There are still a few places left on the one-day Lightroom training course we’re running next week. It’s being organised by and held at Four Corners, a centre of all things photographic. We get asked about group courses quite often but don’t often do them so if you’ve been waiting, now really is the time to come along!

In this one-day course, I’ll be covering a digital workflow using Lightroom 4 — bring your laptop and follow along with the examples, ask questions and take notes. We’ll be going over the setup of your catalogue, the organisation of your files, the import process, post-processing using the Develop module and exporting in different formats and colour spaces.

I’ll be demonstrating using Lightroom 4 but, for any Lightroom 3 users present, will cover areas where the two products differ. The one-day course costs £120 including VAT and is perfect for photographers considering Lightroom or already using it but not as well as they’d like. There’ll be lots of question-and-answer time, too.

The booking form is over at the Four Corners Film site — to book your place, click here.

The results we saw in tests of Lightroom public beta were very positive so we’re pleased the final release follow so quickly.

Aside from soft proofing, which works very well, output quality for high-contrast images is up (retention of colour in highlights, in particular) and some odd bugs, like the use of local adjustments causing loss of highlight colour in areas that you weren’t painting on (!) have been quashed. It’s easier to get convincing and pleasing results in fewer steps. It’s also a great plus to be able to add noise reduction or colour-temperature changes to specific places.

Bug fix, Library module

You can now move many folders from one location to another at the same time by command-clicking (ctrl-clicking in Windows) to select the folders and then dragging any one of them (with the command or ctrl key released). In Lightroom 3, this functionality would silently fail — only one folder would be moved — and none of the point upgrades addressed it; in version 4, it works. It sounds like a small thing but we’ve often had to answer calls from photographers asking how to rearrange a folder structure in Lightroom and we’ve had to tell them to do it folder by folder.

Upgrading

The upgrade procedure from Lightroom 3 to 4 has been smooth for our machines and leaves a copy of your original LR 3 catalogue in place. Nevertheless, back up everything before you begin. As with the upgrade from Lightroom 2 to 3, you’ll see an exclamation mark next to an image that uses the older process version while in Develop mode. You can click that icon to update that image or all the images in the filmstrip. Resetting an image will also update the process version. Although LR 4 will make some attempt to preserve the look of an adjusted image when moving from process version 2010 to version 2012, you’ll likely have to tweak things to get them looking right — but the end result will likely be better than it was in LR 3.

Computer performance — check first

The new process version (2012) does place a heavy load on older hardware. If you’re running an old machine and a high-resolution camera, now might be a time to start looking for a new computer. If you’re unsure about your machine’s performance, download the trial version of Lightroom 4 first. It’s free to use for 30 days.

Price

Adobe’s new pricing is surprising but welcome: officially £86.57 excluding VAT for the full version and less than £50 ex-VAT for an upgrade. That’s roughly half of what you’d have paid for Lightroom 3 just six months ago.

Adobe Lightroom 4 from Amazon UK

Here are Amazon UK links for the full version and upgrade version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4. There’s also a student and teacher version of Lightroom 4 here. (But remember that you need to show eligibility in order to get the student and teacher version running — without it, you won’t obtain a serial number.)

If you run the trial version first, you can buy a retail copy or buy from Adobe directly to convert your trial to the full version, without losing any work — you just need a serial number to activate the software after the 30 days are up.

Lightroom 4 training

If you’re a Lightroom 3 user interested in a top-up course to cover Lightroom 4 specifics or have been using Lightroom causally and would now like to use it in depth, please write or call (020 3092 2907).

We also have a Lightroom training day scheduled for photographers who are new to Lightroom or who haven’t yet got to grips with it — it’s a one-day course on Wednesday, 23rd May at Four Corners in London. It costs £100 plus VAT. Click here to book. (The training day was originally scheduled for 10th May but we moved it to avoid a date clash.)

Topic 1: Lightroom training course, London, May 2012

Important update, April 2012: we’ve moved the date of this course by a week to avoid a date clash: it’s now scheduled for Wednesday, 23rd May 2012.

Every week, we get asked about Lightroom training courses for small groups. We now work mostly one-to-one with photographers but Helena and her colleagues at Four Corner are organising a one-day Lightroom course that I’ll be delivering on Wednesday 23rd May, 2012. I’ve taught at Four Corners before and it’s an excellent place; at £120 for the day, including VAT, this course is terrific value. I’ll set you up with a smooth, Lightroom-based workflow and answer your questions.

You’ll need to bring your own laptop running Lightroom 4 or Lightroom 3. You can use the 30-day trial of Lightroom if you’re still undecided. Questions? E-mail Helena or e-mail us.

Topic 2: Lightroom 4 beta released

It’s old news now but Lightroom 4 public beta 1 is available as a free, fully-functional download, valid till the retail release of Lightroom 4. Back when I last wrote about Lightroom’s closest competitor, Aperture 3, I said that Lightroom’s two weaknesses were the absence of soft proofing and the absence of a book-publishing package. This first public beta addresses both those issues and also makes some thoughtful changes to the Develop module, among other things.

A note of caution: Lightroom 4 public beta 1 is not yet ready for production use. It has lots of interesting new features and is good to experiment with but it’s no more than that. We’ll be talking about it on the course but unless it has been released officially by then, we’ll stick with Lightroom 3.

Key new feature: soft proofing in Lightroom 4

When you soft proof, you see your work on your computer’s monitor looking closer to the way it will look in print. That allows you to make adjustments specifically for the print version.

Lightroom’s implementation of soft proofing is pretty much what we’d been hoping for: quick and simple, with useful histograms and warnings available. As soon as you start to adjust for the loss of contrast on a fine-art baryta paper, for example (compare the two images above), you get a clearly labelled virtual copy of the image for print, which you can safely delete at any time. For us, it’s easily more appealing than Photoshop CS 5′s equivalent — in Lightroom, the use of a paper-white background is practical and effective and it’s easier and quicker to switch between relative and perceptual conversions. (Not as tricky to understand as they might sound. Too long a topic to go into here — come to a training course!)

Topic 3: Lightroom 3 is discounted

Perhaps because of Lightroom 4 beta’s release or maybe because Aperture is now so affordable, the full retail copy of Lightroom 3 has been reduced to just £95 including VAT and delivery from Amazon. That is at least £100 less than the old street price. Click here to buy from Amazon UK.

Hoping to write again in days rather than months. Please call or write if you have questions.

While we’ve been busy providing photographers with personal Lightroom tuition and other creatives with technical help of all sorts, many of you have been waiting for group training sessions and have been writing to say so. Thank you for your patience! We’re planning a workshop based on a non-destructive Lightroom 3 workflow, to be held in London, probably in late August. We’ll go over catalogue functions, development and high-quality output.

Where and when?

Late August, in London. Before we decide on the location and date, we’d like your help; if you think you might be interested in attending a Lightroom course like this (or would just like to join the mailing list for future London workshops), please complete our short survey. It’s multiple choice and takes less than a minute to do; just click the radio buttons and let us know whether we’re on the right track. To begin, click here.

If you know other photographers at any level who have been waiting to get to a Lightroom workflow training course of this sort in London and the South East, please point them to the survey page.

Any questions? Please get in touch by e-mail or phone (020 3092 2907). Thank you!

Keywording

The topics we cover during our workflow training can be divided broadly into two areas: file organisation and quality of output. For most of the photographers we train, pro and advanced amateur, the two areas are equally important but online, there’s relatively little information about keeping your stuff organised so we’ll be attempting to help remedy that this year, beginning with the topic of keywording. A few tips can help you organise your photographs and find them when you need them so we’ll be providing short blog posts on that topic and others relating to organisation of your image library. Although they’ll be based on Lightroom 3, some of the tips will be apply to other digital asset management applications as well.

Lightroom training courses for groups

Most of what we do is one-to-one training but we’ve been collecting names from photographers who’ve written or called to ask about attending a class. If you’re waiting for our next Lightroom training course in London, please e-mail or use the contact form and we’ll measure interest and write to all the people on our list well in advance of our next course. We might even end up putting out a quick questionnaire to ask if the photographers who’ve subscribed to our blog would prefer week-end or week day courses. As usual, follow the blog by e-mail or RSS and you’ll know when we get something ready.

Site reboot

A rewrite. We’ve had a copywriter look over the site and rewrite the copy and we’ve also sketched out a plan to make the whole place a little more streamlined and easier to navigate, with more information about us and a little less clutter but the changes aren’t live yet. You’ll see them roll in gradually over the next few weeks. There may be the odd broken link while that happens—if you spot anything, please let us know.

Shoot Raw moves to Dreamhost. We moved our web hosting to Dreamhost recently, since we host several sites and have recently been helping photographers with their own online presence; Dreamhost makes that a bit easier for us, without the need to worry about bandwidth or hosting fees. We made the move during what we thought would be a very quiet time but some of you noticed the disruption while looking for contact details for us online. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Dreamhost offer. If you’re interested in signing up with them, you can visit Dreamhost and enter the promo code shootraw to get a $10 discount on a year’s hosting and a $20 discount on two years’ hosting. (As of March 2011, that reduces your hosting costs to $109.40 and $204.80 respectively but check the latest prices when you sign up.) What makes Dreamhost different, among other things, is that once you’ve paid to host a domain, you can add further domains that you already own without paying any extra for hosting. (Note: you also get full SSH and SFTP access, which we didn’t have with our previous host — that also makes life easier for us.)

Other Shoot Raw news — Ravensbourne

Earlier this year, I taught a unit at Ravensbourne, previously known as Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. The college was based in Chislehurst but now occupies a fantastic new building overlooking the O2 Arena on the Greenwich Peninsula. The unit was part of the new Digital Photography BA (Hons) course that Ravensbourne began this year. They’ve attracted a really good first-year cohort and the teaching was fun. It was also a good chance to see the way that a bunch of young photographers took to Lightroom 3 and to digital workflow in general. The blog updates that you’ll be reading over the next few weeks and months will have been inspired partly by seeing the result of a group of photographers work on things over a period of ten weeks — it highlighted things that I hadn’t seen when teaching individuals or shorter group courses.

Photography degree courses are now beginning to really value the importance of digital asset management and workflow — that’s really good to know. As recently as 2010, we privately taught recent recent BA and MA graduates of photography who hadn’t touched Lightroom, Aperture or anything equivalent during their entire degree courses and who were processing their shoots very slowly. It’s good to know that the situation is changing — kudos to the folks at Ravensbourne for taking a fresh look at it and coming up with the a strong offering. It’s good to be a part of that change.

That’s it… More Lightroom tips and tricks to come when things quieten down.

We’re often asked about Lightroom tuition in central London, rather than at photographers’ own studios, homes or offices. We’re pleased to say that we can now offer exactly that — an afternoon or a day in the very vibrant area around the Old Spitalfields market. It’s very easy to get to — it’s near Liverpool Street Station or Shoreditch High Street stations. Training will be at one of the meeting rooms at The Cube.

It’s ideal for Q & A, to go over aspects of your Lightroom-based workflow that you’re unsure of or for a full day’s training. You can bring a laptop with your work on it or we can just use ours. Call 020 3092 2907 for details or, better still, complete our contact form. To get to the form, just click here.

Coming up

We’re taking bookings for training in November and December (obviously!), there’s a complete website refresh coming up, we’re going to offer printer profiling soon for your printer/ink combinations and there are new workflow articles on the way.

Hello to readers of the BJP newsletter

If you’ve arrived here after clicking on a banner ad in the current BJP newsletter and you’re interested in help with your photographic workflow — working faster, getting better results — we’d love to hear from you. Call 020 3092 2907 or complete our contact form by clicking here.

Vision 10

We’ll have a discount voucher appearing in the show guide for Vision 10 on Friday, November 19th. It will offer a discounted rate for one-on-on Lightroom training. Look out for it!

We’re really pleased to be able to offer you training in central London, at last! We’ve had lots of requests for more affordable training and we’ve now found a solution we’re delighted with.

We’re bringing to this group training course everything we’ve learned from our successful one-on-one workflow tuition about what photographers find easy and what they find difficult, so we know what to spend a little more time on.

We’ll keep updating this post with more details.

Where

The training sessions will be held at the seminar room at Jacobs, the famous photographic retailer, on New Oxford Street. They’ll run from 10am to 5:30pm with a break for lunch and short mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks as well.

Affordable and flexible

The training costs just £70 per person per day, including VAT. This really is fantastic value for a small group course. (Maximum twelve attendees.)

We’ve done everything possible to keep costs low so there are no frills. We’re not training in a computer room so you won’t be needing your laptop—just bring along a pen and notebook (the type with paper in it, not a CPU, Intel or otherwise). The cost covers just the cost of the course.

You’ll definitely get more out of the training if you can make it to both days. On the second day, the format will allow question-and-answer time and recap but we’ll also go on to cover more advanced topics; that approach always helps the learning process. However, you’ll be able to book just the first day or (if you just need some questions answered and a little help with more advanced topics) just day two. Again, we’re keeping things as flexible as possible.

Day one: Introduction and complete overview of a Lightroom 3 workflow, Monday 18th October 2010

This day will leave you feeling well informed about the complete workflow and about what Lightroom 3 can do for you. Many of the photographers we’ve trained over the last year have been wary of at least one aspect or another—this first day of training is where you leave behind that uncertainty and learn the power of every part of the application; it builds knowledge and confidence. Setup, preferences, importing, filing strategy, keywording, collections, development, filtering, export for web, printing… this day will be a thorough introduction to a workflow based on Lightroom 3.

Cost: £70 including VAT.

Day two: intermediate and advanced Lightroom 3 tuition/Q&A, Tuesday 19th October 2010

More detail on day two and a more open format, with lots more time for questions. We’ll be looking at some essential third-party plugins and providing recommendations, we’ll go into detail about the various ways in which you can combine your Lightroom workflow with Photoshop and we’ll talk about creating your own presets to speed up every aspect of your Lightroom workflow (import, development, local adjustments and export). We’ll cover local corrections in more depth. You and the other attendees will lead the Q & A. Again, check back later for details.

Cost: £70 including VAT.

Get all your Lightroom questions ready and bring them with you on Tuesday—you’ll get plenty of time to ask them and get them answered in detail.

Payment

You can able to pay with PayPal (which accepts credit cards, if you have no PayPal account) or by bank transfer (contact us for details) or by cheque. You willll get a full VAT invoice.

Transport and location

There could hardly be an easier London location to get to. Jacobs is in the West End, near Tottenham Court Road tube station (Central and Northern lines) and close to Oxford Circus (Victoria and Central lines) in an area served by many bus routes. You can plan the London part of your journey by clicking here to get to TfL’s Journey Planner. (The link will set things up correctly for Jacobs, New Oxford Street, as your destination. Just enter your starting station or post code.)

Jacobs

Big photographic retailer in London with an excellent reputation and keen prices. The course will be held downstairs in the seminar room in the Professional Services department. Jacobs have been very accommodating in our dealings with them and we can highly recommend them. You’ll find an excellent stock of cameras and lenses (new and used) and a wide range of accessories at very keen prices.

How to book

Just visit the booking page here.

Pass it on

If you know people who might be interested in this offer, please pass on our details and tell them to check later in the week.

Questions?

Fire away—send e-mail, leave a comment or give us a call: 020 3092 2907.

Updates

For updates, check back here or subscribe to the blog by e-mail or RSS/Atom.

Summary of the issue

Playing back self-contained slideshow movies that you create using Lightroom 3 might show significant colour shifts if you export at 720p or 1080p. (Tests done on Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Lightroom 3.2.) Update: a 720×480 movie also shows the issue, and I’ve updated the example zip file to include a sample at this resolution.

Background

We do post-processing work for weddings shot by a local professional and, as part of the package of print-ready and screen-ready images we produce for him, we now include two movie slideshows with soundtracks. (Good for wedding gusts to have a chuckle over.) The smaller slideshow movie (480 pixels) is for use on an older iPhone or Android device and the bigger one (at 720p HD) is for upload to Facebook or YouTube, or for use on an iPhone 4 or iPad. Both movies use the h.264 codec, which allows excellent compression and relatively small file sizes.

Colour shift at 720p and 1080p

What we’ve noticed is that the colour palette displayed in movies exported from Lightroom 3 varies with movie resolution and is not consistent when played back in different players; in particular, the 720p and 1080p sizes, coming straight from Lightroom 3, display different colours from the other sizes. (Other resolutions show some subtle colour shifts but their colours are still acceptable and are consistent across sizes. Not so for 720p and 1080p.)

Here are are some screen shots from two example slideshows, with a gaudy background colour wash, chosen so that you can see the affect on both warm and cool tones.

When we originally saw the phenomenon, we were using Lightroom 3.0; the screen shots above are from the Mac version of Lightroom 3.2. The player was Apple’s QuickTime Player X.

Different results when movies are played in VLC or QuickTime Player 7

If you use VLC (free for the Mac, Windows and Linux) or QuickTime Player 7, colour is at least consistent across all movie sizes but is consistently wrong—VLC 1.1.3 (current version as of August 2010) and QTP 7 running on Mac OS X 10.6.4 appear to be ignoring the display’s ICC profile (ColorSync profile).

Download examples of h.264 slideshows from Lightroom 3

Here’s a seven-megabyte zip file containing a single-image slideshow at different movie resolutions, together with a 960-pixel JPEG of the same image in the sRGB colour space, for comparison. All the movie files came directly from Lightroom 3.2, with no change of settings between exports other than output resolution. You might notice that the colour in the 720p and 1080p versions are different from the rest.

AVC vs h.264

In QuickTime Player X, the 720p and 1080p clips also list “AVC” instead of “h.264″ as the codec used; in theory, h.264 and AVC should be identical so it’s not clear whether different code is actually used by Lightroom 3 to generate these two HD resolutions or whether QuickTime Player just identifies the same codec differently at these particular resolutions. In other words, this particular point could just be a client issue. QuickTime Player 7 lists all the movies’ codecs as being AVC and get the colour wrong on all of them, too.

The importance of your display profile (ICC/ColorSync)

Our tests suggest that your display profile will make a big difference in determining whether you see these colour shifts or not. The further it is from a regular, canned sRGB or “Color LCD” profile, the more difference you’ll see between the two AVC files (720p and 1080p) and the rest. Switch to a custom profile generated with a colorimeter or spectrophotometer and there’s a good chance you’ll see a bigger difference. (If you want see a huge difference between the two AVC files and the rest, set your display’s profile to “Wide-gamut RGB”.)

Preliminary advice on h.264 movie slideshows from Lightroom

We’re reporting the issue to gather feedback and direct it to the right place. We don’t have any definite answers (we don’t even know whether the problem is definitely a Lightroom issue or an OS issue) but here are some suggestions.

1. Test your own h.264 slideshow output from Lightroom 3 at different sizes to see if you experience the problem and if you do, decide whether it’s a show-stopper. (It may not be—our example is likely to show a worse problem than most real-life files.) Compare your own results with our zip file of examples.
2. Be aware that your clients who use different movie players might see different results from you when you provide h.264 output at 720p or 1080p. The differences will probably most important for product photography, portraiture and fashion. Colour in slideshows with music isn’t usually quite as critical as it is with files you submit to a stock agency or an art editor so this may not be a huge problem. If your results vary from ours, please report your findings on the Adobe Lightroom support forum, where I’ve just started a new thread about this problem. If you report the issue, provide as much information about your environment as you can (hardware, OS version, Lightroom version, display profile, details of media player).
3. We only see the problem in 720p and 1080p slideshow exports from Lightroom 3. One workaround for now is to stick to 480-pixel or 960-pixel output. That way, when it’s played on another colour-managed computer in QuickTime Player, its colour will stand a better chance of being acceptable.
   

If and when we find out more, we’ll post something. This problem may be something to do with Lightroom, Mac OS X components, Quicktime Player or, erm, user error. More to come on this if we get something interesting for you.

The metadata

You can subscribe to these articles for free by e-mail (managed by Google) or by RSS/Atom. We never pass on your details to anyone. If you’re interested in technical training or help, please consider using our contact form to get in touch. You can also support this site by shopping at amazon.co.uk using this link or amazon.com using this link. (You pay the same low Amazon price but we get a bit from Amazon’s profit.) Thanks to everyone who uses this link… we don’t get to see your names in the Amazon reports so we don’t know who you are but we’re very grateful for your support.

re-photo.co.uk
Earlier this week, I was catching up on some well written and informative articles by London photographer and writer Peter Marshall when I came across this one mentioning the release of Lightroom 3.2RC; in the piece, Peter mentioned that he’d found Lightroom 3 to be generating relatively low quality JPEG files for a given file size, at the 600-pixel dimensions that he uses for his site.

Peter had noticed two significant things: first, that he was getting better JPEGs at any given file size when he created them using Lightroom’s web module (which is designed to export a complete web site) instead of the usual JPEG export method; second, that the problem was worse when he was exporting JPEGs of images for which he’d made use of Lightroom’s local adjustments, meaning brushes and graduated filters.

It turned out (see his follow-up post here, and the comments that follow it) that the metadata associated with the file was causing the bump in file size. Clicking “Minimize Embedded Metadata” when exporting JPEGs helps; installing a copy of Jeffrey Friedl’s Metadata Wrangler plugin for Lightroom 3 fixes the problem completely and has added benefits: you can set up presets that get saved with Lightroom’s own export presets. That means you can build a one-click Lightroom export preset that generates the right picture size for your site with all but the unimportant metadata removed, and just the important stuff retained. (Presets are the key to working quickly within Lightroom and are probably its most overlooked feature.)

Explanation: all local brush and graduated filter adjustments that you apply in Lightroom become part of an images’s metadata and are included on export, bumping up the size of the final JPEG file—particularly noticeable for small JPEGs, because this metadata size is a constant and can easily double the size of a file. Not a huge problem if you’re hosting one or two images on a page but if you’re putting up many, the extra file size is significant. For blogs that have the usual rolling front page, hosting all images from the last ten or twenty posts, this sort of thing can make a big difference for your visitors… and for Google.

Important for your photography site’s Google rank

These days, your site’s Google rank is partly dependent on the speed at which your site loads—see this important article from Google on the subject. It’s well worth doing what Peter is doing, optimising carefully and minimising JPEG image size. (On which note, if you’re using WordPress software and your own hosting account to manage your site’s content, you should make every attempt to install and enable WP Super Cache to speed up your site’s response under load. This isn’t the appropriate place to discuss the technical aspects of that plugin but it does its job very well. Obviously, make complete site backups first.)

Photo forum

As Peter mentions, we met at a monthly London event called Photo Forum where photographers (mostly photojournalists) show and discuss their work. The two of us here at Shoot Raw have been three or four times and always enjoyed it. It’s a busy event but a good way to see work that might be new to you and to meet other photographers, established and upcoming. (At the time of writing, the next event is on 9th September 2010.) It’s a credit to Jacobs Professional Services that they host the event every month.

Friedl on JPEG quality versus size in Lightroom

Jeffrey’s definitive article on Lightroom 3′s JPEG quality made the rounds a while back. If you haven’t read it and you generate JPEGs from Lightroom, pay a visit. It’s the last word on Lightroom 3′s JPEG quality versus file size and even those of us who thought we knew exactly what Lightroom was doing in this area learned a few things.

The metadata

You can subscribe to these articles for free by e-mail (managed by Google) or by RSS/Atom. We never pass on your details to anyone. If you’re interested in technical training or help, please consider using our contact form to get in touch. You can also support this site by shopping at amazon.co.uk using this link or amazon.com using this link. (You pay the same low Amazon price but we get a bit from Amazon’s profit.) Thanks to everyone who uses this link… we don’t get to see your names in the Amazon reports so we don’t know who you are but we’re very grateful for your support.