Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

Adobe has just released version 2 of Lightroom, their photography management/development application, and all I can say is that it is amazing. There are so many enhancements and upgrades that it's hard to know where to start. It's probably best to say that unless I actually want to do a whole heap of tricky retouching, I'm hardly going to fire up Photoshop at all anymore.

It's not perfect, however: a rather nasty bug in v2.0 stops all your old keywords from v1.4 from exporting with your photos, although a very simple SQL command (so simple, even I could do it!) fixes that problem. There have also been reports of Lightroom being everything from somewhat sluggish to completely glacial in performance, although my Mac Pro makes light work of just about anything, so I can't really comment on this!

Of all the tools, the selective adjustment brush was the most touted. With it, you can now mask areas and apply exposure, sharpness, colour, clariry (and more!) edits to specific areas of your photos without having to hand the image over to Photoshop. All your edits are non-destructive - just as in the previous version of Lightroom, all your edits are simply saved as instructions that are applied in real time to your image. The interface takes a little getting used to, especially for us Photoshop mavens, but once you've got the hang of it, it really is intuitive and extremely powerful.

However, my favourite tool is the adjustment brush's poorer, less glitzy cousin, the graduated filter. As its name suggests, this tool emulates the coloured or neutral density filters that you can physically place in front of your camera lens to achieve certain effects. My use for this tool so far is extremely prosaic - I use it to fix overexposed areas of sky.

We've all taken photos like this. While the foreground is fairly well exposed and detailed, the sky is completely blown out. If I had shot this picture in JPG, that would be pretty much the end of things - an 8-bit image simply wouldn't contain enough information for me to be able to regain all that lost detail in the sky. White is white, and would always remain so.

But when you shoot RAW, there is a ridiculous amount of information contained in the file (4,096 levels as opposed to JPG's 256 levels). And the important thing to realise is that most of this information is in the lighter areas of any image. As explained in this excellent article at Luminous Landscape, exactly half of the 4,096 levels of information are contained in the brightest fifth of the image, while there's a mere 128 levels of information in the darkest areas, the shadows.

What this means is that it's very possible to restore missing detail from overexposed areas when you shoot RAW. However, this was kind of a painful process before the new tools in Lightroom. To retain the properly exposed foreground but also get the corrected sky, I would have to export two versions of the file to Photoshop (one exposed for the foreground, the other for the backgroun) and then use layer masks to blend the two versions together. It's not something I'd do except for a photo I really thought was worth it.

With the new graduated filter tool, all I have to do is specify my exposure adjustment for the sky (around -2.0 to -3.0 stops, depending on how blown out things are) and drag out my gradient from top to bottom. The gradient is fully adjustable to taste after it's been applied, both in location and intensity. The results are nearly instantaneous and it's ridiculously easy to apply. Here's a before and after of the shot above, just so you can see how much detail can be regained using this technique.

This is an extreme example, requiring a full -3.0 stops to regain the detail in the clouds - probably about the absolute limit of this technique. But just think - there is that amount of information and detail just hiding in that brightest part of your image, and you have to shoot RAW if you want to be able to release it.

Posted in: adobe lightroom, chaosboy, photography on August 8, 2008 at at 9:42:00 AM 0 comments    

Lunar Eclipse, 20th February 2008, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

As promised, here's my night's work from last night's spectacular total lunar eclipse. This is a composite image of exposures taken at 5 minute intervals from 6:13pm to 7:03pm, by which time totality had been achieved. The moon started very low to the horizon, hence the yellower cast in the first few exposures.

I did a lot of reading on the web on how best to photograph the moon during an eclipse, and was quite surprised to see how little exposure is required to shoot a normal full moon... 1/125th second at ƒ/11 at ISO100! Any more than that and the brightness of the moon causes everything to blow out totally.

So I was armed with a handy table of exposure times by the time we headed out, and it proved to be pretty much spot on throughout the night. Which was good, because my attempts to bracket my exposures by using the Automatic Exposure Bracket function on my camera were a dismal failure... something about using the mirror lock (vital to not getting camera shake and a little ghosted reflection of the moon in my shots) caused it not to work, leaving me with three identical exposures instead of some nice bracketed ones. When I got to sorting my images in Lightroom, the first thing I had to do was simply delete two-thirds of my shots... Ah well, you live and learn!

Posted in: adobe lightroom, chaosboy, photography on February 21, 2008 at at 12:59:00 PM 1 comments    

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 1 comments    

... with Chaosgurl, we all know that! But I'm talkin' a different kind of love here, a digital kind of love for computer software that fits the way I want to work so perfectly that I wonder what I did without it all this time. This wondrous piece of computer wizardry is Adobe's latest offering, Lightroom. Aimed squarely at photographers, it promises to help you cull, sort, rate, organise, develop and output your digital photos in a fraction of time that it used to take. And you know what?

That's exactly what it does.

Import and rename your JPG or RAW files directly from the camera. Compare and flag photos. Mark the duds for deletion. Add huge amounts of keywording and metadata with ease. Apply development settings in a completely non-destructive way. Export output files in your desired format, resolution and file type. It's all quite wonderful! And thanks to my gorgeous Chaosgurl, I laid my hands on it at the US wholesale price - around $AU150 cheaper than if I bought it here in Oz. Happy days!

Adobe have a free 30 day trial on their website; if you use a Mac, you may also like to check out Apple's Aperture, which takes a completely different approach to the same problem. I love Lightroom's module-based system, which makes it very clear where you sort photos and where you edit them, whereas others will rave about Aperture's free-form approach, which lets you take any action at any stage of the process. Each to their own, I say, and it's great to have the choice between two great programs like this!

Posted in: adobe lightroom, apple, chaosboy, photography on March 5, 2007 at at 3:13:00 AM 1 comments