Category Archives: Photography

Lightroom 2 Trial

Lightroom

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!

HP Designjet 90 still available!

Printing

A great bargain.

Click on ‘Printing’ in the left hand column and you will see that I am a huge fan of HP’s previous generation DesignJet 90 18″ wide printer. A small footprint, fade free inks, great reliability and …. cheap for what you get. HP’s current large format printers start well north of $2,000.

I thought that the HP DJ90 was no longer available, but a quick spot of Googling and it seems they are still available new.

The print quality is beyond reproach, not least owing to the use of dye inks which results in a really deep black. As for the fade free claim, I can attest to one print I have at a friend’s home, under plain glass, which is in bright sun 8 hours a day and has been for two years. It’s as good as new.

So if large prints are your thing, check out the HP DJ90 or 130 (which will print up to 24″ wide).

Update: Check the Comments to this piece for a discussion of paper and supplies availability. I have also added extensive details about HP’s newly released (2008) profiles for many non-HP papers.

Lightroom 2 tutorials

Lightroom

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.

How many pixels?

Cameras

Most of the time!

It never ceases to amaze me how photographers will splash out on the latest megapixel wonder camera. Point-and-shoots now often boast over 10 megapixels and DSLRs are now up to 22+ mps in full frame sensors. Yet where do all those pictures end up? Why, on a computer screen of course, likely 20″ diagonal in size or less.

Scroll down a while and take a look at the many articles here where I include snaps to illustrate some hardware issue. Chances are that the picture was made with my ancient (5 years old) Olympus 5050Z – a 5 megapixel camera which I use at its lowest quality setting, generating 640 x 480 pixel images – 0.3 megapixels. That’s nice as I can upload them to this journal without any further compression. It probably sells used for well under $100.

Before they got caught up in the pixel race, Nikon’s professional DSLRs offered a relatively low pixel count, preferring to focus on sturdiness and speed of operation. The 3 or 4 mp originals were more than good enough for newspaper work, most of the time, and even then the quality of the original could not possibly be reflected in newsprint reproduction.

So my take on all of this is that the only photographers needing more than 640 x 480 are those making large prints (like me!) and pros working for large format glossy magazines where the difference matters (half a dozen other guys).

Of course, if you were to show up at a modeling session with Linda Evangelista, say, with my little Oly, I do suspect that you might be unceremoniously shown the door, but that’s not to say your pictures would have been any worse than the pro’s had you actually been allowed to take them

A little tweak here ….

Photographs, Technique

…. a little color there.

The beauty of the adjustments in Lightroom (I’m on 1.4.1) is that the results are seen instantly on the screen and the sliders for these are really quite intuitive – not something that can be said of the industrial might of Photoshop with its poor user interface. Further, unlike Aperture, which I no longer use, you do not need the latest liquid helium cooled MacPro with 16 gB of RAM and the latest $2,000 graphics card to run the thing at half decent speed – an old iMac G4 more than suffices and you can probably pick one of those up for $50 with a nice big screen at a yard sale.


Canon 5D, 24-105mm at 58mm, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100

Here you can see the bland original (underneath) and the final versions of this snap. The final adjustments can be seen here from Lightroom’s History panel – look at the right hand column of data.


Adjustment history for the image above

That seems like a lot of work until you realize it took about a minute or so to do, aided by the nice large 21.6″ Samsung LCD screen attached to my MacBook. Exotic? Hardly. Available today for under $200 from many makers. Viewsonic now lists a 22″ screen for as low as $160 – a perfect accessory for the MacBook’s small screen whose gloss finish does little to help photographers. The aftermarket screens come with matt surfaces, as they should. Another example where Apple’s marketing focus does little to serve users. Unless you are in a pretty dark room, the glossy screen is a real pain to use, but Apple no longer markets a matt screen version.

The Vibrance and Clarity sliders are especially useful in giving your image ‘pop’, but I find it’s easy to overdo things. A little goes a long way. Unlike the 50mm Canon f/1.4 optic, the 24-105mm L zoom used here displays no color fringing. Instead you get severe barrel distortion at 24mm, not something that’s visible here.