Photographs, Photographers and Photography

Aperture is dead in the water.

Having started serious volume digital photo processing with Apple’s Aperture and finally made the switch to Lightroom almost two years ago, the following data recently released by Adobe hardly surprise me:

Clearly, I’m not the only one making the move, especially if you take into account the large increase in Mac sales in the past few quarters. Forget the upper table – Aperture does not run on Windows so it’s not a fair comparison. The lower table is.

When did you last hear of a meaningful update to Aperture or see any advertising for the product?

Those still using Aperture should be getting worried and would do well to consult my earlier piece on abandoning that major stress source for Mac performance. Aperture is another orphan application which couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen. It’s future is …. well, what future? Have you noticed how Aperture does not even support Panasonic G1/GH1/GF1 RAW file import – maybe the most signifiant camera design to hot the market in the past year? That makes me think it’s a dying application, starved of capital as Apple concentrates on making …. cell phones.

It bears repeating – the user interface in Lightroom is not only logical and linear, it actually makes photo processing fun. That’s not something I thought I would ever write. And you don’t lose track of originals or accidentally erase them, either.

Useable.

I mentioned a while back that I would comment on how Lightroom 2 runs on an older Mac. I had tried LR 2.1 on my 6 years old iMac (IBM G4 1.25gHz CPU, 1 mB of RAM) and it was not useable for localized adjustments such as the adjustment brush. You would paint something on the screen and many seconds later the effect was visible. Not useable.

Well, Adobe released Lightroom 2.2 the other day so I loaded this up on both the MacBook (Intel C2D 2.1gHz, 4 gB RAM) and the iMac. First, on the modern machine the adjustment brush is now fully useable. Changes occur almost in real time – say a fraction of a second delay as you ‘paint’. In this comparison, the MacBook is running OS Leopard 10.5.5 whereas the iMac is on OS Tiger 10.4.11.

Moving over to the iMac things are quite encouraging.

For purposes of what follows I was using a RAW file from my Canon 5D, so both machines had to perform RAW decoding prior to display of the picture. A RAW file from the 5D is some 12 mB but once converted comes to some 60gB. Not small, in other words. As usual, I let LR generate full-sized previews on import – it takes longer but the payback when processing is immediate. Images pop on the screen far faster this way.

LR 2.2 on an old iMac

Loading LR takes 20 seconds (versus 7 on the MacBook) and the first switch from the Library to the Develop module takes a long 30-35 seconds (MB – 7 seconds). Thereafter, switching between the Library and Develop modules takes 3 seconds (MB – near instantaneous). But, most importantly, the greatest advance in LR2 compared with LR1, localized adjustments, is now quite useable in LR 2.2. I can ‘paint’ on the screen using the mouse and see the adjustment within a second or so – made even easier by using the mask-display routine outlined here.

This little test discloses just how much faster the Core 2 Duo architecture of the Intel chip is over the IBM G4, but also shows the fine job Adobe has done of keeping those older machines in service. If you cannot afford the latest Mac, $300 for a nice 15-17″ display on an older G4 iMac will serve you just fine and there are lots of these older machines around going for a song. While I sold my G5 iMac a while back when the MacBook came along, I would guess that the G5 CPU will be speedier than the G4, much as it was using Photoshop CS2 when I first got the G5. The G5 iMac routinely sells for $350 – $400. A spectacular bargain with clean looks and a nice big screen.

If JPGs are your thing, then a G4 or G5 Mac should just fly. And they sell for a lot less than a new Mac when the current bottom-of-the-line MacBook (mine!) sells for a very overpriced $900 and iMacs start at $1,200. That money saved gets you a another lens for your DSLR and a great computer for Lightroom 2.2.

A bit tricky.

The idea of tethered photography with a digital camera is that what you snap appears shortly thereafter in Lightroom on a screen size of your choice.

Practically, this translates into controlled conditions where the camera and a computer can remain close together, so think studio photography. No matter whether your subject is a flower or a person.

The opportunity of immediately seeing your pictures in Lightroom, with default import processing (camera profile, sharpness, etc.) applied, all viewed on a large, properly profiled screen will take you as close to visualizing the finished thing as you can get. Indeed, if computer display is your goal you will see what you are getting; those who print and have a properly profiled screen/printer will be just as happy.

In a perfect world you should be able to attach your camera to your computer, open Lightroom and bang away. In real life the process is two stage. First, you have to tell Canon’s software (ugh!) to deposit pictures in a named location. Second, you then tell LR2 the name of this folder which it will monitor, transferring any new content to a different folder seen by LR2. Thus the first folder is emptied by LR2 and the second is transferred by you, the user, within LR, with contents either moved to your LR catalog or bad snaps moved to Trash. So you start and finish with these two empty ‘transit’ folders but they must not be removed for everything to work. That’s for the neatniks amongst us!

What follows applies to Canon DSLRs but doubtless similar steps apply with others.

With most modern Canon DSLRs (5D, 40D, whatever) you will need current versions of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (I am using DPP 3.5.1) and Canon’s EOS Utility (2.40). You tether your camera to a USB connection on your computer (laptops are ideal for this) and the camera end is connected with a miniature USB plug. As the one supplied with the camera is short, you can either buy a USB-A to USB-A extension cable, or simply get a longer USB-A to USB-Mini cable. Radio Shack or whatever. There’s no brand value here.

Plug in your camera, switch it on and fire up DPP, then click on Tools->Start EOS Utility. Go to EOS Utility->Preferences and check the box shown below:

This makes sure that what is transmitted to your laptop is also saved on the card in the camera. A useful safety precaution.

Now using Finder, create a unique folder you want monitored. I call mine ‘Canon EOS 5D Capture’ in my user directory.

Back in EOS Utility, go to the Destination drop-down box and enter that destination:

Before even getting into Lightroom 2, check this setup. Take a test picture and it should appear in a few seconds in DPP. With my 5D on a MacBook it pops up in DPP in 4 seconds – that’s for a RAW original.

Now Lightroom 2 has to be told where to look for the picture you have just taken.

Go to File->Auto Import and check ‘Enable Auto Import’ thus:

The click on ‘Auto Import Settings’ and enter the exact folder name under ‘Watched Folder:’ you just created in EOS Capture as shown:

Any typos here and nothing will work.

Back in Finder, create a new folder for the destination of your pictures as seen by LR. I have used the default name of ‘Auto Imported Photos’ which LR2 suggests, above.

Now take a test snap and the left panel of LR2 will show the following:

The new folder you designated appears in LR2. Click on it, hit F5, F6, F7, F8 and L and you will see this and all future pictures presented in their full glory, filling the screen. It takes 7 seconds from click to view with my 5D and modest MacBook (2.1 gHz C2D CPU, 4 gB RAM) with RAW originals. Doubtless JPG would be faster as less processing is involved, but JPG so compromises quality I do not bother with it.

If you like what you see, remember to drag-and-drop (move) the keepers to your permanent Lightroom catalog. Then, still in LR, delete the losers.

If you power down your camera or the battery fails or you disconnect the cord, you will need to go back into DPP and reload EOS Utility from the Tools menu. Other than that, it’s plain sailing. I’m using OS 10.5.5 Leopard and LR 2.1; earlier versions of Leopard seem to have had issues with the Canon software but now all is well. You can check Canon’s site for free upgrades to the latest DPP and EOS Utility software. (The older Capture application refuses to work with Leopard on my MacBook, so don’t bother with it if you are using like tools).

If you read that tethered photography was only fixed by Canon in the 5D Mark II, save yourself the upgrade money. My 5D Mark I works fine with this technique.

There’s no better way to preview studio snaps even if they involve moving subjects. You can check light and color balance from just a few test snaps. Very handy when you are using studio flash where its virtually impossible to ’see’ how your lighting has turned out on the camera’s miniscule LCD screen.

Once you have made the settings above, tethered photography involves the following simple steps:

• Switch on camera
• Connect to computer
• Load Canon DPP and EOS Utility
• Load Lightroom
• Take a test snap
• Navigate to the folder in LR and expand the test snap to full screen
• Bang away

Your camera will use up its battery faster this way as it’s saving both a card image and transmitting a copy to your computer, so come prepared with spares!

Come to think of it, a battery powered netbook computer and a tethered camera would be more than useable in the field. An ideal combination, perhaps, for those who like to take their studio with portable strobes with them. Of course, you would have to convert the netbook to running OS X to use your time effectively ….

Now you can match the manufacturer’s intent.

I have generally avoided using Canon’s DPP Professional software which comes with the 5D. Clunky, slow, limited in application and not integrated with my man processing ‘engine’ – Lightroom – plus all those comedic spelling errors, well, it’s all just too much. Or too little.

Now Adobe has made it possible to view your RAW imports in Lightroom (and this only works for RAW images) emulating the manufacturer’s software. So instead of viewing your images in the latest Adobe Camera Raw profile, you can get to look at them in what DPP Professional would do. The differences are easily seen on the screen.

Point your browser to this address and download the profile package:

Now when you next start Lightroom 2 you will see the following in the Develop panel:

Click the drop down box and the camera specific profiles appear:

So if you are still using DPP, forget about it, download the profiles into LR2 and you have all you need in one place.

Here’s a snap processed using the Camera Landscape Beta 2 profile – note the warmth in the rose:

5D, 400mm ‘L’, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 250

Painless, amazingly.

My extensive tests with the free trial version of Lightroom 2 confirmed that the product is stable and debugged and I now find I cannot live without the localized adjustment features LR2 added. Not to mention enhanced keywording and search functions. Hopefully Adobe will add keystone/perspective correction in the next version and I will be able to bid a not-so-fond farewell to Photoshop CS2 (and its many predecessors), that user interface nightmare of a product.

Having had nothing but trouble upgrading Adobe products in the past I approached the idea of an online upgrade of Lightroom 1.4.1 to Lightroom 2 ($99) with trepidation.

Mercifully all went well.

Pay your $99 – assuming you have a version of LR1 on your computer – and off you go:

Download in progress – you have to elect either the Mac or Winblows version.

The new serial number is provided for input.

Old and new numbers input and she’s ready to go! I have blurred out the last four digits for security – you have twenty thousand guesses!

Even though I had the trial version already loaded, Adobe insisted on uploading the whole thing again – no big deal as it only took a minute or two.

My only complaint so far is that the auto-masking feature, when applied to large areas, is very sluggish. Now I must try the application on our old iMac G4 (PPC, 1.25gHz) and see how well it works on a relatively ancient machine.

If you do not have LR1 then LR2 will run you $299 – $100 more than Apple’s Aperture. Adobe has no earthly reason to drop the price to compete with Apple’s offering. If you elect the latter, be prepared to blow another $2-3,000 on a machine which might actually run it at something approaching reasonable speed. If you don’t believe me, stop by an Apple Store with your favorite RAW file and load it in Aperture on a MacBook. Then try the crop tool. Convinced?

I have been putting this off for too long.

I have been putting off adding keywords to the pictures in my Lightroom database in much the same way as stock market investors prefer denial to fact. Open that statement in the mailbox and, yes, you too will be apprised of this year’s 40% drop in value. That’s the result of the foolish “stay fully invested” mantra of the past two bull decades which has been brainwashed into your psyche by amoral advisers seeking only to maximize their fees. This is by no stretch of the imagination a financial blog – though I do like to point out photography equipment bargains when I see them – but suffice it to say that after the 1929 crash the Dow index did not return to pre-1929 levels until …. 1954. So the ‘fully invested’ bunch, or what was left of it, had to wait out a war and 25 years later they had devalued dollars equal in amount to their 1929 investment.

But, like that reluctant letter opener, I have preferred to fool myself that my Lightroom cataloging system, which heretofore has avoided the use of keywords, would serve me well, added by a solid dose of good memory to help find things in a trice.

Wrong.

I am now finding that it’s getting increasingly difficult to locate a treasured snap in short order. Was that snap of the wife in Bermuda in ‘Cityscapes’ or under ‘Wife’? Was that picture of our sweet little boy, Winston, under ‘Playground’ or ‘Winston’ or ‘Birthdays’?

Here’s how I have ordered my folders:

In LR2, the green light refers to the active drive. The numbers indicate that I have 207gB left on a 465gB drive

Click on, say, the ‘Beach and Sea’ containing folder and you get:

Well, you get the idea. As long as you remember that the snap you want is in ‘Beach and Sea’ the rest is plain sailing. Snag is, sometimes it’s simply not where you would logically place it today and memory tends to fade.

Now that Lightroom 2 has made key wording easier and faster, if no less tedious, I have resolved to add keywords to as many of my pictures as makes sense and I am disciplining myself to do a hundred or so a day. Rather than doing this one by one, I assemble those that need generic keywords – ‘monochrome’ or ‘grain effect’ for example – and do a batch add of the relevant words. In a final pass I will add image specific keywords where warranted, the goal being that a keyword search renders a handful of results.

A related motivating factor is that my catalog of images (the keepers, that is) is growing faster than in days past, owing to the higher success rate of digital technology and greater availability of time for my hobby compared with those days when I was putting in 60+ hour weeks on Wall Street.

Here are some of the keywords I have added – note that I have replicated the folder names in case I ever decide to scrap or revise the folder structure. I have then started adding new keywords like ‘Red’ which identify pictures with strong red content:

LR2 allows you to drag and drop keywords onto image(s) so the process is fairly fast. The tricky bit is coming up with image specific words that make sense. “How would I think of this image were I looking for it?” is the recurring question.

Now when I wish to locate all files matching a specific keyword, I go to the right hand panel of LR2, highlight the word and click the arrow to the right – here’s the result of clicking on ‘Cemeteries’:

Keywords can be stacked for compound searches, though the technology in LR2 still trails Aperture’s where you can select a filter with boolean keyword input, using ‘if’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ logic. I have no doubt that this will eventually come to Lightroom.

So far I have encountered one snag. If you stack images of like kind (I stack composite HDR images for example as all go towards one result once merged) and leave the stack closed when keywording, only the top picture in the stack will be keyworded. If you subsequently change the top picture in the stack you will not be able to find the new one if you forgot to keyword it. To work around this I simply open all the stacks in the Library before keywording, so that all pictures in a stack have the keyword applied.

I have been banging away at LR2, moving files and folders, stacking, copying, processing, exporting and adding keywords for a while now and have had no lock-ups. The only time the application really bogged down was when I tried using the adjustment brush with auto-masking switched on to paint in a large, irregular sky area. I got the spinning beach ball while the overtaxed, modest GPU (Intel GMA 3100) in my MacBook did the data crunching. Mercifully, this is not something I expect to do often. At 4 megabytes of RAM it’s not like I’m hurting for CPU memory so I’m blaming the graphics processor for this one!

If I decide to upgrade to LR2 (I’m using the 30 day free trial which comes fully featured) I’ll give it a run on our old iMac G4 ’screen on a stick’ which continues to soldier away as a great Internet browser. That will answer the question of how well LR2 runs on older PPC CPU Macs. I can confirm that LR 1.4.1 runs well on this computer if nowhere as fast as on the MacBook. It remains more than useable for those looking for a low entry price to the world of Lightroom processing. The latest version of Aperture does not run at acceptable speeds on older machines like this one, whose G4 CPU runs at 1.25gHz and has just one core compared to the Intel’s two. One of the most distinguishing features of LR 1.4.1 is its speed on these old but still useful machines. Let’s hope that has been retained in LR2.

By the way, for those readers into this sort of thing, here are some interesting statistics on LR vs Aperture users from the Adobe blog. Probably self-serving given that this is Adobe’s data, but interesting all the same. Sample sizes are not stated in this survey:

I have questioned Apple’s commitment to Aperture before (no critical mass, no significant profit) and have little reason to change that opinion. And as I can testify, the conversion process from Aperture to Lightroom is not pretty. So the sooner you switch, the better. Adobe does this for a living; to Apple it’s a rounding error.

Enough talk. Here’s a snap from the beach, a composite of four images combined using Helicon Focus:

Kelp. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/100, f/22, ISO400. Composite of four images using Helicon Focus.

Trying it out.

I continue to watch the excellent tutorials to be found here and have now downloaded the 30 day free trial of Lightroom 2.1 from the Adobe web site. I delayed doing this as the predicatble raft of bugs in 2.0 has now been largely resolved and discussion boards suggest the application is stable. Never buy Version 1 of anything ….

My first focus is on the graduated density filter and adjustment brush, which are new features of the localized adjustments added in Version 2 of Lightroom.

While I have for ever toyed with the idea of using those slip-on graduated density filters for landscape work, the whole thing has always seemed too clunky. Further, interposing yet another easily scratched surface between object and image has never much appealed to me and the thought of carrying dozens of those filters and all the related gadgetry to attach them to my lens has left me cold.

Well, with Lightroom 2 there is no more need for external filters. Not only can you add a graduated density filter of your choice to selected areas of an image, you can also tilt the horizon for these where necessary, elect the level of graduation and change color, brightness, clarity, contrast, saturation and sharpness in your area(s) of choice. Try that with mechanical attachments!

Here’s a case in point of a landscape with a sloping horizon taken from my front door yesterday. As the original discloses, the lighting was flat, the scene less than interesting and the sky horribly bland.

A few moments work, applying graduated sloping colored filtration to the sky area and selectively darkening the foreground using the new adjustment brush feature (look at the road at the bottom), plus an overall tweak for saturation and clarity, and upping the reds and oranges, and you get a nice Old Master look, like this:

From my front door – the beauty of central California. 5D, 200mm ‘L’, 1/1000, f/4, ISO 400

The ability to make localized graduated adjustments is powerful and Adobe’s implementation superb. It bears watching those videos as there are so few adjustment buttons that you have to learn how they work, but the engineering and user interface are remarkably elegant. Indeed, it was Lightroom’s far more intuitive user interface and logical work flow that made me abandon Aperture. Not to mention the general slugishness of the Apple application regardless, it seems, of how current or fast your computer is. Lightroom flies, the slowest step being localized adjustment brush operations which take a second or so to register on my MacBook (4gB RAM, 2.1gHz C2D CPU).

By the way, when you first fire up Lightroom 2 it will convert your Lightroom 1 catalog for use with the new version, but it also leaves the original Version 1 catalog untouched in the event you decide not to upgrade. (The on screen narrative does not make this clear, implying that your original files are lost). Nice – no need for yet another back-up, though I made one just in case. You should too.

Finally, this screen snap shows the area to which I have applied the graduated effect – the dot is the center point above which things darken. You can also see that I have sloped the graduated density area to replicate the natural slope of the horizon – just drag up or down on one side to slope the area affected.

Lightroom 2 is beginning to look like a keeper.

As for these guys, well, I would be looking for a new day job in their place:

Yesterday’s hardware. Yesterday’s concept.

And if you have a big investment in these, well, sell them in a yard sale and the proceeds may just pay for the upgrade to Lightroom 2!

Assessing whether to upgrade.

Now that Lightroom 2.0 has come and gone, with the usual fixes for basic bugs which should never have left Adobe’s labs (Americans always prefer garbage today to quality tomorrow), Lightroom 2.1 is beginning to intrigue me. I’m still using 1.4.1 because it’s stable and does what I need, but one of the appeals of 2.1 is the ability to do localized adjustments without hopping over to Photoshop. That’s something I tend to avoid like the plague.

The other evening as I was flipping though photography podcasts on the Apple TV – you can do the same on your computer (Mac or the other kind) using iTunes – I came across a counterintuitively named one going by the title Photowalkthrough.

Here’s the download page in iTunes – just search in iTunes on ‘Photowalkthrough’.

The podcasts of interest are the ones on Lightroom 2. I have watched a couple and there are really nice on screen demos of the use of the local adjustment brush which seems to be the key feature added in LR2. I was especially impressed by the auto masking feature which restricts edits to, say, backgrounds or foregrounds, based on the outline of the object concerned. No need to outline the item in advance, as you might in Photoshop.

I seem to recall reading that the upgrade from LR 1 is some $100 and after watching a few more of these I may well spring for the cost. There’s a 30 day free trial version available, of which more here.

A feature comparison.

With the release of Lightroom 2, Adobe has published a useful feature comparison to Version 1 – click here.

I’m not upgrading right now, respecting my ‘Never Buy Version 1.0 of anything’ rule. Further, as I do not do a lot of image processing, the enhanced controls in v2 don’t do that much for me. 64 bit support? Meaningless to me from a practical perspective.

As for Lightroom 1.4.1, which is what I currently use, I couldn’t be happier. It’s fast, doesn’t lose images and printing is a dream. I’m beginning to wonder whether Aperture will be orphaned soon – a small user base (Mac only), a bog slow application unless you spend $$$ on hardware and very buggy implementation will not see me back with that flawed product.

Hard to believe, really.

I confess that the two words in the title of this piece are ones I would never have seen writing together. To me processing is simply a mechanical step that stands between the snap and its realization. A necessary if boring interlude which should be made as fast and automated as possible to let the picture show itself to the world.

If the increasingly rapacious hardware needs of every latest version of Aperture saw me abandon the product rather than spend more money on newer, faster computers seemingly every six months, then I can only report that my first few months with Lightroom have been nothing short of bliss. Relatively speaking, that is. I still hate to process but now I don’t have the endless frustrations of spinning beach balls and lost originals that were becoming Aperture’s specialty.

First, Lightroom runs happily even on our ancient G4 iMac and second, it simply cooks on my current bottom-of-the-line MacBook (1.83gHz C2D, 2gB RAM). Second, while the interface may lack the polish of Aperture’s, who cares? You no longer need Aperture’s pretty screens to distract you while you wait for the beach ball to disappear. In Lightroom you are already three snaps down the road of production and output. In other words, Lightroom is an industrial grade tool for users who need fast, reliable throughput.

Even round trips to Photoshop are not that bad. Once CS2 is loaded (it takes 30 seconds on the MacBook as it’s running in Rosetta PPC emulation mode) a round trip to take advantage of special features not currently available in Lightroom takes a minute or so. Mostly this is to use ImageAlign or the Transform function to correct skewed and leaning verticals. Other than that, pretty much everything I need to fix a picture is in Lightroom, and I would hope that distortion correction will be added to the next full version of Lightroom in a few months.

Hearst pool cloister ceiling. 5D, fish eye, 1/1500, f/8, ISO 400, Image Align

A related benefit is the easy ability to craft import and processing presets – nothing more than one click settings which confer a bunch of preferred adjustments on your image, with full preview and undo abilities. I should add that I use RAW exclusively for my source images, whether from the 5D or LX-1.

Lone diner. One click to monochrome in Lightroom. Lumix LX-1, RAW original, ISO 80

So I’m not about to say processing is fun, but Lightroom simply makes this step as painless as anything since Polaroid gave the world instant snaps.

Beta testing is the way to go.

Adobe has just released Lightroom 2.0 Beta allowing all and sundry to bang away at it in a sort of group grope-wiki software development approach which I can only applaud.

Why?

Well look at the catastrophe that resulted when they decided to go it alone. Alternatively, compare this to arrogant Apple’s approach with Aperture 2.0 whose first 2.1 update seems to have more error fixes than 2.0 had new features. That’s what you get when you restrict testing to an insider elite comprised of wedding photographers. Apple needs to learn that the real tinkerers who are going to find stuff do not do weddings ….

Localized corrections in the Develop module and multiple monitor use seem to be the most useful enhancements – this is enough to call it 2.0 or are earnings hurting? Still, Adobe is adopting the right development approach. A discussion forum can be found here.

There’s no soft proofing support yet, but read this for a workaround.

Interestingly, the ‘10,000 pixels a side’ import file size limit (meaning files cannot be over 10k pixels on either dimension or more than 100mB in total) has been increased to 30,000. I actually ran into the 10,000 pixel limit when migrating from Aperture to Lightroom on some big scans of 4″x5″ originals, so this is not as odd as it at first sounds.

Anyone can use the 2.0 Beta but to extend the trial past 30 days you either have to be a registered 1.x user or ask Adobe nicely. There’s a neat tutorial here. In a related tutorial an easy way of exporting, say, multiple images to Photoshop, such as in HDR photography is explained. The enhancements allowing multiple image printing on one page are nothing short of superb – some 5 minutes into this tutorial.

Is Adobe trying too hard? With 2.0 Beta newly out and 1.4.1 still in need of repair, is Adobe unnecessarily rushing things?

While I have no access to current data, assuming that PC users outnumber Mac zealots by 4:1, it’s not like Aperture is a competitor. Add the fact that Aperture 2.0 seems to require the costliest Mac to run half decently (if then), whereas Lightroom potters along nicely on an ancient G4 Mac, I somehow doubt there are going to be too many users switching from Lightroom to Aperture. In fact, I would guess they are about as common as people looking for permanent resident status in North Korea. Trust me, Abobe, I only want to go through this hell once, so there’s no way you are about to lose me as a user unless something better comes along and it uses LR’s catalogs without need for conversion.

However, given how few people use Macs, I wonder whether Adobe would be better off canning half the Lightroom development team and spending the savings on properly marketing 1.4. Lightroom 2.0 is nice but, let’s face it, it can wait and you are not going to dump Aperture just because of this Lightroom Beta upgrade which isn’t even ready for prime time.

And, please, no comments about how photographers are disproportionately users of Macs. The sole reason you visit this blog is to read about photography and 80% of you, according to my statistics, use Internet Explorer. Last I checked, that piece of garbage doesn’t even run on a Mac …. and anyone using IE with Parallels on a Mac truly needs a lobotomy. And I’ll bet that of the 20% using Safari, some are running it on Windows and many don’t use Aperture in any case. So the 4:1 LR:Aperture user ratio is probably understated.

Sure, all the toadies, sycophants, commercial flacks and those otherwise in the pay of Adobe will extol the virtues of 2.0 and praise Adobe for its community spirit. Utter nonsense. Adobe is a stockholder-owned public company. It’s primary duty, as with any public company, it to maximize the wealth of its shareholders, not tell us about its great good heart and wonderful social policies.

So, Abode, fire a dozen developers (starting with the fellow who approved 1.4.1 for release) – $1-2mm saved – and roll something like this out.

“Aperture users! Make Lightroom run twice as fast. On your ten year old Mac. Invest the hardware savings in a new Nikon D3 instead”.

And let’s face it, Adobe, your stock is nothing to write home about.

Or, better still Adobe, write a proper converter for Aperture to Lightroom catalogs and sell Lightroom at 50% of retail to anyone downloading it and sending in the box top from their Aperture software. Now that’s something that might make me show some interest in your stock and it would pay for itself with the first few conversions. It might even preclude an imminent hostile takeover though I’m conflicted here as I would far rather own the stock is someone wants to acquire you for a premium to the quoted price.

Some convenient enhancements.

Since publishing my first piece on how to profile monitors and printers for use with Lightroom, I have made a couple of interesting discoveries.

First, I listened to Adobe Podcast#1 (with Mark Hamburg, Kevin Tieskoetter and Jeff Schewe) from Apple’s iTunes store (search podcasts on “Lightroom”) which speaks to profiling (they are speaking about Lightroom Beta Release #4 for the Mac) and was intrigued to note that that we shared the same approach. The development team (a lot of very smart, well informed, outspoken engineers – highly recommended listening) does exactly what I published with regard to the use of Colorsync, letting the printer manage colors, not Lightroom. This philospohy is printer agnostic. Epson, HP, Canon, you name it.

My approach requires making Lightroom use Apple’s Colorsync utility to manage colors. You need a properly profiled screen and I describe in that earlier piece a very accurate way of doing that which does not even require a colorimeter, provided you follow certain disciplines regarding ambient lighting.

I suggest you give this method a try. Your maximum cost is a few minutes, a couple of pieces of paper and some ink. And the money saved on a Colorimeter (wish I had been that smart when I bought mine) will pay for a lot of paper and ink. It does not matter who makes your printer for this screen profiling approach to work.

The other thing I discovered is that it is possible to save the Colorsync setting in the Printer Profile – something I stated frustration at not being able to do.

I had forgotten that there is a ‘Save’ setting in the print dialog box. So elect Colorsync in Print Settings->PaperType/Quality then Save the setting with a meaningful name. I have named my saved file “HP Photo Satin – Colorsync” which states the paper type I chose before saving and obviously uses the Colorsync utility. Note that this named setting is independent of Lightroom’s Print templates – you choose it at print time after selecting a Print template. The printer dialog box dictates color management, the Lightroom Print template controls the paper size, margins and picture layout on the page.

Then, when it’s time to Print, I simple choose this drop down menu option in the Print dialog box (I have not yet figured out how to make it the default, something I would like to do as that’s what I use nearly all the time – what I need to do is work out how to delete the ‘Standard’ setting, I’m guessing, at the OS file level). A quick check – see the following screen picture – confirms that the Colorsync setting has, indeed, been saved and will be used when printing.

Now I am assured that both the right paper profile and the correct Colorsync setting is made without having to check yet another layer of menus in the print dialog box. So printing really is a breeze. I have created three templates – for three different paper sizes. That’s all I need, as I always use the same HP paper.

I learned an interesting thing from this podcast – what do you think Adobe did for the Lightroom development team for Christmas of 2005? They gave each member a digital camera and encouraged them to take lots of pictures. Maybe the resulting stress testing has something to do with the application’s speed? I wonder whether Apple ever considered doing that for its Aperture developers? Or do they simply get a $7,000 Mac Pro and 30″ screen which will run anything well ….

To Photoshop, that is.

While the slightly up-tilted camera distortion is not that bad here, a quick round trip (Command-E on a Mac) from Lightroom to Photoshop CS2 and a few seconds with the ImageAlign plug-in sets things dead straight. Command-S in CS2 saves the corrected version as a TIFF file in Lightroom. ImageAlign is not just for de-fishing fisheye snaps!

Cropping of the perspective-corrected result in Lightroom – a superbly implemented tool.

Here’s the before and after – a subtle change but worthwhile:

Here’s the final result. Magical late sunlight. California sky.

Tough neighborhood. 5D, 20mm, 1/750, f/11. ISO 250.

You can see some lens vignetting but I left it uncorrected as it heightens the center of interest. My shadow works – at least for me!

Two stops under does the trick.

Because very high dynamic range pictures will result in burned out highlights, notwithstanding the fine CMOS sensor in the Canon 5D, I underexposed this one two stops (spot metered on the sky) then brought the detail in the foreground back with the processing controls in Lightroom. Here’s the Before and After – a very well engineered function in Lightroom allowing all sorts of comparisons.

Lone oak. 5D, 20mm. 1/4000, f/8, ISO 250. RAW.

As the controls in Lightroom indicate, I had to add substantial noise reduction and sharpening. As the sun was directly behind the tree, regular exposure would have made the branches unrecoverable – sort of like halation in films of days past. This magnitude of correction could not possibly be done in a Jpg file. The histogram testifies to the complete absence of burned out highlights – there’s no crowding at the right end.

Adjustments made in Lightroom.

I also boosted the Tone Curve substantially in the shadows – this control is perfectly implemented in Lightroom – I used the small pointer tool, which you can see at the top left of the following screen picture,allowed me to see the tone curve in the shadow range by placing the pointer in the foreground of the picture. This helped me determine where to adjust. The dotted line shows the reference starting point.

Here’s the final result after slight straightening of the horizon – the sunlight was quite blinding and it was not easy to see much in the viewfinder!

Once stopped down the rather ‘iffy’ Canon 20mm lens is free from color fringing, so no lens corrections were needed.

Don’t forget to set these correctly.

One slightly frustrating thing about Lightroom’s menu structure is that preferred settings for how the application looks and behaves are all over the place. You would expect to see everything under Lightroom->Preferences, but that is far from the case. A last vestige of the truly frightful user interface enjoyed by Photoshop users for years.

I tend to prefer a really stripped down, minimalist look to the screen interface, opting for a minimum of distractions on the screen. Once you learn some of the most useful one-key short-cuts, then you will no longer need the top Apple menu or much of what clutters the side panels.

In the Develop module I right click on the left sidebar and choose to show only the Library and Folders. I have little use for Find, Collections, Keywords or Metadata Tags, so these are switched off. You cannot get rid of the Navigator selection at the top, but the very irritating flashing of the small picture preview as you go through pictures in the Grid view can be hidden by clicking on the small arrow to the left of the word ‘Navigator’. Because my photography is thematic, I do use Folders and sub-Folders named after the theme in question which, with my limited volume of pictures, works for me when trying to find something. Others will opt for keywording and dated folders. Here’s how my left panel looks in the Develop module:

The right panel is similarly stripped down – I have little use for Keywording or Metadata:

Like ’switching’ can be accomplished in the other modules.

Much as I laud and respect the team which authored Lightroom, I do not need to be reminded of their names each time I boot the product, so I switch the display panel off by unchecking the first box under Lightroom->Preferences->General, like so:

In Lightroom->Preferences->Interface I get rid of the bizarre antique ‘Panel End Mark’ which Lightroom shows by default at the base of each panel, thus:

Now in File->Catalog Settings on the General tab, Lightroom comes with automatic file back-ups every thirty days switched on. First, 30 days makes no sense if you use the application more frequently. Your failing hard disk will not conveniently wait until your last back-up before blowing up. Second, if you are not making daily back-ups to a secure external drive, you are simply living dangerously. So I use SuperDuper! to make a daily bootable clone on an external Firewire disk and switch off this (now useless) choice, electing ‘Never’:

Still in the File->Catalog Settings menu choice in the Library (Grid) view, this time under the File Handling tab, Lightroom comes preset to discard 1:1 Previews after 30 days. Odd. It takes for ever to generate these when you import a lot of pictures and with the small increase in storage (my 40gB picture catalog creates a 6gB preview catalog) and given the vast increase in speed that 1:1 Previews add to the Develop process, you most certainly want to keep these. The third drop-down box is set to ‘Never’:

Next in File->Catalog Settings under the Metadata tab I leave the factory defaults for Metadata alone:

However, were I in the habit of frequent round trips to Photoshop and if I wanted my Lightroom edits to be automatically reflected in the Photoshop image, I would check the third box (’Automatically write changes into XMP’) above. Otherwise, Photoshop will simply show the RAW unprocessed image in the database or the image as it was last saved. On those (rare) occasions where I do round trip to Photoshop I will do a file save (Command-S on a Mac) before round tripping, thus forcing Photoshop to show any Lightroom edits in its displayed image. If you check this box as a default, Lightroom will slow down as every change gets saved to disk. You don’t want that unless you are running on a Cray mainframe and work at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Meaning you have a super fast machine.

Finally, to get rid of the top white menu, I switch it off as explained here.

Now I have the lean and mean user interface I prefer.

Go to the source.

I came across some outstanding tutorials on Lightroom in video format, authored by George Jardine, a member of the Lightroom development team at Adobe.

Click here for an index.

If you do nothing else, download and watch the one titled The Lightroom Catalog – Part 1, or “Where Are My Pictures?” which is definitive on how Lightroom stores files. Without a proper understanding of this you risk loss of files which are stored in disparate Lightroom catalogs.

There are also a lot of useful Podcasts from the Adobe team in the iTunes store, all free. Many are in video format and feature interviews with famous photographers like Peter Turner, Eric Meola, Jay Maisel and Jerry Uelsmann.

While we are at it, I have found an even simpler way of switching off all the panels that Lightroom displays to allow uncluttered picture preview. Simply hit the Tab key on a Mac. Tab again to restore. Finally, to remove the menu bar at the top, go into this menu selection and, henceforth, the menu bar will only appear on a mouse-over:

There does not appear to be a way of doing this from the keyboard. (A reader has corrected me – refer to Comment #1 – the ‘F’ key does this – thank you, Alastair).

Here is the result:

It still cooks!

You can read about how to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom here.

Given the great speed and smoothness of Lightroom on my MacBook (1.83gHz Intel Core2Duo, 2gB RAM, Intel GMA950 graphics card, OS 10.4.11) I thought it might be fun to try it on my old iMac (1.25gHz IBM G4 PPC, 1gB of RAM, OS 10.4.11). This is the elegant ’screen-on-a-stick’ design after which the iMac’s ergonomics went downhill – the poorly thought out stands on the current crop (G5 and later) need a couple of thick books to raise the screen to the right height. We keep that old Mac around in the living room primarily as an email and Internet browser for guests. The screen is superior too – far less color change occurs as you move your head. Needless to add, Aperture will not even run on this machine which uses a GeoForce FX5200 graphics card. Finally, it’s further distinguished by having a proper, horizontal disk drive which not only accepts 3″ discs (put one of those in your MacBook and it’s toast) but also burns DVDs (an option I avoided, to save money, on my MacBook). Unlike the disc slot in my MacBook, which refuses to read discs 50% of the time, this one really works. So much for progress.

Therefore I loaded Lightroom on the old Mac and tried to access my library of pictures by neworking the two. Well, Lightroom reported that it does not support networked volumes, meaning the drive has to be hard wired to the computer running Lightroom. No problem. I plugged the hard drive with the Lightroom database into the old Mac and fired her up. Loading the largest picture in the database – a 100mB TIFF file – was a snap. It takes a few seconds longer than with the MacBook but thereafter the processing controls that so dog Aperture – spot retouching, cropping, horizon levelling – were every bit as smooth as on the MacBook. The dead reliable iMac is some five years old, the MacBook has but a few months (and one repair already) on it.

The wonderful G4 iMac

So anyone running a machine of this vintage and thinking of using Lightroom should be just fine. If your Mac is even older and you are running Lightroom on it, I would be interested in your comments. There are many fine G3 Powerbooks still in daily use out there.

So, finally, a proper break with the incessant, money wasting, perennial hardware upgrade cycle dictated by Apple’s software design. And now I have total redundancy (hardware and data back-up) if my MacBook breaks down again – I wouldn’t be betting against that given my recent experience with Apple’s poor quality control.

Note that both machines are running the last version of OS Tiger (10.4.11). I have not upgraded to OS X Leopard (10.5) as I try never to buy ‘first of breed’, preferring to let others act as Apple’s unpaid guinea pigs. Indeed, there are many comments out there on chat boards that suggest that Adobe (or Apple – much finger pointing here) has work to do to make Lightroom render colors properly with Leopard. Additionally, all this user sees in Leopard is glitz and gloss, with little improvement in the way of function. Just like Aperture 2.0, in fact.

Aperture on a G4 machine? Fugghedaboutit! Neither that graphics card or the G4 CPU are even supported.

For those photographers out there looking to migrate their Lightroom application from Windows to a Mac (a trivial process requiring copying of your picture files and installation of the Mac version that came on your disc), there are some superb, lightly used, bargains to be had out there in G5 iMacs, Powerbooks and MacPros. A great way of fighting back against hardware upgrade tyranny. The LCD screens are reputed to be better than those on many current models (my G4 iMac testifies to that) into the bargain.