A dream to use.

Having explained how to create your own lens profiles for use with Lightroom3 yesterday, here’s that experience being put to use.

In this snap I wanted to emphasize the foreground sign to heighten the impact of the lone child on the beach. As you can see the original is rather blah as I was trying to moderate exposure between the poorly lit sign (the sun was shining into the lens – note how flare free the image is, especially as I do not use a lens hood) and the brightly lit beach. A separate attempt using fill-in flash looked too artificial for my taste, like one of those over-lit 1950s outdoor Hollywood musicals.

Original on the top. G1, Olympus 9-19mm MFT lens at 9mm.

A quick tap on the lens correction profile for the lens in LR3, two minutes work with the adjustment brush on the signs using AutoMask and zero feather to faithfully define the edges, a local exposure adjustment of plus one stop on the masked signs, a minus one stop exposure adjustment to the whole image, a touch on the vibrance slider, a little post-crop vignetting (the Olympus lens is totally free from optical vignetting even at 9mm, as you can see from the original, above), some selective darkening of the foreground and a blah original becomes a picture, and exactly what I visualized when pressing the button. The sheer idiocy of the sign testifies to the fact that the least able in any society work for government.

Stop! Turn right! G1, 9-18mm Olympus at 9mm, 1/800, f/8, ISO 320

With images where you expect to use lens distortion correction or perspective correction at the processing stage, it makes sense to compose with a little space around objects close to the edge of the frame, as that space will be lost when corrections are added – as in this example. Things are made a lot easier by the fact that the Panasonic G1 has one of the very few viewfinders which shows 100% of the image – most crop 3-5% making it impossible to exactly preview the saved file.

Lightroom3 is a powerful, efficient photography tool. The enhancements in Lightroom3 have now almost totally obsoleted my use of Photoshop for which feature, alone, I am immensely grateful.

Thank you, Adobe. Now maybe you can convince that jerk Steve Jobs to allow Flash to work on the iPad before I resort to jailbreaking mine.