Getting started posting your pictures...

A friend of mine (at the rink) asked me how to share his pictures in the same way that I do. He does not have any current accounts (Flickr, Google Photos, Shutterfly, etc.) and so I have put together these instructions to help him and they may be useful for you too.

I am going to base these on a Flickr account. Flickr is a little complex, it takes some use to getting started, but gives you 1Tb of storage and sharing is very easy. Many of the other services are good too, I just have less experience of them.

Getting a login

The first step is to get a login and set up an account. Go to www.flickr.com and you will be greeted with the following screen,

Click the link highlighted by the red circle to sign up.

Enter your details into the form and press Continue.

Yahoo! (the owners of Flickr) want to make sure you are a real person and so they will ask you to do a Captcha test.

Complete the test and verify your email address by getting an account key.

This will send you an email to the address you have entered with a 5 digit code. When you have received the code via email, enter it into the form and press Verify.

If everything has gone well, the account should be created and you'll get a confirmation screen.

Get started by pressing the big blue button. You will be presented with your Flickr home screen.

Setting privacy

It is a personal decision on you protect your pictures, but typically I set up my Flickr account to default to private pictures and then I can choose to share just the ones I want. Before you get started, go to the camera icon on the far right of the toolbar and select Settings. Go through and set it up as you wish, but here are some examples of how I set it up...

Take some time to understand the settings and make your own choices, but this should be a decent place to start.

Uploading pictures

At the top right hand side there is Uploader button (shown in the ring below)

Click this to start uploading your pictures. You will be presented with a screen where you can drop pictures to be uploaded.

Drag and drop your pictures onto this window to select them for uploading. I have added 2 pictures as an example below.

Select the Add to albums and then create an new album in the dialog box

Enter a name for the album and press create. The pictures are linked to album but not yet uploaded.

We can now start the upload with the button in the top right hand corner.

Sharing your album

You now have created the album and added the pictures. Go to "You", "Albums" and select the album you just created. To get a sharing link, click on the Share icon (far left) and you will get a link to album.

Copy the link and then you can paste this as a hyperlink in an email and send to your friends and family to share the pictures.

When you are ready to send out another album, just repeat the upload process and go through these steps again.

Summary

Hopefully these instructions will have got you started sharing your pictures with Flickr...no we can get back to real fun of taking and processing the shots. Enjoy.

Picture Adjustment

Hi again. It’s been a while since I last posted but with finally becoming a Canadian citizen, Halloween and all the hockey game backlog of pictures I’ve been distracted for a while !

Anyway, I am finally all caught back up and wanted to write a post that I know some of you have been waiting for….my adjustment method. What I describe here works well for the hockey pictures but is quite specific to this category. For other types of scene, a lot of the general principles may be true but the specifics will be different. The primary rule is adjust until your eye tells you you are happy…this is the ultimate test….but using the tools can get you to a good place quite quickly.

My primary workflow for each picture is as follows…

• Crop and Straighten (I will cover this in more detail in another post)
• Adjust Exposure
• Adjust Blacks
• Adjust Shadows
• Adjust Noise Reduction (if required)

• Then repeat for all your selected pictures.

I’ll now walk through each of these, step by step.

Crop & Straighten

Click on the Crop Overlay tool and adjust the framing / straightening as required. I'll talk about this in more detail in a future post.

Adjust Exposure

Adjust the Exposure slide to get the general exposure correct. This is a really important step as often the pictures of the hockey are underexposed based upon cycling of the lights. This can be seen in the histogram where we are trying to move the right hand edge close to the upper edge of the window. We don't want to go right to the edge, but likely most of the way. This often moves the lower edge away from left hand side, which is limiting the black level.

Adjust Blacks

Next we adjust the Black level (the left hand edge of the histogram) by using the Black slider. This is similar to using the Contrast slider but only adjusts the dark levels. By adjusting the Exposure and the Black level we ensure that we use a full dynamic range for the picture. This makes the whites look white and the blacks look black.

Adjust Shadows

The faces of the players are really important to my pictures, but often come out too dark. By using the Shadows slider you can bring up the skin tones that are in shadow in the helmet, without impacting the overall picture too much. Care must be taken with this adjustment though as it will increase the visible noise levels. Adjust it until you find the right balance between making the face more visible and keeping the noise down.

Adjust Noise Reduction

Depending upon the conditions of the rink, the picture may be shown noise. This should be adjusted at this stage, but I will address this in more detail in a later post.

Seeing the end result

In Lightroom you can compare the before and after picture adjustments to see if you prefer the final version with changes that you have made...

Even these simple adjustments can make a big difference to end result output.

The key tool to look at to help to understand these adjustments is the histogram. If we compare the before and after histograms they look like this...

We have ensured that this is adjusted so that the light and dark areas of the picture are well adjusted. For hockey pictures we need to try and get the subject...the skater... adjusted correctly. This may mean that the highlights in other areas (e.g. the ice) get blown out and saturated, but this is not so important. Adjust for the skater and the picture tends to "look right".

This method gets faster the more you do it and with a little practice you can adjust a picture in about 30 seconds.

We'll talk about cropping and noise reduction soon, but it's good to get back to posting!

Post Process Flow

Having arrived at home with a memory card full of shots, it's now time for the follow up work to turn these into pictures that you are happy to share. Into the digital darkroom we go !

Flow Outline

• Load pictures onto computer
• Import them to photo editor / manager
• Select the good shots (reject the rest)
• Edit the good pictures
• Publish
• Clean up

Today I am going to give an overview of the process, but in another post I'll talk in much more detail about the actual editing stage.

Download the pictures

The first step is to get the pictures off the memory card into the computer. Since I am running in a Mac environment and want to manage all the picture locations myself, I use Apple's Image Capture to download the shots. This allows me to choose a folder, download and then wipe the card ready for next time. I usually create a folder that contains all of the original pictures (usually sorted by sub folders for each game), and in that team folder I also keep the Lightroom library file. This keeps the whole structure more portable if I want to move it from drive to drive as the referencing in the library file stays consistent with the picture locations.

Import

The next step is to import these into the photo editor / manager to create the association between the original picture and the library file. I import all the pictures into Lightroom and then select all the photos and tag them with the name of the opponent team. This helps later with sorting and particularly when you play multiple teams in the same day. I then create a working structure for each game. In Lightroom we use "Collections" to manage the pictures and there is usually a similar concept in other editors. I create a Collection Set for each game and them within the Set I have an "All pics" Collection. I drag all the imported pictures into this "All pics" and this becomes the location that I work from.

Sort

I then create an additional two Smart Collections that I used to automatically sort the pictures. I create one Smart Collection called "Gallery" and another called "Rejected" and I set up a rule set for each as follows...

By using the date and the opponent name I ensure that I am only looking at the shots from a particular game. The ones I want to keep (Gallery) are all tagged with a rating of 1 or above, all the rejected shots (Rejected) have a rating of zero. When we import the pictures, all of them are rated as zero and so initially all of your shots will show up in the Rejected collection. I then step through the pictures and give each of them a rating. In Lightroom this is simply achieved by pressing the rating number on the keyboard as you view each picture (e.g. "1" for a rating of one star). This moves all the rated pictures out of the Rejected collection and into the Gallery collection. When you have been though all the pictures you will have sort all the good from the rest. In a typical game I take 300-500 shots and I would expect to have 60-120 in the Gallery. This can be adjusted as you go through and edit, but it allows you to concentrate only on the good shots.

Edit

I then select the Gallery so I am only dealing with the better shots (in focus, etc.) , switch to the "Develop" module in Lightroom and then adjust the pictures. I'll describe this in more detail in a following post. As I go through and look in detail, I also sometimes remove pictures from the output by resetting their rating to zero. Having worked through all the pictures I now have a finished set edits ready to publish.

Publish

I then select all the pictures in my Gallery and Export to a new directory where I stored the edited version of the pictures. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor and so all my originals are preserved in my library, so this is the adjusted set of pictures that the rest of the world sees. I usually publish my shots in Flickr and use the very convenient Flickr Uploadier to take care of getting these up into the cloud. I then send the link to on-line gallery to my teams so that they can share and download the pictures that they want.

Clean Up

The final stage is to go back to the Collection Set of the game and delete all the pictures in the Rejected Gallery. In order to manage disk space, I want to use this process to delete the originals from my drive as well. I go to the Rejected Gallery, select all the pictures in in (cmd + A), then I delete all these pictures from the Collection and off of the disk (move to Trash) by pressing Option + cmd + Shift + Delete (on a Mac). This note from Adobe describes this trick in more detail. Having done this we have now reclaimed the disk space for yet more pictures !!

I hope you like this overview of my workflow...using this method I can usually process a games worth of pictures in approximately an hour. There are many ways to approach this and if you have other suggestions or questions, please leave me a comment.