Playing with Lightoom Beta 4

thebigsky

I'm loving these new options in Beta 4, Fill Light and Recovery. I took this old shot and recovered some of the blown sunset whilst increasing the overal lightness of the shot.

May be a tad artificial for some, but I like it, what do you think?

Charlie

botanist

thebigsky wrote:

I'm loving these new options in Beta 4, Fill Light and Recovery. I took this old shot and recovered some of the blown sunset whilst increasing the overal lightness of the shot.

May be a tad artificial for some, but I like it, what do you think?

Charlie

I like it, but can I see the before so i have a frame a reference to compare it to? : Thanks!

mmroden

yeah, me too-- I'm loving this new beta. the UI feels much more polished, and the new functions (especially the new histogram tools!) feel much, much better to me. I have to see about speed and memory footprint though.

ballentphoto

Is Light Room supposed to be a replacement to PSCS2? or is it something completely different? Basically am I going to kick myself because I just purchased PSCS2

botanist

ballentphoto wrote:

Is Light Room supposed to be a replacement to PSCS2? or is it something completely different? Basically am I going to kick myself because I just purchased PSCS2

No it's not a replacement so much, the edit controls in Lightroom still point to PS in the end. What it is is a tool to speed up the digital-darkroom process for digi-photogs such as ourselves. It's a UI built around the needs of photographers instead of everyone on the planet who does some type of graphic design work.

padu

I've downloaded but haven't explored it yet. I was almost putting LR aside (and laugh.. using picasa) because picasa is sooo much faster that LR.
It seems that LRb4 is a tad faster than b3, but that remains to be seen.

I liked the UI improvements though.

colourbox

ballentphoto wrote:

Is Light Room supposed to be a replacement to PSCS2? or is it something completely different?

It seems to be a way to streamline the process, yet without dumbing down the results. The tone and color correction of multiple images that requires Bridge + Camera Raw + 5 Photoshop dialog boxes can be done in one screen in Lightroom. Take the new Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance controls. Each slider achieves what in Photoshop takes several steps and a bit of layering, blending, and mask painting, yet the results are just as highly tuned. Check the release notes for details.

Also in digital, it is easier/faster to whip 100 photos into shape in Lightroom (or Aperture) than using Photoshop + Bridge + Camera Raw.

But when you need to do pixel-level editing, then you still need Photoshop, because Lightroom and Aperture don't do that.

thebigsky

botanist wrote:

I like it, but can I see the before so i have a frame a reference to compare it to? : Thanks!

I've added the original image to the original post.

Charlie

ballentphoto

colourbox wrote:

It seems to be a way to streamline the process, yet without dumbing down the results. The tone and color correction of multiple images that requires Bridge + Camera Raw + 5 Photoshop dialog boxes can be done in one screen in Lightroom. Take the new Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance controls. Each slider achieves what in Photoshop takes several steps and a bit of layering, blending, and mask painting, yet the results are just as highly tuned. Check the release notes for details.

Also in digital, it is easier/faster to whip 100 photos into shape in Lightroom (or Aperture) than using Photoshop + Bridge + Camera Raw.

But when you need to do pixel-level editing, then you still need Photoshop, because Lightroom and Aperture don't do that.

Hmm interesting... I have been using Capture NX so far for the RAW conversion and flipping the file over to PSCS2 for final tweaks/printing. Guess I'll download it and take a look, just not sure if the output will be better than what I get currently with NX.

thebigsky

It's helped my workflow considerably, in the develop module the settings are essentially in the order I want to do them, white balance, exposure, white and black point, saturation, curves etc.

What I'd really like is a healing brush type tool, just for sensor dirt, then I'd hardly need PS.

I understand it's also a univeral binary now so I'm expecting it to fly when my Mac Pro arrives, it's not too slow now on my Powermac though the CPU fans do get a little over excited.

Charlie

DJ-S1

colourbox wrote:

...Take the new Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance controls. ...

That sounds familiar, at least the term "vibrance". I guess they are integrating Raw Shooter code after all.

waveneyman

Hi Charlie .... a bit OTT for my taste but I agree that the vibrance option does offer interesting possibilities - it does weird things to duotones which i like.

I don't know just where the gui is going, there have been changes with the last two betas and the latest is the worst of the lot imo. The grey text on dark grey is terrible to read unless I have the monitor at it's brightest setting which soon gives me a headache and those scrolly designs are awful - not modern looking at all. The print module is still a muddle and where is the duplicate-file option? It would be nice if they allowed a keyline around pics too.

On a positive note, I think it's a little snappier with a large library and file import with thumbnail generation is loads speedier.

2 steps forward and 1& a half back

mark

colourbox

DJ-S1 wrote:

That sounds familiar, at least the term "vibrance". I guess they are integrating Raw Shooter code after all.

Well, RawShooter guy Michael Jonsson (sp?) was added to the development team and they say he's working with Thomas Knoll (Mr. Adobe Camera Raw)...

BenA2

waveneyman wrote:

...where is the duplicate-file option?

I am really liking Beta 4, sounds like more than you, but this issue frustrates me as well. The good news is Adobe has said they'll be allowing versions in the final release. So, while it remains to be seen whether or not you will be able to outright duplicate a file within the library, you will at least be able to have several versions (sets of develop settings) for each file.

thebigsky

My Mac Pro arrived today, I transferred my existing setup via firewire in about 2 hours (I love Macs.) Then, having set up a RAID I copied my Lightroom library onto it and deleted the original.

The next time I started Lightroom I got a dialogue asking to locate my library, which I did, and hey presto everything works and it's really flying now.

BenA2

BenA2 wrote:

I am really liking Beta 4, sounds like more than you, but this issue frustrates me as well. The good news is Adobe has said they'll be allowing versions in the final release. So, while it remains to be seen whether or not you will be able to outright duplicate a file within the library, you will at least be able to have several versions (sets of develop settings) for each file.

I found an interesting post on Sean McCormack's Lightroom Blog. It's titled "Versions: a taste of" and it describes a way to manipulate the history snapshot feature to make versions of multiple conversions for one image. It's not an ideal implementation of versions. But, I think it works better than manually copying a file and importing the second copy into the library. I'll be giving it a try.

padu

BenA2 wrote:

I found an interesting post on Sean McCormack's Lightroom Blog. It's titled "Versions: a taste of" and it describes a way to manipulate the history snapshot feature to make versions of multiple conversions for one image. It's not an ideal implementation of versions. But, I think it works better than manually copying a file and importing the second copy into the library. I'll be giving it a try.

I really wish LR implements versioning in a way that resembles how aperture does it....