Keith Collins (6th Sept)

​On the 6 th September our guest speaker was Keith Collins who gave an interesting talk on Lightroom and Photoshop digital workflows. An accomplished speaker Keith has 45 years experience in photography with a range of interests from landscapes, wildlife through to portraits and weddings. He showed us some examples from his portfolio with some stunning images captured around the world.
 
He then took us through first the photographic equipment he uses and then moved on to the tools he uses for post production describing the hardware, software and ergonomics along with some useful reference material both in book form and on the internet.
Then followed an explanation on reading histograms and how altering the exposure affects the histogram and the image.
 
Keith then compared and contrasted the main differences between Photoshop and Lightroom software listing their individual strengths and weaknesses of the two and whilst there were good arguments for using one or the other Keith came to the conclusion that you probably need to use both. He then demonstrated how to edit an image of a rhinoceros in Lightroom with four clicks; setting the camera calibration, adjusting lens correction, white balance and sharpening. It was fascinating to see the subtle but effective differences these made to enhance the image.
 
After that we were taken through a Lightroom workflow on a relatively simply landscape before using masks and sharpening on a complex landscape of Paris. Again the subtle but very effective changes made substantial differences to the image.
 
During the evening we heard many tips and tricks that Keith passed to help either speed up the editing process or making it more effective. Finally Keith showed us some of his recent images with an eclectic mix of wildlife, landscape and portraits.
 
Our thanks to Keith for an entertaining and educational talk covering a wide range of images and explaining the techniques that can improve them using Photoshop and Lightroom.