Joe Reifer

Wolf Ridge, downstairs, San Francisco view — by Joe Reifer

I’ve just posted a gallery of night images from Wolf Ridge in Marin.

If you’re interested in taking a trip up to Wolf Ridge, check out Andy Frazer’s photography guide for this great location.

A Few Notes on Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom, and Exporting for the Web

Finding the images from Wolf Ridge in my Lightroom archive was easy — all of the shoots from Wolf Ridge have file and folder names with the same structure: wolfridge_YYYYMMDD_01.CR2. In the Grid View in Lightroom I selected Text — File Name — Starts With — wolf. Next I clicked on Attribute and selected a rating of 2 stars or better. I made a rough edit for the gallery by hitting the B key to add images for the gallery to a Quick Collection. After making the final selections, I proceeded to post-processing.

I was able to do post-processing for almost all of the images without bringing them into Photoshop. The image above was the only exception because I needed to do more complex tonal corrections for the sky and fog that required masking. When outputting for the web from Lightroom, I use a combination of capture sharpening in the Develop module (the Sharpening settings under Detail), and Output Sharpening under File — Export (typically set to Screen — Low).

A good starting place for capture sharpening with the 5D and 5D II is about 18% at .6 Radius, with Detail at 80 and Masking at 35. By zooming in to 100% view you can check the Detail and Masking settings by holding down the Option (Alt) key and dragging the sliders. The Masking control is really useful for night photography — just drag the slider until you only see star trails in the sky. This masks the areas of the sky with no detail — protecting you from enhancing any noise that may be present in the sky.

A really useful tool that can be added to the Export screen is the LR2 Mogrify Plugin. Mogrify allows you to add watermarks and borders, but the best part is Mogrify allows you to control the size of your exported JPG files. Use the Resize to Fit setting on the Export page to choose your pixel dimensions, and then set Compress to Fit in Mogrify to the maximum JPG size that works well for your website or blog. Mogrify is donationware — the free version has limits on batch processing.

I hope you enjoy the new gallery, and that these Lightroom tips are useful!