Night Photography Blog — National Parks at Night

Tim Cooper

How I Got the Shot: Moon Over Alabama Hills

Moon Over Alabama Hills. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 lens, light painted with a Luxli Viola. Two stacked frames shot at 5 minutes, f/8, ISO 200 (foreground) and 10 seconds, f/8, ISO 6400 (sky).

The Location

Alabama Hills National Scenic Area encompasses a range of rock formations to the east of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. It’s a huge draw for people with cameras of all sorts. Television and movie productions—especially Westerns—have been filmed there since the 1920s. Photographers have been going there since landscapes were a thing to shoot. And night photographers (light painters in particular) love the rocky scenery and the very dark skies.

Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills. A great example of the area’s fantastical scenery. Canon EOS-1DS with a 16mm lens. 1/90, f/13, ISO 100.

The Moon

For many, the moon is an unwelcome addition to our night sky. Its presence makes nighttime landscapes look like day, overpowers the Milky Way and obscures all but the brightest stars. But while initially the moon may seem like a problem, it can also provide opportunities for other styles of night photography. In addition, embracing moonlight will expand your shooting time to more than just the one moonless week every month.

One aspect of shooting with the moon present is accepting you’ll have fewer stars in the sky. That’s OK. You can create star-filled skies later in the month, during a new moon. Brighter moonlit situations give us a chance to put more emphasis on the landscape instead of the sky.

Begin by choosing compelling subjects that you might photograph during the day. For example, I’ve always been fascinated by the metamorphic rock found throughout the Alabama Hills in the High Sierra. In this image I really wanted to emphasize both the texture and the gentle curves of these magnificent formations. Last month’s waxing gibbous moon provided exactly this opportunity.

The Ambient Exposure

My goal was to accentuate the foreground shapes and to have the moon render like a starburst. So first (as usual) I began by using ISO 6400 for a series of test shots. This allowed me to fine-tune my composition and to determine my base (ambient) exposure of 10 seconds at f/8.

This exposure was short enough for the moon to remain round and for the stars to render as dots rather than dashes (Figure 1). Also, using a 24mm wide-angle lens allowed me to create a starburst effect without having to stop down too much (the longer a lens is, the more you need to stop down to create the star effect).

In short, 10 seconds, f/8, ISO 6400 was a perfect exposure for the sky, stars and moon.

Figure 1. The relatively short exposure kept the moon round and the stars sharp. A longer exposure would have had the opposite affect: The moon would have become oblong and the stars would have begun to trail.

The Light Painting

Once the ambient exposure was established, I began looking at how the light was illuminating my foreground. The full moon over this small cliff face created the perfect backlighting to accentuate the curves and texture of the foreground rocks. However, it also put the entire cliff face into shadow.

To fix this problem I placed a tripod with a Luxli Viola light panel just off camera-right, about 30 yards in front of me. This placement provided texture-revealing sidelight on the cliff face and helped fill in the foreground shadow (Figure 2).

The next step was to balance the Viola with the moon. I began by setting the panel’s brightness to 25 percent. But … oops! That made the image look fake, as the exposure on the back wall was way too bright. I lowered the setting to 12 and shot again, which provided just the right amount of light to make the scene somewhat more believable.

Figure 2. The sidelight from the Luxli Viola brings out the texture in the cliff face.

The Color Temperature

The next problem to solve was the color. For most night photography (including moonlit scenes) I set my camera’s white balance to 3800 K. This renders the sky to my tastes. Remember though, white balance is quite subjective. Some folks like night skies to appear more blue, while others like a more neutral sky. There is no right or wrong. You should always consider white balance suggestions as a starting point.

Because I was using a camera white balance setting of 3800 K, I set my Luxli’s color temperature to 3800 K to match. After a couple of more test shots I realized that this setting made the added light a bit warmer than the moonlight that was kissing the foreground. Increasing the Luxli’s color temperature to 5500 K better matched the color of the moonlight, which made the whole scene appear a bit more natural.

The Final Frame

I had shot all my test frames with an ISO of 6400 to shorten the time between tests. But while ISO 6400 was great for the sky and testing, I wanted a higher-quality, lower-ISO exposure for my foreground rocks. For this I turned to the Six-Stop Rule.

The Six-Stop Rule is a shortcut to translate a short, high ISO test exposure into a longer, low ISO exposure. The rule is simple: The amount of seconds it takes to create a good exposure at ISO 6400 equals the number of minutes at ISO 100. For example, 10 seconds, f/8, ISO 6400 equals 10 minutes, f/8, ISO 100. Both of those exposures allow the same amount of light to hit the sensor.

In this case, I didn’t want to wait 10 minutes, so I used an equivalent exposure of 5 minutes, f/8, ISO 200. Using this exposure didn’t change anything about the lighting. Because both the moonlight and the Luxli are constant light sources, lowering the ISO and lengthening the shutter speed provided identical exposures where the light level looked exactly the same. The only difference, of course, was that the longer exposure showed movement in the stars and moon.

Putting it All Together

The final image. Moon Over Alabama Hills. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 lens, light painted with a Luxli Viola. Two stacked frames shot at 5 minutes, f/8, ISO 200 (foreground) and 10 seconds, f/8, ISO 6400 (sky).

Many times the final image comes together with advance knowledge of how you’ll proceed, while other times the creation process evolves during the process. In this case, a bit of both happened.

I knew I wanted to use the moon as the main light to accentuate the foreground rocks and also to create a moon star and keep the stars sharp. I achieved that through the initial ISO 6400 test images. During those tests, I realized that I needed to add some fill light to the back wall in shadow. So out came the Luxli light panel. Setting the light panel to the same color temperature as my camera produced a warmer light than the moon was providing, so I upped the K setting to 5500.

After lowering the ISO to create a higher-quality rendering of the rocks and wall, the last step was in Photoshop: A simple layer-and-mask blend of the foreground and background.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

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To Contrast or Complement: How to Use Color in Light Painting

Color and Color Photography

I’ve always thought that if you are going to be a color photographer, then you should understand color.

At least that’s what I thought after I learned about color. For the first several years of my photography career I was regrettably ignorant to the importance and impact of the colors we use in our images. I’ve come to find out this is not at all uncommon. Many photographers who produce color images are as equally unaware of color’s characteristics.

I can hear the naysayers already. What color? There is very little color at night. True. Sort of. While there is not an abundance of natural color at night, we do have the opportunity to add our own, with light painting. And we can do that with greater effect if we understand and use the concepts of how the color of light affects perception.

Color psychology

Whether we know it or not, color has a big impact on our lives. From the color of our house to the clothes we wear, color is a quiet indicator of who we are and what we like. You look great in that color, are you a Summer? I am a Winter.

We use it to help fit our mood, or even to enhance it. It may determine the car we drive off the lot or the image of ourselves we want to project. With this level of integration with our daily lives, it’s amazing we don’t give color a higher priority in our image-making processes. We tend to think the color that’s present (in the words of the kids these days) is what is.

pencils.jpg

There’s been barrels of ink written about how we respond emotionally to color, especially when it comes to marketing. We see orange as cheerful, red as exciting, green as peaceful and blue as trustworthy. While there may be grains of truth in this, our personal experiences, not to mention the context the color is being used, render these classifications as no more than points of interest when it comes to photography.

For example, blue may project “trustworthiness” in a logo, but that’s not the word that comes to mind when viewing a night sky. The green of the forest can be perceived as relaxing, but may not have the same effect when projected onto a night scene with a flashlight.

While I think color psychology is interesting, I believe its connection to photography is minimal. When you take a picture of an orange, your viewer is more likely to think of a citrus slice or juice rather than an active emotional state.

What I do believe is important for the photographer, however, is color dissonance and color harmony. These terms describe the effect of pairs or groupings of color.

Color Dissonance

Color dissonance can be loosely described as a color scheme that uses complementary colors, which are ones that are opposite of each other on the color wheel. In Figures 1 through 3 you can see the color wheel used for light (Additive Color Model). With this model, the primary colors are red, green and blue (RGB—sound familiar?); the respective secondary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow.

Figure 1. Additive color wheel.

Figure 2. Primary and secondary colors.

Figure 3. The complementary colors of yellow and blue.

When using complementary colors together, you are creating a color scheme that is punchy. It decreases color unity and increases color contrast.

Color Harmony

Color harmony can be loosely described as a color scheme that uses analogous colors. These are colors that are near to each other on the color wheel. Figure 4 shows the analogous colors of yellow, orange and red.

Figure 4. Analogous colors.

 

When using analogous colors together, you are creating a color scheme that is less punchy. It increases color unity and decreases color contrast.

Strategies for Using Color

You’ll hear that warm colors such as yellow, orange and red are more active, more exciting—and that cooler colors such purple, blue and green are somewhat calming, less active. I believe there is something to that. However, night photographers rarely think of changing the entire color cast of an image to project a feeling. What’s more likely is that we’ll find ourselves in either a warm-color or cool-color situation in the field. For example, we may be shooting in the warmer light of a city (Figure 5), or in the cooler conditions of a wilderness landscape where light pollution is not present (Figure 6).

Figure 5. The warmer colors of an urban environment. Washington, D.C. Nikon D700 with Nikon 35mm f/2 lens. 30 seconds, f/16, ISO 200.

Figure 6. Cooler colors found in the absence of artificial light. Glacier National Park. Nikon D4s with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 30 seconds, f/9, ISO 3200.

It’s within these common situations that we can begin to consider color, and to perhaps even create a color strategy. Sometimes we can affect the overall color dissonance or harmony, sometimes we can’t, but it’s good to know the effects of both approaches so that we can use them creatively when possible.

Figure 7 demonstrates the familiar contrast between the cool night sky and the warmth of artificial lights, and is a perfect example of how we don’t always have the ability to control the color contrast in the scene. If I had changed the white balance to try to change one color cast, that would have affected the other color cast too. In a scene like this, we are stuck with the naturally occurring color contrast.

Figure 7. Cool night sky with warm artificial lights. San Francisco. Canon EOS-1Ds with a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. 20 seconds, f/16, ISO 100.

Other situations, however, may provide us with more power to control the overall effect of color—in particular, when we are adding our own light to the scene.

For the image in Figure 8, I chose to light paint a pale blue truck with an unfiltered Coast HP5R flashlight. I shot this image on a full-moon night with the camera’s white balance set to 4000 K. The cooler white balance kept the sky looking more blue (a warmer white balance of Daylight/Direct Sun/5500 K would have rendered the sky somewhat colorless). This cooler white balance also influenced the color of the flashlight. Here, the HP5R (like many other LED flashlights) has a slight blue cast. The cooler white balance, then, has pushed the color of my flashlight even more blue. Couple that with the blue sky and you get classic color harmony.

Figure 8. Influencing the scene toward color harmony. Nelson Ghost Town, Nevada. Nikon D4 with a Nikon 35mm f/2 lens, light painted with a Coast HP5R flashlight. 4 minutes, f/9, ISO 100.

Compare Figures 7 and 8. In Figure 7 we are seeing color contrast (dissonance), and in Figure 8, color harmony. While looking at each, notice how your eye moves. The movement is more abrupt with color contrast and a bit less when there’s color harmony.

So when you consider the possible changes you can make to color in a scene, consider dissonance versus harmony. Simply put, do you want to create an image that’s visually active and has punch (more color contrast—dissonance) or an image that is tranquil (less contrast—color harmony)?

The trick is to decide where you want the viewer to focus. If the colors are really punchy, the viewer may pay more attention to the difference in color. If the colors are similar to one another, the imaginary line drawn between the colors may be less apparent. There is no right or wrong. It’s just a matter of how you want people to move through your photograph and where you want their focus to be. That decision can be directed by your personal style, or by the subject matter.

Let’s look at a couple of case studies.

Color Dissonance

Figure 9 is an image I made at Battery Spencer on our 2019 San Francisco workshop. It was an exciting night due to the dense fog rolling in from the sea. The fog was glowing with the dominant color of the city’s sodium vapor lights.

In most circumstances I would have lowered the Kelvin temperature on my camera to neutralize this heavy orange cast. In this case I decided to stick with a Direct Sun (5500 K) white balance setting to render the city light as it was. This gave the ambient scene an otherworldly sort of look.

Then I added in my light painting. With the camera’s white balance set to Direct Sun, I knew my Coast HP7R would render as neutral, tending toward blue. But I wanted more color dissonance—more action, more excitement created by color contrast. So I put a pale blue gel over the flashlight to push the color further toward blue.

The result? A blue spotlight creating a star through the orange fog that highlights a silhouette. Color contrast. Color dissonance.

Figure 9. Creating color contrast. San Francisco. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 lens, light painted with a Coast HP7R flashlight. 15 seconds, f/4, ISO 800.

Color Harmony

For the image in Figure 10, I went for the complete opposite: color unity. I made this at Grafton Ghost town during our Zion National Park workshop in 2016. I wanted to create a cool color harmony that would provoke a somewhat spooky feeling.

The landscape was being illuminated by a full moon. I set my white balance to 4000 K. Images made under a full moon can often look like they were shot in daylight, so lowering the white balance to 4000 K helps keep the impression of a night scene.

A setting of 4000 K renders my Coast HP5R only somewhat blue, and again I wanted more blue, to match the coolness of the ambient light. So I added a light blue gel to the front of the flashlight to increase the depth of blue, which helped retain color harmony throughout the image.

Figure 10. Creating color harmony. Grafton Ghost Town, Utah. Nikon D700 with a Nikon 24mm f/2.8 lens, light painted with a Coast HP5R flashlight. 1 minute, f/9, ISO 200.

Pulling it All Together

Color is an important feature in all of our imagery, day or night. While we don’t always have control over the color in a scene, given the opportunity, we should influence it to the best of our ability.

Here are the key considerations to choosing the color of your light painting in the field:

  1. White balance influences the overall color cast. This means it will affect all colors equally. Set the white balance to anchor the color of your ambient light (sky, fog, moonlight, etc.). This step should be done first, as it sets the stage for any color you may add into the scene.

  2. Consider the color of your flashlight or light panel and how your white balance will affect its color.

  3. Consider how you want your viewer to see the image. Should their eyes bounce back and forth between illuminated subjects (dissonance) or should they move gently through the image (harmony)?

  4. Alter the color of your light painting tool to affect either dissonance or harmony. In the case of a Luxli Cello or Viola, you can simply dial in the color temperature to contrast or unite the colors of the scene. If you are using a flashlight, first determine its actual color (see earlier blog posts on correcting the color of your flashlight), then alter the color of the light by using gels.

Wrapping Up

The next time you’re light painting, keep in mind the concepts of color contrast and color harmony. Then experiment with each to create different images with different kinds of impact. This exercise will create an expertise in applying these concepts to great affect, guaranteeing that you’ll level up your night photography.

We’d love to see what you do! Post your images in the comments, share on our Facebook page, or tag us (@nationalparksatnight) on Instagram.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

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Processing HDR Images for Urban Night Photography

While HDR is commonly associated with landscape photography, it can also be indispensable for low-light and night photography. From urban nightscapes to dimly lit interiors, opportunities abound for using this technique to overcome the limitations of cameras and create better photographs. As such, HDR extends the shooting hours and subject choices for the night photographer.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Casting Out Shadows: When HDR is the Right Choice for a Night Scene.” In it I described what HDR is, and I showed some examples of night photography problems that the technique can help you solve.

Now, in this video, I show how to process HDR night images by walking through two examples: an exterior photo at Bruges in Belgium and a low-light interior photo of Sagrada Família in Barcelona (which we will visit on our night photography tour this coming November).

Bruges, Belgium. Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Three images combined into an HDR in Adobe Lightroom.

Sagrada Família, Barcelona. Fujifulm X-T2. Three images combined into an HDR in Lightroom.

While walking through these two examples in the video, I reveal my secrets on editing images using Adobe Lightroom’s Merge to HDR feature. I discuss:

  • the definition of HDR

  • when you should use HDR at night

  • how to shoot for HDR at night

  • using Lightroom to process night HDR images

  • maximizing highlights and shadows without making the photo look false

  • and more!

You can see the video below or on the National Parks at Night YouTube channel. (Don’t forget to subscribe!)

Share Your Night HDR

Have you shot urban HDR at night, or are you now inspired to do so? We’d love to see your results! Feel free to share in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Cleaning the Clutter: How to Get Your Lightroom Catalog in Tiptop Shape

Clean and organized. Some people are and some people are, well, less so. When it comes to Adobe Lightroom however, we all benefit from a clean, well-organized catalog. In fact, cleaning up Lightroom is one of the most common topics we’re asked about on our workshops and in our one-on-one Tutoring sessions.

In this post, I will share three tips on decluttering this very important part of our digital lives.

Tip 1: Use Reject Flags to Remove Unwanted Images

Get rid of those files you’ll never use and do it quickly with Reject flags. Lightroom has the capacity to keep track of thousands and thousands of images. In fact, I’ve not heard of an upper usable limit, but I have noticed that when my catalog neared 50,000 images it started to slow down a bit. Cleaning out the dead weight couldn’t hurt, right?

Here’s a method that will help you sail through your images and quickly mark them for deletion:

  1. Open Lightroom and enter the Library Module.

  2. From the menu choose Photo > Auto Advance (Auto Advance is engaged when there is a check mark next to it). You can also do this by engaging your Caps Lock key.

  3. Find a folder that contains images you would like to cull. Click on the first image and then press your space bar to magnify the image to fill the screen (this puts you into Loupe view).

  4. Now, if you want to keep this image, simply hit the right arrow on the keyboard to advance to the next image. To mark the image as rejected, you can go up to the Menu and choose Photo >  Set Flag > Rejected (Figure 1), or press X. This will set the flag on the image as rejected, and because you have Auto Advance enabled, Lightroom will automatically advance to the next image!

Figure 1. Rejecting an image.

Once you are finished working through that folder, it’s time to actually delete the images:

  1. Return to the Grid mode by pressing G.

  2. The keyboard combination to Delete Rejected Photos on a Mac is Command + Delete, and on a PC is Control + Backspace. Click whichever is pertinent.

  3. Lightroom will ask you to confirm (Figure 2). Click Delete from Disc to permanently delete the images from your computer as well to remove them from your Lightroom Catalog.

Figure 2. Deleting flagged images from the catalog and disk.

Deleting images one at a time takes a lot of time. By using Reject flags and then the Delete Rejected Photos feature, you’ll save a ton of time, thus freeing up more time for you to sift through more images.

Further Tips

  • You can do this whole process of adding Reject flags to the images while working in the Grid view as well.

  • If you accidentally flag an image as rejected, simply click on the image again and press U to unflag it.

  • Conversely, pressing P will flag an image as simply “flagged.” Many of us think of this as a Pick flag. This can be an additional marker on your image along with stars and color labels.

Tip 2: Optimize Your Catalog

Your Lightroom catalog is a database. Databases, like your teeth, need maintenance and occasional care. If uncared for, like your teeth, they will no longer perform the job we ask of them without being painful to use.

Begin by backing up your catalog on a regular basis. This could be once per week or once every two weeks or so. Remember this backs up only your Lightroom Catalog (the database of the location of your images and all the metadata and edits you’ve performed on them). This does not back up your actual photographs. To ensure your images are backed up, you must take the separate step of backing up the drive(s) where your images are stored.

Here are the steps to determine when your catalog will be automatically backed up:

  1. From the menu on a Mac, choose Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings, or on a PC choose Edit > Catalog Settings.

  2. Click on the General tab.

  3. In the Backup section, choose your frequency preference in the dropdown menu (Figure 3). I choose “Every time Lightroom exits.” This setting gives me the option to back up or skip each time I close the program.

Figure 3. Setting backup preferences.

When I quit Lightroom, I see the dialog in Figure 4, which tells me the backup preference that I set earlier. Then it’s time to make some additional choices. Notice that I check both boxes outlined in red. Test Integrity will ensure my catalog is healthy, and Optimize Catalog will keep my catalog lean. This way, by taking the time to back up my catalog, I’m simultaneously repairing it and making it run more efficiently.

Figure 4. Backup options.

Further Tips

  • Both the Test Integrity and the Optimize options are sticky, which means once you check the boxes they will still be checked every time you back up, until you uncheck them. (And vice versa.) So if you check the boxes today and then back up, next week when you go to back up again, the boxes will already be checked for you. Awesome, right?

  • There is no need to have a zillion backups of your catalog. I recommend periodically going to the Backups folder and deleting older backups. I typically keep one or two. The Backups folder can be found by navigating to the General tab of Catalog Settings (directions above) and clicking the Show button (Figure 5). This will take you to the folder on your hard drive where your backups are stored. Enter the folder and delete any subfolders for older backups that you no longer want to keep.

Figure 5. Navigating to the location of your backups.

Tip 3: Organize by Using Smart Collections

I know, I know, the topic of organizing your Lightroom catalog could easily fill a small book. (Or it could even fill a 5.5-hour video dedicated to the Library and Develop modules 😎). For now, I’d like to show you just one of the myriad tools you can use to ensure that your images are always easy to find. That tool is Smart Collections.

The more information you put into an image, the easier it is to find. For example, all imported image files already contain EXIF data from your camera that lists aperture, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, lens model, etc. This embedded information makes it easy to search for, say, all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400. You could further narrow the results by searching for all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400 using a focal length of 14mm.

That is incredibly powerful. But EXIF is only one part of an image’s metadata. The color labels, stars and flags we add to help us organize our catalogs are also metadata. Develop settings we apply—such as Exposure, White Balance and Dehaze—are also recorded as metadata. The keywords we apply to images? Metadata.

So we start off with searchable metadata in the form of EXIF data from our camera. But we can also apply metadata after the images have been imported.

Again: The more information (data) we apply to an image, the easier it is to find. How so? Smart collections.

Think of a smart collection as a really smart, saved search. In the above example we wanted to search for all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400 using a focal length of 14mm. Great. We could do that with Library Filter. But if you did this through a smart collection, Lightroom would immediately find those images and gather them up in one location for you to view at any time. It doesn’t move your images. It just creates another “location” to view the images that meet those criteria, no matter how many different folders the images live in.

The smart collection doesn’t stop there, though. It continually monitors your whole catalog and updates the collection whenever a new image meets those same criteria (Nikon Z 6, ISO 6400, 14mm focal length). You don’t need to anything. The next time you import an image you shot with a Z 6 at ISO 6400 and 14mm, that image will automatically appear in that smart collection.

Creating a Smart Collection

The Collections panel sits just below your Folders panel in Lightroom’s Library module (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Creating a smart collection.

Here’s how to create a smart collection:

  1. Click on the plus sign in the upper right corner of the Smart Collection panel to reveal the actions shown in Figure 7.

  2. Choose Create Smart Collection. You will see the dialog that allows you to set the criteria the smart collection will search for (Figure 8).

  3. Start at the top by giving your new smart collection a name. (Ignore the Inside a Collection Set option for now.)

  4. Keep Match set to “all.”

  5. The large area on the bottom of the dialog contains the rules you will set up for the smart collection. Notice that by default the first rule is sets Rating as “is greater than or equal to.” Clicking on one of the dots to the right sets the star rating it will search for. So if you click the fourth dot, this smart collection will collect all of the images in your Library that are marked 4 stars or above.

  6. Click Create and you’ve just made your first smart collection!

Figure 7. Collection panel actions.

Figure 8. Creating a smart collection.

Putting Smart Collections to Practical Use

Now let’s make a smart collection that will help keep your catalog organized.

  1. Click the plus sign to create a new smart collection.

  2. Name this collection “Without Keywords.”

  3. Click the arrows next to Rating and instead choose Other Metadata > Keywords (Figure 9).

  4. Click the arrows next to “is greater or equal” and instead choose “are empty” (Figure 10).

  5. Click create.

Figure 9. Choosing a criterion for a smart collection.

Figure 10. Refining the options for a criterion.

Now you have a smart collection that shows every image that needs to have keywords applied. Click on any image, apply a keyword, and that image will automatically disappear from the smart collection. Why? Because now that the image has a keyword, it no longer fits the criterion.

Creating this particular smart collection is a great way to begin organizing your entire Library, because it can be very difficult to find images that lack keywords!

Smart collections are extremely powerful. As you can see from the screenshot in Figure 9 above, there are an enormous amount of criteria you can use to build your smart collections. And you are not limited to just one choice. By clicking on the plus sign to the right of your first rule, you can continue to add additional rules. As long Match is set to “all,” an image would need to meet all of the criteria to show up in the smart collection. Figure 11 shows a screenshot of the smart collection we talked about earlier (Nikon Z 6, ISO 6400, 14mm focal length).

Figure 11. A smart collection that collates all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 at ISO 6400 with a focal length of 14mm.

Spend some time thinking about how you want to find and organize your Library. Poke around in the choices for ideas for new collections. Before you know it you’ll be creating smart collections that will keep your Library perfectly organized!

Some Sample Smart Collections

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Make a collection of your favorite photos that are marked with 5 stars.

Make a collection of your favorite photos that are marked with 5 stars.

Make a collection that shows all of your images that don’t have stars.

How about one to show your favorite family photos?

Or your favorite vacation photos?

Further Tips

  • Organize your smart collections by creating collection sets. Think of these as folders to store your individual collections in.

  • In the Collections panel, collections appear in alphanumeric order from top to bottom with the collection sets coming first. If you want to have something appear at the top, use a space or underscore before the title to force Lightroom to move it up there.

  • You can edit a smart collection anytime by double-clicking on the gear icon that appears on your smart collection icon.

Wrapping Up

There you go, three tips to help you clean your Lightroom catalog! It might take some time and dedication to get this done, but the investment will pay off later when you’ll be running a lean, efficient database of images.

Do you have any of your own tips for how you like to clean up your Lightroom catalog? Share them in the comments below or on our Facebook page!

Want some help getting your Lightroom catalog organized? National Parks at Night offers one-on-one tutoring, so we can work with you remotely! See our Tutoring page for more information.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

When the Pen is Mightier: Using a Graphic Tablet For Spot-Editing

As I was working on an image the other day, I realized how much I depend on my Wacom tablet for post-processing. I also realized that I don’t often get the chance to mention this incredible tool when teaching workshops.

So I figured it was high time I share the joys of editing with this indispensable tool. Below I’ll talk a little about the advantages of a tablet when editing, and then show a video detailing how I configure mine to function best for the kind of photo work I do.

Graphic Tablets

A graphic tablet is an input device that replaces a mouse and consists of the tablet itself as well as a pen. They are also referred to as drawing tablets or pen tablets. Wacom is the brand that I use and is generally considered to be the gold standard of this niche.

A typical graphic tablet with its pen.

At the most basic level, the pen and tablet are used as a substitute for the relatively unwieldy mouse or track pad. Instead of working with an unergonomic mouse, you can use the more natural and ergonomic pen and tablet to click your clicks, dab at spots and draw your masks.

These devices are very popular with graphic designers who need to “draw” and “paint” on the computer. Imagine how difficult/impossible it would be to draw a realistic scene with a clumsy mouse. Now put a pencil in your hands. Feel the control? Ah, much easier.

When to Use a Graphic Tablet

For most of our processes in night photography (or photography in general), we don’t need the extreme level of control some of these tablets offer. But the natural feel of the pen does reduce hand strain and does make many of our tasks much easier. When I was recently working on a Death Valley image that needed a lot of spot removal, I was reminded of the convenience of my Wacom.

I’d been shooting on one of those nights when long-exposure noise was creeping into images. (The temperature had been fairly cool when I made the shot, so I didn’t turn on long exposure noise reduction for the series of 3-minute exposures. The night was, however, very dry. This is a phenomenon that I first heard about from Lance Keimig: In dry, desert-like environments, long exposure noise becomes visible at shorter exposures than usual at the same ambient temperature.)

In this example, the long exposure noise hadn’t completely ruined the image, but I definitely had to do a lot of spot removal to salvage the shot. Using the Wacom tablet and pen made my job much easier. Instead of fussing around from hot pixel to hot pixel with a mouse, trying to microadjust the position of the pointer, trying and missing and undoing and redoing ad nauseam, I was able to just pinpoint each spot with my tablet pen.

The image in question, before eediting the long exposure noise. Click to enlarge to see how many pixels need to be spotted out.

Final image with long exposure noise removed. Death Valley National Park. Nikon D4s with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm. Ten exposures at 3 minutes, f/4, ISO 320.

That’s one prime example of when a tablet makes my life easier. For basic image editing (moving the sliders about), I generally don’t use one, as I am fairly comfortable with the mouse and trackpad for those tasks. But the moment I need to perform serious spot removal, I plug in the Wacom and revel in its ease of use. I also use the tablet extensively when I’m working on creating masks for local adjustments in both Lightroom and Photoshop. Basically I use it anytime I imagine that a pen would be a more efficient tool than a brick … I mean, a mouse.

That being said, I know plenty of photographers who use the pen and tablet the whole time they are editing. They just find it all-around more comfortable.

Setting Yourself up for Success

Many models and varieties of tablets are available at different price points. Wacom’s most popular are the Intuos and the Intuos Pro lines. I prefer the Intuos Pro (Medium) for the extra size of the tablet for resting my wrist. It also has better pressure sensitivity for when that may be needed.

Wacom Intuos Pro.

A lot of folks find their first few attempts at working with the tablet to be somewhat frustrating. I know I did. The reason is that it is truly designed for extreme control. This means the pen has pressure sensitivity to regulate how hard you need to press to paint, draw or click. Also, a tablet has a fairly large active area (the surface that’s sensitive to the touch of the pen). In some cases this means you have to move your whole arm to get your cursor/pointer/tool from one corner of the display to another. That can seem like a lot of wasted movement for folks accustomed to nudging their mouse an inch to reach the far end of the screen.

Those aspects of pen and tablet are great for exerting precision strokes, but (I believe) are unnecessary for the average photographer. The folks at Wacom would cringe if they heard how I basically “dumb down” the whole setup for my editing. But, hey, it works for me!

In the following video, I’ll show how I set up my Wacom Intuos Pro. I won’t cover all of the myriad options the tablet offers, but rather just the ones that pertain to my way of working.

Wrapping Up

Using a tablet is a great way to gain comfort, precision and efficiency while editing images, in addition to making certain tasks (such as spot removal and local adjustments) much, much easier. I couldn’t live without mine.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT