Sometimes you can never tell it’s there and then other times, you look at an image on your blog and you think “Ewww, there’s a weird green or purple haze in this image!!”.   Chromatic aberration is VERY common in shots that include detailed tree branches in the background, small checkered shirt patterns and heavily detailed jewelry.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not great at understanding EXACTLY how lenses work but I do know this about Chromatic Aberration! :

- It happens often in HIGH CONTRAST situations and when you’re shooting wide open.

- Higher end lenses have less trouble with Chromatic aberration than starter lens but it DOES still exist with nice glass!

- Chromatic Aberration normally happens more often on the edges of the image. Most of the time the center of the image has less of an issue with this.

- Sometimes it is easy to spot and other times is isn’t.  The lower the resolution of an image, the more noticeable it is.  That is why it becomes most noticeable on blogs or on facebook but not when the high res file is open in photoshop or lightroom.

- You can avoid it by not shooting in high contrast situations.  Also, don’t shoot a zoomed out landscape shot at 1.4!  I know shooting wide open seems so cool because of the bokeh, but your image will suffer in other ways if it isn’t properly exposed.

- The “Technical” definition of Chromatic Aberration is this: Chromatic aberration is an optical phenomenon in which the camera lens is unable to focus the different wavelengths of light on the same plane in order to produce a correct image, resulting in a halo or fringe around objects.  This is especially noticeable in high contrast situations and when shooting at wide apertures. It should be noted that color fringes may also be caused by other factors such as lens flare or the camera’s sensitivity to the different wavelengths of light.

So is there a way to FIX this?! YES!! Hooray! There is!

Lightroom has a “Lens Corrections” tab and under that tab you can select “Color”.  Chromatic aberration usually shows up in the form of a green or purple fringe. You can “Defringe” by using the colored “Defringe” sliders.  I’ve included an example below! When I have a whole series of portraits that need some help with this, I’ll sync them all in Lightroom and will fix the chromatic aberration before editing everything else.

So here is BEFORE:

And here is AFTER:

This makes a huge difference in the overall image! If you have NEVER paid attention to this in your images, I have to apologize because it’s going to drive you crazy now! But at least you have a solution!! I hope this was helpful!!

Ps. Don’t judge me, there are definitely some trees with some glowing green branches in my last wedding post so I’m only human and I missed a few edits there:)  See what I mean? Only photogs would notice that but still, it’s there!! :

and I’d love to share a few tips with you in regards to getting email DONE… and I mean REALLY done… like, a totally clean inbox that is organized and up to date.  Please know that having a totally clean inbox only happens once in a blue moon for me. This isn’t a daily occurrence. This is what I try to remember when I’m overwhelmed with my inbox:  ”Having too many emails shows that your business is active and growing… is it a pain? Yes, but try to consider your emails as “growing” pains.  It’s just part of the job that has to be done in order to move forward.” I need to frame that and put it beside my desktop on days when the emails are coming in quicker than I can return them.  It’s hard to stay on top of these things but I have come up with a few little systems that seem to work.

1. Set aside a chunk of time for emails in the AM and PM and then don’t mess with your inbox throughout the day. If you leave Gmail up in the background, you’ll constantly see emails coming in and you’ll get derailed every time you see this: “Inbox (3)”.  Am I right or am I right? :)

2. Respond to client emails FIRST. They get priority. They are the ones you’re serving and they should come first. When I get a client email, I immediately label them as either:

CLIENTS : Wedding Inquiry

CLIENTS: Wedding BOOKED

CLIENTS: I’m Booked

CLIENTS: Too Expensive

This is super helpful when they return my email because I can see their labels and I know which emails I need to respond to first. After I respond, I click “Archive” and it stores the email in its’ proper folder. (Ps. I keep all emails, even for clients that don’t book)

3. Time Limits:  Set time limits. If you’re responding to an email from another photographer and it’s taking you an hour to answer 5 questions, that’s not the best use of your time. You’re actually losing money… uh-oh. It’s a GREAT thing to help out… but you have to be smart about it too. Blogging about FAQ’s is the FASTEST way to speed up those emails. When someone emails me about preparing images for their blogs, I send them the BLOGSTOMP post I did last year and that email is taken care of in 30 seconds. Think about it… if you have 30 emails in your inbox that need your attention and you spend just 3 minutes per email, it’s going to take you an hour and a half to get that done. Yikes! You could write a blog post or two in that time frame! I have a two minute rule. No email should take over two minutes…. and this next tip can help do stick to that rule…

4. Use templates. I’m not saying that you don’t need to be personal… you definitely do!! But if 3 brides email you this week and ask about what their timeline should look like, you shouldn’t be writing that timeline out every time. Start creating templates for the emails you’re sending on a regular basis.

5. Categorize! I have a category for EVERYTHING! Actually, I have categories and then sub categories. Here are some examples:

PERSONAL < New House, Taxes, Church, Friends, Purchases

CLIENTS < Wedding Inquiries, Weddings Booked, Weddings I’m Booked, Weddings Too Expensive, Albums, Kind Words

WORKSHOPS

COACHING

BUSINESS < Services, Purchases, ShootQ, Showit, Speaking

VENDORS

6. “Star” the emails that take extra attention or are time sensitive. In Gmail, you can star the important messages. So if I have an email from a client that requires me to do something outside of the inbox, I star it so that I can get it down quickly. For example, if a client says their plus site has a broken link, I’ll star that when it comes to my iPhone so that I can fix it as soon as I get on Gmail at my desktop.

7. Reply by DATE. When I start returning emails, I start at the bottom of my inbox so that those that have waited the longest get responded to first! In Gmail, I can see the dates very easily and most of the time, those dates serve as my markers for how much I can get done in the morning and the evening. So if it’s Feb 21st, I’ll make sure I repsond to all of the Feb 19th and some of the Feb 20th emails in the morning. The rest will wait until the evening.

8. Make your inbox CUTE. It really does help to have an inbox that is well branded… but maybe that’s just me because I’m obsessed with that stuff!

Then, the digital revolution, as I like to call it, took place.  Facebook became a main form of online communication not only for college students… but for EVERYONE.  Today, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are household names. Everyone is using them…… and so naturally, my business should use them as well.  I do the majority of my marketing on social media and it’s working. However, I have had to make some decisions about HOW I was going to share my images. Am I going to plaster a massive logo over ALL of my files that go up online just to make sure that no one steals them?! No way.  What better way to kill your sharing capabilities?! I want my SHARING to yield new fans and more bookings.  I want my clients to market FOR me…. and they do that when I make sharing EASY. I use PASS for my file sharing and it’s AMAZING. I’ve already posted about why I love it once before but I had to mention it again because the NEW PASS that will be released soon is pimped out with SHARING TOOLS!! Seriously! I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t just TRY it out. See if you like it and I guarantee it will change your workflow for the BETTER!  Just look at this sneak peek of the amazingness that is coming our way!!

Just the sleek look of the new interface makes me want to upload new events!!! Ps. See that bar to the side? Everything is SUPER Shareable! :)

Anyway, by sharing my digital files, I’m enabling my clients to promote me. By using PASS, I’m sharing my digital files and getting the BEST return possible from my shared images.  Here is what I have realized…. my images have been stolen before…. yes, it’s true and it’s sad. However, they were stolen WITH and WITHOUT watermarks.  Anyone with decent Photoshop knowledge can clone out a logo….. so is it REALLY worth it? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about the protection of our work…. but I AM saying that I see a lot of photographers being crippled because they won’t share their files freely. If your pricing model is product based then I understand why this wouldn’t work for you. For those of you that are service based…. you want to BOOK more… which means you need to MARKET more.  The BEST way to do this is to have your clients market FOR you. I accomplish this by allowing my clients to easily access to their digital files and giving them the permission share as much as they want.  So for me, Watermarking was a huge hinderance. Who wants a facebook cover image with a LOGO all over it? I have found that my clients USE their images on social media MORE when they are logo free… and that gives me more business in the long run.

Now, just to clarify, I DO have my logo on my FB album images…. but I don’t place the logo ON the actual image, I place it on a frame around the image so that my clients can easily crop it out if they want to. Some photographers REQUIRE their clients to keep the watermark on their profile and cover images and in my personal opinion, I think that is hindering them, rather than helping them grow. If Jasmine had told us after our wedding, “You can only post images with my logo on them”, I don’t think I would have appreciated that. The less rules, the better.  Sure, some clients will use an image and never give credit…. but most of the time, my clients always give me credit in one way or another because they appreciate their images and their freedom to share….. and when they SHARE… they are basically acting as mini “Katelyn James” billboards. :)

So to condense, here is why I’m PRO sharing and ANTI Watermarks:

1. Watermarks exist to protect images from being stolen, but with a little PS knowledge, anyone can remove a watermark…. so that scratches that idea.

2. Watermarks are used on Facebook to show future clients who took these lovely images. I understand this… I incorporate a watermark in my FB sharing, but my logo is not ON my images. I never want my clients to NOT use an image on their cover or profile because of my logo.

3. I don’t use watermarks on my blog anymore because they were a HUGE distraction from my images. I want my blog to resemble more of a “Wedding Blog” and you hardly ever see massive watermarks displayed on national wedding blog posts.

4. Not only were my watermarks a distraction on the blog, but because I used them on a white border around my images, they were increasing the file size of my images and slowing down my blog.

5. Pinterest…. I want my images to be more “Pinable” and I have noticed MORE pinning without the frame and logo. (Ps. Do you like “Pinning”? If so, you’ll love the new PASS… just saying:)

Here are some examples of how my clients are marketing for me:

To my brides and grooms that market FOR me… thank you for making my life easier!!!  Love you ALL!!!! And thank you Rebekah Hoyt for being the poster child for this post! :)

“Oh it’s ok that her face is dark, I’ll just brighten it up later with “Ying/Yang”…. that was one of TRA’s actions that I used to use on a regular basis. The sad thing about that thought process was that I didn’t realize what I was doing to myself.  I thought it was normal to just “fix” things in Photoshop.  Well, nowadays, I’m thinking much differently. My goal for that last 3 and a half years has been to NEVER need to take an image into Photoshop. If my image is only good if I doctor it up in Photoshop, then it isn’t a good image to begin with. That’s a bold statement but I think it’s true. For me, Photoshop and Actions were huge crutches that were keeping me from REALLY mastering LIGHT.

I’m not sure how it happened, but eventually I realized that my BEST images were the images that looked great SOOC.  Not only were these my best images, they were also the EASIEST to edit. I could tell when I had a great shoot because I would edit those suckers at lightening speed! You see, GREAT images don’t need hours of work… they need a pop here and a temperature adjustment there… but they don’t need makeovers in Photoshop.

Now let me say this… I know that SOME photographers have a bold and dramatic style to their images and they NEED photoshop and actions to help them get that look. There’s nothing wrong with that.  However, I do think there is something wrong with being DEPENDENT on photoshop to make your images look decent. If you’re in a place where you feel like you have to “SAVE” your images in Photoshop after every shoot…. then you don’t need to be reading a post about editing, you need to be learning technical shooting skills and understanding light.  I say this because if you edit your way through your image issues, you will NEVER improve as a photographer. I realized this early on and I’m thankful that I didn’t spend years trying to figure out what was wrong with my images.  The more I understood light, the less editing I had to do. Six months into my business, I was introduced to Lightroom.  It wasn’t love at first sight… it took a while for me to understand this program…. but after I got the hang of it…. I became a new photographer. Instead of trying to use a ton of actions, I started understanding how to EDIT MANUALLY.

Ok, so we’ve all heard of shooting manually right? Well, this is the same concept. Instead of allowing Photoshop to make a ton of baby adjustments automatically with the click of an action, I started to learn the nitty gritty of basic photo editing. For Example… I wanted my images to POP!! So I thought I HAD to use the “Snap it Up” action to get that magical look.  Turns out, the only thing that “Snap it up” does is adjust the tonal curves, increase the contrast and adds a little vibrance…. all of these things can easily be done in Lightroom.

I became VERY well acquainted with the editing bar in Lightroom. I started learning the difference between “Blacks” and “Darks”…. I started playing with split toning and highlight correction …and I  started to really GRASP the basics of editing.  THIS is when my style really started to emerge. My style became more cohesive because once I learned how to achieve the look I wanted manually, I just applied that same edit to everything I shot!! My editing was becoming easier and easier. It used to take 3-4 hours to edit an engagement session when I first started….. YIKES! That’s because I was taking EVERY image into photoshop and was trying to perfect it with actions. Now, I import into Lightroom4 and I’m done in less than an hour.

I wish I had an “easy” button for this…. but the truth is, learning how to edit well takes time and PRACTICE. It took at least a year for me to really get the hangout of it and I’m STILL learning new things!! So here’s a challenge. If you’re a photographer that only knows how to use actions, challenge yourself to replicate your actions in Lightroom.  It’s TOTALLY possible!! If you have actions that have given you your “style”, figure out what exactly they are doing to your images and you’ll have SUCH a greater understanding of the editing process!!!

Photographers always ask me how I edit my images to make them SHARP… and the truth is, if it isn’t SHARP straight out of the camera, it will NEVER be SHARP.  Shooting sharp, well lit images starts in-camera!  I challenge everything to fall in love with Lightroom or your manual editing software of choice!! I will change you for the better!!!

Here are some images that were edited only in Photoshop with actions in 2008. I didn’t really have “control” over my style because I didn’t understand the basics of editing yet. The only thing “consistent” about my style was that it was INCONSISTENT!

These are some recent images that really show the consistency of my editing style no matter the setting, season or lighting.  All of my images should have a cohesive “look” to them no matter what!

There will be more editing posts in the future but this was an introduction to the foundation of my editing. It started with a lot of PRACTICE and a lot of PATIENCE! Happy Tuesday everyone!

Brides normally love these shots, especially when you can make their details look like they just walked out of a fashion ad! So how do we do that?! STUDY THE ADS!! Not all, but A LOT of detail images are shot in a way that minimizes distraction and forces the viewer to pay attention to the subject. In my case, the subject of a detail shot may be a bouquet or necklace, etc. The best way I have found to minimize distraction is to crop out the eyes. Focus on creating a flattering jawline and then focusing on the subject. We naturally look to the EYES in an image FIRST THING. “Eyes” draw us in and we subconsciously look for them in order to tell if the image is in focus or not. So when you’re focusing on a necklace or bouquet and the EYES of your model are included in the shot, you’re taking away from your subject!! So here are some tips for accessory shots! :

1. Minimize Background Distractions. Try to have a CLEAN background when shooting details. In my opinion, a light, smooth background is best! Ex: A bride’s dress! That’s the EASIEST setup for a bouquet shot because the florals are going to “pop”!

2. Crop out Distractions you can’t get away from…. the BIGGEST distraction are the EYES! :

3. Focus directly ON the subject of the image. This sounds elementary but it’s a common mistake. Be sure that you’re focusing in on EXACTLY what you want to be the main focus! Ex below: I wanted to get a shot of Sara wearing her beautiful sapphire necklace from Dave!…

4. Take a secondary shot… especially if you’re a blogger! This is just how I think when I’m shooting! If I take a detail shot, I need to take another shot in that same vicinity to be able to blog two vertical shots side by side! I know, I’m type “a” when it comes to this stuff! But this really does help my blog posts flow more evenly! :