Access Digital Photography

There are so many significant new features in Lightroom 3 that I’ll say it right out: If you have to make a living from your pictures or if it’s a serious hobby, you’d be stupid not to spend the $99 it takes to upgrade. Why? Because it adds that much more efficiency to the process of keeping track of, processing, and distributing your images. You’re in a field in which time is money…especially when it comes to the quality of your work.

First, a disclaimer: Though I’ve tested all of these improvements, I haven’t had the experience I’ve had with older versions. This blog is about a “first look” and my personal opinions as to what they seem to me to be. I really want you to comment if you disagree because we’ll both learn from the “interchange.” In fact, I always want you opinion on anything you read in this blog.

In the “What’s New” document that’s sent to the press, Adobe mentions thirteen significant new features. Here they are, only I’ve re-arranged them in the order that I’ve found them to be most important to me:

Perspective Correction Accelerated from Shoot to Finish.
Lens Correction
Lower Noise and Better Sharpening.
Exportable Video Slideshows with Music
Smarter Imports
Multi-image Print Layouts.
Natural Appearance Vignetting
Next-generation Image Processing

I haven’t had the time to cover these new features yet, so look for a new post in the “near future.”
Drag and Drop Online Publish Services
Easily Import and Organize Video Files
Create and Control Natural Grain
Convenient Tethered Capture
Flexible Watermarks

Lens and Perspective Correction: I don’t have special calibrations to include for the lenses I have, but I’m pleasantly surprised by how well Lightroom 3 turns corrects barrel distortion and fringing. The image below shows, from left to right, the original photo with the perspective distortion that occurs when the camera is not in parallel with the center of the subject, the Lightroom result of simply going to the Lens Correction Panel in the Develop module, clicking Manual, and interactively dragging sliders until you like what you see. Often, that “tilts” a part of the picture so that there is space in the frame. You can then scale the image up to crop that space out or…as shown here…you can right click on the image and choose to Edit in…Photoshop CS5. Then just make a Quick Selection of the empty space, expand the selection and feather it a bit to make sure there’s no gap, and choose Edit > Fill and tell it to use Content Aware in the resulting dialog. What you see on the right is the result: Magic.

Better processing: It will leave the old ones just as you were used to them, but if you choose Develop > Process > Settings, you’ll see the year of the original process is checked and you can check 2010 and immediately see the difference. If you don’t like it, just press Cmnd/Ctrl + Z and you’re instantly back to the original. I can’t show you the difference here on the Web…it’s too subtle for 72dpi sRGB repro. Take my word for it: you get a bit more dynamic range and image sharpness. So from now on, if I’m going to re-submit or re-interpret an image, I’ll probably re-set the processing to 2010, just to be technically “more acceptable” to a prospective agency or client.

Smarter Imports: This one has taken me some getting used to. I’m so used to the “old way” that I found the new Import interface more confusing when downloading my camera cards. One thing I do like, though, is that it defaults to converting your RAW files to DNG…something I’ve often forgotten to do. LR2 allowed you to do that, but it wasn’t the obvious default. It should be done because this format is open and will outlive all the specific camera and model formats.

The reason I find it more confusing is the very thing that Adobe thinks makes it more useful: There’s no longer a dialog, but an Import Mode that occurs when you click the Import button or insert a memory card, camera, or DVD containing photos. Here’s the screen shot:

What I really do like is the way the photos you’re about to import are shown. You can also choose the destination in your library by clicking an existing folder in the library or by choosing the desitnation from a menu at the right that lets you create a new folder in your Library…just as before. It’s great, but it does take a little “getting used to.

More Exportable Video Slideshows with Music: Rather than having to settle for a PDF slideshow that may not be “includable” as a PDF when you’re making a presentation or emailing the slideshow to someone who doesn’t have Adobe Reader installed, you can now choose to export it as a movie and you can now designate any compatible music file that’s on your computer as background music. Makes it easy to put slideshows on my iPad or into a mass mailing. These slideshows are compatible with both Adobe and Windows Media Players and with QuickTime. Unfortunately, this version of WordPress wouldn’t let me upload an MP4 file here, regardless of whether I chose the Browser or Flash uploaders. But LR doesn’t make a Flash slideshow, which is good news for movies you might want to have seen on an iPad or iPhone.

Lower Noise and Better Sharpening: I really like shooting at night, but at times all I get are images in which I need to bring up the mid-tones because bright lights can “fool” the camera’s meter. I put up with it because otherwise, I simply wouldn’t have the picture. I was astonished, though at how well LR3 brought out the mid-tones in this shot. Sure enough, there was a fair amount of noise (this was only an 8MP image at ISO 200 with an Oly SP 350…not exactly “state of the art”). I usually fix it with Topaz DeNoise because Topaz Adjust has made me such a fan of Topaz filters. So imagine my amazement when all I had to do to eliminate it completely in Lightroom 3 was drag the Noise slider about 1/3d of the way to the right. Not a smidge of noise and the original had been quite dark, which really made the image unacceptably “grainy”. What really surprised me even more was that the edges were still relatively sharp, especially considering the shot was hand-held at 1/20th second. My goodness! It actually looked like the lens had been image stabilized…which it wasn’t (can’t wait to get my hands on a Canon S 90, though). Here’s a portion of the shot at 100% enlargement. You be the judge.

Multi-image Print Layouts: The lovely thing here, for me, is being able to print file numbers, captions, or titles under the images and then print them to a file that I can then open in Photoshop and size and crop for my iPad. Makes it much easier to let a client or prospective print buyer choose a particular image when they’re looking at their proofs on the iPad…or anything else, for that matter. Unfortunately, you can only choose to have one textfield printed underneath, because it would be great if you could have the file name, title, and caption. But if I settle for the title, I’ll be able to use lightroom to find each image the client chooses by searching for its title, so it’s nearly as good. I also rank all the “keepers” with three or more stars, so there’s no confusing which one of the files with that title is actually the chosen one, even if there are virtual copies with different interpretations. The caption you see on the image below was added in the Print Module:

In Photoshop, you could then put frames around them if you wanted or, if you wanted to get fancy, just re-type the names in another font of another color…even put them right on top of the images. Then just select and copy them into another file and save them in the catalog folder that you’re going to sync with your iPad.

PS: There may be another way to do this kind of thing that I’m going to cover in another blog if I can ever get Office for Mac installed (nearly impossible if you’ve ever run a trial version of the software): That is, just exporting the “winner” images to a separate catalog and putting them into PowerPoint. You could then add titles and commentary by hand and export the whole slide show as individual photos. I’ll try that once I get the program installed. Because I tried their trial version first, I couldn’t install the licensed version. I’m sure there’s a solution somewhere. I’ll try to keep you posted. Meantime, if you know or you’ve tried it, please let me know how you solved the problem.

Natural Image Vignetting:

When you go to the Effects Panel you find a few more sliders that let you make the vignette more square or round, feather it to the extent you like, and change the location of the midpoint. In the image below, the composition was really improved by having the vignette make us focus on the flower when I couldn’t show what I wanted to include in the picture and still pay strict attention to the “rule of thirds.

Next Generation Image Processing: The program defaults to keeping the images as they were originally processed, but the newer version seems to add a bit more punch and sharpness. If you like, you can preview the difference and update it. It’s a subtle change, though, that you couldn’t very well see here on the web.

I haven’t yet done much with the remaining features, so I’ll save them for later. This blog’s getting more than a little long anyway.

What’s Missing: I’d really like to see some pre-sets for tone-mapping (single-image HDR processing) so that you could apply and compare several different settings to several virtual images non-destructively in Lightroom. You could then give yourself and your clients some powerful interpretative options when it comes to lighting, color interpretation and color values that, so far, can only be accomplished in a highly destructive way in Photoshop. To be fair, though, I have to say that I have no idea what it would take to do this as a practical matter. But BOY!, wouldn’t it be cool? Maybe a plug-in for Topaz Adjust would do the job?
Please Make Comments on this and any other blog you read or see on AccessDigitalPhotography or any of my other sites. If you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. If you know something I don’t, please let me and our readers know about that, too. It’s all about me making this site as useful to you as possible.

Please Make Comments on this and any other blog you read or see on AccessDigitalPhotography or any of my other sites. If you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. If you know something I don’t, please let me and our readers know about that, too. It’s all about me making this site as useful to you as possible.

Thanks for being here and have a great day. You’re always welcome back.

Ken Milburn, photographer/author

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under Digital Photography News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.