Screen capture from the video, mid-crop

This is a fantastic video for photographers.
(Note: I couldn't get the original Adobe Connect version to work in Firefox; it worked for me in Safari. In any case, there's now a YouTube version for easy viewing, though the video quality doesn't seem as good as the Adobe Connect original.)

In the video, visual artist Stu Maschwitz sits down to a blacked-out Lightroom catalog loaded with a couple dozen photos submitted by strangers, and one by one he unveils and processes them as the whim strikes him, providing a running commentary about his artistic reasons for doing things, or technical comments about how to achieve in Lightroom whatever look he's going for.

There are some amazing transformations, but whether a particular result is or isn't your cup of tea is not the point. The point is to see that amazing transformations can be made so easily, and sometimes so subtly. The running commentary on the hows and whys provide ample little seeds that may germinate ideas when processing your own photos.

Foremost this video is about artistic interpretation. Secondly it's about Lightroom, because all the “hows” are shown in terms of Lightroom. But let me be clear, it's not an instructional video. It's not a “how-to” video, and it's not a demonstration of the “right way” to process photos. (The only time “right way” comes into photo processing is in journalism, where it's a synonym for “nothing”.)

It's just Stu looking at a stranger's photo and instantly deciding what that photo's “story” is to him, and then proceeding to crop and adjust the photo so that as far as he's concerned, it better tells that story.

I found it highly entertaining, and I came away both with new artistic techniques and new Lightroom techniques.

If you're a photographer, I highly recommend it whether you use Lightroom or not.

Update: Photo-Development Challenge!
Try your hand at developing a few of my raw images, and compare your results with others for yet more ideas and inspiration.
See here.