Creative Cloud’s ACR has all kinds of cool features; we used the interactive histogram to fix this photos’s exposure.

If you have Adobe Photoshop, you already have a great RAW converter on your hands in the form of Adobe Camera Raw. Because it maintains feature parity with Lightroom, its new tools keep piling up. But because its interface hasn’t had an overhaul in a long time, you may not know a lot of them are there, and even if you do, you may have some trouble locating them.

Getting familiar with the intricacies of ACR can be especially important if you don’t like the RAW software that came with your camera (or if it didn’t come with any). And it can be even more important if you don’t use an application like Lightroom, Phase One Capture One Pro/Express, or Apple Aperture to organize and process your RAW files. So follow along to make sure you’re getting the most out of Photoshop CC’s version of this stalwart converter. Even if you use it all the time, you’ll likely pick up something helpful.

Tip 1

If you double-click on a RAW file in Bridge, the program will, by default, run ACR within Photoshop. To avoid opening that app if it isn’t necessary (or tying it up if you need to work on another image), run ACR through Bridge. Go to Bridge’s Preferences, then check the box for Double-Click Edits Camera Raw Settings in Bridge. Click OK. If you prefer to open RAW files in Bridge only on demand, you can highlight your file or files and then type Ctrl (Command) + R.

Tip 2

In Creative Cloud, you’ll no longer find resolution options under the Crop tool. Instead—and even better—you can create custom presets for output. Directly below your image you’ll see a summary of the settings by which your image will be processed when you open it or save it. Click on these, your Workflow Options, to adjust.** To make a preset for web sharing, for example, set your Color Space to sRGB, and choose an appropriately small Image Size.** You can adjust Output Sharpening here, too. When back in ACR, right-click or Ctrl+click on the Workflow Options to choose the preset you need.

Print Preview: Now you can soft proof via ACR. In Workflow Options, set a paper profile and intent under Color Space.

Tip 3

One of ACR’s fun (and useful) features in CC is the interactive histogram. Instead of guessing which slider represents which range of tones, you can just click and drag on the histogram itself. Grab the midtones and drag them right to brighten your image; its respective slider will move accordingly. If necessary, do the same with Shadows, Highlights, Whites, and Blacks.

Tip 4

Spot removal was never one of Camera Raw’s strong suits—if you had something long, like a telephone wire, to remove, you had to keep adding spots. But now you can paint on spot removal. Type B to access the tool, or just find it in the toolbar. Use the left and right bracket keys to shrink or expand your brush to a size slightly larger than what you want to remove, and paint the offending area out. Note that the tool’s options now include Feather; use this slider to fine-tune your brush edge. Type B again to exit the tool.

Tip 5

To reduce color noise in a new way, head to the Detail panel. Zoom in to 100%. After you make your adjustments for Luminance and Color noise reduction, minimize the colored patchiness that sometimes occurs in areas where there should be smooth tone. Move the new Color Smoothness slider to the right. If it desaturates too much, pull it back to the left until the effect is just barely noticeable.

Tip 6

The Radial Filter is a quick way to focus an adjustment on a specific circular or oval-shaped area. This can be useful when you want to add a vignette but don’t want it centered, or as a shortcut when you don’t need to paint on your selective adjustment. Get it by typing J. Use the crosshairs to draw a circle around the area you want to affect, and move the central red dot to reposition if necessary. Adjust your feathering (or make any other adjustment you’d like), and choose whether you want the Effect to happen inside or outside the circle.

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We’ve been hearing rumors – and seeing demos – of Lightroom‘s mobile version for a while now, and we are very happy that its first iteration has been released. WIth it, you can sync your photos between your desktop computer and iPad, make edits offline, and share via social media. There’s also an online gallery that will let you display those same collections (but not edit them) from any computer connected to the Internet.

This is definitely an early release. At press time, it’s iPad-only, which means iPhone and Android users are out of luck. And features like star ratings have not yet been integrated (you can flag your favorites though). Still, setting it up is simple and seamless, and in its first version it is already incredibly useful.

How much does it cost? If you’re signed up for the Creative Cloud, unlimited synching is included, whether you’re a member of the Photoshop Photography Program or have one of the other three pricier complete plans. (Note that the Photography Program, which at press time costs $9.99/month and includes only Photoshop and Lightroom, is set to expire on May 31, 2014. But it’s been extended before, and we’re hoping Adobe will extend it again.) Have a normal Lightroom license? You’ll have to sign up for CC if you want the use of Lightroom mobile. For photographers with iPads, we think it is completely worth it.

Here are the basics to get started using Lightroom mobile, and a tour of its best features. -Debbie Grossman

Step 1

Set it up. This is just as easy as you’d hope it would be. Make sure to download the latest version of Lightroom 5 for your computer, and download the Lightroom mobile app from Apple’s app store. On your computer’s LR, click on the identity plate in the top left corner to sign in. Then enter your Creative Cloud account credentials. Open the app on your ipad and do the same thing.

Step 2

Now sync your photos. Lightroom mobile syncs by collection, so you’ve got to create a new collection for every group of images you want to see on your iPad, or choose to sync collections that you’ve already made. If all of your stuff is organized into folders, note that creating a collection from a whole folder is easy and fast—all you need to do is drag the folder down to the Collections panel to create one that contains everything the folder does. Next to the collection on the far left, you’ll now see a little checkbox. Click it to sync. You’ll see a small sync symbol appear to indicate that the folder is available in LR mobile. Then open the app to see your collections appear.

Step 3

The nice thing about syncing is that it goes two ways. You can see photos you add on your computer on your iPad, and iPad photos on your computer. To pull photos from your camera roll into a collection, tap the plus arrow in the top-right corner of the main iPad screen, and tap OK. Then tap the ellipses at the bottom of the new collection’s thumbnail to see more options, and tap Enable Auto Import. You can also manually add images from your camera roll. Auto camera roll upload will likely be far more useful when there’s an iPhone app (or when the iPad’s camera gets better!). For now, if you have Photo Stream set up, you can send iPhone images from there to your camera roll and then get them into Lightroom mobile.

Step 4

Adobe tells us that star ratings are imminent (they plan to update the app as frequently as possible with new features), but until then, you can sort and choose your favorites by flagging. View your image full screen, or choose filmstrip view from the menu at the bottom. Then swipe up or down on your image to flag it as a pick or a reject, or to unflag it altogether. Tap the metadata in the top left to see various image attributes. When you’re done, it the arrow in the top left to go back to the main menu.

Step 5

The ability to edit on the go may be the best part about Lightroom mobile (though of course you’ll want to check color when you’re back at a color managed workspace). To see your picked images, tap the down arrow under the folder name in the top center of the screen. Then choose the photo you want to address, and tap the adjustments icon. There’s a gray “dropper” under WHite Balance, or you can use the usual temperature and tint sliders. All of the adjustments of the Basic panel are accessible, including Clarity and Vibrance. You can also get to all of Lightroom’s built-in processing presets. (Still missing: the ability to use your own favorite presets or do processing-heavy tasks like retouching or distortion fixes.)

Step 6

The ability to share makes the app most useful, particularly for photographers who prefer to give the royal treatment to even their Instagrams. When you get something you like, tap the share button in the top right corner. For now, you can only go to services native to the iOS, such as Facebook. To share to Instagram, first save to your camera roll. You can also, of course, send a (non-full-res) image by email or, if it’s set up, by iMessage.

Get the rest of the details on the official Adobe page

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Lélia Valduga

Photo editing continually evolves, and these days it is changing faster than ever. Back when Adobe Photoshop’s traditional editing software was the best primary option for photographers, companies such as onOne came along with plug-ins that used Photoshop’s architecture to help users achieve quicker (and often better) results. Soon onOne began running its own algorithms within Photoshop. When Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom began accepting plug-ins, onOne developed them to work there, as well.

Now, with the advent of quick, visual, mostly slider-based editing in mobile apps and even in RAW conversion, users have become accustomed to—and sometimes prefer—a mode of editing that previews what they’re going to get and helps them achieve it fast.

The latest onOne Perfect Photo Suite, version 8, does all that. When you run it as a standalone, it now has browsing capabilities to help you find your images and a new Perfect Enhance module to help you do basic corrections. Yes—it works as a plug-in, too, and still does things that Photoshop, Aperture, and Lightroom can’t. But here’s what your workflow might look like if you abandoned your editor altogether and worked only within this program that is now a full-fledged editor in its own right.

Step 1

Start by opening the standalone version of the suite to access all its modules. (If you open via Photoshop, redundant modules, like Browse and Layers, are inaccessible.) Find the image you want, then double-click it to begin working on it.

Step 2

Perfect Enhance is new in this version, and allows you to make basic corrections to the image as a whole. Click on Enhance in the top-right part of the screen. This will bring up a menu of options for the file you’re editing. Set your color space, choose to edit a copy, and pick a layered file type in case you want to work on the image later in another program. Crop, then choose from the presets on the left or use the tools on the right to do basic tonal corrections.

Set File Preferences
You can work on your original, but it’s a safer bet to do your editing on a copy. Note that you can also set color space via the app’s preferences.

Step 3

Click on the Layers module. You’ll see the Enhance adjustments you just made appear on their own layer. The sky could use more drama. We’ll add it using another Enhance layer, so head back to Enhance, lower the image’s overall brightness for a more dramatic sky, and click back on Layers. This will create a second Enhance layer on top of your first. Grab the Masking Bug from the toolbar on the left, and click on your image to add a mask. Use the pulldown menu at the top of the screen to switch from Reflected to Gradient, and position it so you see your darkened sky and reveal the lighter ground.

Step 4

If you like your work, hit the Merge Layers button to combine your masked layer with the one below. Then head over to the Effects module to really change the look of your image. You’ll find lots of filters and presets, all available for preview on the left of the screen, with finer adjustments available on the right. Try adding even more cloud action. Select the Texturizer filter, then choose Category: Natural, and Texture: Clouds 2. There’s a Masking Bug here too, so use it with the reflected gradient to apply the cloud texture to only the sky and water.

Layer Your Effects
Because effects can be applied as layers, you can add masks, using the Masking Bug, to control where in your image they appear.

Step 5

The Suite also contains a black-and-white conversion engine. To see how your image would look if it were monochrome, click on the B&W module. The “Over a Baril” effect is surprisingly beautiful for something so processed. If you’re not sure you want to keep it, click back to Layers—your b&w conversion will be on its own layer. You can save it and turn it off when it’s not the look you’re going for.

Final Step

Perfect Photo Suite 8 contains a module that is useful even for photographers who may never need the rest of the suite—Perfect Resize. Use it when you really need to jack up the resolution of a file; it allows for finer control than resizing in an image editor alone. Start by choosing a preset on the left, then adjust accordingly on the right. When you’re all set, head back to Layers, and hit Save to preserve your work.

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For years Maureen Drennan has investigated what it means to live a life removed. Whether in her study of the pot farmers in the fenced off mini-plantations of Lake County, CA, her investigations of the ice-fishing communities that develop in the harsh winters of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, or, in her most recent body of work, of the people who live at the mercy of the waters that surround Broad Channel, Queens, the photographer has demonstrated a sustained interest in isolation and vulnerability.

When her husband found himself in the grip of severe depression, Drennan found those themes inside her home and her marriage. So she did what came naturally; she photographed.

“The Sea That Surrounds Us” was made beginning in 2010; the last picture in the series, taken after Paul had emerged from his depression and their marriage had emerged from its repercussions, is from last year. The work consists of portraits of Paul and landscapes made on Block Island, Rhode Island. Drennan told me that when she was seven years old and her parents were separated, she and her father lived for a year there. “It was a very lonely time,” Drennan says. “The windblown landscape is very beautiful, and also watching the dissolution of my parents marriage was sad to see.” When her own marriage was in turmoil, she returned to the place to photograph.

In this series, the landscapes work both as self-portraits and as ruminations on isolation and distance. As a child, Drennan was shocked at the difference between the summer vacations she had spent with her family on the island and the place, semi-deserted and lonely, during the off season. She says, “Block Island is like a stand-in for me feeling isolated, feeling cut off, feeling like I could not understand what Paul was going through. And then watching him come out of the depression was like watching a season change. It was miraculous to see the return of this person who was so totally lost.”

Drennan is grateful, too, for her husband’s openness to the gaze of her camera during such a challenging time. His trust in her is obvious in the pictures; the intimacy of making them together was one of the things that got them both through. Drennan notes that Paul, an artist himself, understood the necessity for her to use photography to come to grips with what they were going through together. “Where words failed us,” she says, “the pictures filled in the blanks.”

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Dan Bracaglia captured Jim Testa, music critic for New Jersey paper _The Star Ledger, for a series on the local music scene shot for Bracaglia’s own site, TheLondonBroil.com._

Sometimes, when you first bring an image into your editor, it’s hard to know what to do—especially when it needs lots of work. There are many ways to proceed, but we’ve found it best to start with the big, quick adjustments and progress to the finer ones.

Fixing issues such as low contrast and bad color casts can go a long way, and once those are finished, it’s easier to judge the amount of saturation you’ll need to add or subtract (if any) and whether a crop is in order. Then it’s time for any necessary retouching and other touch-up work. Finally, when all of that’s accomplished, you can sharpen.

These instructions use Adobe Photoshop CC, but tools for these fixes are available in most of the more serious image-editing programs, even if their interfaces will appear slightly different. It’s useful to note that when doing a RAW conversion, tools for fixing the same issues are also available, and it’s a good idea to proceed in the same general order.

No matter what kind of image you’re working on, these tips will help get you started.

Step 1

Whenever you open an image in Photoshop, duplicate your Background layer first. This preserves the original (for reference and other purposes). Next make brightness and contrast adjustments. Create a Levels Adjustment Layer, then slide the white triangle to the left to set a white point and the black slider to the right to set a black point. Generally, place the triangles where the histogram begins or ends. Finally, move the middle slider left to brighten.

Step 2

Adding contrast helps, but doing so makes it clearer what a strong yellow (and slight magenta) color cast this photo has. Make a Curves Adjustment Layer, then use the pulldown menu to select the Blue Channel. Drag the blue curve up to add more blue to the image, thus reducing the overabundance of its opposite color, yellow. Then do the same for the Green Channel to tone down its opposite, magenta. The result is more neutral.

**Add Midtone Contrast **
After adjusting color, select RGB, then add midtone contrast by creating a subtle S-curve toward the lower center of the graph.

Step 3

To add more excitement to this photo, create a Vibrance Adjustment Layer. Then crank it up. The beauty of Vibrance for portraits is that you can add a lot without ruining skintones or making the picture look too unnatural. Try moving the Saturation slider for comparison’s sake—note that your image can quickly verge on the garish.

Step 4

To see what your image would look like with less distortion, click on your Background Copy Layer to select it, and go to Filter > Lens Correction. (You won’t see the result of your adjustment layers in this filter’s preview.) Since the portrait subject is in the sweet spot of this lens, the distortion in this shot actually adds to its look, so click cancel to leave it as is. Still, the shot is distractingly crooked, so grab the Crop tool and click on the Straighten tool in the Options Bar. Draw a line parallel to something that should be horizontal. Then finish by cropping in and hitting Enter on your keyboard to accept.

Step 5

Now on to retouching. Create a new, blank layer to get rid of spots caused by sensor dust. Hit J to grab the Spot Healing Brush (type Shift + J to toggle between types of Healing Brushes). Check Sample All Layers, and turn on Content-Aware. Make your brush just bigger than the spot, and click to remove. If your subject has blemishes you wish to retouch, remove them using the same technique on their own layer. Now’s the time, also, to do any other retouching your image requires.

Final Step

Before you sharpen, create a new top layer that combines the layers below. Type these two keyboard commands, in order: Ctrl (Command on a Mac) +Shift + C, Ctrl (Command) + Shift + V. If you’ve set up Photoshop to show the proper print size, go to View > Print Size to sharpen for print. Then go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. Resize the window if necessary. Then check Preview to compare how your image will look at print size versus close up. This image has little noise, so you can get away with a high Amount setting, a low Radius setting, and just a bit of noise reduction.

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Back when I was in college, when photographer Arlene Gottfried‘s career was in its early years and mine hadn’t begun, I got my first job as Gottfried’s intern. It was unpaid (though she covered subway tokens), and once a week I’d take two trains down from the Upper West Side and across town to Gottfried’s old apartment in the East Village, in Stuyvesant Town. We’d sit in the small darkened second bedroom of her apartment and look at slides. We’d look at her street portraits, and her then recent work on the gospel choirs she documented and sang in. Occasionally we’d come to an image of one of her family members, and I’d glimpse an old woman in a hospital bed, or a portrait of what looked like Gottfried (it was her sister). The images seemed deeply personal and possibly heartbreaking—we never lingered long on them.

Now, they are about to become a book. Entitled Mommie, the book comes out this December from PowerHouse, and is an intimate look at three generations of mothers in her family: her grandmother, her mother, and her sister.

“I wanted to publish it to show the family’s journey: my mother’s illness and my grandmother’s passing and my sister’s choice to have a child later in life so that the family would continue,” Gottfried told me in an interview this week.

The pictures begin in 1972; the earliest, a color photo of her father that Gottfried says is the only color one she ever took of him. Gottfried describes herself as shy, but her work is fearless. She agreed to share six images with us that span the book’s timeframe, and give a sense of the story that Mommie will tell. We are grateful to have them, and can’t wait to see the rest.

There’s an IndieGoGo campaign that runs until July 31, 2015 to raise money to cover the book’s boards with real upholstery fabric. Go there to contribute and get one of the limited edition copies. Plus, watch a short video on Gottfried’s work (and hear her sing!).

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In 2012, eleven Magnum photographers descended on Rochester, N.Y. for three weeks. To the group, Rochester looked like the perfect place to continue its Postcards from America project, where a set of photographers headed out to create an archive of a place in a short time frame.

Susan Meisalas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Jim Goldberg, Bruce Gilden, Larry Towell, Chien-Chi Chang, Alex Webb, and Donovan Wylie would work for the given time period, then edit their final selections down to 100 images. The pictures would be sold as a box set in an edition of five and eventually published in book form. The book from that three-week project, Rochester 585/716: A Postcards from America Project, was released this month from Aperture/Pier 24.

During the photographing, and afterward, there was some controversy locally. The project’s organizers had been drawn to the city for its relationship to Eastman Kodak, which was founded there, and its recent filing for bankruptcy. Tate Shaw, executive director of the Visual Studies Workshop, which acted as a sort of host for the event, noted: “My observation was that people were saying: Hey why didn’t you photograph something that’s exciting and interesting and beautiful and why we all live here?”

But the photographers seemed most interested in finding the kinds of subjects they typically covered. “Paolo Pellegrin is a war photographer so of course he is going to want to go to the [higher crime] Crescent neighborhood—he wants dark and difficult places. Susan Meiselas is a big thinker so she went straight to the Hickey Freeman [garment] factory and tried to get out all the stories of the people,” Shaw explained. “Everybody had their distinct point of view. Alec Soth was interested in community groups. Parr was just out looking for people eating food and being American.”

According to Shaw, the project’s biggest impact was on the students who worked as assistants to the photographers during those weeks. Coming from both the Rochester Institute of Technology and the VSW’s graduate program, the students acted as researchers, fixers, assistants, and more. It was an incredible educational experience for them—some of those students went on to work for the photographers after graduation.

So did the result add up to an accurate portrait of the city? Not exactly, says Nathan Lyons, director emeritus of the Visual Studies Workshop, who wrote a short piece for the book. “I don’t think anybody could capture Rochester in the time that they were here.”

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Photo: Debbie Grossman

Recently, longtime subscriber Samuel “Sandy” Fairbairn wrote to ask if we could help him locate a tutorial I wrote back in 2004 about faking infrared capture. Since it has been so long since we last covered the topic, I was curious what has changed since I wrote the original, which uses the Channel Mixer in Adobe Photoshop CS.

It turns out the best way to fake infrared now is to use a RAW file and create the IR effect during conversion. So check out the old tutorial if you want to use Photoshop—it’s still a good method. Or follow along here to do it in Adobe Camera Raw.

Step 1

Open your RAW file in ACR, then head straight to the the HSL/Grayscale tab. Check the box for Convert to Grayscale, then click on the word Default to zero out all the sliders. Drag both the Yellows and Greens up to 100; you’ll start to see the grass and trees begin to brighten in characteristic infrared fashion.

Step 2

Black-and-white infrared capture turns skies dark, so dial down the Blues slider to –100. Try the same thing with the Aquas slider. Decreasing the Aquas sometimes augments the effect, but sometimes it makes no difference at all.

HSL/Grayscale
While a great starting point, the HSL/Grayscale tab doesn’t take your image all the way to an infrared look. If cranking down the Aquas slider creates banding, turn it back up; you can always darken the sky later. Same goes for darkening the Blues slider.

Step 3

Now head back to the Basic Panel. Bolster your dark skies and brighten foliage by adjusting the white balance to be bluer and greener. Slide the Temperature to the left toward blue. You should see the sky darken even more. Then move Tint to the left to make the white balance greener, as well.

Step 4

Adjusting Shadows and Blacks can help you further brighten the grass and trees while darkening the sky. Start by sliding the Shadows to the right to bring them up; you can often go as far as 100. Crank the Blacks up to 100 as well, then dial them back if the effect is too much.

Step 5

Infrared images often have a blurry, foggy quality. Add it by dialing down Clarity. Don’t go too far—you risk losing all detail when you dial it back to zero. If your image is getting too flat, move the contrast slider to the right to add a bit of definition back.

Basic Adjustments
The screenshot below shows the Basic panel after making adjustments. White Balance, Clarity, and Contrast settings will vary according to the image.

Final Step

Infrared film tends to be a bit grainy. To add some grain, go to the Effects tab. Zoom in to view your image at 100%, then adjust the Amount, Size, and Roughness sliders until you get a look you like.

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Debbie Grossman

Created in part for forensics, the new Shake Reduction filter in Adobe Photoshop CC makes the ridiculous “enhancing” that happens in crime shows seem plausible. The cool tool maps the way your camera shifted due to a too-slow shutter speed, and can bring back detail that you thought you missed.

In our experiments, the sweet spot for photographers seems to be images that are a bit soft, where you should have used a shutter speed 1 or 2 stops faster. Sometimes, the tool adds sharpness without improving aesthetics. And while it can make a shaky license plate legible, it’s not always pretty.

Here’s how to use it, plus info on the newly enhanced Smart Sharpen.

Step 1

Open your image and duplicate the Background Layer. First and foremost, you should never work on the Background Layer. It’s also really fun to turn the sharpened layer on and off to see the radical difference this filter makes when you’re finished. Then go to Filter > Sharpen > Shake Reduction to get started.

Powerful Tool
Shake Reduction requires plenty of processing and can run slowly on big files. To see if it will help your image, try testing it using a low- resolution version first.

Step 2

The larger your image file, the longer the filter takes to load. You can speed things up by unchecking the box for Preview. Then pull out the Detail tool to inspect your image. To do so, click on the Unlock Detail button in the bottom left corner of the Detail tool. Move it around your image to see a preview of your sharpening effect.

Step 3

If it looks like the filter is introducing halos or other strange artifacts, check the box for Preview and wait for it to process—you’ll need to be able to see your whole image to make adjustments. In the Advanced section of the dialogue, you’ll see the Blur Estimation Regions. The first one appears automatically, but you can add more. These can be useful if you have unevenly distributed blurred areas or if you just want to make sure the sharpness occurs in a given region. Click the plus to add a region, then drag it to the area of the image you want to affect.

Step 4

After sharpening, you may notice that your image suddenly looks a lot noisier than it did when it was blurred. To fix this, use the drop down menu in the Blur Trace Settings box to choose the amount of noise that was present in your image when you shot it. You’ll need to play around to see which level works best. Adjust this setting for each of your Blur Estimation Regions.

Step 5

Take a look at your whole image in preview. If you’re getting artifacts, try increasing the Smoothing and Artifact Suppression sliders. These sliders can help get rid of larger noise and “ringing” where you see what looks almost like a ripple effect proceeding outward from your sharpened area. If you see halos, select one of your regions and dial down the Blur Trace Bounds slider. This essentially reduces the overall amount of sharpening. Finally, click OK to render your filter and check out your results.

Finer Adjustments This tool often works automatically, but if it doesn’t, use the Advanced area to add regions and the Blur Trace Settings sliders to adjust the power of the filter.

Final Step

The best part of the enhanced Smart Sharpen filter is its new noise reduction slider. So if there is a marked increase in noise after you apply Shake Reduction, go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. First, employ your brand-new ability to enlarge the preview window to a size that makes sense for your image. Then dial down the Amount and Radius, since you probably won’t need much sharpening at this point, and dial up Reduce Noise. You’ll soon see some softness return to your smooth areas.

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Seasoned pro George Lange has photographed everything from the cast of Seinfeld to the births of his sons with a lighthearted touch that makes his thoughtful and emotional pictures appear completely spontaneous. We talked to him to find out how he does it and got his tips so you can try it yourself.

How did you get started shooting?
I was born in Pittsburgh in 1955. I started taking pictures from when I was about seven years old and I’ve taken pictures every day since. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, graduated from there, moved to New York and worked with Duane Michaels and worked with Annie Liebowitz for a year; the last six months she was at Rolling Stone and first six at Vanity Fair. I did everything for her—I was the main assistant. I traveled all over the world with her. Annie was 1,000% invested in the work that she did. It was powerful to be around and inspiring. After Annie, I decided I would never assist again, and I left to start my own career.

How do you approach a portrait?
My door in is always personal. I am always trying to find out: Who is this person? What is their story? How do they tick? I want to know who you are, I want to know who you’re sleeping with, and I want to know everything about you. We only have these precious moments together, and I couldn’t care less what you look like.

How do you make the portraits seem so natural?
I totally clear my mind. I try to have very little in my head and not think about how the final thing is going to look—I love the process of discovering something special while I’m shooting. Most of the time I just want to let it steer toward something that I never even thought of. I don’t want to restrict the possibilities of the picture by planning too much ahead.

What do you shoot with?
I’m really into this Canon EOS-1D X that I got a year ago. It’s basically a high-end sports camera, but I don’t use it that way. It gives me a couple of extra f-stops, and I’ve gone from shooting 1,000 pics a day to 3- and 4,000 pictures a day. It’s changing the way I see—you can shoot the arc up to the hero shot and the arc down from the hero shot. I’m getting pictures that I’d never seen before, and I’m shooting lots of pictures of my kids moving at 1/1000 sec that I could never have gotten years ago. And there’s no “not enough light” anymore, which is also very liberating. Now even a match is more light than you need.

Do you have a favorite lens?
I mostly use the 24–70mm f/2.8L; I rarely use a lens longer than a 50. I like to be able to touch subjects when I’m photographing them. I don’t like being much further than arm’s length. So between 35mm and 50mm I take most of my pictures.

How does that distance affect the way you photograph?
I don’t want to be screaming across the room at my subject, but I don’t want to be uncomfortably close either—my shooting distance is about the same as having dinner with someone. And I never crop a picture in post. I make it in the camera intuitively, and it’s rare that I will look later and say I should have moved closer.

How do you set your camera?
I am really like a child—I like taking pictures like I’m still seven years old so I could care less about the settings. If it’s a little dark the ISO is generally between 1200 and 1600. I make super-fast decisions: I’ll just take an exposure and look at it on the screen and then adjust off that. Lots of times I won’t even get it right, but it doesn’t matter because you’re shooting RAW and you have so much leeway. In the end, I don’t even care that much if I don’t get the picture. I still had the experience. It’s about that process of seeing and wanting to remember.

How do you edit when you take 3,000 exposures a day?
It’s a nightmare, especially when you are also personally invested in all the pictures! I’m turning in sequences to clients that work as animated GIFs or stop-motion HTML videos. For the most part, my work—and most people’s these days—is seen on the computer screen, unless it’s on my mother’s wall in Pittsburgh. You’re editing for media that people are not spending that much time with, so I try to work as fast as I can.

How do you get that great natural light?
You have to know the light in your house. Not if you’re living in a basement in Brooklyn, maybe—but so many people live out in the country, and there’s all sorts of light that does special things. We are having these incredible dusks out in Colorado, and every evening we go out and take pictures in that light for 10 minutes. In my house, when there’s a light on in the bathroom and it rakes across the bed, the light is ridiculous! It’s not like I’m some genius that I’m taking these pictures—it’s just that I’m aware that there’s good light and I use it.

You photograph your family a lot. How do you balance between photographing and being present?
My wife is super nice about it. My wife and I are both artists—my job is to mine that part of my life and explore that part of my life, and she does that, too. So there is a certain understanding and a real trust between us. Still, every time I pick up my camera it’s like: Do I want to photograph this or do I want to experience this? You have to photograph very quickly—the time that the camera is in front of my face is measured in seconds. It’s a very quick thing that’s happening, and then it’s gone. The way I’ve taught my kids and taught myself is that, when I’m photographing, we are for a moment appreciating how special what’s going on is. It doesn’t feel like it’s detracting from the live event. Instead it’s taking one step back and saying how lucky we are.

What do you think are the biggest mistakes that photographers make?
I think the biggest mistake is photographing what’s already been done and what’s obvious. Duane Michaels used to say, “Tell me something I don’t know.” I know what the view out of the Empire State Building looks like; don’t show me the destination, show me the journey. I used to take my son into New York from Maplewood, NJ every Sunday. We’d go do one thing and then come back. I realized it was the journey that made those experiences so special and not the thing that we went to see. In a picture, I want to know what you aren’t telling me. Photograph a secret. Photograph something you see, but you’d never think to photograph, or something you feel but you’d never think to photograph. One of the advantages I have is that the way I photograph is almost a reflex of muscle. I can see something and I don’t have to think about it; before I know it, I’ve taken the picture.

George Lange’s book with Scott Mowbray, The Unforgettable Photograph (Workman) comes out in September. See more of Lange’s work at langestudio.com.

Fleeting Moments

The Kiss

Against the Wind

The Right Light

Sun Bathing

Sweet Exchange

Farm Boys

Man on the Street

Sunrise View

Dancing Hand

Swamp Dance

The post Tips From a Pro: George Lange on Effortless Portrait Photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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