©2016 David Mark Erickson
Photo Courtesy of Anita Nowacka
My collaborations with David Mark Erickson started shortly after the launch of my NYC Lightroom Meetup Group in 2014. I was looking for presenters with interesting perspectives as photographers and Lightroom users. My starting point? Reaching out to the four other Adobe Certified Lightroom Experts in New York at the time. David Mark Erickson was one of them. After David’s presentation at the January 7th 2015 meetup, we sat down over beers and talked cameras, travel and, of course, Lightroom. Even now, two years later, there are only 7 Lightroom Certified Experts in New York State. We’re the only two ACEs working together as a team that we know of.
© 2016 David Mark Erickson
David and I have totally different backgrounds. Me, an advertising and special effects studio photographer in NYC and David, a freelance photojournalist who’s traveled extensively through Europe and Africa. But like twin sons of different mothers, we found a lot of common ground that connected us and a mutual goal to share our photography and Lightroom expertise. David joined the NYC Lightroom Meetup Group as my co-host in March of 2015.
©2016 David Mark Erickson
Fast forward to this past summer. The NYC Lightroom Meetup Group loses its meeting space at Tekserve due to its closing. I receive my Adobe Instructor and Training Partner status. And David puts a proposal on the table for us to start a series of Lightroom workshops, and thus LightroomNYC is born.
Inextricably connected now, David and I will be working together through the NYC Lightroom Meetup Group, LightroomNYC, private coaching and through this blog to continue building a supportive community. We’re passionate about helping Lightroom enthusiasts and professionals learn Lightroom to become better photographers. So look for David’s unique perspective in his upcoming Lightroom and photography blog posts.
Currently, we’re in discussions with an exciting new venue in Manhattan for the NYC Lightroom Meetup Group and hope to make that announcement soon and return to our scheduled meetings in the coming weeks.
Today Adobe announced the release of Lightroom CC 6.7. It’s important to note before I go into the specs of this version, that it requires Mac OS 10.10 or greater and has compatibility fixes for Mac OS 10.12 (Sierra). I recommend updating to this version of Lightroom before updating to Sierra, just to play it safe. And because this version of Lightroom on Mac requires OS 10.10 or greater, take a look at your “About This Mac” to make sure your operating system is running at least 10.10.
The Lightroom update will appear in the Apps tab of your Creative Cloud app. Click the gear on the top right and choose preferences if you need to log in to your Adobe account.
Here’s how to set the Smart Preview preference in Lightroom CC 6.7:
As a photographer, my focus has been on becoming the best I can be with the complexities and power of Lightroom. I’m very pleased to announce that Adobe has awarded me Certified Instructor status in Lightroom. Different and more coveted than my Adobe Certified Expert status (ACE), an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) is an ACE with proven training expertise. I had to prove my instructor qualifications with referrals from my 9 years at F.I.T. and show that I’ve been an involved member of the Lightroom community and passed one or more ACE exams. Now that I have been vetted by Adobe as a Certified Instructor, I am privileged to be one of only 35 Adobe Certified Lightroom Instructors in the world.
If you work on a desktop computer, then I recommend the 
I’m excited to announce the launch of 
Unlike other workshops, many of our 
Select the Eyedropper by clicking on the icon in the White Balance section. Without clicking again, hover the tip of the Eyedropper on or near something by your main subject that is a best guess for a color that is supposed be “neutral.” (You’ll get an error message if you choose something close to 0% black or 100% white.) The target grid is actually the image under the eyedropper tip highly magnified. Look over your photo for a white shirt or handkerchief, gray pants, a gray wall, or a dull silver object (but not the highlight) in your photo. In a pinch, I’ve even used the target grid to find a neutral pixel on teeth or the white of an eye to white balance a photo! When you have the tip of the eyedropper over a neutral color, click once.
How do you read the eyedropper? Easy. Hover the tip of the eyedropper over the color you want to neutralize. In the example to the left the eyedropper tip is over the shirt collar but I haven’t clicked yet because I want to read the numbers at the bottom of the target magnifier. The Red, Green and Blue values of R93.7% G89.4% B 71.4% make this white shirt yellow. These percentages would be nearly equal values if the shirt was neutral. Once I click on the collar, Lightroom will try to make those RGB values equal. That’s because equal amounts of Red, Green and Blue make a neutral tone without a color cast. For previews of white balance color changes, keep an eye on your Navigator window while hovering the eyedropper over different areas of your photo. 
After I click, the magnifier disappears and the color I clicked on should appear neutral with no color cast. This will be an overall color change to the photo and, depending upon the kind of light source(s) in your scene, it should render pleasing skin tones. If I want to check the color, I select the eyedropper again, never clicking, only hovering over the same place to see if my RGB values are equal. They are close. Remember, do not click this time. From these numbers I’m very close to a perfect neutral tone. Close is close enough. I tap the keyboard escape key (esc) to place the eyedropper back in it’s dock, turning it off. Or, you can just click in the eyedropper dock to put it back.
That’s pretty much the basics of using the eyedropper in the White Balance section of the Basic panel. It won’t always work the first time, so click away until you find something that works for you. You’re letting the power of the Lightroom White Balance Selector do the color cast correction guesswork first. Now you can go and tweak your white balanced photo with the Temp and Tint sliders because you’ve got a good head start. Dragging your Temp slider left makes your photo more blue, while dragging the slider to the right makes it more yellow/red. The Tint slider fine tunes the colors – Green to Magenta – that are not part of the color temperature range. If you find the color cast getting worse, you can undo it by choosing the “White Balance: Custom” step in the History Panel on the Left of the Develop module. This is the name of the step where you used the eyedropper. After you’ve finished removing your color cast, I recommend continuing on to the next section of the Basic panel under White Balance, the Tone section. This where you should continue developing, with adjustments to exposure, highlights, shadows, etc. to further improve the details of your photo.
With the idea of a 2017 India photo tour workshop, I trekked through Kerala, India with a series of talented, local guides by car, bike and foot. It’s an amazing place with infinite opportunities to shoot everything from the local color, to massive terraced tea plantations and Chinese fishing nets, and wild elephants and tigers (which are pretty rare – I didn’t see one).
