So I recently re-installed Windows on my computer. I also recently posted that Mozy didn\’t appear to recognize my external hard drive as already being backed up after this re-install.

It turns out that there isn’t a problem after all… When I initially re-installed the computer and reloaded Mozy Home, it didn’t seem to recognize that there was already 300+gb of data backed up. The data was there; I could see it in the restore window. But it scanned my external hard drive and, I thought, started uploading all 300gb of data all over again. That would have taken forever!

A day later and partially through that initial re-upload, it magically sorted itself out. It uploaded some new data (~25gb of pictures) and then reported that it was done and all 350gb of data are safely backed up on the server. I need to look through the restore area over the weekend and check that everything is actually there and in one piece… but it seems for the moment like there isn’t a problem after all.

So, if you re-install Windows and keep files at the same location, Mozy will (hopefully) recognize that they are backed up and not send them all to the server again.

Maybe I did something wrong. But I don’t think so.  I’ve been using Mozy since the end of July, and this past week I’ve figured out one pretty significant problem with the system. When I re-installed Windows, I had to complete a new initial upload.

From time to time, I find it helps to re-install Windows, clean up the computer, and start from scratch. This gets rid of programs that have been partially uninstalled and left digital litter all over your registry. Although there’s software to try to do this type of clean up, I don’t think anything quite stands up to starting from a fresh slate. Keep reading…

Here we’ve got the same, old underexposed image. After one more post, we just might be done with it for good.

But I felt that to really see the unique aspects of each brightening tool in Lightroom, we should work with the same image throughout. If you jumped in here and you want to go back and read through the entire tutorial, start with the front page: Three Ways to Brighten Images in Lightroom: Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness.

By the end of this tutorial, though, one thing is clear: each brightening tool has advantages and each one has drawbacks. In some cases, a little tweak from one slider will yield a great image. But if your image is a little more underexposed (like this one), you’ll probably get the best results from a combination of the three tools.

Keep reading…

My old student and partner over at Olinda Gibbons Photography is starting a photography program at Kean University this fall. For some reason unknown to me, the program requires her to start with a film camera. Seems strange to me, but whatever. They’re relatively cheap on eBay, so I picked up what was advertised as a Canon K2, although I think the official names are the Canon EOS 300 or the Canon Rebel 2000.

The camera bodies were dirt cheap on eBay ($10-20), but I opted for a slightly more expensive auction (~$50) that came with a kind of wide/standard zoom lens and a battery grip that adapted the camera to use AA batteries. I also thought that this would be a great option, because I was under the impression that it would use the same lenses as the ones I have for my Canon t1i. They’re both in the EOS family, right? Kind of… Keep reading…

If you’ve been following along with our tutorial about brightening images in Lightroom, you may no longer think this is a nice picture. You may be sick and tired of looking at it. Well… too bad!

So far, we’ve looked at how the Exposure slider and the Fill Light settings can brighten an image in Lightroom. The final tool to look at is Brightness. So let’s take a look at a few examples and then see what we can deduce about Brightness.

You can download the the original image in DNG format if you’d like to play along.

Keep reading…

We’ve got a decent image here. Nice posing and facial expressions. I love the two guys clasping hands on the right-hand side.

There’s just one problem. The picture is a tad dark. Sure could use a little fill light. Hey, wait a minute… doesn’t Lightroom have a setting called “Fill Light”? Wonder if that would do.

Using this image as an example (download the original to play along), we’ll take a look at how the Fill Light setting operates and what makes it different from the Exposure slider and the Brightness setting.

First, let’s look at a few example settings. Then, let’s think about what general points we can derive from them about using the Fill Light tool. Keep reading…

This picture is nice, but we’ve got a little problem. It’s a tad dark. Not severely underexposed, but the curtains are thoroughly blacked out and the subjects are a little underexposed – maybe one to two stops. How do we fix it?

The first tool we’ll look at is the Exposure slider. You can download the original image if you’d like to play along. Also, check the table of contents of this tutorial for links to the other tools that you can use to brighten an image.

First, let’s walk through a couple example settings and see what happens. Then, we’ll think a little bit about what makes the Exposure slider a unique tool distinct from Fill Light and Brightness. Keep reading…

It happens to the best of us. You snap a bunch of pictures, you take them home and put them on your computer, and you notice that they’re all a tad… dark. Doh!

Now many people would just upload them to Facebook or Flickr anyway. That’s just the way it is… right? Nope! This is one of the simplest, but probably the most important, “retouching” that you can do with image processing software like Adobe Lightroom. There are six settings that you can adjust which together Lightroom calls “Basic Tone,” and three of these (Exposure, Fill Light, and Brightness) all go about brightening an image in slightly different ways. Keep reading…

In digital photography, clipping means that a pixel has no light/color information – it’s either pure white or pure black. In the case of black clipping, it means that a pixel is pure black.

The picture to the left shows an image in Adobe Lightroom with the clipping indicators on. All of the blue areas (mostly black curtains in the background, where very little light came back to the camera) have been clipped, and they’re simply black pixels. Keep reading…

The basic idea of tethering is that you hook your camera up to a computer and the computer becomes involved in the image capturing process. There are two ways that the computer might be involved: storing the images and controlling the capture.

The simplest use of tethering is to immediately download the pictures you take onto your computer. Normally, images are stored on an SD card (or similar storage device) in your camera. You can see them on the tiny LCD screen, but if you want to preview a larger version of the image you’ll have to pop the card out, import the pictures to your computer, and then open them up. This can be time consuming. Tethering cuts out the middle man, immediately downloading the image to your computer. More to come on how to set this up, but with Lightroom 3 it is insanely simple. Keep reading…