Over in the Digital Photography forum one of our members, Technical Tim, shared the following ‘before and after’ of an image that he’d manipulated with some post processing. Other forum members were keen to hear more of how Tim had done it and asked him to write it up. Tim’s done that and has offered it to be published here on the DPS blog.

One issue with Lightroom is that all the images that you print from the print module print with white backgrounds.

One DPS reader recently mentioned this in a post I did on creating a Triptych in Lightroom. While the reader is correct in supposing that Lightroom does not offer color backgrounds for images, there is a workaround that you can use to print with any color background you like.

Here’s how to print with colored backgrounds in Lightroom:

Start in Photoshop or another bitmap editor that lets you create and save JPG images. Create a new image the size of the page that you want to print.

If you’re a Photoshop and Lightroom user you may, like me, love the Clarity adjustment in Lightroom and wish it were available in Photoshop too. The Clarity slider lets you adjust the contrast in the midtones of an image which gives an over all sharpening and color boost to the image midtones.

As yet, there is no Clarity tool in Photoshop (although there is one in Camera RAW). There is, however, a technique which has been popularized by Mac Holbert which does a similar thing. While the Photoshop technique is more cumbersome than using the Clarity slider in Lightroom it does work very well and gives very similar results.

Once you’ve performed the fix a couple of times you may want to create this as an Action so that you can run it on your images at any time you need to do boost the midtones.

Today Mark Jaquith shares some tips on developing a workflow in Aperture.

Aperture, Apple’s excellent image processing and organizational tool, can really help take your workflow to the next level. I’ve been using it for over two years (to the tune of over 10,000 images), and I couldn’t imagine going back. That said, it is a complicated application with a fairly steep learning curve. And even if you learn all the screens and all the keyboard shortcuts, Aperture doesn’t hold your hand. It is a tool, not a workflow. It is up to you to craft a workflow that fits your needs. In the many months I’ve been using Aperture, I’ve tweaked and refined my workflow. What follows is the system I use.

Step 1: Importing

My number one rule for using Aperture and not losing your sanity is to never ever babysit an import. Don’t try to sort your photos. Don’t try to view your photos. Start the import and walk away. I put Aperture on a dedicated “space” in OS X Leopard to reduce the temptation. Aperture does a lot of hard work when importing, and performance is unbearably slow. Don’t torture yourself.

Because importing is such a bear, I recommend you do it all at once. Even if a card has photos from more than one project, import them into one project and sort them out later.

Speaking of projects, it might be a good time to settle on a method of sorting your photographs. I use a project for each distinct “event,” and store them in folders by year. I have smart folders for each month of the year. Remember that smart folders give you a lot of flexibility, so don’t make your organizational structure more complex than it needs to be.

I have a “To be processed” folder which is where new projects go on import. My projects stay there until I’m completely done processing them.

Step 2: Prepare for sorting and processing

Before sorting, you should turn on Preview Mode. It makes sorting a lot faster. Next, reduce the size of your thumbnails so that you can see more at a time.

If you’re new to Lightroom, there are a lot of interface options that you may not realize hide must know and handy program features. In this post, I’ll show you some of the buttons, icons, samplers and switches that a knowledge of Photoshop (at least versions prior to CS4) won’t help you identify or locate.

1. Navigator

In the top left corner of the Library and Develop modules you’ll see the Navigator. Beside it are the Fit, Fill, 1:1 and 3:1 options. Click these to resize the image in the current window to various sizes including fitting in the space, filling it and 1:1 and 3:1 resizing options. Other sizing ratios are available from the dropdown list.

The 1:1 ratio is particularly useful when you’re sharpening an image. You may already know that, when you hold the Alt key as you drag on the sharpening sliders the small preview image turns to a grayscale mask showing you the impact of the slider on the image.

If you are in 1:1 preview, the entire image acts as the preview, allowing you to focus in on a much larger area of the image and see the sharpening effect. 3:1 and other larger sizes also work but 1:1 is the minimum size