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

One more step

Photographs

America makes another huge step forward.

So much of the world so desperately wants America to be good and great again, that it bears recalling one of the ugliest times in the nation’s history, best characterized by this Dorothea Lange depression era picture.


Mississippi, June 1937

Some seventy years after Lange snapped this picture, bigotry and racism remain nascent in much of our nation, but we rise above this, moving on joyfully.

The bursting blood vessels, the guns, the bibles, the braying of hounds and the clinking of manacles become ever more distant as America once more has the opportunity of being a beacon of light and progress. The senescent purported ‘hero’ (when Americans say ‘hero’ they usually mean ‘victim’) and his boastful ignoramus of a running mate will now return to the cesspool whence they came, hopefully never to be heard from again. An America whose leaders denigrate education, intelligence and thoughtful reflection is not one I want anything to do with. Judging by yesterday’s polling, I am not alone.

It’s been a long time since January 20, 1980, the last time Americans proudly held their heads high and thought “This is what we stand for. This is the example we will set”. Since that time we have seen an America guilty of unilateral military aggression, the abolition of many rights granted us in the Constitution, and crimes of greed unparalleled in our short history. I, along with many of my fellow Americans, hope that the new administration will once more make America an example, not the pariah it has become.

Those who appreciate Lange’s iconic photograph understand.

Color abstraction

Photographs

The mind’s eye

I can never resist this sort of thing – a tight collection of shapes, reflections, textures and a little color.


Panasonic LX1, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100. 16:9 Widescreen format.

The car’s price tag, visible in the original, states $28,888, so you can guess this was taken in the San Francisco Bay Area with its large Chinese population, the number ‘8’ being a symbol of good luck in that culture.

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.