A Quick Intro to Adobe Lightroom

Hello! For those that don’t know me, my name is David Park and I’m a junior in Kairos (was previously in a2f Blue). I’ve been doing photography for about a year now and I’m going to give a quick introduction to Adobe Lightroom (LR).

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. Explain my workflow in post-processing (by which I mean everything between taking the picture and making it available to the public).
2. Give some of my subjective feedback on Adobe Lightroom in light of my experience with iPhoto and Picasa (which are free alternatives programs like Lightroom or Aperture).

My Workflow.

Lightroom is different from photoshop in that it was created to be more of a workflow and organizational tool than anything else.

You can see on the top right the five modules (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web). I usually only use the first two which organizes your photos and edits them (respectively). The above screenshot shows the Library module. The folders you see to the left are exactly how the folders are also set up on your computer, which means when you make changes in Lightroom, the changes will be reflected in Finder or Windows Explorer.

Lightroom makes it pretty easy to import your images. It’s just a matter of plugging in your camera and clicking import.

After importing my images, I make an initial visual scan of all my pictures. The awesome thing about Lightroom is that it allows you to easily flag your pictures either as Pick, Unflagged, or Rejected (using the hotkeys P, U, and X). After going through it once, Command+Delete will delete all the “Rejected” photos, clearing up your hard drive of unwanted pictures. You can already see how Lightroom would help in organizing photos. There are also a bunch of other keywording, tagging, and other labeling options available in Library mode that I don’t use.

The above screenshot shows you what the Develop module looks like. The left sidebar has a bunch of presets that come with Lighroom. You also have the option of creating your own presets. Basically if you click on a preset, it changes the sliders on the right to whatever you chose that preset to be beforehand. The sliders to the right are the brunt of the editing that Lightroom allows you to do. They’re taken from Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for those of you familiar with that plugin.

From this point on, I’ll take you through the editing of this image (I chose a JPEG though I shoot exclusively in RAW. I think a lot of people still use JPEG so I’ll work with the limitations of JPEG. The JPEG vs. RAW discussion is another discussion that’s worth a whole new post).

Here’s the original unedited JPEG. In all pictures, I check composition, white balance, and exposure.

• Composition: The question is… should I rotate or crop this photo? In this photo I chose not to do anything.
• White balance: My first thought is “it’s good enough.” Unless the white balance is really off or unless I’m trying to intentionally make it warm or cold, I sometimes just leave this until after I work on exposure. I may want to make this picture a bit warmer, but for now I’ll leave it as is.
• Exposure: When I took this, the baby was in the shade and the background, which happens to be the ground, was in the sun so this left the baby underexposed. I want to increase the exposure to properly expose the baby.

Since the background on the picture is well exposed, just increasing the exposure will completely blow out the background. So instead, I pushed up the fill light slider which lightens up the darker areas. I also increased the “recovery” slider which takes bright highlights (the background) and makes them darker. This results in a very “washed out” looking image since the contrast (difference between darks and lights) has effectively been reduced. To compensate, I increased the contrast slider also.

Changing the sliders can often cause colors to look unnatural and in this case, I wanted to take away some of the color that came in because of increasing contrast. So I lowered the vibrance slider (this would be equivalent of decreasing saturation on the new iPhoto and checking “avoid saturating skin tones.” In addition, I increased the clarity, which adds more detail and looks the picture look a bit more “gritty” (this is called “definition” in iPhoto).

And with those adjustments here is the final image:

The great thing about Lightroom is that you can take specific edits that you did on an image and save them as a preset. You can also easily do batch editing. For example, if I took pictures of an indoor event and had to consistently underexpose and had incorrect white balance, then I can just edit one picture to correct exposure and white balance and then batch edit the rest, no matter how many there are.

Side note: all the edits I did on this picture, I kept limited to edits you could replicate in free programs such as Picasa and iPhoto. I’ll write another post later on showing you the edits I did using the more powerful tools in Lightroom which is what gave me this picture:

However, I do want to say that I believe the Lightroom basic adjustments work better than either iPhoto or Picasas. That is to say that if you did the same exact adjustments using iPhoto, you wouldn’t get the same result. Of course, the saying “you get what you pay for” does stand even in the case of post-processing. I’m really happy with Lightroom and what I can do with it and I “can’t go back to iPhoto or Picasa” because I’ve grown used to it. However, whatever program you use, it’s about getting used to that program (iPhoto ‘09 is actually VERY powerful for a free program). That is all for now!

Jun 21, 2009 | Categories: Photography | 6 Comments »

Affordable Macro

Nope, not the latest Apple rowboat (har, har), but macro-photography: shooting stuff from a close distance to make it look really big. Often used in nature close-ups of plants and insects, macro photography can be lots of fun, providing a different perspective on subjects, and is a nice addition to one’s quiver of photographic tools.

To give a bit of the tech background: one characteristic of a lens is its ‘minimum focusing distance’ (MFD). Due to design constraints (cost, size, product marketing), a given lens is made in such a way that it cannot focus closer than a certain distance from the lens, i.e. MFD. (However, at the other end, all lenses are able to focus to infinity.) A lens’ macro capability is described in terms of “reproduction ratio,” which is (size of object image on 35mm film) : (actual size of object). . I.e., a 1:1 ratio means that if you are using 35mm film, a 1cm long beetle will have an image that is 1cm long on the physical negative. A 1:2 ratio means the will have an image .5cm long on the negative. The higher the reproduction ratio, the more detail available.

Macro photography for SLRs is a niche market, and macro lenses usually command much higher prices than their non-macro siblings at the same focal length. Canon has a 100/2.8 USM macro lens that retails at $509 from B&H, Nikon has one in a similar focal length (105mm) with VR, that goes nearly $900 – ouch. So, what’s a fellow to do if he wants to try out macro? Luckily for us, there are two affordable alternatives:
1. Buy a ‘macro body.’
- Pretty much all consumer point-and-shoots these days come with a macro setting. This is one of the most remarkable advantages of modern digicams, that one can switch to macro without having to change lenses. The image quality is not quite as good as on a dSLR of course, but with some of Canon’s cheapest Digital Elphs (Amazon.com is a good source) going as low as the $100 range, this is a much cheaper way to play around with macro than the lens options above.
2. Go retro.
- One of the quirks of the Canon EOS system, is that a variety of other lenses can be used on EOS bodies, via use of adapters. One type of lens that can be used in this manner, are Nikon manual focus (MF) lenses. Yup, you can use Nikon lenses on Canon bodies! (the converse is not true, however). While this is a topic that probably deserves its own post, one of the benefits of this is that Nikon had several micro (Nikon’s name for macro) lens offerings: 55/3.5, 55/2.8, 105/2.8, 200/4, to name a few, which now, since these lenses are manual focus only, are much cheaper than their AF counterparts. One such lens is the Micro-Nikkor P 55mm F3.5 here:

This lens cost me $25 on Craigslist, and it was in pristine condition. It can go to 1:2 normally, and 1:1 with use of an extension tube, which it came with. Taken right at around 1:1, this shot of a quarter I took captures what is possible with a macro lens:

Another thing you’ll notice is the hair-thin depth of field. Since you are so close to your subject, the DoF becomes really narrow, thus macro photography generally requires larger apertures to get the entire object in focus. The high degree of magnification also exaggerates camera movement, so most macro applications also predicate use of a tripod.

There’s more to explore about macro, but hopefully this intro discussion and two possible affordable solutions has been useful/interesting! Also, comment back with some neat macro shots you’ve taken.

May 25, 2009 | Categories: Photography | Leave A Comment »