Wanted Lightroom Training in London/SE

Question

Does anyone know of any independent trainers in London or the SE who can give me some training for a day on Lightroom? Thanks for your help. Angus

Answer 1

Not alot of help to you guys, but I could have helped you both a little, however emigration to sunnier climates has stopped me.
Create a small project and shoot a couple of hundred shots. Try shooting photos where some thing needs to be removed, a dot of a bird in the sky - use the spot removal tools.
try dropping in gradients to change the colour of the sky, the hue and the exposure of the sky. if someones face is totally under exposed - bright sunny clouds behind their faces, use the local adjustment tool, set the exposure to +4.00 so you can see where you are drawing the mask over, then reduce the exposure setting or whatever tool you are wanting to use.
( Adobe may create a better method of allowing you to see where you have masked off in the future, then you will not need to set the exposure to +4 so you can see where you've masked...)
Try getting the match total exposures to work then get frustrated as it does not do as you'd hoped.
I learned so much by having to shoot a job and then having to use lightroom to develop my work, to select the best few, tag them with stars and coloured labels then remembering that blue 5 means great and use...
create collections of shots of differing colours.
Shoot a panorama and stack the images in a pile.
Its a learning curve and the best teacher is yourself. If someone had sat next to me and taught me at the speed I learnt I'd be very broke. Then I grasped some ideas and got paid for a wedding or two and needed lightroom to cut me previous work flow from a day processing to 2 hours, to get images ok for a contact sheet for the couple.
Time IS money, workflow is so essential to get right and Lightroom does allow it, but you need to put in the hours to make your own workflow.
Now, if I sat next to you and taught you, you'd be frustrated at the way I taught you, not because I'm good at lightroom, but because I use it my way, its inconsistent and keywords are seldom used until I output images to my website. Then I need it for Google to appreciate my work. People like images google likes keywords and tags.
Look at online tutorials, I still do and I always will as people use it differently to me and I'm always learning things.
Make a work flow and stick to it when you can, though dont be afraid to try new things and if they are better, use them, but when you need to get something done, use the tried and tested methods.
That was your lesson from he who was in South East London. Now in Cape Town. Mines a London Pride!
Better still have a browse. All these images were all taken on a beach, a preset was used to put tone curves, clarity and vibrance onto the shot. The preset was set up to create the black and white curves, ie amount of blues, reds, oranges etc. The white balance was set the same for the whole lot of images.
The vignetting was done with the pre processing, its still so much nicer than the post processing vignetting.
Yes, each image was tweaked a little, but the website was thrown together in 2 hours and thanks to LRmogrify as well. Great great program until Adobe finds fingers and puts in a water marking / labelling /borders part of Lightroom, ie a decent post processing for 90% of photographers who want to protect their work
b http://www.positivenegatives.co.za/kakope
none of these shots have been anywhere near photoshop
Good luck
Hamish