I was surprized to find an amazing amount of people packed into the tiny venue. Not only that, but there was the husband of one of the dancers setting up an elaborate tripod and lighting system to videograph his wife. I went over to speak to him to figure out how to handle the logistics of the situation. He told me that he was simply a hobbiest, but not to worry, that he knew what he was doing and that the single large overhead light that was lighting (only) the center of the stage area was daylight balanced. Well, I thought that that was very nice and all except that the actual ambient daylight was fading into sunset and would soon be gone. All of those color shifts would not match his light. To top it off, the rest of the stage area was light by the existing track lighting in the coffeeshop which was- you guessed it- florescent. Also, since he was videographing and had rented all this nifty equpiment, using my flash, which would show up on the video, would not be appreciated. Of course, I had to do it hand held, but considering I could not use my flash, and the lighting was pretty low, so this was going to be tricky.

You can just imagine how the images would turn out in such a situation. I lamented my predicament because I knew how much correcting I would have to do on each and every single image. Enter my superhero Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. That program is actually what saved the day. Ever since I first used it I have loved it and been impressed with all its functions (I know I sound like a commercial, gushing like this and all, but it is the truth).

In this case I divided the images into their varying light conditions- some were shot as the sunlight was going down and streaming directly into the windows, some were shot just after this when the light was cooler, some were shot with no sunlight at all, and some were shot with flash (I had the opportunity to take it out for the last dance of the performance). Then in Lightroom I adjusted the first image in the set. The strength of Lightroom here is that the color options in Lightroom give you more control then the Photoshop ones do, and you do not have to work on one image at a time when you come up with something that works. At best in Photoshop you can batch process the RAW images when you open several of them up in the program, but Photoshop RAW doesn't give you many options as far as color goes. You could come up with an action that works and open the images one by one in Photoshop and apply it, but that is ridiculously time consuming. Lightroom has a Paste Settings function that allows you to paste any settings from one image to another or even a group of images, and you can simply leave out the ones you don't want to apply (for instance if you like the color but not the crop, you can apply that, or both, or vice versa). Also, it doesn't alter you original file (what you see on the screen only gets created that way when you export it) and the fantastic thing is it saves every step you perform in your history. Not just the last 20. It is wonderfully effective for working on a large series of images. In this case, once I found color settings that worked I was easily able to copy and paste them to every image.

The other thing that is really nice about Lightroom is that you can easily switch between it and Photoshop for those times when you need some heavier editing. Like the flourishes you see on this image, but I'll talk more about that later. I've been rambling on and I have to get to work!