Category Archives: Lightroom

Adobe’s masterpiece for processing and cataloging

Lightroom 5.3

Lightroom, Photographs

Fixes a frustrating bug in OS X Mavericks.

Each major release of an operating system from Apple brings with it renewed fears that the ceaseless dumbing down of the user interface will bring with it new horrors, more disabled third party software and much time wasted on remedies. Indeed, since OS Leopard, 4 releases ago, I cannot think of any ‘enhancements’ in subsequent versions of the OS which have moved the needle on my satisfaction scale – with the possible exception of the addition of the frequently frustrating AppStore in Snow Leopard – and the loss of the excellent Rosetta emulator and additions of such primal idiocies like LaunchPad leave one scratching his head along “What were they thinking of?” lines. After breathing a sigh of relief once the ever more massive upgrade is completed and the anomalies sorted, the best one can say of recent OS X releases after the pain and wasted time required for installation is “Thank goodness nothing is broken”. For Hackintosh aficionados the problem is far greater, as every major OS release – and some minor – has brought with it massive upgrade headaches, one factor which contributed to my migration from that excellent breed to a used Mac Pro.

For most photographers Adobe is the vendor of choice for photo processing apps and their recent track record of upgrades puts even Apple’s shambolic performance to shame. Minor changes since PS CS3 have added little value, and the recent move of CS to a Cloud model means that you have to keep making monthly rent payments for the privilege of using Adobe’s PS until the undertaker comes along, or lose access to your catalog. Sure, CS6 is backward compatible for now, but would you like to bet how long that continues? Then there’s the small matter of Adobe losing a big chunk of its Photoshop code to hackers the other month, along with 10, 30, 100 or 500 million customers’ credit cards, depending which of their press releases you care to believe. Let’s at least hope that the code thieves come out with a better, cheaper product.

That said, Adobe has done an excellent job of keeping Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (which uses the same RAW decoder) current with regard to the many new cameras coming to market, and their latest LR release adds many. If you own LR, which can still mercifully be run locally from your machine with no rent payments due to keep the software active, you can continue to use LR as your catalog/point of entry application for your files, round-tripping to your locally installed CS3/4/5/6 with no rent due to Adobe. Anything later than CS2 runs on Intel Macs without Rosetta.

The only significant bug I have noted in moving to OS Mavericks is that Lightroom lost the very useful feature of showing file counts in the Metadata panel. Now, mercifully, Adobe has fixed what Apple broke by issuing LR 5.3 which restores count data, as shown below:



LR5.2 metadata in Mavericks.


LR5.3 – counts restored.

I find this data very useful for tracking my activity levels. If I find them dropping I tell myself it’s time to get up, grab a camera and get out more.


A break from Xmas shopping. Union Square SF, GX7, 17/1.8 Zuiko MFT.

Lightroom supercharged

Lightroom

More speed, free.

All this talk of speed in the guise of my Mac Pro adventures – click on ‘Mac Pro’ in the menu bar – got me thinking about speeding up LR5 even more. What follows should apply equally to earlier versions. I’m on Lightroom 5.

Lightroom stores data in three files, and all of mine reside on a spinning hard disk drive:


LR files.

These are pretty much self explanatory:

  • .Previews.lrdata is the file with Previews. To maximize LR’s speed, generate 1:1 previews on import of new images. This greatly speeds access to images and you only burn time once to generate these, rather than each time you want a full-sized preview.
  • .lrdata stores development adjustments you have mede to your original files. LR never touches the original files, rather storing a set of metadata in this file telling LR what adjustments were made.
  • Pictures. These are your original RAW/DNG/TIFF/JPG files. You can actually go into this directory and see them in there.

My Previews and data files are 36GB, whereas my Pictures directory is 268GB.

Given that LR only accesses the Pictures directory on generation of exports, slideshows or prints, this means it is using the Previews and data files for most of the Library viewing and Developing that the user demands. So it makes sense to have these files on the fastest access device, and that means an SSD, not a poky HDD.

Accordingly, I moved the following two files to my SSD:


LR files moved from HDD to SSD.

This took 6 minutes. Here is the process taking place:


LR access files being moved to an SSD.

Here are the files on the SSD. after I cleaned their names up:


LR files on the SSD.

Until SSD prices fall further, it’s uneconomical to use an SSD for storage of the original files in the Pictures directory – they remain on the slow HDD.

You can now start LR by double-clicking on the .lrcat file newly moved to the SSD. Next time around you will find that your desktop icon remembers that’s where you want to start LR from, and it will remain the default starting point for loading of the catalog and previews.

The results are well worthwhile if you have an SSD with sufficient space to do this.

On my Mac Pro start up time falls from 7 to 3.5 seconds. First entry to the Develop module falls from 7 to 4 seconds and is instantaneous thereafter. You cannot hit the arrow keys fast enough – the application will easily keep up with you as you page through images in glorious 1:1 preview size. Deletion of unwanted images is instantaneous.

Me? I’m erasing my SSD Bak drive, used as a recovery from various predecessor Hackintosh catastrophes, mostly occurring on OS X upgrades – the bugaboo of many a Hack – and dedicating that SSD to the LR catalog and previews. I will move the backup of SD Boot from SSD Bak to a 120GB partition on one of the HDDs in the Mac Pro, where there is space to spare. Recovery is unlikely to be necessary, and should it be so, the slow HDD bootable partition will be just fine.

Lightroom 5

Lightroom

Worth the money.

All the enhancements I set forth here are in the final release, made yesterday. The upgrade from earlier versions is $79 and easily worth the money, not least for the splendid keystone correction which is built-in.

Conversion of my catalog, some 10,000 mostly RAW files totaling 265GB with another 35GB of full size previews, took around 5 minutes and performance seems identical in all respects to Lightroom 4, meaning excellent. The application opens in 5-7 seconds on my nuclear powered Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX660 GPU), and image-to-image changes are instantaneous. Life-size previews really help here and I recommend you create those when importing files. The penalty in terms of storage space is modest, with 13% additional space used in my case.


Rain in Burlingame, CA. A rare sight.

Photo taken on the iPhone 5, processed in Lightroom 5.

Lightroom 5 Beta

Lightroom

Out now.

Adobe has announced the free availability of Lightroom 5 and as in previous releases the enhancements are substantive. Lightroom 4 brought greatly improved Highight and Shadow sliders and the team at Adobe has been diligent in bringing the latest RAW converters to LR in a timely manner. Most recently, they distinguished themselves with a revised release of converters for the Fuji X series of cameras which use a non-standard arrangement of pixels, resulting in enhanced image quality. Impressive.


Click the image to go to the download page.

Adobe reckons to have the bugs out by the summer and they have to be commended on the way they obviously listen to users. The final release will allow conversion of your existing LR4 or earlier catalog(s) of images. The current Beta version does not permit conversion, so I simply imported a handful of RAW images to see what was of interest.

These were the significant new features which caught my eye:

Automatic verticals and horizontals:

One click in the Lens Corrections panels and keystone distortion (leaning verticals) is (reversibly) removed, automatically. You have a choice of verticals, horizontals or both and it’s instantaneous. Be sure to apply your lens correction profile of choice to render lines straight (meaning you are removing barrel or pincushion distortion) before using this tool.

Visualize spots:

A new control renders the image in high relief to make finding spots easier. Very effective, along with a slider to change the degree of ‘spotiness’:

Simply click on the spot removal tool to invoke, then click the ‘Visualize Spots’ box.

Non-circular healing brush:

You can now elect to define an irregular area for use with the healing brush. The old circular functionality is retained. The size of the irregular area cannot be varied with the mouse’s wheel, whereas the size of a circular spot can be, as before:

Variable aspect ratios:

This allows stretching or squashing of an image with a simple slider. Very useful, and ideal for obese Americans:

I have an image where fixing verticals loses too much content. So I first squeezed it in LR5 using the new aspect ratio slider, then applied the verticals fix and the result was identical to what I achieved in DxO Viewpoint, and in a fraction of the time. Very nice indeed.

No code bloat:

There are many enhancements to other modules like the Book and Slideshow ones (the latter now allows embedding of videos). It seems that LR is on a 2 year upgrade frequency and this new release looks very promising. I’ll let smarter (?) users help Adobe work out the bugs and I expect the upgrade will be the usual $100, which is a bargain.

Pixel peeping fallacies

Lightroom, Nikon bodies, Technique

Know what you are looking at.

When I migrated from the 12mp Nikon D700 to the 24mp D3x, I did a bunch of thinking about the justification for more pixels.

If you do not propose increasing your print size or cropping more severely, more pixels will likely not serve you well. I contemplate making both larger prints and cropping more when needed. Thus, the higher pixel count sensor makes sense for my contemplated needs.

When I first uploaded D3x images from the D3x to Lightroom, I naturally previewed images at 1:1 and remember thinking “What’s the big deal? This does not look any better than the files from my D700 at 1:1.”

The problem, of course, is that I was not comparing like with like.

Here’s a simple table to illustrate the issue.

I have compiled data for four common Nikon sensors – the math is brand-independent, it’s just that I know these bodies and have RAW images from all. I enlarged these original images using the 1:1 preview function in LR4 and measured the image width on my 21″ Dell 2209WA (1650 x 1080) display. So in the table above, using the D2x as an example, the 12.2MP sensor delivers an image which, if printed 1:1, would be 47″ wide.

What does Adobe’s Lightroom mean by 1:1? It means that images displayed 1:1 are displayed at 90 pixels/inch – you can confirm this by dividing the ‘Sensor – W’, the pixel count across the width of the sensor, by the ‘Width at 1:1 in inches’ and in each case you will get 90 dots per inch. That’s good for an LCD display or for prints looked at from a reasonable distance. If you want to stick your nose in the print, then you want to limit the pixel density to 240 pixels/inch, which is the same as dividing the above ‘Width at 1:1 in inches’ data by 2.7. So a 240 pixels/inch print from the D800’s sensor, for example, would be 31″ wide (83/2.7). But in practice, you do not need that high a density in huge prints.

As you can see, comparing a D700 image with, say, a D800 image, is not fair if identical 1:1 preview ratios are used. You are comparing a 46″ wide image with one almost twice as large at 83″. To make the sensor comparison fair, you need to preview the D800 image not at 1:1 but at 1:2. That will yield approximately the same reproduced image size, making for an objective comparison of resolution and noise if the same lens and technique are used for both.


Preview options in Lightroom.

Yet, I suspect, many snappers fall afoul of these erroneous 1:1 comparisons concluding:

  • I need better lenses with the newer body
  • My images are blurred, I need to use faster shutter speeds
  • My focus is out, there’s something wrong with the camera

All of the above lead to much time and money wasted in fixing the unfixable. Bad data.

It is indeed quite likely that your new sensor out-resolves the limits of your older lenses at 1:1. It’s also reasonable to expect motion blur to be more visible at the same shutter speeds if you use faulty comparisons. And the chances are it’s your technique not your hardware which accounts for poor focusing, the errors only becoming visible at double your former preview magnifications. But, unless you contemplate making crops to one quarter of the area of your previous sensors or making prints 7 feet wide instead of 4 feet wide, your sensor upgrade is only causing you needless pain.

My first conclusion with the D3x compared to its D700 predecessor was all of the above, until I figured out what I was looking at. Some comparisons are easily drawn. It’s clear for example, that the D700 has lower noise than the D2x for the same image size, hardly surprising as we are comparing a recent FF sensor with an older APS-C (D2x) one. The total pixels and 1:1 print sizes are almost identical. On the other hand, comparing the D700 at 1:1 with the D800 at 1:2, for like print sizes, shows little difference. It’s only when you double preview sizes with the D700 to 2:1 and the D800 to 1:1 that you see the greatly superior resolving power of the D800, as the number of pixels you are looking at in such a comparison is tripled in the case of the newer sensor.

Nikon has not helped the situation. After their affordable high pixel count FF bodies – the D600 and D800 – came to market, they started publishing pieces intimating that only their very costliest and newest lenses were ‘good enough’ to extract the best from the new sensors. The rest of the sheep writing purportedly critical analysis followed right along. It’s called sales and makes little sense. Some of Nikon’s highest resolving power lenses were made ages ago, long before digital sensors existed – any Micro-Nikkor macro lens pretty much qualifies (55, 105 and 200mm) – as do a host of pre-Ai lenses, many over four decades old. If you like the latest and greatest (and costliest) have at it. But don’t believe everything you read from such conflicted sources. Their primary focus is not on your image making capabilities but on your wallet, be it through sales (Nikon) or click-throughs (the whores who parrot this stuff as if it was technically proved fact).

So before you chuck out your old lenses and start buying costly superspeed exotics which allow the use of faster shutter speeds, while contemplating return of the body to Nikon for repair of focusing errors, ask yourself what you are really looking at when you preview those enlarged images on your display.

Practical implications: It’s not like you can avoid buying new gear with lots of megapixels by trying to save money on something with fewer. Everything has lots of pixels today. 12MP is hard to find at the lower limit. But the practical implication of this rapid technological advance is that, for those on a budget, substantial savings can result from buying the previous generation of hardware, comfortable in the knowledge that while 8-12MP may not be a lot, it’s more than enough for 99% of needs. DSLR bodies like the Canon 5D, Canon 5D MkII, Nikon D700, Nikon D2x, Nikon D3 and others no less capable from Pentax and Sony offer tremendous savings just because they have been replaced with something that measures better in a comparison table. Heck, a lightly used 6mp Nikon D1x can be had for under $250 and will offer tremendous capability, outfitted with a $50 mint MF Nikkor, far in excess of the abilities of most. The barrier to entry to good hardware has never been lower. 16″ x 20″ prints? No problem. Why do I say that? The D1x’s sensor is 3,008 pixels wide, so for a 90 pixel/inch print (what Lightroom shows at 1:1 preview) you would get a print sized 33″ x 22″. Unless you stick your nose in it, it will show just fine.


Nikon D1x. Add Nikkor of choice.