Using Guided Transform in Lightroom

A few updates ago Adobe went and added one of their more useful updates to Lightroom CC. Often I am very critical of the way they update their apps, but the addition of the 'Guided' transform in the Transform panel is a genuinely useful tool that speeds up adjustments to architectural images. Essentially what it does is add the ‘Distort’ feature from Photoshop’s Free Transform to Lightroom while simultaneously making it slightly simpler or more intuitive to use.

Seeing the World in Slow Time

Several years ago (okay possibly, more than several - more like a decade) I came across an article by the Canadian nature photographer Darwin Wigget entitled ‘Painting With Time’ (I tried to track the article down but it seems to have been converted into an ebook so is no longer freely available). I had always been interested in long exposure photography, but the images that Darwin Wigget posted were mesmerizing. From then I found myself increasingly trying to slow the world down in a single frame so that a dimension of time played out in the image. Rather than a frozen moment in time - Cartier Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ - a period of time could be seen in an instant. In some ways it’s seemed to invert the way we look at photographs. Rather than a single moment gazed upon for longer than the image took to capture, now we would look at the image for a shorter period of time than it took to create (well in a way; we always hope that our images resonate and that people gaze at them for ages, and if we are extraordinarily lucky they do).

The Image Divorced From Context

Usually at the end of every year we have a series of images paraded before us that are supposedly ‘the images of the year’. If the publication nominating them is a journalistic enterprise, we tend to see images that convey some of the more newsworthy events of the year. Other’s such as National Geographic pull from the images that were created for their stories, but tend to be nominated along lines of photographic prowess. Admittedly I am prone to an introspective cynicism at the start of the year, but found myself rather depressed at this year’s crop of images. Not because they weren’t good. No, in fact the imagery is brilliant. Rather, it is because of the response to the imagery that my usual levels of cynicism were bested.