Today’s found on the net article is by my friend Julieanne Kost. In it, she details shortcuts an techniques for getting the most out of Photoshop’s crop tools. Give it a read.
Rikk Flohr © 2017
I stumbled on this video tutorial on Fstoppers the other day and it wandered my mind till today when I said, yeah. 
(Thunder in the Snow – Badlands National Park – Focal Length 55 MM)
For, literally, decades, the ODOP (old duffers of photography) have been espousing a “”Zoom with your Feet conceit. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with your composition a little old-fashioned positioning can’t cure. While true to a point, this video spells it out quite nicely.
Give it a watch.
Rikk Flohr © 2017
Here’s a quick tutorial from the Lightroom Coffee Break series featuring Ben Warde.
Rikk Flohr
If you’ve ever looked for a definitive guide to a variety of social media sites’ aspect ratios and pixel dimensions for posting, Holy Crop! may have found an answer for you.
Here is a capture of my Facebook page. There are four differently cropped – differently sized images with which to contend. These can change at any time – both the size and the crop! Facebook isn’t the only place where this occurs. Instagram, LinkedIn. Twitter, and many others have unique requirements and evolve periodically to meet the needs of their social communities. It can be daunting to keep track of this moving target. Though daunting, it is important that you display your images in their best possible manner to your adoring public.
I stumbled upon a site recently named Sprout Social and they had a blog post that caught my eye.
Even better, they have a Google Doc that compliments their blog post with a tabbed spreadsheet that gives you more detail in cheat sheet form.
Always Up-To-Date Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet
Armed with these, you will always be able to crop to the appropriate opening shape and size your image appropriately for maximum quality. I recommend bookmarking both sites and using them to improve your photographs’ appearances on social media.
Rikk Flohr © 2017
Greetings all,
A month later than normal, I am announcing year seven of my Badlands Photography Workshop series. This year, well, it’s complicated. My ongoing work with Adobe complicates my workshop schedule this year. To that end, I will not be holding the annual May workshop for Spring Scenic topics. Then, there is my Iceland expedition. Iceland falls right in the middle of the Badlands Night Sky workshop normally held in September. This year, circumstances are going to require me to limit Badlands to a single winter workshop.
Complete information can be found at the Badlands Photography Workshop website.
Sign up sooner rather than later. The previous six editions of this workshop have sold out and I expect this one to do the same. Early signup pricing is available until 8/31/2017 but typically this workshop sells out by June 1st. Linger at your peril.
We would love to see you in the Badlands in December!
Rikk Flohr © 2017
One of the great things about applications on the web is that they can iterate faster than a mobile device application and much faster than a desktop application. That is why you often see advances moving more quickly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ™ for the web than you do in ‘for mobile’ and ‘for desktop’. For the bolder folks in the crowd, Adobe offers the ability to turn on Technology Previews where you can kick the tires on various features before they are released to the masses.
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to Lightroom for web. Go to http://lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe ID. All of your previously synced pictures will appear along with some other goodies. (1) if you click on the Lightroom icon in the upper left, you will see a menu with options appear. (2) Technology Previews appears on this list. Click it.
Here, you will find a list of available Technology Previews you can activate and test out in your mobile workflow. On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, Adobe made available a new web-based feature called Suggested Crop. Click on the box and then on Apply Changes. Now, when you invoke the edit command on an image in Lightroom for web, you will get the Suggested Crop feature.
Here’s a quick screen grab showing the location of the new tool in the web interface.
Zooming in, you can see that a group of suggested crops appear. Clicking on them will modify the existing crop on your image. Sometimes, more than one crop will be available at a particular aspect ratio so remember to click each button a couple of times. This is a new technology that is analyzing your image and attempting to give you aesthetically pleasing crops following classical rules while matching the aspect ratio you need. You can still crop as you have always done but now have this new tool as an alternative.
Because it is a work in progress, your feedback is very important. On the Technology Preview activation screen is a place to leave feedback. Please do so!
While Suggested Crop might not give you a better result than your careful tweaking and retweaking, it is worth considering for quick down-n-dirty crops to fit a specific ratio. Give it a try.
Rikk Flohr © 2016
Rikk Flohr © 2016
