Applying Develop Settings to Groups of Images

If you are looking to save time as you work a shoot, before you start developing it think ahead about which images are shot under similar conditions and therefore need similar adjustments, or which images you  you want similar treatments for (e.g. black and white), and apply your changes to these groups of images all at once.

Lightroom is a relatively new program, but there are already multiple ways of accomplishing this,  each with a different twist.   You have three main choices:

1.  Make changes to your first image and then synchronize the settings:

• After making the changes to the first image, in the filmstrip select all of the images you want to apply the setting to, including the one you already did.
• Make sure the one you already did is “active”.  Do this by clicking inside the thumbnail for that image, so that the border is brighter than the other selected images.  (Clicking outside the thumbnail will break apart the selection!)
• Click on the Sync… button at the bottom of the right-hand panel strip. (If you don’t have multiple images selected, you won’t see it.)
• Choose which settings from the active image you want to apply to the rest of the images, and hit Synchronize.

2.  Make changes to all of the images at once:

• In the filmstrip, select all of the images you want to affect.   Decide which of these images you want to see as you work, and click inside its thumbnail to make it active.
• Hold down the Ctl/Cmd key, and click on the Sync… button to change it to Auto Sync.
• With Auto Sync on, make changes to the active image.  Notice how the same changes are applied to all of the selected images automatically.
• Remember to turn Auto Sync off, or you may end up making unintended changes to groups of images.  Hold down the Ctl/Cmd key and click on Auto Sync to change it back to Sync…

3.  Copy and Paste your settings:

This method works for applying settings to one additional image, not groups of images.  I find it completely unnecessary given the Sync functionality, but since the buttons are there (at the bottom of the left hand panel strip), I will mention it.

• Make changes to your first image.
• Hit Copy, and select which settings you want to copy to another image.
• Select another image you want to apply the settings to.
• Hit Paste.

Figure out which method(s) you prefer, get in the habit of using them, and really start to leverage the power of Lightroom to get you away from the computer in much less time.

 

Some Cool Composites

I post this link particularly for RMSP students who took my compositing classes this summer.  Enjoy!

 

More LR3 Beta Information

Here’s a link to a write up by Victoria Bampton on what’s new in the LR3 beta.  Keep in mind that this is a very early beta — some of the new features will disappear, others will be added, and you will encounter bugs (particularly known are render preview issues).   At the bottom of Victoria’s post are links to many other blogs with articles on LR3.

Lightroom 3 Beta Now Available

Lightroom 3 won’t officially be released until 2010, but tonight Adobe Labs announced the release of its first public beta.  If you want to try it out, kick the tires, and join in providing feedback to Adobe on LR3, click here to go to Adobe Labs and download the software.

Is it all we need in LR?  No (for one thing, we absolutely need soft proofing.)  Is it a step in the right direction?  Yes.  There are feature enhancements, but importantly, Adobe has focused on improving performance by rebuilding the LR architecture.  Adobe recognizes that we are building very large catalogs of images, and that we need LR to handle them quickly and efficiently.

Here are some of the feature enhancements Adobe Labs lists:

• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

There are links on the Labs site to videos introducing the new beta features.

In addition, there are alot of little improvements throughout the program.  For example, when using the adjustment brush, you can double-click on the word “Effects” to reset all settings, and on the word Color to reset the color swatch to none.  Look for these improvements everywhere!

I’ll be curious to hear your experiences with performance… is it better?  Much better?

Once you try LR3, you can provide feedback to Adobe in the LR3 forum.   Remember, this is a beta release, so expect bugs and help Adobe out by reporting these bugs.

Enjoy!

Adobe Labs Announces Content-Aware Healing and Fill

Want to remove telephone lines, whole buildings, or other objects from your photos?  Adobe posted a video on Facebook today from Adobe Labs, demonstrating technology that they are working on for a future release of Photoshop.  CS5 perhaps?

Click here to go to video.  Be sure to watch all the examples — it just keeps getting better!

When Words Fail Us

As you may have guessed, I love Lightroom.  Its design is efficient and elegant, and the library/catalog model really works.   However, in my humble opinion as an instructor who sees students struggle time after time, what doesn’t work is the language around this model.  Specifically, what doesn’t work is the idea that you “Import” images into Lightroom, and “Export” them when you are ready to share them.  As an experienced user, I realize that we are really importing image information into the LR catalog rather than importing images into LR, but this is not how many users interpret the process.

My Honda was made in Japan and imported into the U.S..  When this happened, it physically left Japan and entered the U.S..   Similarly, when we export Chrystlers to China (do we?), they physically leave the U.S.  and enter China.

However, when you import images into Lightroom, you are not moving your images into Lightroom.  (See my post The Library Analogy for how it actually does work.)  This trips up so many users — it is not uncommon for newer users to import their images into LR, and then delete them from their hard drives — and then they wonder why they have question marks all over their folders and images.   Users also often think that because they back up their LR catalog when prompted, and their images are in the catalog, that no further backup of their images is needed.  Of course when their hard drive containing their images fails, they realize otherwise. 

From what I have seen, users who are not very computer saavy really struggle with this, and plenty actually give up.  Does it matter?  It depends on how broad of a market Adobe wants to appeal to with Lightroom.  Certainly the fact that newbie users struggle creates teaching and income opportunities for me, but I would love to see more people be able to get further with LR on their own. 

The solution isn’t a revamp of LR — the solution in my opinion is a revamp of the language, or packaging.  We need another word for Import, that does not imply that the images are moved, but rather that an entry for the image is created in the central catalog.  What would that word be?  I’m not sure.  I think an “Add to Catalog” button would be less misleading  than an “Import” button.    Do you have any better ideas?

What If Your Computer Doesn’t Turn On Tomorrow?

Could you keep working?  If the hard drive was fried, would you lose everything?

This happened to me yesterday morning.  I don’t know what the problem is yet — I dropped the tower  off today at a repair shop.  In the meantime, I’m not in too bad a shape — for the most part I work off an external hard drive (actually a drobo).  It has my images, and both professional and personal documents.  I also have another backup offsite. 

Unfortunately I had been meaning to transfer my latest working documents from my messy desktop to the external drive, but hadn’t gotten around to it.  They may not be lost, but that teaches me to keep that desktop clean, or specifically backed up.

Here’s the one thing that I really goofed on — a few months ago I went through all my CD’s and got rid of old software.  Because I had bought the Office 2007 upgrade, I got rid of Office 2003.   Now I need Office on my laptop, but I can’t install the 2007 upgrade, because I have to have 2003 installed first!  Ouch. 

So learn from my experiences, before it happens to you!  Backup completely and often, and don’t get rid of software that you have recently purchased the upgrades for!

Looking for Ideas from You!

I enjoy writing for this blog, but sometimes I temporarily run out of ideas for posts.  I’d love to hear some ideas from you!  Post them as a comment to this post.

Thanks in advance!

Exporting Images to CD/DVD

Hint:  click on the title of this post above to see the post larger!

You can export images directly to CD or DVD using Lightroom.  The feature is a little bit hidden:

• In the Library module, select your images to export.
• Click on the Export button
• At the top, you see the following:

The Default: Export to Disk

• Click on the drop down arrow next to Files on Disk, and change it to Files on CD/DVD.

Export to CD/DVD

• If you want to keep a copy of the exported files on your hard drive, select and specify a specific folder or the same folder as the original photo.  Otherwise if you want them to only go to the CD/DVD, choose Temporary Folder.

Lightroom will write the exported files to the permanent or temporary folder, and then launch and run the CD/DVD burning process.  If your images don’t fit on one disk, you will be prompted to put in additional disks.

Unfortunately this process doesn’t work with the 64 bit version of Windows — the 3rd party burning software the Adobe is using doesn’t support it.  In this case, choose Files On Disk, write to a folder, and then launch your CD/DVD burning software and specify this folder to burn.

Until Early October

I’m headed out this weekend for Missoula, Montana, where I’ll be teaching  creative techniques and compositing in Photoshop at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography.  While it is possible that I will post while I am out there, it is unlikely — so plan to check back the first week of October for new material.  In the meantime, as always, check out my blog archives, and if you are in the north,  get out and photograph the fall color!

Lightroom Workshop Coming Up Soon — October 10-11!

I still have a few spots available in my Lightroom Fundamentals Part One workshop in Seattle on October 10-11.  New to Lightroom, ready to dive in and learn it well?  Already been using Lightroom for quite a while but looking to fill in the gaps in your knowledge?  If so, this workshop could be for you:

Lightroom Fundamentals: Making Your Work Flow — PART ONE

Lightroom is Adobe’s image management and enhancement program designed specifically for photographers. With the inclusion in version 2 of the ability to make local image enhancements, Lightroom has become a powerful program which can dramatically increase the efficiency of your workflow. In this two day Part One workshop, learn the fundamentals, concentrating on the Library and Develop modules where you manage, edit and enhance your images. With hands-on practice with my images and yours, discover how to optimize images and work through large shoots efficiently with collections, presets, and synchronized settings. Discuss where Photoshop may still fit in your workflow, and learn how to move between Lightroom and Photoshop. No prior experience with Lightroom is necessary; laptop computer required; limited to 12 students.

Seattle, Washington
Oct 10-11, 9 am – 5 pm, $285

Lightroom Fundamentals: Making Your Work Flow — PART TWO

In this two day Part Two workshop, explore advanced editing, searching and keyword management techniques in the Library module. Learn more about adjustments in the Develop module, and dive into the Slide Show, Web and Print modules. Achieve quality prints through Lightroom, learning how to print efficiently by fully leveraging the power of templates. Color management will be discussed in terms of color spaces, monitor calibration and printing. Finally, learn how to incorporate Photoshop actions and third party plug-ins into your Lightroom workflow. Laptop computer required; limited to 12 students.

Seattle, Washington
November 7-8, 9 am – 5 pm, $285

A $40 discount is available to those who register for Part Two by the end of Part One.

Both will be held at the Hampton Inn near Seattle Center.  Click here for more details. Email me or call to sign up, or with questions:  laura@laurashoe.com, 206-940-7145.

Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5 Are Now Available

If you are not prompted to update when you open LR and Bridge/Photoshop, in these programs go up to Help>Check for Updates.  Downlaod the .exe (PC) or .dmg (Mac) file to your desktop, then double-click to launch the installation.  When it is done, you can throw away the Adobe folder the install process placed on your desktop.    If you use LR and PS, be sure to update ACR as well — when you take a file from LR to PS, ACR is used to render the file.

It looks like a minor release to me (unless of course you own one of these new cameras and have been waiting to be able to process your raw files!)   According to Tom Hogarty, product manager at Adobe,the updates include the following:

Camera support for the following models:

• Nikon D300s
• Nikon D3000
• Olympus E-P1
• Panasonic DMC-FZ35**
• Panasonic DMC-GF1

**Note that in Europe and Japan this model is marketed as the DMC-FZ38. Unfortunately, due to a metadata difference between these cameras, files from the DMC-FZ38 will *not* be supported until the next Camera Raw and Lightroom updates.

Release Notes:

• Camera Raw 5.5 and Lightroom 2.5 include a correction to the demosaic algorithms for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response. Olympus, Panasonic and Sony are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files.
• Lightroom 2.5 corrects for the following problem in Lightroom 2.4. Lightroom 2.4 on Windows continued to display the import dialog when a memory card was detected regardless of the preference setting “Show import dialog when a memory card is detected.”

Cropping with a Fixed Aspect Ratio

In Lightroom you can restrict your crops to be a specific aspect ratio, such as 5×7, 8×10, or the same aspect ratio as your original.  To do so, select the crop tool from the toolbar (R), click on the double up/down arrow next to the padlock to reveal the aspect menu, and choose your desired proportions.  If what you want isn’t listed, choose Enter Custom…, and specify.  Selecting “Original” will constrain any crop you do to the same proportions as the original.

Now you can drag inward the edges or corners of the crop frame to adjust your crop.  To move your crop, click in the center of the crop frame and drag the image to reposition within the frame.

Let’s say you have a horizontal image, and you want 4×5 proportions … but you want a vertical crop (5×4).   The method of dragging in from the edges of the image doesn’t allow you to switch from horizontal to vertical.  You could create a custom setting 5×4.  But there is an easier way:  click on the crop frame tool, click in your image and drag to draw out a vertical frame.  Then fine tune the size by dragging the edges and repositioning as necessary.

To go back to unrestricted cropping, click on the padlock to unlock it.

Note that cropping this way doesn’t determine how big your image will be, just the proportion of width to height.  How big it is will be determined by what size you set in the Export or Print Dialog.

To go back to unrestricted cropping, click on the padlock to unlock it.

Thanks to a student from Thursday night for suggesting this topic!

Check Out the Archives

These days I try to post regularly, but I gave up long ago on the idea of posting daily.  If you check in on a day when I don’t have a new post for you, take the opportunity to go back through the archives — if you haven’t been following my blog for all of the past 10 months, you may have missed some tips and tutorials that would be useful to you.

Scroll down this page to the archive section.  Once you enter the archives and click on an article title, you can just hit the backward or forward button below the article to continue through the archives.

I hope you find something worthwhile!

What You See Is Not What You Get? Time to Learn to Calibrate Your Monitor

When you print images  yourself or send them out to a printing service, do your prints look like what you see on your monitor?  If not, there may be many reasons for this, but the first to consider is that your monitor is very possibly  off in terms of color, brightness and contrast.   If, for example, your monitor is too bright, then your prints will come out darker than you expect.  If your monitor is too blue, your prints will look too yellow (the opposite of blue).    The solution is to calibrate and profile your monitor on a regular basis, using what is called a colorimeter.  I recommend the Eye One Display 2, though I am sure there are other good ones out there as well.  The Eye One is $200, but it is money well spent if you are a serious amateur or professional and want consistently accurate output.

Rather than explain how to do this process, I will point you to another good set of videos by David Marx.  Watch the first video for non-Apple monitors, and the second for Apples, including their laptops.

Enjoy!

PS:  Other reasons for prints you do yourself  being off include (but are not limited to) not using a good quality printer/paper profile, viewing the print under a light with a color cast (like a fluorescent light with a green cast) or under an insufficiently bright light, forgetting to turn color management off in the printer driver, and clogged ink nozzles.

Adjustment Brush Finesse

Did you know that the adjustment brush allows you to slowly build up the amount of change you apply to an image, and also slowly back off on a change you made? The secret is in the Flow and Density sliders. Density controls how much of the specified adjustment can be applied in total, and Flow controls how many brush strokes it takes on the area to reach the full effect.

Let’s say that your goal is to brighten various parts of your image. You set the Exposure slider to +1.5 stops because you expect that this is the maximum brightening you would need to apply. Setting Density at 100% will allow you to apply the full 1.5 stop effect. If you set Flow at 20%, every brush stroke you make on an area will apply 20% of that 1.5 stops. Brush once on areas where you need just a little brightening; brush over areas twice or more –up to five times — where you need more brightening.

Now let’s say that there is an area that you brightened too much, and now you want to back off on the strength. To do so, reduce the density and paint over the area again — reducing it to 80% and painting again will give you just 80% of the effect. Painting with a density of 0% removes the effect entirely, and is therefore just like using the Eraser brush. (If it is an area that is difficult to precisely paint over again, you may find that it is easier to use the eraser brush first to remove the effect entirely and then start over again with applying the effect with flow reduced.)

There is no substitute for experimenting — everything you do in Lightroom can be undone! Play with the adjustment brush at different flow and density settings to understand what they do, and then hit the delete/backspace key on your keyboard to delete your current adjustment, or hit the Reset button just below the density slider to undo all your adjustment brush changes.

Adjustment Brush Flow and Density

Video about Adding Borders and Watermarks with LR2/Mogrify

I had planned to write more about Timothy Armes’ great plug-in LR2/Mogrify, which among other things allows you to add fairly sophisticated borders and watermarks to your images when you export them.  However, today I noticed that my very talented colleague David Marx has posted a video about this on Lightroomlab.com.  Do check it out!  You can download the plug-in here.  Read the Quickguide for more instructions and examples.

Seattle Area Lightroom Demonstration September 10

I will be doing another of my popular two hour Lightroom demonstrations on September 10 at 6:30 pm at Shoreline College.  Click here for more information.  Email me at laura@laurashoe.com to RSVP — I’d love to see you there!

Updating Lightroom with Changes Made in Bridge and Camera Raw

These days I encourage students to leave Bridge and Camera Raw behind and use Lightroom for all of their basic image editing needs (resorting to Photoshop when heavy guns are required).    But if you do find a reason to use Bridge and Camera Raw, you’ll discover that Lightroom does not automatically see and show any Bridge keywording, rating or other metadata changes, or Camera Raw image adjustment changes that you have made.

To update your images in Lightroom with any changes you have made in Bridge or Camera Raw, select them, right-click and choose Metadata>Read Metadata from File.  This will read the XMP file that Bridge and Camera Raw have written the changes to.  Of course if you have since made changes in Lightroom that haven’t been written to XMP, this action will overwrite your recent changes.  All the more reason to use only one program.

Plug-Ins Galore!

Last week I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s plug-in that allows you to export images directly to Facebook.  There are lots of other great third-party plug-ins out there.  But how can one find out about them?

Easy, of course, or I wouldn’t be writing about it!   In the Library module of Lightroom, click on the Export button (bottom left), then Plug In Manager (bottom left), and then Plug-in exchange.  This takes you out to the Adobe web site, where you can browse and download plug-ins.  You can choose to look at most popular, highest rated, featured, or all, and browse by category — Develop presets, Export plug-ins, Web galleries, and Other.   You can also filter by whether they are shareware, donationware, commercial, etc.   Adobe makes it all very easy for us — because these plug-ins increase the power of their product — a good deal all around.   Just remember, it is third party software, and is therefore  not guaranteed by Adobe.

Among other things, you’ll find plug-ins for exporting to places like Flickr, gmail, Smugmug, Photobucket,  for creating borders and watermarks (check out LR2/Mogrify), for managing metadata, creating more sophisticated slideshows and web galleries, and for launching images into programs like Photomatix.  You will also find all kinds of Develop presets for creating different looks for your photos.

Explore and enjoy!

Post Revisited: About Your Images and the Lightroom Catalog

I often look to see how readers get to my blog, and I have noticed that one post  in particular that I wrote about understanding the Lightroom catalog often gets referred to on digital forums.  Thank you to everyone who links to it.  For those who haven’t read it, I thought I would call your attention to it:  click here to read.

Moving Through Your Image in Lightroom While Zoomed In — Page Down

If you plan to print your image, I recommend that you do all of your clean up work zoomed into 1:1.   You should also review all of your local adjustments at this zoom ratio to make sure that your edges aren’t obvious.    Here’s an easy way to move through your image while you are zoomed in so that you don’t miss any of it:

-  Zoom into 1:1  (by clicking on 1:1 in the navigator panel or Ctl/Cmd + twice)

- Press  the Home button on your keyboard to move to the top left corner of your image.

- Hit Page Down on your keyboard to move through the image one frame at a time.   The first time you do this, watch in the Navigator panel how the rectangle (viewing area) moves:  first down, and then to the right from the top down again.  Page Up takes you in the opposite direction.  End takes you to the bottom left corner.

The Perfect Exposure, or When Good Things Don’t Look So Good

I wrote about the importance of exposing as brightly as possible, short of blowing out important highlights in my post “What Lurks in the Shadows: The Case of the Black Cat“.    I encourage you to read it if you haven’t.

I thought I would show you an example of a perfect exposure that in fact looks terrible in-camera.

Here is a photograph I took on the Oregon Coast:

The Beach -- As Shot

And here is the histogram:

A Perfect Exposure

I nailed the exposure on this one — the histogram is as far to the right as possible without anything being blown out.  But on the back of the camera the shot looks terrible!

Of course I didn’t worry, because I knew that I captured very high quality information in that right side of the histogram, and I can add lots of contrast and darken the image without worrying about noise and other data issues.  Simply spending 30 seconds on the image in Lightroom, bringing the blacks slider to the right, adding a ton of contrast and reducing brightness gave me this:

The Beach After a Few Adjustments

Histogram after Processing

The bottom line:  if you try to darken something that is too bright, you will find that the image holds up quite well.  If instead you try to brighten something that you have underexposed, you will find that noise that lurks in the shadows, as I show in my Cat post.

Do try this at home!

Post photos from Lightroom directly onto Facebook

If you’re like me, you weren’t one of Facebook’s early adopters.  But you dipped your toe into the water, ended up with lots of friends that you enjoy being connected with, and now Facebook  is part of your daily routine and you can’t imagine life without it.  Actually, come to think of it,  my experience with Lightroom was quite similar.

Anyway, if you share photos on Facebook, you can easily upload them into the album of your choice directly from Lightroom, using Jeffrey Friedl’s export plugin.  Unfortunately (and this is a big caveat), due to limitations on the Facebook side, you can’t upload to your business/fan page,  only to your personal page.

You will find information and the download on his blog here.  The download and installation instructions are on the righthand side.  Jeffrey is providing this as donationware.  As he says, “t is provide for free and is fully functional for the first six weeks, after which it becomes limited to processing at most 10 photos at a time until registered. Registration costs 1 cent; any additional donation you’d like to make in encouragement or thanks is up to you.”   I think you will find that it is worth a donation.

Seeing Images in Your Parent and Subfolders

Just a quick tip today — it is 92 in my office and 103 outside –  the hottest day in recorded Seattle history.  (I realize that this is nothing for some of you!)

My folders are arranged in a hierarchy –  Pictures\year\shoot, with ocassional subfolders within a shoot.  By default the Lightroom folder panel shows an image count for the parent folder, plus all subfolders within it.  And if you click on the folder you see all of the images in that folder and its subfolders.   In the snapshot below, I have a total of  1866 images from 2008.   Most live in shoot subfolders (only a partial list is shown.)

Default View: Show Photos in Subfolders

If I click on the 2008 folder, I see all 1866 images, regardless of what subfolder they live in.

This is usually exactly what I want, but occasionally I want to see just images that live in the parent folder, and NOT in the subfolder.   In this case I want to see just images that live in 2008, and are not in a subfolder.   To do this, I go to File>Library Filters and uncheck Include Photos from Subfolders.  Now what is displayed is just what lives in that specific folder:

Alternative: Do Not Show Photos in Subfolders

So I have one image in 2008 that I forgot to file in a subfolder.  When I click on 2008, I will see just that one image, and can move it to its proper subfolder.

Stay cool!

Getting Those Panels Under Control

In Lightroom you can hide the top, bottom, left and right panels so that you have more room to show your images.  To hide a panel, click on the triangle at the outside center edge of the panel.  Click on it again to show it again.   There are shortcuts, of course:  Tab hides and shows the left and right panels;  Shift-Tab hides and shows all four panels.

Have you ever closed your Lightroom panels,  and then been annoyed when they pop open again when you hover over that area with your mouse?    If so, you can take control over this situation:  right-click (Ctl-click if you have a a one-button mouse) on the panel triangle and choose Manual.  Now they will only open and close when you click on the triangle.   In “Auto Hide and Show” mode the panel will close when you move the mouse away and open when you hover over the area.  In “Auto Hide” mode the panel will close when you move away, and will only reopen when you click on the triangle.

Your Chance to Help and Influence Adobe

Adobe is looking for Lightroom and Photoshop users to interview!  Those that participate receive an Amazon gift card.   You need to respond to Anita Dennis this week to be considered.

Details are on Adobe’s Phosphors blog, which is a great source for updates on Help content for Lightroom, Photoshop and Camera Raw.  Check it out and consider bookmarking it or setting up a feed.

I have Lightroom. Do I need Photoshop?

I have been meaning to write a post on this topic.  However, I noticed today that my colleague Gene McCullagh has just written about this over on his blog, Lightroom Secrets.   I agree with Gene that Lightroom will serve most photographers needs most  of the time (and some photographers, all the time).   My advice to serious amateurs and pro’s is to learn Lightroom very well, and only then,  if you find you need more sophisticated pixel-editing tools, consider Photoshop (or even PS Elements) for just those advanced needs.

I believe that today, with Lightroom so well established and powerful, educational programs that start photographers out in Photoshop rather than Lightroom are doing them a real disservice.  I hope that programs that continue to take this outdated approach will catch up soon.

Click here for Gene’s post.

By the way, there is alot of great material on lightromsecrets.com … do check it out!

Selecting Images in Lightroom

Selecting images seems to be a fairly straightforward task, but Lightroom can actually be pretty finicky about how you do it.  Here’s a video I put together to show you how to select individual images and groups of images, and to help you avoid unintended consequences.

watch video

Lightroom 2.4 and Camera Raw 5.4 Updates Released

If you don’t get prompted to perform an automatic update, in Lightroom and in Bridge, go to Help>Check for Updates to update to the new releases.   Lightroom uses Camera Raw when you use the  Edit in Photoshop command on a raw image, so be sure to update both.    Adobe only provides these updates to Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4, so if you have an earlier version, you are out of luck until you purchase an upgrade.

Information from Adobe:

Lightroom 2 Bugs – Fixed

• Web galleries with a Collection Title of six characters would not export or upload
• The crop aspect ratio could revert to the last selected ratio even when reset to original
• The crop aspect ratio in Quick Develop could be lost after a crop adjustment The crop aspect ratio lock could be lost after an orientation switch
• Images could preview incorrectly when imported using the MTP/PTP USB protocol
• Sony .ARW files may not have been recognized by Lightroom’s import dialog
• The Japanese language configuration of Lightroom on Mac OS X 10.5 could fail to switch to the print module if the HP B9180 was set as the default printer
• Metadata options that are intended for use were dimmed incorrectly when exporting DNG files
• The Japanese language configuration of Lightroom on Mac OS X was missing a shortcut for “Zoom Out”
  Several translation and shortcut corrections were made for the eight additional languages introduced with Lightroom 2.3

New Supported Cameras:
Support for the following cameras has been added in this update.
Canon EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i/EOS Kiss X3 Digital)
Canon PowerShot SX1 IS
Epson R-D1x
Hasselblad CF-22
Hasselblad CF-22MS
Hasselblad CF-39
Hasselblad CF-39MS
Hasselblad CFH-22
Hasselblad CFH-39
Hasselblad CFV
Hasselblad 503CWD
Hasselblad H2D-22
Hasselblad H2D-39
Hasselblad H3D-22
Hasselblad H3D-31
Hasselblad H3D-39
Hasselblad H3DII-22
Hasselblad H3DII-31
Hasselblad H3DII-39
Hasselblad H3DII-39MS
Hasselblad H3DII-50
Kodak EasyShare Z980
Nikon D5000
Olympus E-450
Olympus E-620
Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1
Pentax K-7
Sigma DP2
Sony A230
Sony A330
Sony A380

Understanding Resolution

Two factors determine how big your image will be when displayed — the size of your image in pixels, and how many pixels are displayed per inch, which is referred to as resolution.

Both of the example images below have 6 pixels (3×2):  the first is displayed at  1 pixel per inch, and the second is displayed at 2 pixels per inch.

3 pixels x 2 pixels at 1 pixel per inch

3 pixels by 2 pixels at 2 pixels per inch

When you prepare your images for print, you specify  what resolution your images will print at.   If you have a 6 megapixel camera (i.e. 6 million pixel camera), your image is approximately 3,000 pixels wide by 2,000 pixels high  (3,000 x 2,000 = 6 million).      If you print this image (with no upsizing or downsizing) at 300 pixels per inch, your image will be 3,000/300 = 10″ wide, and 2,000/300 = 6.6″ high.   If you print at 100 pixels per inch, your image will be 3,000/100 = 30″ wide, and 2,000/100=20″ high — much larger, but it will look less detailed because at this much lower resolution the individual square pixels are larger and more visible to the eye.

When you prepare images for display on a monitor (such as for the web or for sharing by email), what resolution you specify is not important, because the viewer’s monitor will control the resolution.  For example, if you view an image on a monitor that displays 90 ppi, that is exactly what you will see, regardless of whether you specified a resolution of 90 or 3000 when you sized the file in the LR Export dialog or the PS Image Size dialog.    All you need to worry about is the size of your image in pixels, and whether this will fit on your viewer’s screen without alot of scrolling.  Since you probably won’t know for sure what size monitor your image will be displayed on, I suggest sizing your images to fit on most monitors.  Most people today have monitors that display at least 1024×768 pixels.   I therefore size my images for email at 800×600, because I know then that they fit well on most monitors, with room around the image for menu bars, docks, etc…

Check Out the Lightroom Lab and Computers for Photographers

There is so much to learn about Lightroom and digital photography, that I highly recommend visiting many website and blogs regularly (including mine of course!).   One of my favorites is thelightroomlab.com.  Check it out for great tutorials, tips, videos, news, reviews, discussions and more.  It is run by a very smart colleague of mine, Scott Rouse, a self-described “geek extraordinaire”.

Scott is a photographer, graphic designer, web designer, instructor,  and IT professional. He specializes in web design for photographers and other artists.  More information his web- and graphic-design services can be found at scottrousedigital.com.  In addition to his freelance work, Scott teaches photography and Lightroom/Photoshop workshops worldwide for Photographers Alliance Workshops.

David Marx is also a regular contributor to The Lightroom Lab.   David is an amazing instructor and  sports photographer.   His blog is also an excellent one for you to visit regularly — computersforphotographers.com .  In addition to news and tutorials on Lightroom and other digital topics, David focuses on the hardware side of digital photography — where many of us definitely need some expert advice.    David can also help you design and purchase a computer system (Mac or PC) that meets your specific needs.

Synchronizing Your Folders in Lightroom

You have imported a folder of images into Lightroom.  Later you add more images to that folder.   Have Lightroom figure out which haven’t been imported into its catalog and import them for you:

• In the Library Folders panel,  right-click on your folder (ctl-click on a one button mouse) .
• Select Synchronize Folder.   Lightroom looks at the folder and determines how many of the images it does not yet have in the catalog.
• Check  Show Import Dialog if you want to be able to copy, move or rename the files, add copyright metadata, keywords, or apply develop presets as the images are imported.
• Scan for Metadata Updates will look to see if any of the images already imported have been updated more recently in Bridge or another program.  (It will read check the XMP file.)
• Hit Synchronize.
• If you checked Show Import Dialog, go through this dialog as you normally would.

There are many situations where you may add more images to a folder.   Here’s one example:  a client of mine has a folder of scanned images.  This folder of images has been imported into Lightroom.  When she scans new images and they are saved into the folder, she now synchronizes the folder to get the new scans into Lightroom.

Crop Tool Tip

You may have noticed that once you specify a crop in Lightroom and then try to move the crop frame, that it goes in the opposite direction from what you expect.  Instead of thinking of yourself clicking and dragging inside the crop frame  to move the crop frame, think of yourself as clicking and dragging inside the crop frame to move the photograph.   Once you adjust your thinking, you will find that it performs exactly as expected.

Define initial crop

Clicked and dragged to the right to move photograph

An Easier Way to Get Your Color in Lightroom

You are designing a slideshow, and you want the background color to be a particular color from one of your images.  Or, you are designing a web gallery, and you want the background color to be the color on your website, or some other cool color you have found.  The question is, how do you find out what that color is, and tell Lightroom to use it?   A while back I wrote a post on using Photoshop to identify the color, and then specifying this color in Lightroom.   It turns out though, that there is an easier way — you can do it all within Lightroom.  This is why I love Lightroom more every day — it just continues to surprise me!

I will show you how to set a LR slideshow background color, and then I’ll talk about how to set other colors.

• If you want a color from a web page or another document, size your Lightroom window and your web browser or document window so that both are visible on your monitor.  If instead you want a color from one of your images, have that image selected in the slideshow module.
• In the LR slideshow module, click on the color swatch next to Background Color in the Backdrop panel.

Slideshow Background Color Color Swatch

• This will open up the color palette.

Color Palette

• So here’s the secret:  click inside the main color square (where the eyedropper is in the illustration above), hold, and drag the eyedropper out of the color palette and over into your image that you want to take the color from or your web page or other document.  As you drag, you will see that the slideshow background color changes to reflect what you are dragging over.  Let go when you have selected the color you want.
• That’s it!  Notice that the color palette displays the Hex value of your color — if you want to use this exact color elsewhere, write down this hex value or copy it to the clipboard, and then type it in or paste it in elsewhere.

Of course this doesn’t just work for a slideshow background color, it works for any color setting in LR where you see a color swatch that opens up to a color palette — all the color settings in Web, Slideshow and Print, as well as the Color setting on the adjustment brush!

Now that is cool.   (Thanks to Matt K. at www.lightroomkillertips.com for pointing this out!)

Another Seattle Lightroom Demonstration

I’m back in town very briefly, so I thought I’d post information about my next free Lightroom Demonstration here in Seattle.  It is Saturday, May 16, from 10:30 am – 12:30 pm at the Capitol Hill Library.

For more information, click here.

Space is limited, so please RSVP to laura@laurashoe.com if you would like to attend.

Also, I have scheduled another round of Lightroom workshops:  Part One is June 13-14, and Part Two is June 27-28.  See my workshops page for more information.

Until May

I will be out of town and out of touch for most of the rest of April, and will not be able to post again until the first week of May.  In the meantime, check out the blog archives for lots of Lightroom tutorials and tips (and a few Photoshop ones as well.)

Happy Spring!

Laura

Seeing Your Folders in Lightroom

When you import a folder of images, the folder will show in the Folders panel, but you may not see the parent folder that it lives in.  For example, when I imported my first 2009 shoot folder, Lightroom did not show me that it lives inside my 2009 folder, which lives inside my Pictures folder.  That’s exactly where it still was, it was just that Lightroom by default considered this unnecessary information to display.  To show this hierarchical folder structure, I simply right-clicked (ctl-click on a Mac) on the shoot folder and selected Add Parent Folder.  This revealed the 2009 folder.  Then I right-clicked on the 2009 folder, and selected Add Parent Folder again, and this revealed the Pictures folder.

If you like to show the whole structure like I do, just be aware that if you have a parent folder selected, and therefore are showing all images that live in the parent folder and all of its subfolders, you cannot drag and rearrange your images.  To do this, you must be in the root folder where the images actually live.

Cropping Your Image for Print

Need to produce a print of a specific size, like 5″x7″?  These are most likely not the proportions of your original image, so somewhere in your workflow you will need to crop the image to these proportions.

You could use the crop overlay tool in the Develop module to get the proportions and then go to the Print module to print, but I like this alternative better:

In the Print module:

• Turn on Zoom to Fill and Rotate to Fit in Image Settings
• In Layout, set the Cell Size to 5″x7″.    If your image is of different proportions, part of the image now necessarily doesn’t show and won’t print.
• Click inside your image and drag to specify what part of your image you want to print.  (This is the part I love!)
• Now print as usual.

About Your Images and the Lightroom Catalog: The Library Analogy

Alot of people have a hard time understanding where their images are in the Lightroom environment, what the catalog is, and how it all fits together.  This is completely understandable, as the terminology is confusing.

Think of a public library — you have stacks and stacks of books everywhere — the main floor, 2nd floor, 3rd, …., in the basement, and even offsite.   And you have the centrally-located card catalog (or web catalog), which helps you find and make sense of those books.  The catalog has an entry for each book, with its location in the stacks, what the book is about, copyright and publication  information, a picture of the front cover, etc, etc.    When you want to work with books,  you don’t go to the stacks and walk along them until you find what you want — you go to the catalog.  Furthermore, if you put a paperback that you bought at the grocery store in the stacks, it is as if it is not there — it is not accessible to people until the librarian creates an entry in the catalog for it.

So here’s the analogy:  your images are like the stacks of books — they sit on your hard drives in folders however you decide to organize them.   The Lightroom catalog is just like the card catalog — it is a centrally located collection of information about each of your images that you have taken the time to create an entry for.   By default this catalog is located in a “Lightroom Catalog” folder in your Pictures folder on your internal hard drive.

Contrary to what you would think  “import” means, when you “import images” , you are not moving your images — you are simply creating an entry for each  image in the centrally-located Lightroom catalog.   Once your images have been entered into the catalog (i.e. imported), you can see them in Lightroom, and you can work on them.   You may have thousands of images on your hard drive(s) that you don’t see in Lightroom — just like the paperback that was put in the stacks, they aren’t accessible to you through Lightroom until you enter/import them into the catalog.

But, you say,  the Import dialog  asks you if you want to copy or move your  images, so importing must move your images, right?  No — the fact that the Import dialog allows you to move or copy images (usually used to copy from a memory card to the permanent location of your choice on your hard drive) is simply a convenience to you — it is not the import itself, which is simply the creation of catalog entries.

So what information is stored in an image’s catalog entry?   The location of the image,  metadata (data about the image – more about this in another post), keywords, ratings and labels you have assigned in LR or Bridge, jpeg previews of the image, and what I call the Develop recipe:  a set of instructions representing the enhancements you make to your image in LR.

A Lightroom Catalog Entry for an Image (It doesn't really look this way, but carrying the analogy along, think of it as a card in the card catalog)

Note that when you look at an image in LR, you are looking at a jpeg copy/preview of the image  that LR has added to the central catalog — just like when you see a picture of the book cover in the public library web catalog, you are not looking at the actual book.  This way LR (the librarian!) doesn’t have to go get the image from the hard drive every time you want to look at it.

So let’s carry the analogy further:  in the public library, it really does not matter how the books are organized in the stacks — alphabetical by author first name, the dewey decimal system backwards, etc..  — as long as the card catalog can communicate to you where a book is located.  Same with LR — LR does not care how you organize your images on your hard drive, and it doesn’t help you to organize them — it is up to you to decide on a folder structure that works for you.  (For example, a Pictures folder with year folders within that, and shoot folders within the year folders.)  Lightroom would be just as happy if you dumped all your images on your desktop, as it will simply record that that is where it should go to find them — but we know that this would be a mess for us in other ways.

One of the things you may have heard about Lightroom or observed yourself is that it can do searches very, VERY fast.  I can do a search of all 20,000 images in my catalog for just winter tree images shot with my wide angle lens, and before I snap my fingers, LR will have them displayed.   Why is this?  Because LR searches the central catalog, rather than going out and looking for the images on your hard drive(s) — just like in the public library you can find a book much faster by going to the card catalog than walking up and down the stacks searching for it.

If you store your images on one or more external hard drives, you may have noticed that even when those drives are not plugged in, your images are still visible in LR, and you can do Library module work with them (assign keywords, rate, label, add metadata, sort, put in collections, etc..), as well as build slide shows and other output. How is this possible?  The same way that if you can do library research at night on the web, even though the library is closed — you are accessing information in the catalog, not in the stacks.

I’m sure I will have more to say about the catalog in the future, but hopefully this is a start to clarifying what the catalog is about.  If I have made any sense, next time someone asks you where your images are, you won’t answer  “they are in Lightroom”, you will say where on your hard drive you put them.

Working on Two or More Computers with One Lightroom Catalog

If you regularly work on two or more computers and carrying an external hard drive is not a problem, then consider putting your images and your Lightroom catalog on the external drive, so that you can move easily between the two.

If your catalog is currently on your internal hard drive, you will need to move it to the external drive:

• In LR, go to Edit (Lightroom on a Mac) > Catalog Settings, and on the General Tab note the location of your catalog.

Finding Out Where Your Catalog Folder Is

• In Finder or Windows Explorer, move this folder to your external drive.

Now all you have to do is to tell LR to launch this catalog when it starts:

• With your external drive plugged in,  hold down Ctl/ Cmd as you launch Lightroom to get the Select Catalog dialog.  Click on Choose, and navigate to the .lrcat file inside your Lightroom Catalog folder on the external drive.
• Hit Continue.

That’s it!  When you need to work on your other computer,  plug in the drive, point to the catalog on this drive when you launch LR.

I would suggest a different approach if you ocassionally work images on your laptop when you are in the field photographing.  See this post for more information.

Why Do I Have Question Marks on My Folders in Lightroom?

When you import images into the Lightroom Catalog, Lightroom keeps track of where those images live — in what folder, on what hard drive.  This shows in the Folders panel in the Library Module.

Imagine moving the car while your family or friends are  inside the convenience store.  (I confess to having done this once or twice!)  When they walk out, you can imagine that they will be confused, since they weren’t around to see it happen.  It is the same with Lightroom:  if you  move your files and folders while Lightroom isn’t looking, it loses track of them and gets confused (displaying the question mark.)   If you use Mac Finder,  Windows Explorer or any other utility to move your files or folders, Lightroom can’t see that you have moved them.

The solution is simple:  do any moving of files and folders within Lightroom.  In the Folders panel you can click on a folder and drag it inside of another folder, on any hard drive that Lightroom is aware of.    This physically moves your folders and images just like using Finder or Explorer would, but Lightroom is able to keep up with you.  If you want to move selected images from one folder to another, click on the folder they currently are in so that they show up in Grid (thumbnail) view.    Click on the thumbnail and drag the image to another folder in the Folders panel.

If  you do get a question mark on a folder, right-click (ctl-click on a one button Mac mouse) on it and choose “Find Missing Folder”.  Point to the folder in its new location, click choose, and the question mark will go away.   If you get a question mark on an individual image, click on the question mark next to the thumbnail, and choose “Locate Missing File”.   Point to the file in its new location.

At least Lightroom doesn’t get angry, like friends or family sometimes do!

Virtual Copies in Lightroom

I wrote a post recently about making snapshots while you work  so that you can explore different versions of your image — for example, a black and white and a color version –  with the goal of having just one version in the end.

If you want to end up with two or more versions — to export to share with others, or to use in the output modules, you can do so with virtual copies.  Simply right click on your image and select “Create Virtual Copy”.   You’ll see in Library Grid view or in your filmstrip that you now have two copies, and that the second one has a bent page corner symbol, indicating that it is a virtual copy.

You can now work on this second one as a completely independent image, converting it to black and white, cropping it differently than the first one, etc, etc.

Why is it called a virtual copy?  Because no duplicate of your original file is created.  A virtual copy is simply a second set of instructions to be applied to the one original file.  The days of having many different copies of your images on your hard drive for different purposes are over!

If you use virtual copies, leave a comment here sharing what you use them for.

Using Snapshots in Lightroom and Camera Raw 5

Have you ever worked on an image, been satisfied with your work, but then wanted to try some other things with the option to get back to what you had?  Perhaps you want to compare different versions of your work to decide which you like best — for example, a color version, a black and white version and one with a mix of black and white and color;   or you want to compare a straight-photo look and many  different versions of a highly-stylized look.

Snapshots are perfect for this –  every time you reach a point that you want to be able to get back to, create a new snapshot.  Then later you’ll simply click on the snapshot name to get back to that version.

In Lightroom, the Snapshots panel is located on the left in the Develop Module, below Presets and above History.  Click on the + sign, and name the new snapshot.  If you later want to delete the snapshot, click on the – sign.

Snapshot Panel in Lightroom

In Camera Raw, the rightmost tab accesses the Snapshot panel.  Click on the page icon at the bottom of the panel to create a new snapshot;  click on the trash can to delete one.

Snapshot Panel in Adobe Camera Raw

Your snapshots are saved with your file metadata, so if you come back to the image in the future, the snapshots will be there.  (Note that this is a partial workaround to ACR’s lack of  History.)

Both LR and ACR by default have an Import snapshot — clicking on this is a quick way to get back to how the image looked when you first imported it.

If you save a version as a snapshot and then improve the version more, you can update the snapshot with the improved look — in either program, right click on the snapshot name, and choose Update with Current Settings.

Of course in Lightroom you can also create virtual copies of your images. I will talk about these more in my next post, but as a general rule I create a virtual copy if I know that I am going to want to end up with two different versions.  I use snapshots when my goal is one final version, but I am experimenting along the way.   I can always turn snapshots into virtual copies …  stay tuned for more.

What Lurks in the Shadows: The Case of the Black Cat

As you may have heard, with digital, unlike film, your goal should be to expose your image as brightly as possible, without blowing out important highlights.  In other words, your histogram should be as far to the right as possible without going over the edge.

What is the histogram?  It is a graph of the tones in your images, from pure black (blocked up, no detail) at the left edge, to pure white (blown out, no detail) at the right edge.

I recommend that you set your  camera to show the histogram next to the image on the LCD screen, so that you can see right away how succesful you are with your exposure.

In this case, the exposure is ok:

ok exposure

If the subject of the image has no bright tones, the image may look perfect visually.  However, opening up a stop and a half gives a better exposure, even if the image looks to bright.

better exposure

Why is this?  The camera is able to capture much more information in the highlights than in the shadows, so exposing your subject closer to the highlight end will improve your image quality.   Particularly down in the shadows, if you zoom in (and turn off any automatic noise reduction in Lightroom or Camera Raw), you will see alot of color noise, and a loss of detail.  You will not see this in the highlights.

Here’s an extreme example to illustrate what happens in the shadows.  This is a perfect exposure of my cat, visually — the cat is black, so I would expect it to fall at the shadow end of my histogram.  (If the cat looks like a solid black blob with no detail in the fur, it is your monitor.)

perfect "visual" exposure, cat in the deep shadow tones

But look at this image when I zoom into 200% and focus on the dark fur (I have brightened it so that you can see it more clearly on the web):

noise and loss of detail in the shadows

If your image is only going to be displayed at low resolution such as on the web or emailed,  and what falls in the shadows is supposed to be very dark so you don’t need to brighten it in Photoshop or Lightroom as I have, then the noise won’t show.  But if it needs to be brightened (meaning you underexposed it), or you are going to print the image at high resolution, it most likely will.

This image is also one that has a full range of tones from very dark (the cat) to very bright (the white blanket), so I can’t increase the exposure to get the cat out of the deep shadows, without blowing out the blanket.  But for the sake of the illustration, I would like to pretend that the cat was on a darker blanket, so that there would be room to shift the histogram to the right.

To reduce the noise, I open up one stop in my exposure, shifting the histogram to the right:

Photographed one stop brighter

better exposure histogram

Less noise and loss of detail

(The image is blurrier, because it was a slower exposure and my cat insisted on breathing!)

Now in Lightroom or Camera Raw, I simply reduce exposure and brightness to darken the cat:

Darken the image after overexposing it

Zoomed out and at low resolution this image looks the same as my first one, but because it has  less noise and more detail in the shadows, it will hold up to a high resolution print, and I can brighten it or adjust it in any way I need to without fear that noise will be revealed.

Once again, my advice to you from all of this is to:

-  display the histogram when you are photographing

-  expose as far to the right as possible without blowing out important highlights.  If you underexpose, don’t think “that’s ok, I’ll fix it in Photoshop” –  if you can, take the time to reshoot.

See also my follow up post:  The Perfect Exposure, Or When Good Things Don’t Look So Good

Adobe TV

I’ll get back to making my own tutorials and videos soon, but in the meantime, check out Adobe TV.  Click here for Lightroom videos, and here for Photoshop videos.  (They load in two stages, so give it a little time.)    Check or uncheck the Release, Skill Level and Topic checkboxes on the right to narrow your selection.  Enjoy!

Seattle Lightroom Lecture and Workshops

Not sure if Lightroom is right for you?  Or you already have it but aren’t sure you are leveraging its capabilities fully?    If you are in Seattle, consider attending my free two-hour demo of Lightroom on March 18, from 5:30 to 7:30 at the Capitol Hill Library.  Please click here for more information and to RSVP.  I hope to see you there!  UPDATE:  THIS SESSION IS FULL — I HAVE ANOTHER ONE SCHEDULED FOR APRIL 11.  CLICK THE LINK ABOVE FOR MORE INFO.

My next set of Lightroom workshops are starting soon — there are still some spots left — sign up soon!

Lightroom Fundamentals: Making Your Work Flow — PART ONE

Lightroom is Adobe’s image management and enhancement program designed specifically for photographers. With the inclusion in version 2 of the ability to make local image enhancements, Lightroom has become a powerful program which can dramatically increase the efficiency of your workflow. In this two day Part One workshop, learn the fundamentals, concentrating on the Library and Develop modules where you manage, edit and enhance your images. With hands-on practice, discover how to optimize images and work through large shoots efficiently with collections, presets, and synchronized settings. Discuss where Photoshop may still fit in your workflow, and learn how to move between Lightroom and Photoshop. No prior experience with Lightroom is necessary; laptop computer required; limited to 12 students.

Seattle, Washington
April 4th-5th, 9 am – 5 pm, $285

Lightroom Fundamentals: Making Your Work Flow — PART TWO

In this two day Part Two workshop, explore advanced editing, searching and keyword management techniques in the Library module. Learn more about adjustments in the Develop module, and dive into the Slide Show, Web and Print modules. Achieve quality prints through Lightroom, learning how to print efficiently by fully leveraging the power of templates. Color management will be discussed in terms of color spaces, monitor calibration and printing. Finally, learn how to incorporate Photoshop actions and third party plug-ins into your Lightroom workflow. Laptop computer required; limited to 12 students.

Seattle, Washington
April 18th-19th,  9 am – 5 pm, $285

A $40 discount is available to those who register for Part Two by the end of Part One.

click for more details

For questions or to sign up, contact Laura

Lightroom 2.3 and Adobe Camera Raw 5.3 Released

Hooray — the official 2.3 release of Lightroom is out.  This fixes a number of bugs in 2.2 that I am happy to have behind me.

From Adobe:
The goal of this release is to address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom 2 and provide additional camera raw support. A comprehensive list of issues fixed in this release is included below:

• In the Windows 64-bit version of Lightroom an sFTP upload process could cause Lightroom to crash.
• Slideshows could return to the first image randomly during playback.
• A memory leak could cause Lightroom to crash while attempting to process files with local adjustments.
• Canon EOS 5D Mk II sRAW files could process with artifacts in Lightroom 2.2.
• Lightroom 2.2 could cause disc burning to fail for Windows customers.
• Attempting to undo(CTRL-Z) a single step in Lightroom 2.2 on Windows could cause a series of previous actions to be undone.

I actually installed the early release of this a few weeks ago, and no longer experience the crashes that I had with 2.2.

LR 2.3  and ACR 5.3  also introduce support for the Nikon D3X  and the Olympus E-30.

Updates are free.  In Lightroom, go to Help>Check for Updates to install LR 2.3.  In Bridge, go to Help> Check for Updates to install ACR 5.3.

Photoshop CS4 Content Aware Scaling

For me there were not alot of exciting additions to Photoshop CS4,  but I have to say that the new Content Aware Scaling is quite impressive.

Here’s an image that I like, but I feel that there is too much empty space between the photographer and the subjects:

Original Photograph

Here’s how to easily eliminate some of this empty space:

In the layers palette,  double click on the background layer and hit OK to convert it to a regular layer that can be transformed.

Go to Edit>Content Aware Scaling.  Drag in on the right hand center square of the transform bounding box, to shrink the empty space.

Scaling with Content Aware Scaling

Hit enter to commit the change, and then crop the image with the crop tool (C) to eliminate the now empty canvas on the right.

With no guidance from me,  CAS has detected most of the important content, and protected it as it threw out information in unimportant areas.   The only area that it has distorted perhaps unacceptably is the shadow of the center woman.   So let’s let Photoshop know that this is an area that it should protect:

Undo the content aware scaling you have done, with Ctl/Cmd Z.

With the Lasso tool (L),  circle the shadow and the clamming tube:

Select area to protect

Then up in the Lasso tool options bar,  select Refine Edge and soften the selection by increasing Feathering to 10.

Save the selection as a new channel by going to Select> Save Selection, and naming it Area to Protect.

Deselect the selection, Ctl/Cmd D.

Now go back to Edit>Content Aware Scaling, and in the options bar, click the drop down next to “Protect” and specify the new channel “Area to Protect”.

Specifying channel with information on area to protect

Pull in the right side of the image again, hit enter, and crop.

Not bad!  What we come to take for granted in 2009 is actually pretty impressive.

After Guided Content Aware Scaling

Straightening Your Horizons

When I don’t take the time to use a tripod, my horizons are often not straight.  Here’s an example:

Crooked Horizon

To fix this in Lightroom, in the Develop Module tool drawer underneath the histogram, click on the Crop Overlay tool (R).    Crop options appear beneath it, and a grid is placed over your image.

Crop Overlay Tool

Now you have two choices.  The first is to rotate the image visually.  Hover the mouse outside of a corner of the image until the double arrow appears.

Rotating visually

Click and drag the cursor up or down, aligning the grid with your horizon.

Straightened Image

When you are satisfied, hit Enter/Return or click again on the crop overlay tool symbol to exit crop mode.

The second method is to click on the ruler (i.e. the Straighten tool) in the crop options box to select it, and then click and drag it over your crooked horizon — the whole horizon or just a part of it.   Lightroom will calculate how far off from level the horizon is, and rotate the image the proper amount to fix it.

The Straighten Tool

Drawing Along the Horizon with the Straighten Tool

When you are satisfied, hit Enter/Return or click again on the crop overlay tool symbol to exit crop mode.

With either method  you do lose part of the image — this is the price you pay for not getting it straight in camera.

You can use the same methods in Camera Raw.  The Straighten tool is right next to the Crop tool.

Point and Shoot Camera Reviews

A colleague of mine, Kathy Eyster, brought to my attention a great series of compact camera reviews that Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) published for the holidays:

Enthusiast Digital Compacts

Premium Digital Compacts

Ultra Compacts

Budget Compacts

Digital Photography Review also has excellent  in-depth reviews of DSLR’s and lenses.

Kathy is a an excellent photography  instructor, by the way.  Check out her blog at www.essentialdigitalcamera.com.

Using the Painter Tool to Add Keywords

There are many ways to add keywords to images in Lightroom, but one of my favorites is to spray them on with the Painter tool.  It is quick, and even fun.

In the Library module, click on the paint tool in the toolbar below the grid:

In the Painter options bar that appears, choose Keywords from the drop down to the right of Paint:, and type the keyword or keywords (with commas separating them) in the text box.  I will apply the keywords father and Joe Smith.

Entering Keywords to Paint

Now simply click on image thumbnails in the grid that you want the keywords to be applied to.

If you hover over an image that you have already applied the same keywords to, the cursor will change from a paint can to an eraser.  Clicking on the image again  will remove the keywords that you painted on.

When you are done painting, put the painter tool away by clicking Done at the right in the options bar, or in the empty circle to the far left.

You can also paint on labels, flags, ratings, metadata templates, develop setting presets, rotation and target collection assignment.  Choose in the dropdown instead of Keywords, and select any options.

Enjoy!

Lightroom 2 on Sale at Amazon

If you don’t yet have Lightroom, now is the time to buy –  the full version  is on sale at Amazon for $189.99 … $109 off of Adobe’s list price!  It is a Gold Box Deal of the Day — it won’t last!!

Go to Amazon

1/28 Update:  It was sweet while it lasted … it is back up to $273.99.

Lightroom 2.2 Issues and 2.3 Fixes

Have you experienced crashes in  LR 2.2  that you didn’t experience before?  Many have complained about memory leaks and other issues.    Adobe has announced that  LR 2.3 will address the following:

• In the Windows 64-bit version of Lightroom an sFTP upload process could cause Lightroom to crash.
• Slideshows could return to the first image randomly during playback.
• A memory leak could cause Lightroom to crash while attempting to process files with local adjustments.
• Canon EOS 5D Mk II sRAW files could process with artifacts in Lightroom 2.2.
• Lightroom 2.2 could cause disc burning to fail for Windows customers.

It hasn’t been released officially, but you can download the  early-version “release candidate” if the issues are holding you back and you want to  move to 2.3 early.  According to Adobe, “The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.”

No word on when the official version will be released.

To upgrade, go to adobe labs.

Two Button Printing in Lightroom

Check out my post over on O’Reilly Digital Media’s Inside Lightroom blog on the miracle of two button printing in Lightroom.    If you have been printing in Photoshop, you will be amazed at how you can streamline your printing  process.

Selective Black and White

Take advantage of Lightroom 2’s  (or Camera Raw’s) adjustment brush to create images that are part black and white and part color.

I will start with the color image below, and convert all of it to black and white except the poster and the can.

Before

In the Develop module, click on the adjustment brush tool (shortcut K).

Adjustment Brush Settings

Slide the Saturation slider all the way to -100.

Make sure all the other settings sliders, such as Exposure, are at zero.

Set your  brush density and flow are set to 100, so that you fully desaturate when you paint.  Adjust your brush size with the Size slider or the left and right bracket keys [ and ].   Now paint over all that you want to be black and white (all but the can and poster for me.)   Adjust your brush size as needed.   To paint with more precision, zoom in and out with Ctl/Cmd + and Ctl/Cmd – or with the Navigation Panel.     If you painted over an area you didn’t mean to, click on Erase  or hold down the alt/option key to get the eraser brush, and  paint to erase.

When you are finished, put the adjustment brush away by clicking on it again or typing K.

After

Done!

PS:  Yes, I wish I had turned the can around before photographing this!

Getting Rid of the Winter Blues

In overcast conditions, your images may have a blue color cast, as does this great snowman image shot by my friend Debbie Espinosa. It was shot with the camera on daylight white balance, so the camera did not adjust for the bluish color that overcast light has. What the image “should” look like is subjective. Blue suggests cold, so you may like it as is. Or you may prefer it to be more neutral.

Before: Blue color cast

If you prefer it more neutral, the first way of achieving this is to photograph the subject with your camera white balance set to cloudy. If you haven’t done this, after photographing you can also adjust the white balance in Lightroom. There are three main ways to go about this, all using the white balance section:

1. From the white balance drop down menu, choose cloudy or shade, depending on which looks better to you. Both of these add yellow to adjust for overcast blue light.
2. Use the temperature (Temp) slider: slide it to the right to add yellow, which is the opposite of blue and therefore counteracts it.
3. Click on the white balance tool to select it, and then click on the snow in the image. Lightroom will calculate what color it needs to add to the image to make the area you selected completely color-neutral (i.e. white or grey).

4. Any combination of these methods. For example, you can use the white balance tool to get the image technically neutral, and then adjust the temperature slider to fine tune the white balance for visual appeal.

Adjusted with the White Balance Tool

If you shot many images under the same conditions, fix the first one, then copy your solution to all your other images:

• Click the Copy button at the bottom of the left panel in the Develop module
• Check None to deselect all settings
• select White Balance
• Click Copy
• Highlight all of your other images
• Click Paste (next to Copy)

You can also accomplish the same with Synchronize or Auto Sync, if you prefer.

A couple other notes:

- The same white balance tools are available in Camera Raw.

- White balance correction works best on raw files, but you can also use the tools on jpegs and tiffs.

Film Borders and Classic Vignettes in Lightroom

The Post Crop section in the Vignettes panel of the Develop Module allows you to add creative vignettes. It is called Post Crop, because the vignette will always adjust to any cropping you do, even if you crop after you create the vignette.

Unless you have played with all the sliders, you may not realize what kind of creative effects you can get. For example, you can simulate a film border, as in this image:

Post Crop Vignette

To get this, I slid all the post-crop sliders to the left:

Black Film Border Settings

Amount controls the tone of the vignette, from pure black at -100 to pure white at +100. So if you want a white border, slide it all the way to the right.

Roundness controls how thick the border is. Less negative roundness gives you thicker edges. When you go towards zero and into positive territory the shape moves from rectangular to oval and then round. I increased Roundness here from -100 to -80, and changed the Amount to +100 to make the vignette white.

Thicker White Border, Roundness at -80

For comparison, here is Roundness at +20 — now the shape is an oval:

Roundness at +20

Feathering softens the border edge. Here I have gone back to my rectangular example, with Roundness at -80, and increase the feather setting from 0 to 50 :

Feather = 50 to Soften Edges (All other settings as above)

Here’s how I would create a classic soft black oval vignette:

• Slide Amount to the left to darken to your taste.
• Is the border too visible? If so, increase feathering to fade it more. If instead you want more of an obvious edge, slide feathering to the left.
• Adjust the roundness, to the left to make the vignette more rectangular, to the right to make it rounder.
• To cover more of the image with the vignette (leaving a smaller center), reduce the midpoint. To cover less, increase the midpoint.

Classic Dark Oval Vignette

The same vignette, with Amount = +85 to make it almost white:

Almost White Oval Vignette

No doubt you will find settings that you prefer to mine — I hope this post encourages you to experiment. Once you find a vignette that you like, save it as a preset so that you can use it on other images :

In the Preset panel on the left side of the Develop Module, click on the + sign to the right of the word Preset:

Type a descriptive name in the Preset Name box, click “Check None” to clear all the checkmarks, then click in the box next to Post-Crop under Vignette, so that this is the only setting from the image you have been working on that the preset remembers:

Select a new image (or many images!), then in the Preset Panel under User Presets, click on your vignette preset

and watch Lightroom do its magic.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Have a wonderful and safe holiday season.  May your dreams come true in the new year.

Laura

PS:  Check back after December 27 for my next post!

How to Use the Graduated Filter Tool

Here’s a video I made showing how to use the graduated filter tool in Lightroom 2 and Camera Raw in CS4. In listening to it I realized that I am currently stuck on the word “so”. So you’ll have to grin and bear it!

go to video

Maximizing Compatibility, Minimizing Headaches

In addition to writing this blog, I will be contributing occasionally to O’Reilly Media’s Inside Lightroom blog. Visit the blog today to read my first post, on maximizing compatibility of Photoshop files so that you can import them into Lightroom.

Go to O’Reilly

There are twelve writers and alot of great information, so visit often (and come back here too!).

Dragging Images from Bridge into Lightroom

Sometimes I use Bridge to look at images, and from there I decide which ones to import into Lightroom. It is then easy to simply drag the images over into Lightroom.

• Size your Bridge and Lightroom windows so that you can see both.
• In Lightroom, go to Library Grid view (shortcut G). It does not matter what folder or collection of images are showing.
• In Bridge, select the images you want to import.
• Click and drag from Bridge over onto the Lightroom grid (thumbnail area). Let go.
• The Lightroom import dialog will open. Specify import options as usual.

Point and Shoot Cameras Under $300

I have been thinking lately that it would be nice to have a point and shoot camera that I could always have in my pocket. Here’s an article from yesterday’s New York Times, with recommendations for point and shoots under $300.

article

I didn’t check them all, but I doubt they shoot in raw. I know the Canon G10 does, but it is closer to $500.

How to Move Your Lightroom Catalog

I have written about moving your Lightroom work from your laptop to your desktop (or any two computers) here. This involves exporting your work on the laptop as a catalog, then importing it into your desktop catalog.

Sometimes though you may want to simply move your catalog. Mine was initially on an external hard drive; I then decided to move it to my internal C: drive because it would read and write faster.

The first step in doing this is finding out where it is stored currently.

• Hold down the Alt or Option key as you open Lightroom. (Sometimes on my PC I have to hold down Ctl instead or I get a LR Properties Dialog). You will get this popup window:

Location of Lightroom Catalog

• Write down the location of the catalog. For me, the Lightroom Catalog folder (with the lrcat file inside it) sits directly on my C: drive.
• Cancel out of this dialog.
• Next, go into Windows Explorer or Finder on the Mac, and drag the Lightroom Catalog folder to its new location.
• Holding down the Alt or Option key again, open Lightroom. Now, in the dialog box click on the Change button next to the catalog location, and point to the new location. When you do this, you will have to point to the lrcat file within the Lightroom Catalog folder.

Done!

PS:  Note that if you want to delete a catalog, just delete the Lightroom Catalog folder.

When HSL Rules Over the Adjustment Brush

The adjustment brush and the graduated filter tool are wonderful additions to Lightroom 2 for making local changes. But there are often quicker ways to make local changes. I will talk about HSL in this post.

In the image below I want to darken the sky. Yes, I can get the adjustment brush, set the exposure to a negative amount, and paint the sky.

Before

But since the only blue in the image is the sky, it is alot faster accomplish my goal by darkening the blues in the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel: click on HSL, click on luminance (luminance refers to brightness), and slide the blue slider to the left.

Darkening the Blues in The Image

Darkened Blues

Let’s say I now want to saturate the grass and tree more. I can use the adjustment brush with a positive saturation setting, but instead, in the HSL panel I will click on Saturation.    I’m not sure if the grass is green or yellow or some combination, so instead of guessing and fooling around with the sliders, I’ll use the handy Targeted Adjustment Tool (TAT). I will click on it, and then click on the grass and drag upwards since I want to increase saturation. I will do this in a few places in the foreground.  The TAT detects the colors you are dragging on, and adjusts those throughout the image — in this case increasing saturation of yellows and greens.    It works for us here because there are no yellows and greens in the building or sky — otherwise those would become more saturated as well.

Saturated Foreground

The yellow is a little too saturated for me, but now it is easy to go to the Yellow slider and reduce it a little. Note also that I could have darkened the sky with the TAT as well, clicking on luminance and dragging downward on the sky, rather than using the blue slider.

Finally, I am going to use the Hue component in the HSL panel to change the color of the background in this image:

Before

I click on HSL, Hue and the Targeted Adjustment tool, then click and drag up and/or down on the blue background to change the color to something I like. Because there was no blue in the subjects, they are unaffected.

After Hue Change

By the way, if skin is too red, try clicking on saturation, and dragging downwards on the face to take some of the color out. In this case, since purple also contains red, it will change the background a little as well, but that may be acceptable, and a big time saver over working with the adjustment brush.

The key to being able to use HSL to do local adjustments is that the area you want to darken, lighten, increase or decrease saturation of, or change the color of, is made up of colors that don’t exist elsewhere in the image. In my first image, for example, if the building had also been blue, I could not have isolated the sky using HSL. I would have had to use the adjustment brush to specifically darken the sky.

More on Spot Removal in Camera Raw

I showed you how to use the spot removal tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw, and how to copy your spot removals from one image to others in Lightroom in my spot removal video.

However, I didn’t mention how to copy your spot removals from one image to others in Camera Raw. (Thanks, Teri for this question.) So here it is:

• Open your first image and fix your spots. Click Done to close the image.
• In Bridge, select all the other images that have spots in the same places (i.e. dust on the sensor).
• Right-click, choose Develop Settings>Paste Settings …
• From the drop down box in the dialog that appears, choose spot removal. Hit OK.
• As I recommended in my video, review each image to make sure that its solution for each spot works well.

You can also open up all the images at once in Camera Raw, click Select All, and work on all the image simultaneously. Or, with all of them open in Camera Raw, select the first, then click Synchronize and choose Spot Removal. But I find both of these to be slower than pasting in Bridge.

Before and After in Lightroom

In the Lightroom Develop module, there are different ways to look at Before and After for changes that you have made. One of my favorites is to use the backslash key \ to toggle between Before and After. The default Before state is the first step in the History panel, usually your file import. So by default, you are toggling between “before all changes” and “after all changes”.

Sometimes though, you may want to look at Before and After just the last change you made, or the last few changes. Fortunately, you have the flexibility to set which step in your processing will be the Before state: in the History panel in the Develop module, simply right-click (ctl-click for one button mac mouse users) on the step you want to assign to Before, and choose Copy History Step Settings to Before.

In the example below, my Before state will be before sharpening (which involved setting four settings). Toggling the \ key will therefore show me before and after sharpening.

Right Click to Set Your Before State

Sometimes when I am using the \ key to toggle between Before and After, I will try to continue making adjustments to my image and find that Lightroom is locked up, and I can’t do anything. It is always because I have forgotten that I am still in Before mode, and changes can’t be made in this mode. If this happens to you, hit the \ key again to get back to After.

Painting with Color in Lightroom 2

If you have used the adjustment brush in Lightroom 2, you may have noticed that you have the ability to paint color on your image. After clicking on the adjustment brush to make it active, click on the color square next to the word Color to choose your color.

Adjustment Brush Color Setting

In this case I chose blue. Here is the image I am going to work on:

Before Painting

When I paint over the flower with blue, blue is added to the existing red, and the result is a bluish red:

Painting over the Flower with Blue

What I really want to do is to replace the red with blue. Here’s the secret: in addition to selecting the color blue, I also reduce the adjustment brush saturation slider to -100.

Settings to Replace Color

Then the red is removed and I get what I want:

Painting with Blue AND Saturation of -100

By the way, with auto mask turned on, painting over the flower with a large brush produced a very good selection of the flower, with just a few missing spots. I then turned off auto mask and painted in those missing spots. The auto mask check box is located right below the brush settings.

Adjustment brush settings are sticky, so next time you use the adjustment brush you will most likely still have your color selected. To unselect it, click on the color square, slide the slider down to 0%, and then close the color window.

Simulating Shallow Depth of Field with the Lens Blur Filter

Let’s create the perception of a shallower depth of field in this image, with the police cars sharp, and the background more out of focus.

Before

Duplicate the background layer (Ctl/Cmd-J), and add a layer mask to it ( circle-in-a-square symbol at the bottom of the layers palette.) We will blur the duplicate layer, and then mask off the foreground that we want to keep sharp.

This particular image has alot of noise, as the close up below shows. It was shot at ISO 800.

Close Up Showing Noise

If we blur the background, the blur will eliminate the noise and look unrealistic against the foreground unless we bring the noise back. Notice also in the full size image that there are blown out highlights in the background neon lights. Because blurring is done by averaging pixels with neighboring pixels, a simple blur would dull these areas as highlights are averaged with shadows. The lens blur filter will allow us to retain the blown out highlights and also add back noise.

Click on the image thumbnail on the duplicate background layer.

Go to Filter>Lens Blur.

Lens Blur Filter Dialog Box

­Set the Radius to the amount of blur that you want, or slightly more than you will likely want, planning to reduce the layer opacity to fine tune it.

The Specular Highlight section allows you to retain specular highlights that otherwise would be end up dulled to light grey. Your goal is to retain the blown out highlights without making them bigger. Brightness values in an image range from 0 for pure black to 255 for pure white. In this section, all brightness values brighter than the Threshold will be brightened, by the number of values specified in Brightness. It is best to start with the Threshold at 255 and Brightness of zero, and adjust from there. Set the Brightness somewhere around 5, and watch the areas that you know should be blown out as you slide the Threshold slider down. Stop when you are on the edge of making the specular highlights bigger than they were. Then fine tune the brightness slider. Turn the preview on and off to compare. In this case I settled on brightening all values over 238 by 5 points.

Add noise back in with the Noise Amount slider if needed. Leave the distribution on Gaussian, and check Monochromatic. Hit OK.

This blurs our entire picture. Now we will mask off the blurred layer where we want the sharp image below to show through. Click on the blurred-layer layer mask, and paint in black over the foreground cars. If the blur is too much, reduce the opacity of the layer.

Layers Palette After - Layer Mask on Blur Layer, Adjust Opacity if Needed

After

Of course I recommend spending more time painting your mask than I did for the example — my edges still need some work.

Admittedly, this was a straightforward example, with only two planes — a foreground, and a background. In other situations you may need different amounts of blur for objects at different distances from the foreground. For this you will need to create a depth map. The depth map tells the Lens Blur filter how sharp each part of the image should be. Perhaps this will be a topic for a future post — leave me a comment if you have an interest in this.

Deals on Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2

I would be willing to bet quite a bit that Adobe will not be offering anything in terms of Black Friday sales, but you can still save: if you buy the full or upgrade versions of Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 at the same time through www.adobe.com, Adobe will give you 30% off of your Lightroom purchase.

If you are a member of NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) you can save an additional 15%. First go to the NAPP site and in the Discounts for Members section under software get your promo code. Then enter this promo code when you purchase the software from adobe.com.

Speaking of NAPP, in my opinion being a member is well worth the annual $99 annual membership fee. Not only do you get their magazine, training videos and tutorials, as well as help desk support, but many companies provide discounts to NAPP members: Dell, Apple, Office Depot and the makers of the Drobo to name a few. And best of all in my opinion: free shipping from B&H! Check them out at www.photoshopuser.com

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy and be safe.

Learn from My Dusty Mistake

In my last post I showed you how to remove spots using the spot removal tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw. After I made the video, it occurred to me that I didn’t show you my most horrifying example of dust on the camera sensor. I took this image in 2004 shortly after I got my first digital SLR. (Click on the image to see it larger — there is much more dust than you can see in this small version!)

Dust on the Camera Sensor

I didn’t realize back then that it is a very bad idea to change lenses without turning the camera off — the camera has a charge that draws in dust.  So learn from my mistake on this one! I was able to clean up the image, but it took hours.   These days I turn off the camera, and also turn the camera downwards as I replace the lens so that no dust inadvertently falls into it.

Using the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw

Here’s a video in which I demonstrate the spot removal tool in both Lightroom and Camera Raw. You may have to turn your speaker volume up all the way … bear with me as I continue to work on this issue. watch video

Why Can’t I Rearrange My Images in Lightroom?

I thought I would address this commonly encountered issue as I am learning to do videos. Sorry it is a little repetitive, they will get better. Bottom line if you don’t have time to watch the video: make sure you are in a bottom-level folder, and also that you are not in a smart collection. watch video

If you have any issues watching this video, please shoot me an email — I would appreciate hearing so I can make future videos better.

Painting Back What You Take Away

Sometimes you want to make an adjustment to your image almost everywhere. You could use the adjustment brush and paint almost everywhere, but that could be slow. Instead, make the adjustment everywhere, with a global change in the Basic panel, and then use the adjustment brush to change back the area you didn’t want to affect. This works in both Camera Raw and Lightroom. Here’s an example. I want to give this portrait image that glow that is popular these days, but I don’t want it to affect the eyes or the mouth.

Original

I will give the image the glow by reducing clarity to -60 in the Basic panel. I also boosted contrast and vibrance.

Clarity at -60 Plus Boost Contrast and Vibrance

With the adjustment brush set to +60 on clarity (the opposite of the global change I made), I would then paint over the eyes and mouth to reverse the negative clarity change. That is the idea — but to make the change obvious to you in this small image environment, I actually painted with +100 clarity, to accentuate the eyes even more:

Paint +100 Clarity over the Eyes and Mouth

Note that with this technique, Lightroom (or Camera Raw) isn’t blurring the eyes and mouth and then sharpening what it has blurred — that would not in fact work. It is only applying one change to these areas — the cumulative effect of the negative and positive clarity.

Another example of applying a change everywhere and then painting back with the opposite effect where you didn’t want it is an image that needs to be brighter almost everywhere — brighten it globally, then paint back the areas that you didn’t want brighter with negative brightness. Depending on what type of adjustment you are making, you may find that the amount that you need to paint back is not exactly the opposite of your global change … after you paint with the adjustment brush, adjust the slider until it looks good visually.

Finally, note that this will not work when you want part of your image in color and part in black and white — you can’t desaturate the image (saturation of -100) and then paint color back in with +100 saturation. In this case instead start with the color image, and with the adjustment brush set to -100 saturation, paint the areas that you want to be in black and white.

Lightroom on Two Monitors

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have your thumbnails on one screen, and your full size image on another? Lightroom 1 users thought so and pressed Adobe to provide this functionality. Adobe did so in Lightroom 2. It is very easy to set up: In the Library and Develop modules, on the left side just above the filmstrip, you will see icons for screen 1 and screen 2:

Dual Monitor Buttons

Click on the 2 icon, and a second LR window will open that looks like this:

Secondary Monitor Display

Drag this to your second monitor and size the window to fit.

Your keyboard shortcuts (G=Grid, E=Loupe, C=Compare, N=Survey, D=Develop) still control what you see on your primary monitor.

In the secondary display, in the top left are your options for this display: Grid, Loupe, Compare or Survey. If you choose Loupe, you will see three options to the right: Normal, Live and Locked. Normal works as expected — when you click on an image thumbnail in your grid or filmstrip, the image is displayed on the second monitor. With Live, as you hover over a thumbnail, the image is displayed on the second monitor — you can quickly review one image after another by moving the mouse over each thumbnail. With locked, the image displayed will stay on the screen even when you then choose another one for your primary screen. This is useful for comparing images — for example, on your primary screen you may be working on an image in Develop, and you want to make sure that you set its white balance to have a look consistent with another image. To set it up, select the second image, and on the secondary monitor choose Loupe and Locked. Now select the one you want to work on in Develop for the primary screen.

For those of you who calibrate your monitors (hopefully all of you!), be sure it is your primary monitor that is calibrated, and make all judgments on color and tone from this display.

Moving Lightroom Work Between Laptop and Desktop Computers

You’re on vacation, at a workshop or shooting on location commercially, loading your images onto your laptop and working them in Lightroom 2. Will you be able to successfully and easily transfer all your Lightroom work to your desktop Lightroom catalog? Absolutely!

Let’s say your folder of images on your laptop is named “Vacation”. In the Library module in Lightroom, right-click on the folder name, and choose Export This Folder as a Catalog. Choose a location to store this temporary catalog. I recommend the desktop because it will be easy for you to find. Another option is to save it directly to an external hard drive that you can then use to transfer the catalog to your desktop. Choose a name for the catalog, like Vacation Catalog. Checking Export Negative Files will bundle a copy of the originals with the catalog so that you don’t have to move them over separately to your desktop and then have to have LR find them. I recommend that you do choose this option. Checking Include Available Previews will save and transfer the jpeg previews that have already been built. If you don’t, LR on your desktop computer will simply regenerate them — it just takes time that you have already spent for them to be generated on your laptop. Finally, click Save.

This process generates a folder called Vacation Catalog that has all the components in it. Move the folder to an external hard drive and connect it to your desktop computer. (Another option is to save the folder to a DVD and then insert this in your desktop computer.) In the Library module of Lightroom, in the menu bar go to File>Import from Catalog. In the dialog box, navigate to the Vacation Catalog folder on the external drive or DVD, double click on it to open it, and select the Vacation Catalog.lrcat file (it will be the only file that is not in a subfolder). Click Choose.

In the Import Dialog that then opens, under File Handling choose Copy Files to a New Location and Import, click Choose and navigate to the folder you want to store the images in permanently (like 20080701 New Mexico Vacation within the folder 2008). Click Import.

Done! Assuming everything went well with the import and your images and LR enhancements are there, you can go back to your laptop and remove the Vacation folder of images from the LR catalog and the hard drive. In the LR Library module, right click on the folder and choose Show in Explorer (Finder on a Mac). In Explorer or Finder, delete the folder. Back in Lightroom, right click again on the folder and select Remove, to remove it from the catalog.

Happy travels!

A Few Days Off

I’ll be out of town for the rest of the week teaching a Lightroom 2 workshop in Eugene, Oregon. Please check back on Monday for my next post. Remember, if there is a topic or question you would like me to address, click on “Submit a Question” to the right, and email it to me — I would love to hear from you.

Thanks for dropping by!

What is that cool color? Find Out Using Photoshop

I was creating a web gallery in Lightroom today for a friend, and I wanted it to look as consistent with her website as possible in terms of colors and fonts. The issue I faced was how to determine what the website background color was. Here’s how to do it:

• Open up Photoshop, open any image and make sure you have the background layer highlighted in the layers palette.
• Resize the Photoshop window so that the web page (or any other document) you want the color from is next to it.
• Grab the Eyedropper tool (shortcut I), click anywhere in the image, and then drag over onto the web page color you want. As you drag around, you will see that the foreground color in Photoshop’s tool palette changes to reflect the color you are over. Let go when you have sampled the color you want.
• Click on the foreground color swatch in the tool palette to open the Color Picker dialog. Write down the 6 digit hexadecimal color code (circled below):

Photoshop Color Picker Dialog Box

Here is how to use the color in a Lightroom web gallery:

• In the Web module Color Palette, click on the background color, and when the color dialog box opens, click in the hex box and type the new number in. That’s it!

Changing a Lightroom Web Gallery Color

Once you have your web gallery designed, don’t forget to create a template, so that you can use the design again without having to start over from scratch. More on that in another post.

Chromatic Aberration

When you are working on an image for print, or any application where it will be viewed full size, it is important that you zoom in to 100%, and inspect the entire image for issues that you can’t see when it is smaller. I was working on this image today

Fall Image

and when I zoomed in to 100% I discovered a red and cyan colored fringe around the bird in the image. Here it is zoomed in to 400% so you can really see it:

Red/Cyan Chromatic Abberation

This is chromatic aberration. It is is apparent when the camera lens fails to focus all wave lengths of light in the same focal plane. It happens mostly with wide angle lenses (this was shot at 24mm), and closer to the edges of the image frame. In this image I also noticed it in the tree branches towards the edges.

But not to worry: Lightroom, Camera Raw and Photoshop all have tools to align the color channels and remove or at least reduce the fringing. In Lightroom you will find the Chromatic Aberration correction sliders in the Detail panel in Develop. In Camera Raw they are on the lens corrections tab. In Photoshop, you will find them in the Lens Correction Filter (Filter>Distort>Lens Correction).

Chromatic Aberration Correction Tools

Simply slide the Red/Cyan slider until the fringing is eliminated or minimized. If you start to see cyan where there was red and red where there was cyan, you went too far. Sometimes you will then have to adjust the Blue/Yellow slider. Below is the the result of my Red/Cyan adjustment. I do see some subtle purple at the back of the bird, but it seems to be the blending of the blur of the bird with the bluish sky behind it.

After Chromatic Aberration Fix

For a given focal length and lens, the same C/A correction settings should work on other images as well. Consider creating and using a preset to eliminate the need to experiment with the sliders.

Shortcuts You Can’t Live Without: Lightroom Library Module

From my experience teaching, I know that some folks love shortcuts and others much prefer to use menus. But even if you are in the second group, you will find that learning and using just a handful or so of the most important shortcuts will really speed up your Lightroom experience. I dare say, you will not go back!

G takes you to the Library Grid view

E takes you to the Library Loupe view

D takes you to the Develop Module

Tab hides and reveals your left and right panels

Shift-Tab hides and reveals both the panels and filmstrip

\ hides and reveals the filter bar at the top.

0-5 assign 0 to 5 stars to your image.

6-9 assign colors to your image.

B assigns the selected image to the Quick Collection

If you are really into shortcuts, in Lightroom go to Help>Library Module Shortcuts to see a list of many more.

Photoshop CS4: To Upgrade or Not

Here’s a nice summary of Photoshop CS4 new and upgraded features that pertain to photographers, from John Nack of Adobe:

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/11/cs4_for_photographers.html

There are a couple new very powerful features, and then there are alot of changes that make it easier to get around in Bridge and Photoshop, and easier to do things that you could already do before.

The first new feature is the ability to do local adjustments in Camera Raw using the graduated filter and the adjustment brush. Scott Kelby has a video demo of these at www.photoshopuser.com/cs4

These were also introduced into Lightroom 2, so if you use Lightroom (and followed my advice from an earlier post to upgrade to Lightroom 2), you already have these features and you aren’t using Camera Raw anymore. If you don’t use Lightroom, then the introduction of the ability to do your dodging and burning, local contrast, saturation and sharpening enhancements right in Camera Raw is a powerful reason to upgrade in itself. Imagine not having to go into Photoshop anymore for many of your images that don’t require sophisticated selections and masks. I consider it a huge efficiency boost. The one word of caution I have on this for you to be prepared for these tools to challenge your machine’s processing power, unless you have upgraded recently. I don’t think this is a reason not to upgrade to CS4, but you will have to be a little patient at times. (And if it is time for a new computer, check out my colleague Dave Marx’s blog, www.computersforphotographers.com for thoughtful articles and recommendations.)

The second brand new and cool feature is Content Aware Scaling.  Consider those situations where you need to crop your image to different proportions, such as 5×7 or 8×10. But you don’t want to get rid of any of the image, and you also don’t want to squish it, making everyone really thin and tall, or widen it, making your paying customers fat. Assuming that there is negative space in your image, content aware scaling will try to find this negative space (or you can tell it where it is with an alpha channel), and will just shrink that down or expand it, preserving important areas like people at the right proportions. Russell Brown has an excellent video demonstration of this tool that I highly recommend you watch at http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/ContentAwareScale_SM.mov

If this interests you but would be your only compelling reason for upgrading, I suggest downloading the 30 day trial version and experimenting with the tool. It is good, but it does have its limitations in terms of how smart it is and what situations it is useful for.

Whoops, there is one more cool new feature — it  allows you to automatically combine multiple images shot at varying focus points, to get sharpness throughout the image. So when your depth of field is too shallow, shoot multiple images and use this Blend feature.

Ok, just one more major change — the ability to leverage 64 bit Windows processing. With this you can finally exceed the 4 GB limit that PS has been restricted to working with before. Of course if you don’t have or anticipate buying a new 64 bit machine in the next year, then this isn’t applicable to you.

Otherwise I consider most of the other features as nice to have. They make your day a little easier and the experience more pleasant.

Is it worth the $199? It depends on how dear $199 is to you these days, how much tolerance you have for learning new features, and how you value the new ones introduced.   Unless you use Camera Raw and can take advantage of its local enhancement tools, the decision is not so clear cut as, in my opinion, the decision to upgrade from Lightroom 1 to Lightroom 2.

Most Used Shortcuts

Just a quick post for today, with my most used shortcuts. I can’t recommend these enough — they work everywhere, Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom, and in places where other shortcuts don’t necessarily work, like in Photoshop filters.

First, the left bracket key [ and right bracket key ] for decreasing and increasing brush size … paint brush, healing brush, clone stamp, adjustment brush, spot removal tool, eraser, etc, etc.. Don’t waste your time going into brush menus for this! Similarly, shift [ and shift ] control how soft or hard your brush is, in 20% increments.

Second, for zooming in and out on an image, I use Ctl/Cmd + and Ctl/Cmd -. Again, in all of these programs. Holding the space bar down gives you the hand tool so that you can click and drag around in the image to get to the part you want to see. (Hold the space bar down the entire time).

The Scoop on Vibrance

If you have upgraded to Photoshop CS3 or CS4 or if use Lightroom, then you have encountered Vibrance. Consider it a smarter less heavy handed form of Saturation. Saturation will saturate all colors equally, and it is easy to go over the edge into blobs of frightening color and loss of detail in a color that was pretty saturated to start with, just to get the saturation up on another color that started out less saturated. Vibrance on the other hand will saturate less-saturated colors more than ones that are already more saturated. It will also protect somewhat against oversaturating skin tones. Consider this example. The first image is before adjustments. My goal is to increase the saturation of the colors in the hat.

Before

When I increase saturation, as shown in the second image, it not only increases the saturation of colors in the hat, but the skin gets yellow as well. In addition, the reds in the hat have started to go over the edge where you lose the detail of the yarn, because the reds were more saturated than the blues to start with.

Increase Saturation by 50 (on scale of 0 to 100)

When I instead increase vibrance, notice that the skin color is pretty well preserved, and that I am able to get more saturated blues without losing the detail in the reds.

Increase Vibrance by 80 (on scale of 0 to 100)

How well you see these changes will depend on your monitor. Give it a try with your own images, comparing what you get with saturation and with vibrance. I find I rarely use Saturation any more.

Photoshop CS3 has Vibrance in Camera Raw. CS4 also introduces a Vibrance adjustment layer.

Clarity — Part 2

I showed you in my first clarity post how to use negative clarity in Lightroom or Camera Raw to soften skin. For a creative look, try heavy negative clarity on the whole image:

Before

Minus 100 Clarity (click on the Image to see larger)

Negative clarity reduces midtone edge contrast, so it softens or blurs. The pier is much less ffected by the softening because it has alot of deep shadow tones.

Before

After: Minus 100 Clarity

It looks kind of like a slide sandwich, or having a gaussian blur layer or smart filter in the soft light blending mode over the background layer (for those that have taken my filters, blending modes and montages creative class.) You may have to increase vibrance or saturation and contrast afterwards.

Note that Camera Raw introduced negative Clarity with CS4. It has been in Lightroom since version 1.

Photoshop Scrubby Sliders

Scrubby sliders are one of Photoshop’s great time saving features that you may not discover on your own. In many places in Photoshop, when you click and drag left or right on the name of a numeric setting, it adjusts the setting down or up — with no need to go into drop down boxes or to type in numbers. As an example, you may have worked with layer opacity, a setting in the layers palette that allows you to reduce the strength or opacity of a layer. The slow way to adjust the opacity is to click on the right facing drop down arrow to the right of 100%, and then adjust the slider that appears:

Drop down opacity slider - the slow way

Th quick way is to click on the word Opacity and drag the slider to the left to reduce it. Notice that as soon as you hover the mouse over the word, a hand with a double arrow appears … this is your indication that a scrubby slider is present:

Another scrubby slider is found up in the options bar for the text tool. You can type in the font size, or instead, click on the Tt symbol to the left of the size and drag!

Set text size with the scrubby slider.

You will find many scrubby sliders in numeric options for your tools. Look for them everywhere!

He Really Is Not Kidding!

This is a digital photography post, rather than Photoshop or Lightroom, but it has me fascinated enough that I must send you over to Luminous-Landscape to see for yourself. Michael Reichman was shooting with the new $500 Canon G10 point and shoot along with his $40,000 Hasselblad/Phase 1 digital medium format system and found that image quality is pretty much comparable, on screen and for small and moderate size prints (up to 13″x19:).

Please, read for yourself:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/kidding.shtml

This is a great site to monitor — excellent articles, reviews and training material.

Lightroom 2 Adjustment Brush Tip

If you are using the adjustment brush to make local image enhancements, you can hover over the pin to see the mask that you have drawn, but it shows for just a moment. To keep it on as you brush, type the letter O, for Overlay. To turn the overlay off, type O again.

If instead you use the adjustment brush in Camera Raw, simply check the Show Mask check box to see the mask. (Why isn’t this check box in Lightroom?)

Are you clear on Clarity?

The clarity slider was introduced in Lightroom 1.1, and is also now in Camera Raw. A positive clarity value punches up an image, makes it look a little more three dimensional, by enhancing contrast along edges. The changes are concentrated in the midtones, and do little to highlights and shadows. Here is an example, a portion of an image with Clarity set to 0, and then set to 60.

Before Clarity Adjustment

Clarity of +60

60 may be a bit strong, but hopefully you see the difference. I find that almost all my images can use some clarity, at least 30.  Note that it is not a substitute for sharpening, which does increase edge contrast, but along a much finer/narrower edge.

Now for the cool part: negative clarity, which as expected, decreases edge contrast. What are wrinkles, but edges?! So let’s soften some wrinkles and skin to get a little bit more of a healthy glow … my own face makes a great candidate. The first image shows no adjustment. In the second image, with the adjustment brush in LR (or CS4 Camera Raw) active, I set the Clarity slider to -100, and painted over my face, excluding the eyes and mouth.

Before Negative Clarity Adjustment

After Clarity Adjustment of -100

Actually, since some of my wrinkles are deep enough to be dark shadows, clarity only improves them a little, but it does much to soften the blotchiness of my skin. If -100 was too much, I can dial it back after painting (can I ever look too young??) And it is so easy to do.

If you don’t know how to use the adjustment brush in CS4 Camera Raw or Lightroom, watch a Scott Kelby video tutorial at www.photoshopuser.com/cs4.

Why Use Lightroom?

These days there are two primary digital workflows for photographers: Adobe Bridge/Camera Raw/Photoshop (all packaged into the Photoshop product) and Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop as a supplemental tool. Both routes are equally powerful, but I would say that the Lightroom route offers the potential for large efficiency gains. This of course is more important if you shoot large quantities of images and need to process them efficiently. If you are a fine art photographer and shoot and process few images at a time, then this won’t be so much of a consideration.

Lightroom’s efficiency gains come from these key features:

• It is a streamlined application — it only has what photographers need — you are not navigating through a complex program designed to be the be-all and end-all not only for photographers but also graphic designers, illustrators, and many others. In Photoshop there are also probably 15 ways to accomplish each task, because the program has been around for years and the old ways of doing things are not dropped as new ways are developed.
• Through the entire workflow, you never have to open up an image in an application (like Camera Raw and Photoshop). From initially importing the image from a memory card through keywording and otherwise managing, enhancing, printing, creating slideshows and creating and uploading web galleries you are working within Lightroom’s modules, where all images are accessible and essentially active. So you never wait for things to open and you don’t have to think about saving and closing them.
• Collections and smart collections offer dynamic ways to group images for specific purposes. And these don’t require multiple copies of the images to be floating around.
• Virtual copies allow you to have different versions of an image (for example color and a black and white versions, different crops) without having two actual file copies — so you are not doubling storage space or having to keep track of two files.
• Easy-to-create presets allow you to apply your commonly used image enhancement, print, export, web, slideshow and other settings to groups of images with one click.
• Lightroom can manage images on multiple drives, and you can actually perform a fair amount of work with the images even if its drive is not plugged in, because Lightroom stores information about the images in its central database. For this same reason, Lightroom can also find images from your database of thousands and thousands nearly instantaneously, whether they are on or offline.
• The ability to apply Photoshop actions to images as you export them from Lightroom.

In addition, because Lightroom was created just for photographers and is streamlined, learning it and using it is much more intuititive than Photoshop.

So where does Photoshop fit in with Lightroom?

There are still things Lightroom cannot do. I find myself taking about 5-10% of my keeper straight photography images into Photoshop for further enhancements, which include more sophisticated retouching than Lightroom can perform with its spot healing brush, local changes that require complicated selections and layer masks, and the use of 3rd party noise reduction and other plug ins. In addition, while I use the LR2 Print module for all my printing now, it does not have soft proofing, which allows you to see the image with the printer profile and rendering intent applied. So when soft proofing is critical, I take the image quickly into Photoshop to verify that I will get what I expect when I print.

In any case, with the release of LR 2 with its local adjustments, I find myself in Photoshop much less than with LR1, and I am sure I will even less so when LR 3 comes out, and so on. Of course I also have to go into Photoshop to do more creative work, like creating composites with multiple photographs and applying artistic filters. I would imagine that Adobe will always preserve some reasons for us to use Photoshop!

I would suggest that you base your decision on whether to start using Lightroom on your tolerance for learning a new product, your desire for a more efficient workflow, and your ability to absorb the $299 cost, realizing that you may still want Photoshop (though you may no longer feel the need to upgrade Photoshop each 18 months — more on that in another post.) If you want to test drive Lightroom, download a free 30 day trial version from www.adobe.com. I have been searching for a high level video introduction to Lightroom that demos LR 2, but haven’t found one yet. (There are plenty that show what is new in LR2.) If you know of one, please post a comment. Otherwise I may have to create one myself!