Brandon Oelling

For more than 10 years Brandon Oelling has been at the helm of x=photography+consulting, working with photographers and studios both old and new to demystify technology and break down the complexities that surround digital workflow. Leveraging his extensive engineering background and fine arts training, Brandon's expertise in best practices, planning, and execution strategy for RAW digital workflow and digital asset management (DAM) has helped him bring many a client into the new age of photography - minus the 'kicking and screaming'.

With the advent of increasingly powerful digital camera products and technologies, a massive shift is taking place in the photography industry, and Brandon has been closely involved in this change since the early beginnings.

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Brandon blogs at:
http://blogs.oreilly.com/lightroom/

Lightroom Tip O' the Week

January 14 2009

Before we get to the goodies this week, I wanted to take a moment to thank Mark Sirota, Bob DiNatale, Jao van de Lagemaat, Gene McCullagh, and Mike Aaland for a great set of posts this month. With 2009 in... read more

Lightroom Tip O' the Week

December 18 2008

Stacks are pretty cool … I use them quite a bit while I shuffle around images in Library mode. There’s a very nice shortcut for creating and collapsing stacks that I’m totally digging lately … it’s ultra-simple: Select the images... read more

Lightroom Tip O' the Week

December 09 2008

This weeks tip has been around since version 1.0 of Lightroom, and although I personally do not use it that often, it’s a great image inspection technique. Normally, I’m pushing images to 72ppi for proofing on the web, which... read more

Soft Focus - Hocus Pocus

December 02 2008

Sticking to my promise to expose more complete details on my workflow for select projects, we’re going to look at a detailed workflow leveraging one of Lightroom 2.0’s localized correction tools. This post roots itself in my previous tutorial... read more

Total Workflow - Part II

July 07 2008

I received a lot of emails in response to last weeks post from viewers asking me (and others - like YOU) to document our workflow in detail for some select projects. We tend to provide a lot of small snippets... read more

Total Workflow

June 26 2008

I find that what photographers really need aside from specific direction (ie. How do i do XYZ in Lightroom?) is a sense of the big picture, a sense of why we make one decision over another, and how it all... read more

Lightning Quick Gallery and Version Creation

June 19 2008

Wedding photographers shoot a lot of photos … not just a few hundred - I’m talking thousands of photos per shoot. This has always presented some unique challenges for our studio as we process images and create galleries for clients... read more

Proportional Exposure Control

June 12 2008

I don’t use the Quick Develop Panel. There I said it … I’m as guilty as the next person for having ignored what is truly a powerful tool in Lightroom. Sure I’ve played around with some Alt key trickery but... read more

RPG Keys - Lightroom Editing

June 04 2008

This weeks post is going to be brief as I am TOTALLY addicted to my new toy - RPG KEYS from Riley Photographic This is one of those products that leaves us all saying “why didn’t I think of that?”... read more

Pick, Pick, Reject

May 27 2008

With the summer months fast approaching, the last thing I want to do is spend more time staring at my monitor. Every tip and technique that enables me to speed up my workflow, give me some control over my freetime,... read more

Page Down, Page Down, Page Down

May 16 2008

On a recent project, I was preparing a series of images for print on a high resolution press (Fuji Frontier 590 to be exact) and I found myself obsessing about removing any residual sensor noise or image imperfections from my... read more

Lazy Man's Auto Sync

May 09 2008

While processing another massive batch of images, I boasted with pride to my team how Auto Sync is streamlining my workflow. All the while, I flicked my Alt, Ctrl, and Command keys like Beethoven as I waxed prophetic on my... read more

Alt-ered States

May 02 2008

Continuing on with my exploration of time-saving keyboard tricks, I have become a huge fan of using the {Alt} key (mac or PC) to quickly access two functions I use daily: Tone Control and Export as Catalog. During my... read more

Sync, or be Sync'd

April 30 2008

Auto Sync has changed my life. I have easily squeezed an hour out of my workflow by making Auto Sync a primary tool in my arsenal. I won’t go so far as to say Auto Sync is a ‘hidden’ control,... read more

Have XMP, Will Travel

April 18 2008

Our team process a lot of photos, i mean A LOT of photos. 10 Terabytes (TB) worth of images have been know to fly through our studio on a weekly basis as we process and deliver a myriad of jobs... read more

The End Is Not Near

April 11 2008

During a recent panel discussion, I sat across from a room of photographers that worked in a wide cross-section of our industry. Despite the multitude of great tips and techniques we wished to bestow on our audience, they all wanted... read more

Monetizing Presets

April 04 2008

As a self diagnosed preset addict, I have spent a great deal of time and energy gathering what I feel to be a great set of presets that my team and I use on a daily basis in our workflow(s).... read more

Lightroom as Your Datasource

March 27 2008

With the release of Adobe’s Lightroom Export SDK, developers and users alike can take advantage of Lightroom’s image processing and format conversion engine to do some very cool things. During my search for a Lightroom RAW export plugin I have... read more

+JUMPING WITHOUT A HOOP

March 20 2008

Here at our studio, we began providing RAW processing services for wedding, portrait, and editorial photographers in early 2008. Since then we have processed thousands of photos for clients and have spent countless hours delivering them via client supplied hard... read more

Virtual Copies ... Making the Commitment

March 13 2008

In continuing with my theme of sharing in last weeks post, I want to delve into the topic of virtual copies and how my team and I have been leveraging them in our collaborative workflow. We’ll look at how we... read more

Share, and Share Alike

March 06 2008

In a previous posting, David Miller punctuated some great points regarding traveling with presets and templates This topic goes hand-in-hand with James Davison’s tips for keeping things straight using multiple catalogs. When working in collaboration with other editors, our team... read more

Location, Location, Location

February 26 2008

I received a GPS device last year for Christmas and I’ll admit I have become a bit overly geeky about tagging everything I can with location information - including my photos. Still, leveraging the built-in GPS support from my camera... read more

To DNG, or not to DNG ...

February 21 2008

Ever since its arrival, my team and I have become big fans of Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) file format. Unlike proprietary formats (Nikon NEF, Canon CR2/CRW, etc.), we prefer a format that is openly documented, and supported by Adobe. We’ll... read more

The Devil is in the Details

February 14 2008

As a workflow consultant, I get a backstage pass to analyze and dissect what our clients are doing to streamline and perfect their workflows. What amazes me time and time again is how small inefficiencies add up to make processing... read more

The flickr Metabrowser

February 07 2008

In my previous post: Plugins to Piglets, we explored some unique ways to extend Lightroom’s plugin architecture to automate the online delivery and post-processing of any select number of images. This week we’re going to dig deeper into the flickr... read more

Plugins to Piglets

January 30 2008

In my previous post I discussed my love affair with Lightroom presets as a way to extend my workflow and in turn automate post-processing. This week we’re going to visit the bleeding egde of Lightroom’s plugin architecture to look at... read more

My Preset Affair

January 24 2008

It all started with Photoshop actions, which I still use daily in my workflow. Yet, my biggest gripe has always been the ability (or lack thereof) to preview the result of an action before applying it to my image. When... read more

FTP for You and Me

January 17 2008

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is an amazingly simple and powerful technology that can be leveraged within Lightroom to quickly and easily upload a selection of images directly to any server that supports the FTP standard. I use this feature for... read more

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