Category Archives: Lightroom

by Tom Dills

Another Example

Image processed in Lightroom from a single “-2 EV” RAW file

On my previous post, Monte asked about how the HDR version of that image came out, and as it turned out I didn’t do an HDR series on that particular photo so I didn’t have anything to compare.  Just for kicks though, I went back and found an image where I did do a bracketed series including an in-camera HDR file.

HDR Image from 3 bracketed frames, blended in Photoshop and finished in Lightroom

Most of my readers know that I really dislike futzing around in Photoshop, so I probably didn’t do the HDR version justice.  But while there are things I like about it, I’m really a fan of the contrast you get from a single file.  While the HDR version perhaps shows more “detail” I’d rather see the contrast.  Of course I’m a fan of rich, dark tones in my photos and HDR kind of defeats the purpose for me.

In-camera HDR from the same 3 frames used for the Photoshop version. Unprocessed, it’s a little dark for my taste.

I’ve made these files a little larger for those who want to pixel peep.  But please don’t criticize my Photoshop skills.  Because, especially for things like HDR, I’m really out of practice.

I hope everyone has a great Sunday!

by Tom Dills

“Let’s See What She’ll Do”

Kidd’s Mill Covered Bridge, Reynolds, PA

Walking around the inside this covered bridge last weekend, I knew that it was the perfect subject for some HDR.  I’m not a particular fan of HDR as a rule, but knew that this would be a good place to give it a try.  I took a series of bracketed shots using the in-camera HDR feature in my camera.  But when I got to playing with it in Lightroom, I decided to see what it looked like without actually blending the frames.  As it turns out I think that I actually like it this way.  I’ve had to make some pretty extreme exposure adjustments and it’s as noisy as my neighbor’s dog, but I think I’ve got the final result that I envisioned when I took the photo.  And ultimately, if I get the result I’m looking for it really doesn’t much matter how I get there, does it?

Here’s a “before” shot just to see where I started:

Kidd’s Mill Covered Bridge, Reynolds, PA

by Tom Dills

Anatomy of a Photograph – “Early Snow and Fall Color, Smokies”

Final Processed File using Lightroom 3 and Process Version 2010. Canon 5D with Canon 100-400 at 200mm 1/13 sec @ f22 ISO 200

A number of my non-photographer friends have asked me on numerous occasions why their photographs don’t look like my photographs.  And of course the sentiment I hear most often is that “I must have a really great camera.”  And I tell them, “of course I do, but I could make the photographs I make with just about any camera.  It all has to do with how I take the photograph, and knowing what to do with it after I take it.”

Many people incorrectly attribute this answer to mean that I am “Photoshopping” my photos, but when they do, their impression is that that means something sinister or unethical.  I try to explain that a lot of what I do is no different than what might have been done with film in a darkroom.  I just don’t have to do it with chemicals, I do it with a computer.

This article is written primarily for me to be able to point my friends to something that explains, better than I could possibly do in the lunchroom at work or at dinner in a nice restaurant, what I mean when I say that I “develop” or “process” my photos in Lightroom.  And hopefully some of my photographer friends will find this interesting and perhaps even informative.

This photograph was taken in October 2011 on one of those rare times when the fall color was just about at peak, and an early morning snowstorm came through with just about perfect timing.  An hour before this photo was taken I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at Clingman’s Dome, being buffeted by gale force winds when a snow plow driver stopped to tell me that I had better get started down because he was planning to lock the gate.  I wisely retreated to a lower elevation and found this scene.

The scene in front of me was overall pretty dark and lacking in contrast, because even though the sun was lighting up the clouds the light was pretty diffused and the sun was not shining through all that brightly.  I knew from experience that my camera would try to overexpose to bring the values closer to an average exposure.  But I also knew that the snow and clouds were on the brighter end of the scale and would cause my camera to want to under underexpose the snow and clouds.  I figured (correctly) that the two would just about balance each other out and made no adjustments to what the meter was reading.  I confirmed the exposure with the histogram after the shot.

At the time I was pretty certain that I had captured some good photographs of a pretty amazing scene, but I also knew that a great deal of post-processing would be required to obtain a final image that looked like what I “saw” while I was standing at that overlook.  When I got home and imported the files into the computer, the first thing I saw was this flat looking gray mess that some people might be tempted to toss.  But I had a plan and went to work.

Unprocessed RAW file as imported to Lightroom

The first thing I did was to adjust the white balance to warm the scene up a little.  My camera does a very good job with finding the “right” white balance, but I knew I was going to need to add some warmth to get the look I was after.  About 500 points was plenty to get what I wanted.  Next, I knew I needed to add a lot of contrast, since the snow and clouds made for a very low-contrast scene.  I ended up adding a lot of black – about 70 points (this is Process Version 2010 in Lightroom – the new adjustment tools had not been invented yet!).  Some adjustments to the mid-tones and highlights and I was starting to get somewhere!

After some basic adjustments to white balance, tone and contrast.

My next step was to add some additional color contrast by using Split-toning to cool the shadows while keeping warmth in the highlights.  This is pretty subtle but gives the scene a bit more vibrance.

After extensive use of the Adjustment Brush for localized dodging & burning, contrast and saturation

After a bunch of time spent cloning dust spots – the photo was shot at f22 – I was ready to move on to some fine tuning.  I made extensive use of the Adjustment Brush to selectively darken and lighten specific areas of the photo, added some contrast and saturation to areas that needed it, and generally “shaped” the image to direct the viewer’s eye through the scene.  A little vignetting to keep the viewer inside the frame, some tweaks to the capture sharpening and noise reduction and it’s done.  Or done for now, as I haven’t yet tried to make a print of this photo.  Doing that will undoubtedly require another round or two of adjustments once I see what it looks like on paper.  I’d also like to experiment with this image using Process Version 2012 in Lightroom 4, but when I click the button to convert it the photo turns to crap again.  So we’ll have to save that and printing for a future episode!

After some additional fine tuning and sharpening, and adding a subtle vignette.

After some additional fine tuning and sharpening, and adding a subtle vignette.

by Tom Dills

August 2012 Wallpaper

Moon Over Price Lake at Sunrise, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC

Well, how did that happen?  We just finished June and already July is over!  Of course that means we are edging toward Fall, and an end to Summer’s heat is just around the corner.

Price Lake is a hit-or-miss spot for me photographically.  A decent photograph here generally depends on getting something interesting to reflect in the water.  Sometimes it is fall color, sometimes you can catch some good clouds at sunrise or sunset.  Such was this case on an August morning back in 2005.  One morning prior to attending the annual Camera Clinic at Grandfather Mountain, I was up to shoot the sunrise and shortly after the sun came up I ventured down to the lake to see what was happening.  It’s a little hard to see in this photo, but a nearly full moon was playing hide-and-seek in the clouds.  I got a few shots with the moon in the clear, and a few with it partly or mostly obscured.

This photo was taken with my Canon 20D and 17-40 lens.  It was originally processed using Photoshop Elements, then reprocessed using each of the prior versions of Lightroom.  For this calendar I converted the file to Process Version 2012 and updated my settings one more time.  It’s amazing what newer software can do with photos that were taken with cameras that are now sitting in storage.

by Tom Dills

A Little Breathing Room

Pedestrian overpass in Roanoke, VA

I mentioned in several earlier posts that I had just about run out of hard drive space, and that coincidentally one of my three drives – the one that had been my main working hard drive for three years – had been acting weird and giving my trouble.  I switched over to one of my backup drives, relegated the old main drive to temporary backup status, and ordered new hard drives.  Exciting, huh?  Non-photographers can probably stop here…this is as good as it gets!

This past Monday I took delivery of three new 2 Terabyte Western Digital My Book Studio external hard drives to replace the 1 Terabyte drives I had been using.  It wasn’t a hard job, in fact it was remarkably easy.  But given that those drives contain all my photos from the last 8 plus years, I wanted to shut down Lightroom and stop processing photos until I was finished.  The third drive finished copying sometime this morning.  It took about 15 hours to copy the data from the old drive to each new drive, but now I have three identical copies, one that stays connected to my computer, one that lives in a cabinet in my home office, and another that lives offsite at my work office.  I then use SuperDuper! to run incremental backups on a regular basis.  I did a backup on each of the new drives just for fun, and each one took 30 seconds.  But of course nothing had changed, so that was what I expected.  No problemo.

Acquainting Lightroom with the new drive couldn’t have been simpler.  I opened up Lightroom, pointed it to the new main drive, and in seconds it was synched.  Piece-o cake-o!  Back in business and ready for a few more years worth of photos.  Hopefully another 3 or so years, but it’s hard to say.  These files are getting rather large!

by Tom Dills

A Number of Good Points

Fuji X10 in "Super Macro" mode

I attended one of Les Saucier’s “Refining your Photographic Vision” workshops this past weekend. I think it was the third or fourth one I’ve attended. I seem to always get something out of Les’ workshop that makes it worth the time and cost. This time was no exception. The thing that I find most fascinating though is that a lot of the things I learn don’t always come from the instructor or even the other participants. Sometimes the best “nuggets” are things that I learn about myself.

Part of the day’s activities involves a critique of images we have selected and brought in to share. Les goes through everyone’s images and comments on what he sees, how they might be made better and he usually has some good suggestions on things to work on and look for the next time. One of the participants showed an image that, while it was not taken with an iPhone, it was processed to look like it was done with one of the popular apps. Les’ comment was that – and I’m paraphrasing – the effect should not be the subject, that the software effects used in processing our images should be used to obtain or achieve our vision for the photograph.  The photograph should not be “about” the effect. I found this interesting, because I feel that too often an image is shared to show off a technique, rather than to show someone what the photographer saw or how the photographer felt. I wrote about this several years ago in a post entitled “Don’t Make It About the Technique” where someone had suggested something similar to me about my use of camera movement to show motion in an image. The same concepts hold true here.

During the introductions, one of the participants mentioned that they were using all the latest Nik and Topaz software. Les asked how that person knew when to use what software, since the software is a tool to achieve our vision, not a vision in and of itself.

Several people in the class mentioned tools or software or equipment that they had purchased but “hadn’t had time” to use, hadn’t learned how it works or hadn’t even taken it out of the box. The problem I have with that is that too many people buy stuff without really understanding whether they need it. They just think that if they have something then they can take pictures just like the person who sold it to them. That may be true, and it may be absolutely OK if that’s what you want, but the best tool in the world won’t help a bit if it doesn’t help you achieve your intended result. And it does nothing for you whatsoever if it never comes out of the box. We spend way more time searching for recipes and magic buttons than we do actually figuring out what we want to say. Unless, of course, “look at all my stuff” is our message.

At another point in the day there was a discussion about tripods. Les gave us his “Good, Better, Best” talk and showed us his choices for Better and Best tripods. He told us that he couldn’t recommend the Best tripod because it costs too much. But the Best one is the one he uses, and also happens to be the one I use. I realize that there is a point at which we all have to determine what our needs are, and that helps us decide what price represents an appropriate amount to spend for a given tool. But when I ran those numbers for my own purchase several months ago, I decided that Best was what I needed and wanted, and while the difference was fairly significant in dollars it was relatively small in terms of my overall investment in equipment. Now that the money is gone, I never ever question my decision to buy the Best tripod. It is exactly the tool I need and has made a noticeable improvement in the sharpness of my images (notice that I didn’t say that it has made a noticeable difference in the quality of my photographs!). Again, we all have to make a choice, but for something as important as a tripod, I’m not sure the Better is good enough when Best costs only a little more.

The best nugget for me was during the critique of one of my photos when Les suggested cloning out a few distracting elements. I agreed with him and had actually thought about doing that when I originally processed the image. I thought about his comments later and remembered that the reason I hadn’t cloned them out originally was because I couldn’t get the result I wanted in Lightroom. Lightroom’s healing brush doesn’t work well on larger areas and to do it right I was going to need to use Photoshop. My desire to do everything in Lightroom (a nice way of saying ‘my hard headedness’) makes me avoid Photoshop obsessively except for the few things that I just can’t do in Lightroom. But as I thought about it I realized that it was foolish of me to allow my choice of tools to influence my artistic decisions. It’s no different from someone else using a tool or software indiscriminately to determine their vision. If I need to use Photoshop to get the results I want, then I just need to use Photoshop. So as soon as I have time I’m going to go back and re-work that photo in Photoshop to get the result I should have gotten to start with.

Overall it was a great session. I learned some things that I think will be valuable. Les’ biggest lesson is that we need to get our cameras out and go practice. So Sunday morning I did just that. This had already been planned before the workshop, but I stepped out of my comfort zone, got up well before sunrise and went out and shot some commercial photographs for a restaurant in Charlotte. But that is a story for another day.

by Tom Dills

A Little R&R

Policy Out of Date

Kathy & I are spending the long President’s Day weekend (President’s Day for most banking-related employers except mine. Oh, well….) in Belhaven, NC, one of our favorite getaway spots. We enjoy coming to Belhaven because we can do or not do, as much or as little as we choose. It’s a nice little town on the Intracoastal Waterway, a little sleepy but there’s enough to do if you want something to do. We’ve got some good friends that run a B&B here, and it is nice to visit several times a year to catch up. After the hustle & bustle of The Big City it is a welcome change.

Saturday we visited Washington, NC, just down the road between Belhaven and Greenville. There’s a great wine shop there we like to visit called Wine & Words (‘Words’ because it is also a used book store). We go for the wine but I’ve also bought books there, once picking up a copy of Peter Turnley’s The Parisians for an amazingly good price.

Pink Building in Washington, North Carolina

I’ve been begging Kathy to let me try out her little Olympus E-PL2 for quite some time, and she decided that she wasn’t planning to do any shooting this weekend, so as long as I used my own memory card (so I wouldn’t corrupt hers!) I could shoot to my heart’s content. I didn’t shoot a lot with it, but I did get a chance to make some walking-around-town photos in Washington and worked a little bit around the Sunset Hour, although colorwise there wasn’t much to work with.

Looking For Antiques

Today has been wet and cold and rainy, so while I ordinarily wouldn’t spend time processing and posting photographs, it seemed like a perfect day to play around with Lightroom 4. I’m teaching a Lightroom class this coming Saturday and thought I probably should at least be able to discuss the upcoming update. I decided to just jump in without reading any tutorials, so now that I’ve spent some time with it I can look at some tutorials and figure out what I should have known before I started. Sort of like reading the manual after assembling the swing set, but I figure I can’t hurt anything. So far, so good.

2 Cool Dudes

A lot of the new version looks pretty much like the old one, although I’m obviously going to need to spend some time learning about the new Map and Book modules. There are some interesting new slider functions in the Develop Module, and that’s where I spent most of my time. It will be interesting to read about the changes and find out what I should have known before I started!

2 Cool Dudes 2

So anyway, these are a few images shot on an unfamiliar camera and processed with a partially unfamiliar program. I think they’re kind of fun, I had fun making them and fun working with Lightroom 4.

Zig-Zag
Danger High Voltage
by Tom Dills

Learning by Doing

Carriage House on the Cone Manor, Blue Ridge Parkway near Blowing Rock North Carolina

 

I recently traded e-mails with a student from one of my Lightroom classes who told me that she liked my teaching style because I showed her how to do things then gave her time to try them out while being available to give feedback or answer questions.  I appreciated that feedback because that’s always my goal.

As someone who is mostly self-taught – after a great introduction from a photo class taught by my now good friend Emilie Knight and a few other valuable mentors – I am a firm believer that while it is good to get inspiration, knowledge and information from workshops, websites, videos and the classroom, it is absolutely critical to “complete the circle” by taking the time to do the work.  Sit down at your computer and figure out how to use whatever software you choose to create the images you envisioned.  Watching me doing it and taking notes isn’t going to help you.

People like to tell me about how hard they think Lightroom is.  It’s not hard – in fact it’s remarkably simple – provided you take the time to learn how to use it.  If you’re looking for that big “Easy Button” you won’t find it.  But if you take the time to learn how to use it you won’t need the Easy Button.  For me the goal of software is to not have to think about it.  Learn what the capabilities are, just like you learn the capabilities of your camera.  Before you know it you’ll be taking photographs and visualizing the results because you will know exactly what the capabilities of the software are.

Get out and photograph.  Apply the inspiration you get from others and get to work making your own photographs.  You need to get out and take pictures – YOUR pictures.  Not your version of my pictures or someone else’s pictures.

When I do my classes or presentations I show people my photography, show people how Lightroom works, talk about what inspires me or how I see, but I don’t want to do it for them.  Enjoy my work, hopefully be inspired by some of it (hey, inspiration can inspire to do or to not do, you know!), see what the possibilities are then go do your thing.  That’s one of the problems with sharing technical data.  When I show a photo and someone asks me what lens I used, or what the shutter speed was, they’re not thinking about the photograph.  They’re distracted by the how and not paying attention to the why.  I encourage people to think about it instead of asking the question.  That’s how we learn.

If someone asks me for the technical information and I say “Canon 5D with the 70-200 2.8L IS USM at 190mm, f16 @ 1/30, ISO 100” and they write it all down what does that do?  It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook.  But if they look at my photo and think to themselves “looks like a longish lens because he got in close, shutter speed is pretty short because he froze the movement and there’s pretty good depth of field so he probably used a small aperture” guess what?  They get it!  It doesn’t matter whether you get the exact numbers but as long as you get the idea that’s close enough.  Then take that and apply it to your own situations.

Don’t get me wrong.  Going to the classroom or attending a workshop is great.  It’s fuel for the fire.  Another tool for the toolbox.  But take that fuel or that tool and go out there and make something with it.  Something that’s special.  Something that’s yours.

by Tom Dills

It’s a Commitment

 

I spent some time the other day helping a good friend try to diagnose some problems he was having with Lightroom.  His computer was doing some strange stuff with multiple catalogs and he couldn’t figure it out.  It’s going to take some more work because he’s made a bit of a mess of things, but I’m going to help him out because it’s a good way for me to learn, he’s a good friend and it’s something I want to do.

Sometimes it takes working with someone else’s digital file management system to appreciate how truly difficult it can be to manage our photographs.  I’m very fortunate to have realized from the start – even before Lightroom – that good organization was going to be essential if I had any hope of keeping track of what I was certain to be a lot of files.  And boy was I right – I had no idea!

The biggest realization for me is that using a program like Lightroom is a commitment.  Lightroom is designed to be your sole system for image organization.  It doesn’t do you any good if you put just some of your images in Lightroom, or if you work with Lightroom sometimes and other programs other times.  Once you decide to use it you need to learn how it works, figure out what works best for you and embrace it 100%.  It won’t do you any good any other way.

I’ve told this story to groups before so it’s nothing new to a lot of my readers, but the first time I used Lightroom it was to organize, edit and process images from a magazine assignment.  I decided that I was going to use Lightroom from start to finish to complete this assignment, and that I would use what I learned to develop my workflow around it.  I “got it” from the very beginning, understood how it worked and what it would do, and soon I imported my entire photo collection, which was much smaller than it is today, into my Lightroom catalog.

Today I use Lightroom for everything – from editing to processing to printing.  I rarely use Photoshop for anything – going there for the occasional cloning job, a panorama or the rare – for me – HDR image.  And I don’t own and haven’t tried any of the third-party software.  Not that I have a problem with it, I just don’t feel like I need it.

When I teach and work with other people dealing with their digital workflow, I try to help them develop a system that they understand and that works for them.  They could copy everything I do exactly, but unless they understand what I’m doing and why, they’ll never get comfortable with it, probably won’t use it and soon they’ll have a mess.

A lot of people enjoy the computer side of digital photography.  I enjoy it to the extent that I love figuring things out and solving problems, but once I get to a point where I have a system that works I want it to get out of my way and let me do my thing.  I don’t want to have to worry about hardware and software and plug-ins and actions.  I want the computer stuff to be a tool that I use to achieve the desired result, and I want it to come as natural to me as changing the aperture on my camera.

I’ve worked hard to get to the point I am at with my workflow.  I enjoy helping other people too, but it takes a certain level of commitment to get to the point where you have something you can use.  Getting there might take some valuable time away from our photography, but ultimately that time investment will pay off more than buying a new piece of software or even a new lens if it helps us spend our time being creative instead of trying to figure out the computer stuff.

by Tom Dills

Multiple Catalogs in Lightroom

I advocate, as most Lightroom users do, the use of a single catalog for my images.  Recently I had an occasion where a separate catalog turned out to be the perfect solution for me.  I needed to prepare a group of files for a commercial printing company, and there were a number of things they needed me to do that were specific to these files:

- The file names had to be customized according to subject;
- I needed to customize my black point and shadow tones to output correctly on their printers;
- They needed an 11×14 version and a 4×6 version of each file

Several problems I needed to solve for my own benefit were:
- I didn’t want to intermingle those versions with my regular images;
- You can’t have virtual copies with different file names, and changing the file name in my main catalog would mess up my normal naming convention;
- Any processing I did to the images would be specific to the files for this project, and I didn’t want any processing of the new versions to interfere with my original files.
- I could have solved some of these problems by creating multiple virtual copies and putting them in collections, but that didn’t solve the naming issue.

I used a Collection to keep track of the initial images I sent for review, and created a separate Collection of the images they chose so I could keep track of them.  I wanted to review each of the images before sending them, and I realized that I was going to need to keep track of the files I had sent and the ones I still needed to review, so I created a Smart Collection using a client keyword for the images that have already been sent.

Once I completed my review I used the “Export As Catalog” function to create a new Catalog of those images.  I then added the client name keyword to the images in the Quick Collection to remove them from the “Need Processed” Smart Collection.  I now have the images in a new Catalog ready to prep for the client.

In the new catalog I need to do three things with my images to prepare them for output to the client: (1) I need to rename the files to a custom name reflecting the subject of the photo, (2) I need to adjust the black point and shadow tones, and (3) I need to create versions in 4×6 and 11×14 format.  It’s a manual process but easy to do.  When I am done I create a new Collection called “4×6” and add all the images to that Collection.  As it turns out most of the images happen to be already in a 4×6 format so I don’t have to do much cropping.

Next, I select all the images in the 4×6 Collection and create a new Collection titled “11×14,” being sure to select “Create New Virtual Copies.”  This creates Virtual Copies of all the images that I now go through and crop to 11×14.  This requires some interesting aesthetic compromise as I’m not completely happy doing this, but I do it and they’re fine.

At this point I have two Collections.  One has the images in a 4×6 format, the other with the same images in an 11×14 format.  Remember that the images have not actually been resized, they are just virtual copies, or versions of the original RAW or TIF files.  Using two separate Export Templates I export output them into separate folders, and once they are done I upload them to the client’s FTP server and that’s it!

The “Old Fashioned Way” would have had me doing two different versions in Photoshop, and even though I could have automated the process to some extent it would have been very manual.  In this case I was able to keep the manual work to a minimum, and I now have a catalog that contains only the files for this client in the formats they have requested, and the catalog is completely separate from my main image catalog.  If the client decides at some point to do a different size image, it will be a simple matter to go to the correct image, create a new virtual copy and export it exactly they way they want it.  Hopefully the client will want more of my images in the future, in which case we’ll repeat the process and add the new images to the existing catalog.  Easy!

PS: Another interesting thing is that as I went back and reviewed the older images, I found that with only two exceptions I reprocessed them exclusively in Lightroom and ended up with a better result than I had achieved with the older images processed in Photoshop.  This is admittedly due in part to an improvement in my own processing skills but I think also due to a dramatic improvement in software over the last 3-5 years.

PPS: This is the short version of this article!  I wrote another one that is much more detailed and another page or so longer.  E-mail me if you want a copy and I’ll send it to you!