Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

I've long believed that the computer, along with photo-editing software like Adobe's Lightroom and Photoshop, acts as a digital version of the traditional darkroom. Instead of chemicals, paper and manual dodging, burning, pushing and pulling we now rely on the power of the computer to treat our photos. I've been using Lightroom as my main photo editing software for just over a year now and I love it. It allows me to sort through the thousands of pictures I take each year, adding keywords and other metadata quickly and easily and then get on to the important task - making the best photos really "sing".

Lately, however, I've been feeling that my photos were a little still a little flat... that maybe I could take my processing a bit further somehow. To that end, I bought Scott Kelby's excellent book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book For Digital Photographers, to see if I could glean any useful hints and tips from this renowned expert. While I have a pretty good grasp of what all the sliders and controls in Lightroom do, Scott still had a lot of useful tips and information that will allow me to approach things in a slightly more organised fashion.

But the main thing I got out of the book is that he still uses Photoshop for his final photo editing, something that I have rarely done since starting to use Lightroom – I guess the simplicity of doing eveything in one application was a little too beguiling for me! He has some fantastic techniques that you can use to really make the colours in your image "pop" - he calls it painting with light, and it's not a bad description at all. I'm not going into the technique here: it involves converting images to LAB mode, using the Apply Image command (which I have never used before in all my years of Photoshopping, shame on me!) and then painting on Layer Masks with a screened duplicate of your image. Sounds complicated, but after a few goes it becomes quite simple to understand and execute.

It's probably best if I just show a couple of examples. On the left of each image is the shot exactly as it came out of my camera (a Canon Digital Rebel XT shooting RAW files), on the right is the image after all my processing in Lightroom and Photoshop. Lovely, innit? It really brings out a lot of hidden colour detail that is sorely lacking in the original images, although I must stress that you always have to do some post-processing work on RAW files to make them look good: they are simply showing you the raw data from your camera's sensor, with none of the contrast, saturation or sharpening that you'll automatically get when you shoot JPG. If you click on the pix, you should get to see a larger version of the image...

Posted in: adobe lightroom, chaosboy, photography on February 17, 2008 at at 4:38:00 PM