can then use image cleanup tools as needed to clean up any obvious areas of duplication or odd shapes that resulted from the duplicated and flipped pixels.