Glorius in the garden - new free preset.

Winter may seem like an odd time for me to be advocating getting outside to shoot, but winter sun (as any driver will tell you) can be more intense than spring and summer. It gives fantastic contrasts on frosty days particularly. This image has been processed with my new garden glory lightroom preset. It will enhance shadows and emphasise the natural greens and reds in your shot to make the most of the winter sunshine.

This is my garden I did not have to wander too far to get what I wanted, I'd love to see what anyone else comes up with & how the preset looks, please feel free to post links to your pictures in the comments section.

New year new preset

Not a fantastic photo but this is a shot from New Years day, I started the flickr 365 days project on boxing day and this is my SP. The violet doze preset is perfect for those lazy days shots and works on black & white conversions to add a little splash of colour. You can download the preset by clicking the title link, C+C welcome as always especially as this preset was exported on my mac and not the windows machine I had had to use for the others so please let me know if there are any compatibility issues.

Back to basics

Have you ever done something disasterous to your computer? Well, yesterday I managed to drop a cup of juice onto my macbook. I consider this fairly disasterous. Generally I do back up every month (only once a month though) everything important, I learned this the hard way from having to formatt the hard drive on my last, 8 month old, windows PC. Its something I continued on my ultra-reliable mac, what I did not account for was my own stupidity of course! How many times have I stressed at the kids for moving drinks close to my shiny white macbook while I am working, thousands probably. So it's the ultimate irony that I should be the one the ultimately kill it off. Currently its drying out and I'm hoping the sticky sugar in the juice hasn't done too much damage. I could not bring myself to follow the (very sensible but gut wrenching) suggestion of a fellow mac-addict to pour more water on it to rinse the sugar out off components.

So I find myself without any PS actions, and actually without lightroom at all so am having to shoot in JPEG again. That said sometimes its good to be unable to rely on LR to correct your mistakes, it's good practice to think better about what's through the lens before pushing the shutter release like I used to with a film camera. So here's my back to basics shot, anyone with a spare windows copy of LR is my new best friend.....