Absolutely f8 is my go-to.  But as I mentioned this was done hastily and I had it in shutter priority at this super high ISO because I was shooting somewhere prior to that that was very dark, and I had to move quickly.  It was just sloppy on my part to not realize what my settings were at.  ... View more

Thanks footprint.  Is there a way to do this similarly with the Lightroom sliders? ... View more

Any ideas on how to conquer the noise?  Is there a way to mask the noise reduction so as not to get rid of the detail? ... View more

Could you elaborate on how you did these things.... So I did two things here: One, neutralized the black point and removed the blue/purple cast in the low end, and two, Increased local contrast here and there with a soft brush. ... View more

Great! Thank you. ... View more

This is so great of you to help.  I have some questions.  Your original hard edged mask goes from the frame and just a bit beyond the shadow area, correct? In order to nudge the mask to the left you have to unlink it, correct? Then when you say, What I've done here is add a copy merged layer to the top of the stack, and set it to Screen. Then added a hide all layer mask, and run a soft white brush down the slightly darker bit It means you just hit command J from the original layer (named painting area copy in your screen), changed blending mode to screen and hid it behind a black mask? Also why do you unlink the mask to feather it? I'm not sure if it's proper to ask this on the same thread but would you use the same method to correct the bright light on this image? ... View more

How would you use the gradient tool to lighten the shadow?  I tried using it on a mask but couldn't get it to work. ... View more

Could you be more specific on this -- 'Then it's fairly straightforward to use soft masks and lighten blend mode to lift only the shadow parts, leaving the main area unaffected.' ... View more

I guess I forgot to mention I no longer have access to the painting and my options were very limited in shooting it in situ having to have a black cloth up to block reflections limiting the positioning of both of my lights.  Had I the opportunity to shoot it again I would have tried to position my lights to get the same amount of light in the corners despite reflections for some of the exposures and tried to blend them.  But even if I could do that I would still have the problem of that line that appears whenever I try to blend them.  I guess what I was trying to ask was a more specific way to try and address this line and problems blending in post.  Cropping the piece itself was also not an option. Any thoughts on specifically how to use the lighten blend mode and masks to accomplish brightening this area without getting a line?  Any tutorials out there that might help? I did use a curves adjustment layer on the shadows and that helped.  But I found it impossible to blend in the shadow from an overexposed image that had lighter shadows.  ... View more

This looks pretty good.  How did you get curves to get you this?  Did you do two separate adjustments? ... View more

Not only could I not unframe the piece but it was behind glass and hanging from strings.  It couldn't be moved except for the gentle sway it had going from hanging. Trust me, I also do this for a living and I tried everything.  I took some shots over exposing the piece and thus exposing the shadows correctly but any time I try to line them, or mask them, or anything I get a line.  I'm really stuck.  I can't crop the painting. Chuck how did you get that result with a curve adjustment layer?  ... View more

Hi Everyone, This is such a great topic.  I have been trying to create a working backup system for really long.  I have tried RAID 1 mirrored systems (both hardware and software based) but these don't make any sense as they are unreadable outside of the particular enclosure in that array.  If your enclosure dies or eventually becomes obsolete you are stuck until you buy that brand enclosure again. I wanted to find a solution where my working copies would be readable from any hard drive dock and that way once I filled up those two drives I can archive them both sending one off to a secure location while keeping one onsite for easy access.  I am running Mojave version 10.14.2. I bought a 4 bay thunderbolt 3 enclosure from OWC and use it as JBOD.  I put two 6tb hard drives in bay A and B for my current working files (C and D are used in the same way but with a different project).  I use a Master LR catalog for all my projects unless it gets too full and then I start a new one organized by date.  After many many failures I found FreeFileSync and tried just a regular sync between my A and B drives.  It worked great.  I didn't save it as a batch and I had some problems running it again and had to reformat my drives which was fine because I was just running tests.  The I saved it as a batch and ran Real Time Sync, and that worked perfect.  I also had the default refresh at 10 seconds but had forgotten to make it run in the background.  So when I did tests making changes to RAW files in Lightroom I got a notices all the time.  I'm thinking I can change it to not give me the alerts all the time and just run in the background.  I was afraid that the constant changes you are making to files in Lightroom might not work well with this but so far in my tests haven't had a problem.  Perhaps I will change the refresh time to be a little longer.  My other thought was to sync hard drive A and B but to exclude the LR catalog through the filter option.  I could then set my LR catalog to back up to the B drive upon closing.  But that would mean losing work I did during any given session if something happened. Also once a week or so I will connect a thunderbolt 3 dock and make a complete backup of the data on drives A and B and keep them offsite just in case so as to employ the 321 method.  Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on this setup?  I have heard that it's bad to run freeware because they could be monitoring your computer but couldn't that be the case with other softwares? It seems to me that a lot of people use FreeFileSync and have had a decent experience.  There are also many other softwares that you can pay for or use the free version of that do this same thing but I don't know anything about them.  I was also wondering why this post is still listed as 'unanswered'.  Don't Adobe experts monitor these forums and give advice?  Is it still unanswered because we are discussing third party softwares?  Won't they answer questions on how 3rd party softwares work with their software? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated and I'd love to know if Joefry99 is still using this system and with what results.  Thanks! ... View more

I did save the converted tif to a psd and that also retained the metadata information.  I did add the metadata in PS under file info, but when you look in Bridge after saving that, it doesn't show any metadata.  I'm can share the file if you'd like to see it but it is really big.  ... View more

Once I save it as a tif I see the metadata that was added in LR.  From then on the copyright metadata appears. ... View more

So I saved the file as a tif with layers and it showed all the metadata info. Can I ask a stupid question?  What is the difference between a layered tiff's and a psd with layers? I then resaved as a psd and my metadata info appeared?  Do I lose any of the properties of a psd file when I save as tiff and then resave as psd?  If you see the image icon in bridge as a psd icon and not a thumbnail of the actual image is there a problem or is this normal?  the layered tiff also appeared as the tif icon instead of a thumbnail of the image. ... View more

I'm actually just trying to add in my copyright information. ... View more

One of the psd files was created as a file in LR that was edited in PS by opening from LR directly into PS.  The other was created in PS. I have cleared the cache for this folder and reset preferences without any success.  When I try to do anything to the metadata I get a 'the property cannot be modified' message ... View more

The psd files are located in a separate folder containing only psd files ... View more

I understand that is what Bridge is for but in this particular case, the pencils are missing and the option to add my metadata template or edit any metadata are grayed out.  It is available with all other files.  But not the PSD files. ... View more

So then I gather it's fine to delete the original catalog and just keep the '-1' updated version.  If this is the case, can you then rename the catalog you keep (with the '-1'), to the original name of the catalog without the '-1'? ... View more

Ok, so my apologies for referring to them as backups.  They must be some kind of upgrade.  They make my folder look like a mess, and if I click on the wrong one and make edits they aren't all in the same place.  How do I fix this?  How do I merge to make one master catalog?  AND how can I set the preferences so that the most recent catalog opens every time. ... View more

I don't think you understood me.  I'm not trying to eliminate the backups process or put it on a different disk.  The problem is that they all show up in the same LR folder with a very strange naming convention like '-1' or '-1.2' etc.  It makes it difficult to see which one is the catalog you should click on to open.  I'm just trying to clean it up so it's obvious which catalog to click on. ... View more