Posts Tagged ‘Software’
Lightroom 4 is out
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.)
September 3rd, 2010 by Bahi Para
Colour in h.264 slideshows created by Lightroom 3
This article is about a Lightroom 3 quirk we’ve recently become aware of: a colour shift when exporting slideshows as self-contained movies for use iPhone, iPad, YouTube and Facebook. We see the problem on all our Macs; we haven’t tested yet on Windows.
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.
Above: a screen shot of a 480-pixel movie slideshow playing.
Below: a screen shot of 720p slideshow. Resolution aside, no differences in the settings between the two. Compare the colour of the blue MINI in the two pictures above and below.
Finally, below is the picture exported from Lightroom 3 as a JPEG in sRGB colour space, to act as a comparison against both movie screen shots. You can see that the 480-pixel shot is closer to displaying accurate colour.
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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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April 29th, 2010 by Bahi Para
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 Para
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.
March 23rd, 2010 by Bahi Para
Switching between old process and new process in Lightroom 3
Lightroom 3 is built around a new, improved demosaicing engine (the raw converter code that makes a full-resolution, full-colour image out of your raw file). It also includes the older conversion engine used in Lightroom 2 and earlier so to see the full power of Lightroom 3, you need to make sure you’re using what Adobe calls the 2010 process (that’s the new raw conversion engine) on each of your raw files. The old engine is referred to as the 2003 process. (In Lightroom 3 public beta 1, they were called process version 1 and process version 2—the new names are a definite improvement.) This is a per-image setting so you can choose which images use which process and can mix old and new in one catalogue.
How do you tell which process you’re using?
As of Lightroom 3 public beta 2, the main sign that you’re using the old (2003) process is the unmissable presence of an exclamation mark in the lower right of your image when you’re in the Develop module. The symbol appears next to any image that’s using the old engine and looks like this:
To switch to the 2010 process, just click that warning symbol. You’ll get the chance to review the before-and-after changes and to apply the changes to the whole filmstrip. Comparing the the changes side by side at 100% can be a useful way to understand the differences between old engine and new.
Above; the box you see when you click the exclamation mark in the Develop module
A warning about noise reduction and sharpening
In Lightroom 3 public beta 2, released today, local sharpening controls (brushes, gradients) and luminance noise reduction are both much more powerful than they were in Lightroom 2. You might find some settings for sharpening, negative sharpening and luminance noise reduction that you’d used previously to be way too high for the new versions so carefully review as you update your work.
To switch back to the 2003 process
To remind yourself of how a picture looked using the old demosaicing engine (aka process version 1 or the 2003 process), you can always switch back. In Lightroom’s Settings menu, go to Process, where you’ll see a choice between the 2003 version and the 2010 version. (The old process is labelled 2003 because Adobe Camera Raw—or ACR—dates back to that year. Even though Lightroom was only released in 2006 as a public beta, it shares code with ACR, which means that at some point, there will be a version of the ACR plugin that has offers this new raw conversion engine, too.)
Above: switching between processes using the Settings menu
Alternatively, you can now choose your process version from a new menu item in the Camera Calibration section of the Develop module (lower right).
Above: the new Process menu inside the Develop module’s Camera Calibration section
Use virtual copies and the compare function
When you begin to use Lightroom 3, it can be useful to make a virtual copy of a picture and use the old engine (2003 process) and the new side by side on the same image to get a feel for the difference between the two raw converters. For the full effect, choose a high-ISO image, with local sharpening applied. The second public beta now includes an option to view images side by side when you convert from the old process to the new but it can be useful to do it manually, particularly for images in which you’ve used many brushes. Compare results at 100% using the compare function (hit C in the grid, with both versions of the picture selected) and you should see a significant—and sometimes dramatic—difference in quality.
Why do some or all files use the old process version in Lightroom 3?
If Lightroom 3 can tell that you’ve done some work on a raw file in Lightroom 2 or a pre-v6 release of Adobe Camera Raw, it will keep using the 2003 process for that image so that the picture continues to look just as it did in Lightroom 2. That’ll happen if it sees an XMP sidecar file next to the raw file and can tell that the XMP file was created by Lightroom 2 or ACR 5.x or earlier.
What are the main differences between the 2003 process and the 2010 process?
The new 2010 process uses the new demosaicing engine in Lightroom 3, offering finer detail and better rendering of high-ISO work, among other things. Dramatically improved noise reduction, too, and much more powerful local sharpening controls. (Brushes, gradients.)
For an early and subtle example of the difference in quality between version one and version two with default settings, even at low ISO, see an earlier post on protecting fine colour detail in Lightroom 2. Towards the end, it contains some Lightroom 3 screen shots of the example image—there’s a clear difference in the way that colour noise reduction works.
Now that Lightroom 3 beta 2 is available and contains working luminance noise reduction, we’ll post more example files soon. Initial testing suggests very impressive NR results but it will take more time to be absolutely sure.
March 23rd, 2010 by Bahi Para
Lightroom 3 public beta 2 has been released
[Update: that was quick! Lightroom 3 public beta 2 is out and it looks good. Luminance noise reduction that—at first glance—seems to work extremely well and an easier way to switch between the old raw conversion engine and the new. I'll leave the rest of this post intact but it's now outdated, less than an hour after it was posted as a pointer to a rumour.]
The free Lightroom 3 public beta was released in 2009 and was a big hit, particularly among low-light shooters, but the beta is due to expire at the end of April. Could it be that there’s a new version on the way before the final release? Take a look at this thread at the (usually very useful) Lightroom forum over at the Luminous Landscape. Apparently, there was an announcement that even made it to DP Review before being pulled. Perhaps by the time you read this, it’ll actually be out. This is the Adobe page to check.
If there is another public beta on its way and if it offers a peek at the new luminance noise reduction that Adobe has been working on, it will be very welcome. We’re keen to see how the luminance NR compares with third-part solutions like Noiseware, Noise Ninja, Topaz Denoise and Neat Image.
March 16th, 2010 by Bahi Para
Photoshop Elements 8 offer at Amazon UK
Update 12th April 2010: the price of Elements is now back to normal. The offer lasted till 11th April 2010 so over three weeks in total. Still very good value but the prices mentioned below are no longer available from Amazon directly . The article will stay up since it provides some detail on using Elements with Lightroom.
First, our apologies to the regular Photoshop users among you and to those of you outside Europe. You can skip the rest of this note.
We don’t plan to do this sort of thing often but we received e-mail today from Amazon UK mentioning that it is now listing Photoshop Elements 8 at less than £50 as of 16 March 2010. That price includes VAT and shipping. This is the boxed, retail DVD and by UK standards, that price is an absolute bargain. (US readers who are still reading will raise their eyebrows at that description but sadly, it’s true.) The list price is £75 and it routinely sells on Amazon for £65.
It comes as a Mac version
Compared with most of the newer image editors intended for casual and occasional use, Elements wins hands down. It now offers layers, full Adobe Camera Raw compatibility, adjustment layers, and layer masks (for adjustment layers). It even offers smart sharpening and a version of the context-aware scaling function that you find in the full Photoshop (attempting to keep people and buildings in proportion while you stretch the image).
Who’s it suitable for?
Photoshop Elements will suit you if you don’t need to do much retouching outside Lightroom or Aperture but do need to clone out a stray object or element or if you need to run third-party noise-reduction plugins or something else requiring Photoshop. It will also suit you if you previously outsourced most of your own post-processing (or provided your clients and editors with images that weren’t retouched) and are only now beginning to do more of it yourself. It’s an excellent, low-cost way of beginning your Photoshop journey.
Elements 8 compared to Photoshop CS4
For occasional use, Elements 8 has only three significant weaknesses compared with Photoshop 11 (CS4).
- It doesn’t allow you to do as much work on 16-bit files as the full version of Photoshop does
- It doesn’t offer any access to the LAB colour mode
- It doesn’t allow you to convert to CMYK.
(It’s also not a 64-bit application but neither is the full Mac version of Photoshop CS4.) Both LAB mode and the ability to work at 16-bit depth are useful but for many people who do most of their work (including local adjustments) in a raw converter like Lightroom or Aperture, these things might matter less than they once did.
LAB mode in Photoshop is very powerful but relatively few people use it today, particularly after recent additions to Photoshop’s functionality, offering the “fade to luminosity” function. (That’s not to say LAB isn’t useful, powerful or under-rated—it’s all those things and fans of LAB mode will be horrified, of course, to read all this. It’s just relatively unusual to see people actually use it today, now that editing in RGB is as powerful and capable as it now is.)
You’d convert to CMYK if you’re preparing press-ready work (for magazine or book adverts, say). Again, you’ll already know if you need it. If you ask nicely, many publications’ prepress folks will do the conversion from RGB to CMYK themselves if you provide them with tagged files that you produced in a colour managed workflow.
Working in 16-bit mode, particularly in a larger colour space like Adobe RGB (all things we will discuss in future articles) is a way to help preserve smoothness of tone and colour, among other things. It will help avoid banding and other colour artefacts. The banding and other issues are mostly likely to appear when you do lots of work to the contrast, saturation and exposure of part or all of an image, particularly in areas of the image the show smooth surfaces
If you have used Lightroom, Aperture or another raw converter to do most of the grunt-work, like exposure compensation, highlight recovery, tone, white balance, contrast, dodging and burning) on a raw file, you’ve done most the things that would cause problems with 8-bit files. Performing some further minor work (some cloning or healing in small areas) on an 8-bit file is not usually something to worry about.
In addition, if you’d like to use Photoshop to run a noise-reduction plug-in like Neat Image or Topaz Denoise, the plugin will usually work in 16-bit mode in Elements 8. If you intend to use layers to blend the post-NR image with the regular image, you need to convert down to 8 bits so the conversion after you’ve run the noise-reduction routine to minimise the effect. (Elements 8 opens and saves 16-bit TIFFs—it’s just that layers and some of its own built-in filters and functions don’t work in that mode. Luckily, the third-party NR plugins work fine.)
Lightroom integration with Elements 8
Above: setting up Lightroom to work with Elements 8 for work that will remain in 16-bit throughout.
Lightroom integration with Photoshop CS4 is deeper than with other image editors like Elements. However, Elements offers most of what you need: in Lightroom’s preferences, perform a one-time setup. You specify that Elements 8 is your image editor, you tell Lightroom which colour space to use when creating an export file and which format to and bit depth to work at. Once you’ve set it up once, you’ll have a keyboard shortcut (for example, command-option-E or ctrl-alt-E) to invoke Elements but you can also right-click an image inside Lightroom and edit in Elements that way. Because it’s set up, the bit depth, file type and colour space will be taken care of automatically after that.
Lightroom also allows you to set up Elements 8 in different ways (16-bit TIFF, ProPhoto, 8-bit TIFF sRGB) so that you get a choice of options for each image that you send to Elements: you would choose the most appropriate for the task at hand.
Above: examples of what you might see when you right-click an image in Lightroom having set up different ways of sending an image to Elements 8.
If you do work that requires you to shift to 8-bit mode, first switch to a smaller colour space. (ProPhoto RGB is not a sensible choice for 8-bit work. More on colour spaces another time.)
What you don’t get with Elements 8, compared with CS4, is the smart objects integration, the HDR-from-raw-files integration and the ability to create panoramas from your raw shots.
To run noise-reduction plugins
If you were using Photoshop Elements to run a noise-reduction filter like Neat Image or Topaz Denoise, you’d choose to work with 16-bit TIFFs in something like Adobe RGB space. Lightroom will create a TIFF that contains all your existing Lightroom edits and will send it to Elements. When you finish and save your work in Elements, you’ll see the edited file in Lightroom, next to the original. Lightroom will handle the 16-bit TIFF as it would any other file, allowing you to export JPEGs, print, etc.
We own and use both CS4 and Elements 8 (for which we paid a good deal more than £49!) here at Shoot Raw, just to make sure we keep up-to-date with both. We can recommend Elements 8 for photographers who don’t spend a huge amount of time doing advanced Photoshop work or for people beginning with Photoshop, who’d like to get familiar with the application.
One more thing: if you were to buy Elements at £49 and then upgrade to Photoshop CS4 today at the Adobe UK site, you’d end up saving £30 over the cost of just buying CS4 outright from Adobe. Though it’s impossible to say this with absolute certainty, that saving is likely to continue when CS5 is released.
Amazon UK is marking this is “for a limited time only”. No idea how long it’ll last. We’ll try to update or delete this note when the offer has gone.
Disclosures and disclaimers
We earn commission from Amazon UK if you click one of the links and check out and pay for a product within that shopping session. That’s nice but the commission (about £2.50 per copy of Elements that you pay for during your visit to Amazon from our links) clearly isn’t reason enough to plug the product. We’re recommending it because it’s good (as long as you understand its limitations—see above), because the sub-£50 price is an absolute bargain and because Amazon UK is a reputable seller. (On which subject, we’d recommend that you buy directly from Amazon rather than one of its resellers—look for “Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk “.)
The Mac version:
Below: the Windows version
Coming up
We’re going to start a series of articles looking at exactly which camera settings affect the data in your raw files when you work with Lightroom and how. We’ll be looking at the primary exposure controls—shutter speed, aperture, ISO—and secondary camera settings like saturation, sharpness, contrast and colour mode (meaning options like Adobe RGB and sRGB). Over the series, we’ll be giving you definitive answers and explaining the technical language.
If you were sent a link to this post, you can subscribe by e-mail or RSS to receive all future articles in full. It’s free.
February 19th, 2010 by Bahi Para
Ten backup tips for Adobe Lightroom users
Here’s an article about backing up your work when you’re using Lightroom. It offers ten tips for backup, addressing common mistakes and misconceptions about what photographers should back up and how. It’s a long article but you can skim it very quickly and see if any of the headings tell you something new. If you have no inclination to read it but you think you should do something about making backups of your work, you can always call us.
1. Your Lightroom catalogue is critically important. You need to back it up.
Lightroom maintains a collection of information called a catalogue. The catalogue tracks the names and locations of all the images you import into Lightroom together with the changes you make to those images. Brushes, gradients, keywords, ratings, crops, colour and contrast changes—everything you’ve done to every image in Lightroom is in that catalogue. The Lightroom catalogue has a filename that ends with .lrcat. Find the catalogue and make sure it’s being backed up. See screen shots below to learn how to identify your catalogue file.
Above: the Lightroom catalogue icon as it appears in Mac OS X. This particular catalogue is called (fairly obviously) Shoot Raw. Below: how to find the location and filename of your Lightroom catalogue after choosing Catalog Settings inside the Lightroom application. This example shows a brand new, empty Lightroom catalogue.
2. Back up your image files—they are NOT stored in your Lightroom catalogue
Lightroom doesn’t usually alter your original image files at all, whether you shoot raw, JPEG or TIFF. It uses the original files together with the changes recorded in the Lightroom catalogue to generate all its previews, prints and exports, including web galleries. So: back up both your catalogue and the image files that Lightroom sees.
3. Run your backups when Lightroom is not running
This is an important point that many photographers miss when using Lightroom. If your backup software (something like Time Machine, if you’re on a Mac) backs up your data while you’re working in Lightroom, there’s a good chance that even if it manages to grab a version of that all-important Lightroom catalogue, what it gets might be useless when you need to restore it and you’re in a major, major panic. So make sure you run your backup software when Lightroom itself is not running.
4. RAID isn’t backup. Neither is a Drobo.
If you keep your pictures and Lightroom catalogue on a Drobo or on a suitably configured RAID and you experience the failure of a hard drive, you can usually continue working without data loss. That’s very useful but on its own, it’s not a substitute for a proper backup plan. A backup plan is more likely to protect you against human error and software glitches.
Here are some examples. Let’s say you accidentally ask Lightroom to remove and delete some original raw files instead of the low-res JPEG versions that you once generated for client approval. Or imagine that your Lightroom database becomes damaged and refuses to open. Neither a RAID nor a Drobo will save you. You can’t go back in time and pull back an older version—if your Lightroom catalogue became corrupt yesterday, it’s the corrupt version that’s now safely duplicated across the RAID. There’s no guarantee that you can undelete the raw files you deleted, especially if you don’t discover your mistake for a fortnight. If you one day make a change to a complex, layered file in Photoshop and accidentally saved only the flattened version—how do you get last week’s version back to remove one of the changes?
RAID systems and Drobos help eliminate downtime by guarding against loss of data due to hard drive failure but they do not perform the same job as a backup plan. One is not a substitute for the other.
5. Save space: you don’t have to back up Lightroom’s preview files
If you want to save a chunk of space on your backup drives and get faster backups, you can safely ask your backup software to ignore Lightroom previews and Adobe Camera Raw previews. (For my main Lightroom catalogue, the Lightroom previews are fairly modest in size and quantity but they still amount to tens of gigabytes—that’s a lot of backup space for a folder that changes daily and can be recreated at any time by Lightroom.)
Just find your Lightroom catalogue (see screen shots in step 1) and you’ll find the Lightroom previews sat right next to it. See the screen shot below for the icon. Its filename ends with .lrdata. When you’ve found it, tell your backup software to skip this item when backing up.
Above: the icon for Lightroom Previews. This file is created automatically by Lightroom, taking its name from the catalogue name that you choose. In this case, it takes the name Shoot Raw Previews.
6. Don’t rely solely on Lightroom’s own catalogue backup function.
Lightroom can back up its own catalogue file every so often. (Scroll back up to the picture of the Catalog Settings window and you’ll see how and where to activate this function.) The way it works is this: you launch Lightroom and it asks you whether you want to back up the catalogue. You look at the message and you say: no, I’m going to have to skip the backup this one time. Don’t you? Be honest—that’s what you do. You do it because you have work to do in Lightroom right now (that’s why you’re launching the application) and you can remember how long it took last time. You tell yourself that you’ll let it do the backup next time. We all do it.
Above: the all-too-familiar prompt and the impossibly tempting Skip Now button
That’s not the only problem. Are you even backing up the catalogue to a separate volume? And when you’ve finished your marathon Lightroom session, the backup copy that you made before you began is already out of date. Lightroom 3 is going to address a couple of these issues by prompting you to back up when you quit the application instead of when you launch it but there’s more.
The catalogue doesn’t contain your images (see point 2) and is no good without them so you need to back those up separately. If you do that, you have to get the (possibly out-of-date) catalogue and the backup of your images in sync when it’s time to restore. And then there are the Lightroom presets you’ve created and any Lightroom plug-ins you’ve installed: are they getting backed up?
The solution is this: get your backup software to run regularly and automatically when Lightroom itself isn’t running. Get it to back up all your stuff, including your images and your Lightroom catalogue. Test it from time to time. Job done. Lightroom’s own backup is great when you’re working in the field with a laptop and some extra drives but it’s not intended to be a replacement for a backup plan.
7. Don’t rely solely on XMP sidecar files
If you don’t know what XMP sidecar files are, you’re not relying on them at all so feel free to scroll down to point 8.
You can ask Lightroom to automatically create and update files called XMP sidecars. The application will create an XMP file for each image that you have in your catalogue. Each XMP file lives right next to the image that it represents.
Each of these sidecars contains any ratings and labels you assigned the image, some metadata from the camera, the keywords you’ve entered and details of all your Lightroom work on that picture. You can send someone an original raw or JPEG file (not an export) together with its XMP sidecar from Lightroom; the lucky recipient will then be able to import the two things together and use Lightroom to see and modify all your adjustments—even the brushes and gradients. That’s useful. But if you rely on backing up these sidecars instead of backing up your Lightroom catalogue, you’ll find that when you start over in a new catalogue, you’ll have lost all of your Lightroom collections and collection sets.
There’s also a performance hit if you tell Lightroom to automatically generate and update these XMP sidecars all the time. Every time you make a change to a file, Lightroom needs to update its catalogue and the sidecars. Twice the work.
Above: image files in a folder with their XMP sidecar files next to them, one per image. These XMP files were generated on demand in Lightroom, not automatically. (Select the images in Lightroom, hit Command-S. Lightroom will write XMP sidecars for them.) That’s our recommendation—just generate them when you need them.
8. Restore your data as a test
Many photographers will first test their backup schemes only when disaster has struck. That’s not the time to find out that your best work hasn’t been backed up at all or that your Lightroom catalogue can’t be restored. Check everything when the going’s good: restore your data to a spare volume and test that it’s valid and complete.
Personal note: I have seen automatic daily backup schemes that were missing all the important stuff on a drive—backups that were not getting a single thing of use in the event of a hard drive failure. (I am not making this up.) The only thing worse than not backing up at all is thinking that you are when in fact you’re not. Backup software today is much easier to use than it once was but don’t leave it to chance—check your backed up data by restoring it to a blank drive and using it. (After a successful test, delete the restored data!)
9. Start with enough space for two to three times your current data size
If you have a terabyte of data, start with at least 2TB of space on your backup drives. Leave plenty of room for expansion and archive. (See the note about the Drobo, below.)
10. Keep off-site copies of your data
A good single backup volume or RAID set next to your main machine will cover you in the event of hard drive failure but probably not fire, flood or theft, all of which might affect your backups as well. Keep a copy of your data off-site and update it every so often.
If you made it this far, well done. If you’re already doing all the stuff in the article, that’s even better. The biggest problem we see is that photographers either aren’t backing up at all or are not backing up what’s needed. Are you one of them? Don’ t be.
Useful links to do with storage, backups and Lightroom
- XMP sidecar files. If you’d like to find out more, there’s some background in the Wikipedia article here.
- Time Machine—backup software that’s supplied with Mac OS X. More info on Apple’s site here.
- Notes on storage devices. This is from Apple and the notes are pretty basic but will be useful for many—the article is here.
- Mac Pro RAID. A note on Apple’s site about the software and hardware RAID options you get with a Mac Pro here.
Drobo. A Drobo (from “data robot”) is a decent choice for a photographer to use as a backup storage device because it’s so easy to expand its volume as the device fills up. (That’s not a recommendation to keep your work on a Drobo—see point 4. The suggestion is that you keep your work where it is and back it up to a Drobo.)
Above: a five-bay Drobo S. This version has space for five drives and is quicker than its four-bay predecessor. The bottleneck was the Drobo’s internal CPU and design, which has been upgraded.
You can add hard drives to the Drobo and it will give you extra backup space without any reconfiguring and without needing to copy your old data across. You can keep working even if a hard drive fails (in the Drobo S, you can have two hard drives fail) or you can take one drive out and put a bigger drive in its place. You still lose no data and you don’t need to manually copy stuff across to the new drive—the Drobo sorts it all out. To calculate how much real, useable space you get when you add drives to the Drobo, use the appropriate capacity calculator on the Data Robotics site here.
If you’re thinking of buying a Drobo or two, read this first: data on the disks in a Drobo can only be read in a Drobo of that type. So if yours fails—if its power supply goes, for example—you can’t slide a drive out of it, put it into your Mac Pro and read useful data from it. For a backup device, that limitation is an acceptable price to pay for the convenience and scalability that you get in return but it’s one of the reasons we don’t recommend using a Drobo as primary, online storage unless you have another one as a backup. (Drobos are not unreliable—quite the opposite—but it’s important to be aware of that aspect of a Drobo’s design.)
- Snow Leopard. Time Machine is supplied with Leopard (Max OS X 10.5) and Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). You can read about Snow Leopard on Apple’s site. It runs Lightroom faster than Leopard but you must remember to switch Lightroom to 64-bit mode to benefit from the speed boost. (Find Lightroom on your hard drive, select it, choose “File=> Get Info” and make sure the box that says “Run in 32-bit mode” is not ticked.) Snow Leopard requires an Intel Mac.
- Carbon Copy Cloner. Great software (donationware) from Mike Bombich for making a clone of a single drive (for example, your boot drive) to supplement (not to replace) your data backup plan. Download it from Mike’s site.
- SuperDuper! Alternative to CCC. Like Carbon Copy Cloner, it can be used to make clones of your boot drive, to supplement (not to replace) your data backup plan. Get it from Shirt Pocket.
- Online backup services. There are several, with Backblaze and Mozy among the more popular. We haven’t used them or set up clients on them but they’re generally well regarded. They usually cost a few dollars a month and the idea is that your stuff trickles, encrypted, up to a central storage pool using your broadband connection. Probably not much good for your entire catalogue (depends how much you shoot) but potentially good for office documents, paperwork and perhaps a collection of your best work. Some services will send you a DVD or drive of your stuff in the event that you need to restore huge amounts of data.
We can help
If you’re a little stuck when it comes to this sort of stuff and you’re located in the UK, we can help. Call us on 020 3092 2907 or mail develop@shootraw.co.uk.
New: the Shoot Raw Store!
A new thing for us: a virtual store, powered by Amazon UK. We’ve put up a dedicated page about it. You can get to the store by clicking here. We’ve sold a few things already, much to our surprise. Thank you for your support—it’s very encouraging and we really appreciate it!
February 11th, 2010 by Bahi Para
Aperture 3: the game’s back on
There aren’t many applications of the sort that we would use for a fast and powerful photographic workflow. You could argue that, for the approach we advocate and support at Shoot Raw, there are only two real players: Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom (or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, to give it its full name).
Alternative approaches
The approach we take isn’t the only one. There are raw converters like Raw Photo Processor that aim to provide the highest resolution or the best sharpness (in the case of RPP, it succeeds admirably in those aims and it offers some integration with Lightroom to registered users—its user interface, though, is, shall we say brutally minimal); there are photo browsers (like Photo Mechanic) that aim to provide the fastest way to categorise your pictures and deal with metadata. But only Aperture and Lightroom aim to combine both the raw conversion and the digital asset management functions in one package and employ quick, friendly user interfaces and useful post-processing functionality.
Above: Lightroom 2 screen shot, with develop controls exposed
History
When Apple released Aperture, Adobe had been working on Lightroom (Shadowland) for some time but didn’t have a product ready for release. Aperture’s initial success showed that a market did exist for this kind of application and Lightroom was released some time later, after a long public beta period. As of late 2009, photographers were overwhelmingly choosing Lightroom over Aperture on the Mac. (Aperture isn’t available on Windows but Lightroom, as you might expect, holds a commanding lead over other solutions that platform.) Figures from InfoTrends are fairly conclusive, as reported by John Nack here. (John Nack works for Adobe but the figures he’s reporting are independent.)
Image quality in previous versions of Lightroom and Aperture
Both products have offered decent image quality for some time but both have also had their weaknesses. Many users are adamant that one or the other application is streets ahead for their particular camera; our experience has been that the default output Aperture 2.0 has been less blotchy and more pleasing at low light, high-ISO extremes but that Lightroom offered more control over the image and Lightroom 3 beta offers a stronger rendition throughout the ISO range. (It’s slow but we expect that to be addressed in the final release.) We haven’t yet tested specific new profiles offered for cameras like the Nikon D3 in Aperture 3, following complaints from some users of these cameras in Aperture 2.
Above: Aperture 3 screen shot, with heads-up display (HUD) minimised.
Image development
One area where Lightroom has had a clear lead since version 2 is in its ability to allow non-destructive adjustments to parts of an image. Exposure compensation, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity (“punch”) and sharpness can all be brushed in or out or applied using one or more gradients. Using the brushes and gradients is quick and easy, and they can be combined and applied one over another. These adjustments are referred to as local adjustments because they affect only parts of an image—you brush them over (or apply a gradient to) whichever areas need them. Best of all, they’re entirely non-destructive—you can revist them at any point and alter them or remove them without any need to convert your raw file to something like a TIFF (as was the case with Aperture 2).
Aperture 3 now includes similar brush functions to those used and loved by Lightroom users and closes what was probably the biggest gap between the two applications.
Print and web output
Lightroom 2 offers excellent sharpening for screen and print (using functionality from the highly regarded Photokit Sharpener plugin) for Photoshop. Aperture 3 offers soft proofing, using the ICC profile of your chosen printer/paper combination to give you a better idea of which areas of your image will cause a problem when you print, allowing you to deal with those problems, in advance, on screen. Both are useful functions and both applications will likely end up offering versions of them both. We don’t have any inside information but we expect Lightroom 3, due soon, to include soft proofing of some sort and retain its excellent print sharpening.
Asset management
Aperture 3 allows you to include video and audio inside your Aperture database. Lightroom users can add some of this functionality by installing Jeffrey Friedl’s Video-Asset Management plugin but it would be nice to have it built in. There are also differences in the two applications’ approaches to managing mobile libraries, with Aperture leading the way.
Camera raw file support
This is an area where many photographers feel Apple has been lagging, though users of Nikon and Canon DSLRs in general won’t have had much to complain about. Adobe’s support for smaller and cheaper digital cameras that shoot raw has certainly been faster and more far reaching—for example, Aperture has just gained support for the Panasonic LX3 (released seven months ago) and still doesn’t offer support for the Panasonic GF1 (released five months ago), both supported in Lightroom for many months—but for our market of mostly professional DSLR users, it’s probably not a major concern and there are signs that Apple’s approach is improving.
Camera profiles
One Lightroom strength (version 2.x onwards) is the existence of camera profiles that try to come close to the camera manufacturers’ profiles for popular cameras. That means that they attempt to give you the colour and the look of your manufacturer’s raw converters (e.g., Nikon’s Capture NX) or in-camera JPEGs. They’re pretty good— a clear improvement over Adobe’s standard profiles. In particular, many Nikon users will find the Camera Neutral profile within Lightroom 2 to their liking.
Interface
Mostly subjective—you need to download the trials and see how you get on with each application. I initially loved Aperture’s loupe effect but came to dislike it over time. (I no longer use it and just use a full-screen zoom.) Lightroom is what’s called a modal application, meaning that you switch between develop mode, view mode and so on using a keystroke. It becomes second nature when you’re used to it but it does irritate some new users. I loved Lightroom’s interface from the moment I used it—it seemed elegant, clean and simple and offered me the chance to customise its behaviour to my taste. Others have had exactly that reaction to Aperture.
Moving libraries between applications
[Update March 2010. We have an article with a little more detail about moving your library from one application to the other here.]
Both applications now support the import of XMP sidecar files (it’s new to Aperture). XMP sidecar files hold information about the file’s metadata so you’d expect that to mean that ratings and keywords would travel between Aperture and Lightroom if you decide to move your library permanently from one to another. As of February 2010, however, that only works when moving from Aperture to Lightroom. Aperture doesn’t read image ratings when importing, even though it clearly writes those same ratings to its own XMP sidecar files when told to. (See the Apple knowledge base article on this issue here.)
Your image edits do not survive the journey in either direction so your non-destructive post-processing work will be lost if you migrate from Lightroom to Aperture or vice versa unless you’re prepared to bake in your changes by exporting TIFFs or JPEGs. (That’s a significant step—make sure you hang on to your raw files and move those across as well, if you choose to migrate TIFFs or JPEGs.)
Is Aperture 3 good enough to warrant a switch from Lightroom 2?
It’s a very strong upgrade for existing users and also a strong offering for new users but most of the switchers are likely to be people who prefer Aperture’s interface. There are lots of aspects we haven’t discussed above, including great book-publishing options, for one, and publishing options with custom book publishers. All this should seem like good news for Lightroom users—a lacklustre or half-hearted Aperture release at this stage would have left Lightroom with little or no competition in this area and the product would have been more likely to stagnate. Now that Aperture 3 has non-destructive brush adjustments and some other improvements, the game is back on. Aperture 3 should prove to be a good enough product to stop the general move from Aperture to Lightroom and put some pressure back on Adobe to continue innovating.
Faces and places
In brief: Faces, in its current Aperture 3 and iPhoto incarnations, is unlikely to win over many pro photographers or serious amateurs. It’s a great idea that will one day be genuinely useful. Places is another thing altogether: if you have a GPS unit with your DSLR or use an independent unit like a Garmin, this is can be a real time saver.
What we’re expecting in Lightroom 3
We expect excellent noise reduction (both colour and luminance) and probably soft proofing, though this feature didn’t make an appearance in the beta version. We also expect the much improved, more detailed rendering in the Lightroom 3 beta to make it through to the final product in some form. It will retain its excellent output sharpening, gain much improved local sharpening controls (which are a little weak in Lightroom 2) and probably one or two surprises. (These are personal opinions—we have no link to Adobe or Apple—but we’re quite confident about them.)
Advice for existing users and new users
If you have a large library in either application, you’re probably best sticking with it for the moment. Both offer free trials so you can import all or part of your existing image library into the competing app and compare output quality, speed, interface and functionality. Run them in parallel for a month. With the release of version 3, Apple has shown clearly that the Aperture project is alive and kicking and perhaps the momentum that the Aperture team has gained recently will carry through to an early, class-leading version 4. If you’re starting out, you now have a genuine choice again between competitive applications—something that couldn’t have been said a week ago.
Will Shoot Raw be offering Aperture 3 training?
We’re certainly looking at the product with renewed interest—that wasn’t the case with Aperture 2, after a short testing period. We welcome your thoughts and we’ll keep you posted.
The iPad question
Will there be raw converters on the iPad device? I’d guess so, eventually. And which raw converter is most likely to make is likely to make it to the iPad first? Well, that’s easy…:-)
Where to get the trials.
The Aperture 3 trial (for UK users) is here. Apple will mail you a download link and a serial number that’s good for 30 days.
The LIghtroom 3 public beta (free, expires April 2010) is here.
The Lightroom 2 trial is here.
Where to buy
Here are our Amazon UK links—all Amazon prices include VAT.
Aperture 3 upgrade from Aperture 2 (requires an Intel Mac and Leopard or Snow Leopard):
Lightroom 2, full version for Mac OS X or Windows:
For Lightroom users upgrading from version 1 to version 2 (OS X or Windows):
Amazon isn’t allowing affiliates to link to the full version of Aperture 3 yet (not sure why) but you can find it here.
Aperture 3 is also available at the Apple UK retail store.
Questions?
If you have questions about Lightroom, Aperture or raw workflow in general, drop us a line and if we can, we’ll turn the answer into a new blog entry.
March 7th, 2012 by Bahi Para