Posts Tagged ‘Tips’
Edge Detail in Lightroom 3 beta: what does it do?
Adobe Lightroom 3 beta offers many refinements and some new features over Lightroom 2. One of the most intriguing is a control labelled Edge Detail. The slider is intended to deal with the smearing of colour that you sometimes see in very high-ISO shots, when noise reduction has reduced the sharpness of edges and the colour might leak from one part of the image into another.
The edge detail slider at work
Here’s a very mundane picture. It wasn’t taken at very high ISO (just 500) but was pushed to about ISO 2,000 equivalent during post-processing and was taken on an older camera that has a very noisy sensor by today’s standards. (As a point of reference, any of you shooting the new Nikon D3S would probably need to go to ISO 25,000 or 50,000 to get anything quite this noisy.)
Now take a look at a detail from the image, first with the new Edge Detail slider set to zero and then, in the second crop, with the slider set to 100. Look at the way the edges of the orange indicator lamp are defined against the car’s bodywork.
You can see the effect of Edge Detail quite clearly—it appears to be adding sharpness and clarity to the colour edges, emphasising colour boundaries in a way that regular sharpening doesn’t and getting rid of much of the orange mush that you can see in the top picture. (In Lightroom, regular sharpening acts only on the luminance data—i.e., the brightness—and not on the colour. That’s intended to prevent colour shifts.)
Digital photography allows us to work in very low light but the level of colour noise reduction going on often smudges the colour; Edge Detail has been designed to counter that where it matters and can be quite effective—it just needs a better name.
Indoor, ambient-light photographer?
Although this slider is a feature of the beta version of Lightroom and could change (or even disappear) before the final release, it might be worth an early look if you’re an event photographer shooting with only ambient light and sometimes end up working in some challenging, low-light conditions. If the Edge Detail feature makes it through to final release, you’ll also see it in the corresponding version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for Photoshop, which is rumoured to be ACR 6.
Workflow and notes
- All the processing for the image above was carried out only in Lightroom 3 beta, and designed to show the effect of the Edge Detail slider as clearly as possible.
- The only difference between the two crops is that the Edge Detail slider was moved from zero to 100—no other control was touched.
- Lightroom 3 beta is a free download for Windows and the Mac, even for users who have no version of Lightroom currently installed. It’s beta software so it has bugs and some performance issues that will be ironed out before a final release. It will expire in April 2010.
- All the images used above show lots of noise because Lightroom 3′s luminance noise reduction is disabled in the current public beta.
Training
In case you were wondering, our training is not this geeky—it’s about workflow rather than esoteric details! We put this stuff in the blog so we don’t have to spend as much time covering it in regular courses. If you find this kind of thing useful or interesting and know others who might, we’d love it if you could pass on details of our site.
January 11th, 2010 by Bahi Para
Tips for buying Lightroom online in the UK
[Last updated: October 2010. Links and information and now current again for Lightroom 3 instead of Lightroom 2.]
Here’s some more detail on how to get hold of a copy of Lightroom (official name: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3) in the UK. There are Amazon listings but also tips on buying, cross-platform compatibility, licensing and on the various versions. available.
1. The free, 30-day trial from Adobe
Anyone looking at Lightroom for the first time should turn first to the 30-day trial. It’s wise to try before you buy. Even if you’ve already run a previous version of Lightroom on a 30-day trial (i.e., a version older than 3.2, which is current at the time of writing), you’re still entitled to a 30-day trial of version 3.2 and you’ll find no issues downloading and running it. (Useful if your previous trial showed incomplete support for your new camera or lens.) The trial is the perfect start—test the software and see how you get on with it. During the trial, there are no restrictions whatsoever on functionality. After the trial, you won’t be able to use the application but when you later buy it and activate it, you’ll find you’ve lost none of your work—when the trial expires, the software doesn’t delete the images (obviously…) or the adjustments you’ve made to them.
2. Buying from Amazon UK: Lightroom 3 full retail version
If you’re looking for an upgrade version or an academic version for students and teachers, scroll down. To view the Amazon UK listing for the full retail version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, click the icon immediately below.
We use and trust Amazon so we’re happy to use affiliate links to the UK store. They’re reliable, their refund policy is good and they no longer charge for super saver delivery, regardless of item cost.
That little picture of Lightroom 3 above this text should always display the current Amazon price for the full Lightroom 3 retail product so check back to see it change over the days ahead.
One thing to watch out for when you order from the Amazon site: make sure you know whether you’re ordering directly from them or from an Amazon reseller. If it’s an Amazon reseller, check the reseller’s reputation and delivery charges before ordering.
3. Buying from Amazon UK: Lightroom 3 Student and Teacher version
If you’re looking for the Student and Teacher edition of Lightroom 3 from Amazon UK, click the picture below to see the full listing.
Important note: you will need to prove your entitlement to run this academic-users version of Lightroom 3, and I believe you will need to supply photo ID as part of that process. If you’re looking for the full retail version, use the previous link.
4. Buying from Amazon UK: Lightroom 3 upgrade version
For this upgrade to work, you’ll need Lightroom 1 or Lightroom 2 legally installed (i.e., with a valid serial number) . To view the full listing, click the icon below.
5. Using the Google Product Search service
This is an interesting option that not very many people seem to use but which we’ve found very useuful. Previously branded Froogle, it’s not a retailer or reseller—it’s a product listing generated by Google from online retailers, with prices and online reputations visible to buyers. For each retailer, it also lets you know whether you can use Google Checkout (an alternative to PayPal) to pay. It’s good for all sorts of things that you can buy online, including cameras and lenses. At the very least, it gives you good overall guideline prices that you can use when you shop.
To get you started, here’s an initial search that attempts to exclude versions of Photoshop CS4 and CS5 that seem to appear on Froogle when you search for Lightroom, as well as attempting to exclude upgrade versions of Lightroom. (Inevitably, one or two of the items listed are still upgrades.) Before you click on the logo below, read through the search tips that follow. You’ll then feel more confident about modifying the search terms inside the Google search box and experimenting to widen or narrow your search.
Search tips for Google Product Search:
- Lightroom comes in academic and full retail versions. Unless you’re in educaton, you’ll need the retail version so make sure you’re not fooled if you see very cheap prices. If you order the academic version, you’ll likely be stuck with software that won’t work till you offer proof of education status, including Photo ID. What you buy needs to say retail version on it.
- Lightroom (both retail and academic) comes in upgrade versions and full versions. Unless you’re upgrading from Lightroom 1.x or 2,x, you’ll need the full version. The upgrade version is no good without v2 to upgrade.
- Check seller reputation, delivery time and delivery cost before buying. We won’t recommend individual sellers here but haven’t had a problem so far using highly rated sellers found on Froogle. (And again, we have used the service a lot.)
- Check whether the listed price includes VAT or not.
Tip: Mac version and Windows versions
An Adobe Lightroom box always includes both the Mac and Windows versions—not just one or the other—so you don’t need to worry about which platform to buy for. This is part of a new approach by Adobe and one that we hope will spread to its other product lines.
Tip: point releases of Lightroom 3
If you buy any full version of Lightroom 3 (for example v3.0 or v3.2), you can upgrade to the latest version of 3.x for free using the same product key. Just make sure you buy v3.0 or higher and you’re set.
Tip: desktop and laptop licences
Like most Adobe licences, the agreement for Lightroom permits you to install the product on one desktop machine and one portable but not to use them on both machines simultaneously.
A note about affiliations
We’re not affiliated or associated with Adobe, Google or any retailer, service or product listed here in any way except for Amazon UK. We only list products and services that we continue to find useful. If you buy a product from Amazon UK after clicking through one of our links, we get a small commission of up to £7.
Lightroom 3 Courses in London
We’re taking bookings for our one-on-one photographic workflow training, delivered at your studio, office or home, over one or two days. Bespoke Lightroom tuition in London (and the South East), delivered by a friendly, knowledgeable instructor, at your pace.
Call us on 020 3092 2907 or e-mail develop@shootraw.co.uk to arrange a time to talk (for free) about exactly which aspects of your digital photography workflow are holding you back. We build a course for you and make the difficult stuff seem easy! Start by visiting our contact form: click here. We look forward to hearing from you.
December 17th, 2009 by Bahi Para
Stephen Shankland on shooting raw
In a recent article, Cnet’s Stephen Shankland makes some interesting points about raw files vs JPEGs in your photographic workflow. Here’s one that everyone should consider and which we continually emphasise to photographers:
If you’re converting a raw image with software, you not only get more computing horsepower than a camera offers, you get algorithms that are updated.
He’s absolutely right. Put differently: raw files from several years back can look incredibly good when processed using the best of today’s raw converters—much better than they ever did when they were first taken.
JPEGs produced by expensive professional cameras, even recent ones, shot in difficult conditions (low light, mixed lighting, high contrast) are completely outclassed by raw files from the same camera, taken at the same time, processed in today’s best raw converters. When you tell the camera that all you want is a JPEG file, you have to make decisions that are often better left till later (things like sharpening, contrast, colour space, white balance, noise reduction—none of these settings affect the raw file in any way) or ask the camera to make them for you. In many cases, the decisions you make are difficult or time-consuming to reverse later and have a permanent effect on the quality of your photographs.
Today’s raw converters deal with colour fringing, overexposure, underexposure, sharpness, noise, detail and resolution much better than most cameras’ JPEG engines. Whether you shoot professionally or for pleasure, if you’re serious about image quality, choosing to shoot raw makes sense and costs just a tiny amount of disk space.
Yesterday’s gone but you’ll have gathered the point of this post: the raw images you shoot today are likely to look even better in tomorrow’s raw converters. To start with, all you need to do is tell your camera to shoot raw—and if you don’t know what to do with a raw file yet then set your camera to shoot raw plus JPEG and store the raw files safely away somewhere. They’re your digital equivalent of film negatives and there’ll come a time when you’ll be very pleased that you still have them.
December 9th, 2009 by Bahi Para
A good Lightroom 2 video tutorial
When we deliver one-to-one Lightroom training, we leave photogrphers with one of several published Lightroom books to supplement their notes. (Watch for reviews of these books in future articles.) Some photographers understandably prefer to watch video tutorials, rather than plough through a book, in which case we recommend this video tutorial.
The instructors
When you learn using a one-way medium like video, you’re at the mercy of an instructor’s styles and priorities but the approach adopted by the two presenters of these videos should please most viewers.
Jeff Schewe works closely with Adobe on Lightroom and Camera Raw, testing the software and providing his input as a professional commercial photographer. He is also the current author of the best source of information on sharpening digital images for print and screen, the awkwardly named Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom
Michael Reichmann is an alpha tester for Adobe products, a long-established photographer himself and the man behind The Luminous Landscape.
Those of you familiar only with Jeff Schewe’s posts to various forums, for which he sometimes employs what you could call a very direct approach, might be surprised by the avuncular style on display here— there’s a twinkle in Jeff’s eye that came as a surprise to me when I first watched it. The conversational format of the video works well and the collection is easily worth the price of download, at $40 for more than seven hours of HD, split into many short, bite-size episodes.
Good for beginners and existing users
If you’re planning on booking one-to-one tuition with us, this tutorial is a good primer but it’s just as useful if you plan to work alone. You’re likely to learn quite a bit and even experienced Lightroom users will probably find new information and appreciate Jeff’s insight. The tutorial covers most aspects of Lightroom 2 and only minor details are outdated. (There were some changes introduced in the resizing methods used by Lightroom at version 2.3, for example.)
After watching the video a few times…
If you have specific questions after completing the videos, you could always buy some support time with us. More information coming soon.
We have no links whatsoever with Mssrs Schewe or Reichmann, nor with the Luminous Landscape, except as satisfied customers.
New readers always welcome
If you’re finding these snippets useful and you know others who’d benefit from reading them, please pass on the details of the site. You can sign up for free with Google to get new articles e-mailed to you every morning (UK time) so you don’t have to keep checking back. The link is on the front page but you can also click here. (We never pass on or sell your e-mail address.)
December 7th, 2009 by Bahi Para
White balance in raw vs JPEG, part 1
A traditional reason given for shooting raw (if you can call any aspect of digital photography “traditional”) is to be able to set white balance in post-production rather than during the shoot.
Claim
The old argument goes like this: when you shoot (particularly events, concerts, weddings…), you have enough to worry about without having to add white balance concerns to the mix. Why rely on auto white balance or set custom white balance using large grey cards for each type of light? You’re better setting it after the fact, taking the occasional shot using a small grey card in it but not having to fiddle with the camera settings. This argument was often advanced by proponents of a raw workflow, who claimed that this approach only worked when you shot raw, not JPEG.
Counter-claim
Others now claim that you can shoot JPEG and take the same approach—set white balance when you’re back at your computer, in a single click, as if you’d shot raw. They say that it’s just as easy and you can even use the same white balance tool.
Facts
Here’s what you need to know.
- Just as easy but not as good. Yes, it’s just as easy to use the one-click white balance tool with a JPEG but compare the result with a raw file shot in the same conditions and you’ll see significant differences in colour: the JPEGs can look distinctly unconvincing by comparison.
- The more challenging the light, the bigger the differences. If you’re shooting in low light and particularly if that light is tungsten (regular indoor lightbulbs), your results can end up looking a little rough; if you’re shooting JPEG, they’re can get very rough. You’ll know this already if you shoot conferences and events in ambient light and deliver colour results. It’s just as easy to click and change white balance in post-production with a JPEG but it’s much harder to look at the results with anything but disappointment.
- Challenging light conditions are not uncommon. Current digital cameras struggle when there’s a strong imbalance between red, green and blue light in scene, particularly if there’s not much light around to start with, overall. For example, if you shoot events in ambient light and deliver colour work, your files have very little blue colour information in them because tungsten light provides mostly orange and yellow. (You won’t see things that way at the time—your own internal white balance routines are much more sophisticated than those of your camera.) When you get the images back to your computer and set white balance, that tiny amount of blue information needs to be amplified to make the images look colour balanced and that process can introduce noise and colour shifts that make the images look a little flat, even with a raw file. With a JPEG, things are worse because of the way the files are compressed. The same thing can apply at dawn or dusk (lots of blue light) or in the mixed light you find at concerts and nightclubs.
Coming soon in part 2, some examples of raw-vs-JPEG white balance corrections—some will be extreme, others less so. You’ll be able to see the differences between raw and JPEG quite clearly.
And a quick update on group training
We visited several potential venues in London last week and we’re working out figures and catering costs. Things are looking very good for January and February, with places (and gift certificates) available later this week. More news to follow shortly—please pass on details of our site to anyone you think might be interested. Meanwhile, we’re still taking bookings for one-on-one training sessions at your studio, office or home. Mail us and we’ll work out a course structure and schedule that suits you: develop@shootraw.co.uk.
November 23rd, 2009 by Bahi Para
Protect fine colour detail in Lightroom 2
The colour noise reduction slider in Lightroom is set to 25 by default. In Lightroom 1 and 2, that value is often too high.
Colour noise reduction is subtle
There are some controls in Lightroom that have clear and immediately visible effects but colour noise reduction isn’t one of them. Slide the saturation control a little and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it’s doing to your image but with colour noise reduction, any change can often be very slight or invisible, particularly at low ISO and certainly as you slide it between its default and zero. So it’s very tempting—particularly if you only shoot at low ISO—to quietly ignore it…
Resist temptation
Left to its own devices, colour noise reduction can remove significant colour detail from some of your images, even when there’s no little or no colour noise present—and you may never know what you’re missing. Take a look at the simple test shot below; it was taken with the camera set to base ISO and f/8, using a sturdy tripod and the fading light of a late November afternoon in London. (If you’re reading this in your e-mail client and see no images, click on the heading of the message to continue reading the piece in your browser.)
Above: the complete image, resized for the web
Below is a 100% crop from the photograph, presented in two versions—one with colour noise reduction left at default (25) and the other with it set to zero. The Lightroom settings are otherwise identical in every way. The difference is quite striking: with the colour noise reduction gone, the subtle colour pattern printed on the paper is suddenly clear and becomes an important part of the picture’s texture. Take a close look.
Top photo: colour noise reduction slider set to 25.
Lower photo: slider set to zero. No other changes.
The only thing it took to reveal that subtle printed detail was to move the colour noise reduction slider away from its default. It’s the same raw file, same sharpening, same JEPG compression on output—same everything. That should give you an idea of how colour NR might affect the fine detail in your work, whether you shoot landscape (subtle tonal variations and detail in in grass and foliage), portraits, product shots or fashion (think of fabric detail). If you offer large, fine-art prints in colour or display large images online, it may pay dividends to pay attention to that harmless-looking slider.
How about Lightroom 3?
As of November 2009, the current beta version of Lightroom 3 has a completely reworked noise-reduction algorithm; like its predecessor, it comes set to 25 by default but that and the name of the slider seem to be about the only things carried over. The new version in Lightroom 3 removes far less valid colour detail from the photograph. Here’s a crop from the same raw file, this time processed in Lightroom 3, with all settings unchanged.
Above: in Lightroom 3 with colour NR set to 25
This time, with the slider left at its default, you can see the printed pattern very clearly. There’s more good news, too: as well as being far less intrusive, the new noise reduction routines in the beta version of Lightroom 3 are also more effective. (We’ll have detailed examples coming up in articles on noise reduction, in which we’ll also look at the surprising differences between a few of the dedicated noise-reduction packages available.)
Our recommendation for Lightroom 2
When you begin to work in Lightroom 2.0
Presets
When you’ve found your way around these settings, build one-click presets for your commonly used noise-reduction settings and your workflow will speed up considerably. Good use of presets is a big help in achieving a fast, easy raw workflow while maintaining image quality.
Noise reduction, edge masking and sharpening
Even if the odd default value might be a little off, the noise reduction functions in Lightroom (including version 2) are already a lot better than most Lightroom users realise when should be used in conjunction with Lightroom’s edge masking and sharpening controls. When you make the most of these controls, they can produce excellent results. More on that coming up in future articles.
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A reminder that you can get all our future articles, for free, by e-mail or RSS. Click here for e-mail subscriptions and here for RSS. The e-mail messages are generated and sent automatically to subscribers each morning (UK time) but only on days when there’s new content on the site—no new content means no e-mail. Please pass on our site details to any photographers—professional or amateur—whom you think might find this information useful.
One-on-one training
And another reminder. As always, we’re available for one-on-one training at your studio, home or office and we still have free slots in December 2009 and January 2010. In a day, you can easily get enough information to get you up and running confidently using a raw workflow; alternatively, you can choose to concentrate on particular aspects that are proving a little tricky. Our minimum booking is a half-day in the London area and a full day elsewhere. We’re also putting together phone support packages. Call 020 3092 2907 (regular London landline number) or drop us a line for details.
November 12th, 2009 by Bahi Para
ASMP creates dpBestflow.org
The American Society of Media Photographers has just launched its new digital photography site, dpBestflow.org, covering a lot of what you need to know about digital photography workflow. We haven’t had time to explore every section yet but so far, it’s looking very thorough and easy to follow. It was funded by the US Library of Congress and is entirely free; its content is also free to share, as long as attribution is provided. It looks very promising, covering workflow, colour management, printing, and best practice in many areas of digital photography.
http://dpbestflow.orgTo begin with, watch the five-minute video overview here.
One tip for UK readers: if you search for topics related to colour management, you’ll want to make sure you’re using American English spelling. There’s plenty of information there on colour management but understandably, a search on “colour” returns no hits right now, while “color” returns five pages of links . 
Tucked away at the bottom of the Project Team section is a list of names, under the heading Friends of Bestflow. They include Tom Hogerty, John Nack and the excellent Eric Chan (aka MadManChan), all Adobe employees heavily involved with Adobe Lightroom.
(Via John Harrington.)
November 9th, 2009 by Bahi Para
Looking for dirt? Keep on moving.
When you’re checking for sensor dust, keep the camera moving during the exposure.
Any detail that remains in the shot represents something that’s moving with your camera and is not part of the scene. Spots on a wall that you’re pointing at, for example, or flecks on a sheet of recycled paper, will all be blurred away to nothing as long as you move the camera enough during the test exposure.
Here’s how most people recommend that you identify sensor dust:
- Set the aperture of your lens to the smallest available. (Beginners might need a reminder that this is the highest f-number; quite often, it will be f/22 or f/32.) The idea is get the greatest depth of field.
- Aim the camera at an area of low detail, like a white piece of paper or a smoothly painted wall.
- Take a well exposed shot that’s bright enough to have the paper appear as a middle-to-bright grey
- Scroll slowly through the image at a high magnification (ideally, on your computer rather than on the camera) and identify the dark marks that are the tell-tale signs of sensor dirt.
- Clean the sensor using your chosen method (there are many but be careful: even though it has a very thin, protective glass coating, the coating and the sensor are easily damaged).
- As step 4; with luck, the sensor shows fewer marks now or perhaps even none.
- Repeat the whole process if necessary till the dust has gone, moving from dry cleaning to wet cleaning if that’s what it takes to shift the dirt.
There are variations—sometimes you’re advised to put the camera on a tripod, sometimes to point at the sky rather than at a wall or piece of paper—but you get the general idea.
The illustration at the beginning of this short article was shot at f/22 with the camera was pointing at an indoor wall lit by daylight and tungsten. The light was low enough to require a 30-second exposure. (In good daylight, you’d need only a fraction of a second.) You can see the sensor dirt quite clearly in this cropped section, displayed at 1:1, even though there wass plenty of texture and detail on the wall. The camera was moving round and round in circles for the entire exposure, meaning that the photographer (me, in this case) met his daily exercise quota as well.
Incidentally, we’ve found that we see the sensor dirt more clearly when manually setting focus to the nearest distance available instead of infinity, at least on the lenses that we used when experimenting with this. That makes sense but again goes against much of the advice out there. Try it and let us know how you got on.
One last thing about sensor dust: when you shoot at wide-open apertures to achieve a shallow depth of field, sensor dust will not appear clearly in your images but as long as it’s there, it will always be reducing contrast and clarity in some part of your image. In short, it’s worth eliminating. (Read your camera’s manual and seek advice if unsure. You can break or scratch the protective layer over your sensor doing this and repairs won’t be covered under warranty.)
Coming up: some information on Lightroom 3, public beta 1, which is free to install and download, even if you’ve never used Lightroom before. (It’s a beta version, which means it will expire.) Also, we’re putting some prices and information together on our courses based on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom—we cover Lightroom at every level, from beginner to advanced. To continue to receive all the free articles here on the blog when they appear, you can subscribe via RSS or by e-mail. Both options are completely free and we do not pass your e-mail address on to third parties. If you find the articles useful, please pass on our URL to others: shootraw.co.uk
January 27th, 2010 by Bahi Para