tech today sales, and then we’ll move on to see what Matt is going to teach us. Good photographs are also a wonderful tool for stepping up clients. Imagine two scenarios. The first is a shop that does excellent work, but doesn’t see the need for documenting their builds. They are too busy building awesome things to worry about taking photos. A potential client hears good things about the shop and decides to look them up online. They only find an outdated website and some Yelp reviews. The Yelp reviews seem good, so they decide to visit the shop. The potential client enters the shop only knowing that they heard the work is good. The second scenario is a shop that does excellent work and documents their builds. They schedule time to share them on Facebook, Instagram and also in galleries and build logs on their website. The same potential client hears good things about this shop and decides to look them up online. The client sees some work they
would love to have done on their vehicle. In fact, they see work they didn’t even think about having done, but are really interested in. Through the photographs and social media interactions, they start to form a connection with the shop before visiting. When the client enters the second shop, they already know the level of work they can expect. They are comfortable trusting them with their car. And they have seen things above and beyond what they thought possible, and they want it! Of course, it doesn’t always pan out that way, but I have personally seen it a number of times. From the minimal investment in time and money can come great returns. Now let’s see what Matt has to share on the topic of post-production and using Adobe Lightroom to make the most of our photographs.
Matt Schaeffer’s Post-Production Tips Post-processing is an unavoidable, inseparable part of professional photography today. Think of life before DSP (Digital Sound Processors). The automobile is one of the worst atmospheres to reproduce a song as it was recorded. We have many challenges in order to get the best out of the equipment we are installing. With the help of a DSP, we can quickly obtain a center image with time alignment and contain that nasty reflection
50 Mobile Electronics December 2016
that otherwise would be audible because of OEM driver placement. This becomes a part of our daily routine when upgrading audio systems to quickly get to the finish line. In the photography world, that DSP would be Adobe Lightroom. Before we get started explaining what Adobe Lightroom is, you need to be familiar with the RAW file format. In our field of mobile electronics, most of us are familiar with MP3 and WAV. As we know, MP3 is a lossy format which means part of the music is eliminated to reduce the file size to a more compact state. Moving forward, let’s associate MP3 files to JPEG photo files. A WAV file, however, is an uncompressed or lossless format. With WAV files, you are essentially getting a raw bit stream representation of the audio signal in digital format. Knowing this, let’s associate WAV with RAW file format. A RAW file is basically a digital negative of your photo. A RAW file is information gathered from your camera’s image sensor before any digital adjustment. It is good to note that RAW files are not images. In fact, they are descriptions. These files need to be decoded by specific software to be viewed as a photograph. They carry a lot more information inside them and are more adjustable than JPEG images. The added information means more resolution and a ton more dynamic range. In a RAW file, there is more color information and detail hidden in light and dark areas of an image. This is great because now, things like exposure, highlights and shadows are highly adjustable without clipping your image. We will get back into this a little bit later in the article. (It is worth it to note that RAW is not an actual file extension. This means there are no “RAW” files, per se. Many manufacturers use different file extensions. Adobe uses “.dng,” Canon uses “.cr2” and Nikon uses “.nef.” DNG is universal and can store any other format inside of it.) Adobe Lightroom is a program that can decode the information stored within the file so you can view it as an image. In addition, it allows you to manipulate the information stored within it and save it as a graphical image file such as a JPEG. Lightroom becomes your one stop