Just downloaded Lighroom for a free trial
Dogdots
Registered Users Posts: 8,795 Major grins
Hello Anyone or Everyone,
I just downloaded the trial for Lightroom. Does anyone have any pointers or quick ways into how this program works.
And I'd like to know why this would be good if I have CS3.
I did to a photo really quick on there and WOW it is quick. But.....if you take the same picture and do one in CS3 and the other in Lightroom can you tell the difference in the end?
Any and all imput would be helpful.
----Mary
I just downloaded the trial for Lightroom. Does anyone have any pointers or quick ways into how this program works.
And I'd like to know why this would be good if I have CS3.
I did to a photo really quick on there and WOW it is quick. But.....if you take the same picture and do one in CS3 and the other in Lightroom can you tell the difference in the end?
Any and all imput would be helpful.
----Mary
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Comments
All those bells and whistles on these apps all boil down to mathmatical equations.
So if you punch the same numbers in on each program, you will get the same output.
Some color geeks here will say this isn't so since Lr uses a pseudo prophoto colorspace then converts blah blah..
For your intents and purposes though. The answer is, NO. The results will not look any different if you process it through Lr vs. ACR, Ps. or any other Adobe App.
Go to the video link here (I'd start on chap. 2) to get your feet wet w/ the application. Make sure to have the video and lightroom open at the same time.
After that, post some questions in this thread. This can be your one stop shop for Lr knowledge. Dgrinners will be happy to help you out w/ any questions you have.
I feel LR adds a bit too much noise and it always look more crappy. That is my 2 cents.
WildViper
From Nikon D70s > Nikon D300s & D700
Nikon 50/1.8, Tamron 28-75/2.8 1st gen, Nikkor 12-24/4, Nikkor 70-200/2.8 ED VR, SB600, SB900, SB-26 and Gitzo 2 Series Carbon Fiber with Kirk Ballhead
Technically, raw converters never add noise, but some remove it better than others. If noise is appearing, it usually means the applied corrections were boosting the existing noise up out of the shadows.
As for getting to know LR, I bought the $15 luminous-landscape.com tutorial video set as a download, which is really helpful and they have good tips for shortcuts, philosophy etc. Highly recommended. I believe there's a free video tutorial over at rawworkflow.com.
If you press command + / (forward slash) you get a panel showing the keyboard shortcuts for the module you are in. Very handy.
For me, the most important and most used shortcuts are:
D — gets to to the Develop module
G — gets you to the grid
E — shows you the Loupe Mode, which is another way of seeing one photo at a time
C — compares two selected photos
N — compares as many photos as you have selected.
R —opens the photo, ready to crop or straighten.
Study THIS MENU:
Ahh, i should add that your life will be better if you know about Tab, Shift-Tab and the F key. Shift Tab gets the panels out of the way. You can individually click their arrows on the sides to show or hide them. Pressing F goes into two versions of Full Screen mode.
Hey Mary,
I'd print up Pindy's post, download the video if you like. Adn jsutplay in lightroom.
Trying to take more than this in gives the chance for you to get confused. Just play with it, jam the sliders all around.
I'll add three things that have really helped me then let you have at it:
NOTE: I recommend playing a bit on your own then reading these tips..)
To make your workspace less cluttered. ALT click on a menu bar. You will see your triangle next to your word turns into a bunch of dots instead of a solid colored triangle. What this does is make your menus pop up one at a time. So if I have HSL/COLOR/GRAYSCALE open and then you click on Basic, it will close the other menu and onlyleave the basic menu open. Like it the other way? Just ALT click again and it resets the settings back to default.
Develop Module>Basic
slide around the histogram (the colored jagged thing at the top of the screen) and slide around your exposure, recovery, fill light & blacks. You'll see that they do the same thing. If your old school you'll use the sliders, new school will probably use the histogram.
NOTE: You really need to understand what these 4 settings do. These are the foundation of the image. If these settings are off, the rest of your image is already doomed. Like building a mansion on a beach w/ no foundation...
Develop Module>HSL/COLOR/GRAYSCALE
click on the little round circle w/ the arrow on the top and bottom of it (this is in the top left corner of this box). Then bring the mouse over the picture. Click down on the color you want to change, then just push the mouse up and down. It finds all the colors like the one you clicked on and changes them all for you!
Photoshop came WAY before lightroom. In fact when you go to look up things for lightroom. You'll find that the Lr is actually called photshop lightroom.
It's most likely sharpening artifacts & most converters apply some baseline sharpening whether you like it or not. That can appear to be "adding noise."
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
In the nicest possible way. Can we keep the thread in a non rocket science world? I know your not going into algorythyms and high end stuff. Mary is just starting out and has tons of time to learn from you all.
Regards,
-Jon
I should also point out that simply using the tools to set white and black points is really nice and quick and helps to get you going in LR. Hold down option/alt and drag the Exposure slider or the Blacks slider. It's the same thing as in photoshop when you use the Threshold command to find where your highlight and shadow clipping points are. You'll see blobs on screen when you are clipping or blocking the extremes. Season to taste!
- Sorting and Keywording - Its great.
- Maintaining a huge database of your pictures - not so great..very very slow.
- Mucking about changing exposures and stuff - You see for yourself.
I myself only use it for keywording and sorting stuff. After that, everything happens in PS CS2. The reason is that I had 2-3 clients tell me that my pictures weren't as sharp as before. I dug deep and found that I had started using LR to do my curve adjustments and exposure settings.
When I switched back to CS2, the client complaints stopped. So, technically they maybe similar, but none of that matters to me. If my clients complain, I have a problem to fix. In my case, it was LR.
WildViper
From Nikon D70s > Nikon D300s & D700
Nikon 50/1.8, Tamron 28-75/2.8 1st gen, Nikkor 12-24/4, Nikkor 70-200/2.8 ED VR, SB600, SB900, SB-26 and Gitzo 2 Series Carbon Fiber with Kirk Ballhead
After going thru the link I will have a lot of questions I'm sure. So hopefully those reading this will be ready
I'm sure every program has its faults. And wondering if the pictures would turn out the same is important to me. As I'm sure anyone else. I didn't notice that when you use the slider to move the histogram in LR does the #'s for what it changed show up anywhere? Just thinking that if it did -- then I could go into CS3 and see what to change and try it on the same photo. LR is quick--gotta say that for it.
Questions coming---hope not to bore anyone or seem like I'm using up valuable time.
---Mary
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
This is going to sound crazy, but in the few minutes I have had to play with it I found the Histogram is awesome. Has that posed any problems for you? Say you use the Histogram slider then move the photo into CS3 and finish it off. I can't see buying this program for just the slider with the histogram. Good marketing tool...put it in LR and not CS programs. That way we have to buy both if we want it......kinda ticks me off.
I also like the key wording which I haven't even used yet. But I see the benefits of it. Everything seems so simple in LR. Also the metadata seems easier to use. Then again I haven't gotten that down in CS3. So I really can't compare it.
And the customer is always right and they will notice the difference sometimes before we will. I had over 100 prints printed out at this one place. And I wasn't happy with the color. It was off. They said I would pick it up, but nobody else would or had. They ran them over for me. Ex. of a customer is right
----Mary
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
Something that hasn't really been discussed here is that Lightroom is one part of the workflow equation - it is not designed to be the stand-alone, end all photo editor. For the weekend photographer that shoots 30 or 40 photos and then wants to clean them up, Camera Raw/Photoshop CS2/3 will be all they need. Lightroom really shines if you have a ton of photos to process quickly. A good example is event photography such as a dog show. I may shoot 800 - 1000 photos. Lightroom enables me to quickly catalog them, sort them, reject the losers, and then perform the initial processing (color, tone, contrast, and prelim sharpening). I can make adjustments to a single photo and then copy the adjustments to the entire catalog. This alone saves uncountless hours (seeing that I only have the evening before the next day of the show). As a final step, I can print contact sheets of proofs or generate photo slide shows directly from Lightroom.
If a client orders photos (or in non-client situations I want to print for myself), I export the photos as psd's and perform the fine-tuning adjustments in CS3. This includes sharpening for the desired output size/medium and any noise reduction that may be needed.
Do you need a fullscale workflow solution? Only you can answer that based on the number of images that you shoot per session. Camera Raw now has several of the benefits asociated with Lightroom. I personally wouldn't want to manage without it. Are there better solutions for cataloging and preprocessing? Aperature and Extensis Portfolio are better in some areas but Lightroom seems to provide everything that I need for my workflow.
Just a couple of cents from a broke man......:D
My Images | My Lessons Learned and Other Adventures
One major thing Lightroom lacks today is output sharpening. Currently I have a number of Lightroom export settings which output a scaled .psd and launch a Photoshop droplet which drops a sharpening layer (as well as a watermark layer) over the PSD. I then tweak the opacity of the sharpening layer to suit the image and run an action which flattens the image converts it to 8 bit sRGB and saves it as a JPEG. Since the whole sharpening process is so quick, I dump that intermediate .psd file into a temp directory and blow it away when I am done. I find it is less work to regenerate those .psds than it is to catalog them. I hope that some future version of Lightroom will support output sharpening, but for the time being I find processing in Lightroom and sharpening in Photoshop is still faster than an all Photoshop workflow.
Output sharpening is a subtlety that may or may not matter to you. If you want to display the absolute best quality images online, it matters. It is also important if you are making gallery prints at home. However, if you are uploading images to Smugmug for print, it is irrelevant because EZPrints is going to rescale and resharpen your images anyhow.
As for slowness with big databases, I have about 9,000 frames in Lightroom and I haven't noticed it bogging down yet. The one thing I have noticed during the beta is that Lightroom starts getting a bit slow if you put too many files in a single directory. I have gotten in the habit now of not allowing more than about 500 frames in a single folder. It is possible that since the release Adobe has fixed that issue; with my current workflow I wouldn't notice.
I understand where your coming from Ken but I don't believe that Lightroom could build in output sharpening that would fully satisfy everyone. There are just too many variations (2-pass LAB, 3-pass Unsharp, Red Channel sharpen, High Pass, etc.) I think final output sharpening would have to reside in CS. It would be interesting if you were able to call CS functions from Lightroom and save them as part of the non-destructive file so that you wouldn't have to export and then reimport.
My Images | My Lessons Learned and Other Adventures
I am purely a hobbyist and yet I still find the workflow to be very helpful. On average I shoot about 150 frames a week. After deleting the junk I still end up adding over 5000 frames a year to my catalog. One of the things we do is produce both a family calender and a neighborhood memory book each year. I am in the process of prepping for those projects now and Lightroom makes the process of selecting photos for each project much easier.
Exactly.
Here is another trick I play. When I need to do significant Photoshop work (major cloning, burnning, dodging or local color correction), I render the entire RAW to a .psd for processing in Photoshop (I always use 16 bit Prophoto RGB for this) and the Photoshop file automatically gets layered over the orginal RAW in my database. Once I am done in Photoshop, I return to Lightroom to straighten and crop the photo. Since I always have the full image on disc, I can always go back and recrop. Over time I often end up with saved Lightroom settings for several different crops. Each time I add a crop to an image, I tag the image with a keyword for that crop which lets me quickly find an image to fill a hole in a layout.
Excellent suggestion!
My Images | My Lessons Learned and Other Adventures
The 4 sections so the Histogram move the Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light and Blacks sliders. A bit like when you move the tone curve.
Something to bear in mind with the settings is that the numbers between ACR and LR will be the same because they are both RAW processors based on ACR's engine. PS CS3 is NOT a RAW processor and that's why they include ACR as a plug-in front-end to PS. So it's a not apple/apples to compare ACR/LR's controls with Photoshop's, given that LR's controls (all of them) are metadata and do not alter the original image file, whereas PS is destructive and is truly an image editor. I doubt the overlapping controls in "Photoshop Proper" are identical to ACR/LR. You wouldn't need ACR for anything other than converting the RAW if that were true.
Whether it is better for your workflow to ignore the RAW conversion/processing stage and simply use PS for all you exposure/tonal/color balancing needs is not mine to say. I would rather take as much advantage of the RAW processing as possible and use PS to do things your RAW processor cannot, like local editing, layers, etc. I don't find LR lacking in image quality.
I have certainly found that front loading as much processing as I can into the RAW conversion stage has improved my end results. Using Lightroom instead of ACR (along with some prodding from Andrew Rodney) has really encouraged that workflow. These days I find that for the majority of my images that, while I could get a better result in Photoshop, what I get from Lightroom is good enough.
That's a great tip because it works with both Lightroom and ACR. However, I'm lazy, so I prefer to press the J key shortcut in Lightroom so that both the highlight+shadow clipping colors stay on or off together until you press J again. It's less tiring than keeping option/alt pressed. (On the menu, the command for this is View > Show Clipping.)
1. I understand that LR is non-distructive. I take that to be true for jpegs as well. You can edit the heck out of a jpeg and it stays the same as the time it was shot. Right?
2. Work flow is so much easier.
3. Editing all like photos is super easy.
4. I haven't even gotten into how to set up files and keywording the files. I"m still trying to figure out how to get all my photos onto there
5. Gotta ask....you do some editing in LR and transfer it over to CS3 to do some more---does it do damage in the transfer? Also if you want to transfer it back to LR to file it or do something else....does it damage the photo in the transfer back?
----Mary
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
Another way of doing things in LR that I was ignorant of. Cool!
1. True. Nothing's baked into the file. When you export, you get a baked file as your output.
2. Some people like Bridge/ACR/PS. I don't, but it works for many. I came from Aperture, so it's a similar layout.
3. This is a major benefit.
4. Again, you can take your pick of 3-4 different methods. One will likely become a methodology you like.
5. when you "round trip" to PS, make sure you set the export prefs to a similar working space, like ProPhoto RGB and 16-bits, which is what LR works in (I won't go into the linear gamma thing—thanks Andrew R). This simply writes your LR settings to non-compressed PSD file (or not—you can tell it to send a copy with no LR settings). When you hit SAVE in PS, it automatically saves the PSD back to you LR library, again, uncompressed. Theoretically, you could round-trip between PS thousands of times in this scenario without degradation from the transfer process at least.
I have heard generally good things about this book. This book is on my list of things to buy (mostly for the workflow stuff—I have a lot of the develop down for my purposes anyway).
Yes, I've never read a Kelby book, but this seems to be the consensus, if Amazon review writers are to be believed.
Hi,
Nope....nobody mentioned this book. I will have to take a look at it.
Sorry to hear a Kansas rain destoryed your book. I've been thru a few of those storms down there
scary.
Mary
www.Dogdotsphotography.com
I got Rob Sheppard's book, Photoshop Lightroom for Digital Photographers Only from the public library. I own Kelby's book. Maybe i'm a dumass, but Kelby's humor still hasn't completely bored me yet, and I have three of his books. So far, the jokes are mostly new from book to book.:D
Anyway, I find Kelby's book more helpful.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Hi,
I like Kelbys humor. And I need all the humor I can get learning this stuff
---Mary
www.Dogdotsphotography.com