Archive for April, 2010
Lightroom 3 point-curve tutorial, online tips and Shoot Raw updates
A great piece on Lightroom 3’s point-curve editor
I was some way into the writing of a long article about Lightroom 3’s excellent new point curve editor (available in the beta 2 release) when I came across Gene McCullagh’s comprehensive piece on the topic over at lightroomsecrets.com. It’s very well written and worth reading carefully—it left my own half-finished attempt seem mostly superfluous. Beginners who wish to try creating custom tone curves after reading Gene’s post should start with the Linear curve, which contains only two control points—it just makes things a little easier to begin with. A linear curve makes it easier to follow the advice on adding a control point and holding down the option (alt) key while adjusting the position of that point.
Lenswork Technology Bog—highly recommended
One day, we’ll add a long-overdue list of resources that are useful to your raw workflow but since we’re on the topic of the new point curve editor in Lightroom 3, now seems like a good time to mention one very useful site that dealt with tone curves recently. Take a look at Brooks Jensen’s use of a custom tone curve in Lightroom to control highlights in print.
Brooks’s post is based on Lightroom 2, which offers a parametric tone curve but no ability to control the end points, preventing him from using the curve editor within Lightroom 2 itself to finely control the appearance of highlights in print. His workaround was to create a custom tone curve using Adobe Camera Raw, export that curve and then use it in Lightroom. It should now be possible to use the curve editing within Lightroom 3 to allow at least a similar level of control.
The Lenswork Technology Blog is excellent reading for photographers, particularly those of us who produce our own prints; the same is true of the Lenswork podcasts and the Ask Brooks blog. If you’re in the UK, you can get the Lenswork podcast via the UK iTunes Store (for free) here.
Welcome to our new subscribers
Lots of you have subscribed recently to the blog—thanks and welcome.
We went through a bit of a busy patch recently, as you might have gathered from the absence of blog posts but we now have a few days before the next scheduled training session so we’re firing off a few updates and articles. We’re hoping to add a little more information to the site and reorganise things a little, too. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in our main offering—one-to-one workflow courses in the UK based on Lightroom—we’re now taking bookings for May and June. Call 020 3092 2907 if you’d like to chat, or drop us a line. We’re doing a bit more travelling in the UK now and have worked out some ways of making our Lightroom courses more affordable—we’ll put details up on the training page soon and add a post here when it’s done.
We now use Lightroom 3 for all training
We recently switched to using Lightroom 3 beta 2 for all our training—it didn’t really make much sense to base tuition on Lightroom 2, given the quality of the current beta, the improved rendering of raw images and the new features that beta 2 offers. Reaction from photographers continues to be very positive—we’re very, very pleased with the direction in which Adobe is taking Lightroom 3.
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If you’re not currently a subscriber, you can choose e-mail via Google or RSS/Atom for your feed reader. (For the e-mail option, you get a single e-mail message in the morning whenever there’s a new article on the site but nothing otherwise.) The blog is a collection of tips, news and information for photographers, mostly covering workflow, image quality and technical subjects.
April 29th, 2010 by Bahi
Lightroom 3, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CS4
Some good news and updates recently for users of Lightroom and Photoshop CS4. Along with the good news is continued confusion in various online forums about Adobe Camera Raw and its relationship with Lightroom so here’s an attempt to explain some of what the two have in common.
What is Adobe Camera Raw?
Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is a software plugin used by Photoshop to decode (or “demosaic”) raw files. A version is supplied with every new copy of Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements) and the plugin is regularly updated as new cameras are released because new cameras mean new types of files for the ACR plugin to understand. Any new major release of ACR (like ACR 6.0, 7.0, etc.) is usually available only for the latest versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. The current version for Adobe Photoshop CS4 is ACR 5.7, released last week and available from Adobe as a free download. It works with Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Elements 8.
Links to the (free) Adobe Camera Raw 5.7 downloads:
- ACR 5.7 for Photoshop CS4 Mac
- ACR 5.7 for Photoshop CS4 Windows
- ACR 5.7 for Photoshop Elements 8 Mac
- ACR 5.7 for Photoshop Elements 8 Windows
Does Lightroom use Adobe Camera Raw?
No, not directly. Lightroom’s decoding (or demosaicing) of raw files doesn’t rely on the ACR plugin itself so installing a new version of ACR won’t change Lightroom’s rendering or allow it to read new types of raw files. However, Lightroom and ACR share functionality and code—it’s just that Lightroom’s implementation is contained within the application itself. A new release of the ACR plugin for Photoshop usually means a corresponding release of Lightroom. The two are independent but usually updated together.
Adobe Camera Raw 5.7 and why it’s important for Lightroom 3 beta 2 users
ACR 5.7, like Lightroom 2.7, offered support for raw files from newly released cameras but that’s not the reason for this article. Version 5.7 also included a nice surprise for users of Lightroom 3 beta 2. It turned out to include the code to allow it to decode raw files using the new raw decoding engine contained in the Lightroom 3 betas—specifically, Lightroom 3 beta 2. This code is what gives Lightroom 3 its much improved colour noise reduction (see previous articles here and here) and finer detail. Till now, if you were working in a Lightroom 3 beta and chose “Edit in Photoshop” (command-E on the Mac, ctrl-E on Windows), you’d see an error message in Photoshop CS4 (if you were using LR3 beta 2) or just wonky results (in LR3 beta 1). When you install ACR 5.7, that problem is gone, allowing you to work on a raw image in Lightroom 3 beta 2, then open the raw file (including your Lightroom edits) in Photoshop CS4 and continue to do pixel-level work. Very nice.
A few weeks back, we wrote about the new and old process versions for Lightroom 3; what ACR 5.7 offers is really a way for Photoshop to work on raw images that you edited in Lightroom using the 2010 process. It doesn’t allow you access to the new noise-reduction controls directly from Photoshop but it does appear to respect the settings that you used within Lightroom 3 beta 2.
Sidenote: when you work on a raw image in Lightroom and choose “Edit in Photoshop”, Lightroom doesn’t immediately create a TIFF and send it across to Photoshop—the ACR plugin within Photoshop reads the original raw file and the list of changes you’ve made in Lightroom and applies those changes itself. The TIFF gets created only when you save the file in Photoshop. Now that version 5.7 contains a raw decoding engine that’s compatible with Lightroom 3’s, this process works again for users of CS4 and Lightroom 3.
What all this seems to suggest is that there will be a version of ACR for Photoshop CS4 that will remain compatible with the final release of Lightroom 3, meaning that you don’t have to update to Photoshop CS5 immediately to keep tight integration between Lightroom and Photoshop. If that’s true, it’s a very welcome gesture.
The obligatory gasp about Photoshop CS5’s content-aware fill
Photoshop CS5 looks like a very strong release for a certain type of photographer. If you haven’t already seen the content-aware fill demonstration, you’ve been missing out so take five minutes to watch it now. It’ll make your jaw drop.
April 29th, 2010 by Bahi
More Lightroom 3 features revealed: correction for lens distortion
The final version of Lightroom 3 (and ACR 6.1) will allow us access to lens-correction features that have long been lurking.
Distortion correction has been around for a while in Lightroom
For some compact cameras that shoot raw and for some Micro Four-Thirds camera-and-lens combinations, both Lightroom and ACR have been providing behind-the-scenes corrections of lens distortion. Users of the Canon S90, the Panasonic Lumix LX-3 and some wide-angle Micro Four-Thirds lenses (such as the excellent 20mm Panasonic f/1.7) have seen automatic correction of very significant barrel distortion but Lightroom 3 (and ACR 6.1) will extend that benefit, in some form, to the rest of us.
Control over the degree of correction
Many users of the cameras and lenses mentioned above probably didn’t even know that their images were being corrected, sometimes for an eye-popping level of geometric distortion. The feature just worked, unbidden, behind the scenes. Adobe’s engineers generally seem to have matched the correction that the camera manufacturers applied to JPEGs generated by the camera and/or the results produced by the raw converters shipped with the cameras, meaning that by design, images from cameras like the S90 and LX-3 show some residual level of barrel distortion after automatic correction within Lightroom—correction over which the user has had no control, till now. With Lightroom 3, we’ll be able to fade the degree of correction for things like vignetting and distortion.
The best bit: we’ll be able to profile our own lenses
Out of the box, the lens-correction feature will support some lenses from Canon, Nikon and Sigma (who even issued a press release about it) but potentially the strongest aspect of Adobe’s implementation is that we will get a mechanism to allow us to profile our own lenses for optical defects. There are other solutions to the lens-correction problem (DXO Optics Pro, for example, or PTLens) but Adobe’s looks like it might be the strongest so far for a couple of reasons: firstly, the existence of an easy way to profile your own lenses (the proof of the pudding will be in the tasting, of course) and secondly, the apparent concern of the Adobe Lightroom/ACR team to get local corrections working well with this new feature. This is harder than it sounds: say you’ve removed a spot of sensor dust from an image or you’ve added saturation and sharpness to a an area of a photograph: quite how should Lightroom react when you later switch on the automatic correction for lens for distortion? Should it even let you switch it on if you’ve applied local corrections?
Head over to Tom Hogarty’s blog post, where he shows how it’s all going to work. Congratulations to the Lightroom team on what looks to be an excellent implementation.
April 30th, 2010 by Bahi