Clearing storm along the North Carolina-South Carolina border—processed with Lightroom 4
I’ve finally had a chance to really dive into Lightroom 4, and I’m very happy with the results I’ve been getting. While I haven’t found a big difference in processing low-contrast images, with high-contrast scenes the improvements are significant.
The accompanying image was made during my trip to South Carolina last November. It was a fast-changing situation—the sun suddenly broke through, and I missed the exposure slightly, so the brightest highlights at the top of the clouds were blown out. By the time I adjusted the exposure the scene had changed.
Redbud and oaks, Merced River Canyon, processed in Lightroom 3
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know that I’m a big fan of Lightroom. It’s easy to use, yet powerful, which makes it a great tool for both beginning and advanced photographers. I teach workshops about Lightroom, and wrote an eBook about it, because I think it’s a tool that can help many photographers. Personally, as Lightroom’s processing tools have grown more sophisticated I’ve used Lightroom more and more and Photoshop less and less.
As many of you probably know, Lightroom 4 went on sale yesterday. In this new version Adobe has completely revamped the Basic panel, with significant improvements in highlight and shadow recovery. I’ve already used the beta version of Lightroom 4 to take advantage of those improvements. For example, I was able to get smoother transitions around the sun in one of the photographs from this post (“Ross’s geese taking flight at sunset”).
The Basic panel tools have completely changed in both operation and behavior, which may require some modifications in they way we work in Lightroom. I’m looking forward to exploring these new tools, and telling you about my discoveries, but unfortunately I’ve encountered a frustrating roadblock—a bug in Lightroom 4 that causes all of my Tone Curve settings for images previously processed in Lightroom 3 to disappear! All I see is the default Tone Curve for the camera, and, since I do most of the tonal adjustments for every image with curves, my images look rather flat (the accompanying images show one example of this). And I don’t want to re-create the curve for thousands of images!
As many of you know, Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 4 yesterday. There are some major changes to the Develop Module—the Brightness slider has disappeared, while the Recovery and Fill Light tools have been replaced by Highlights and Shadows. Adobe says these Highlight and Shadow tools were improved, and a quick test bears this out—I was able to recover detail in an overexposed moon with Lightroom 4 and not with Lightroom 3. There’s also a new Whites slider, the Blacks slider is quite different, you can adjust individual color channels with the Point Curve—and they’ve changed the default settings.
Remember that this his a beta, so it’s bound to have bugs, and the final shipping version will be different, so adjustments you make now might not translate to the finished version. If you want to import a few images into the beta version to try it out, great, but I don’t recommend that you start using Lightroom 4 beta as your primary tool until the final version ships.
You can’t upgrade your current catalog to Lightroom 4, which is good—you don’t want to mess with your existing catalog. Adobe also recommends that you don’t save metadata to XMP, and I wholeheartedly agree. Don’t Save—don’t press Command-S on a Mac, or Control-S on Windows, and make sure the option to automatically write changes into XMP is turned off. It’s turned off by default in Lightroom 4, but to check go to your Catalog Settings (under the Lightroom menu on Macs, or under the Edit menu on Windows), click on the Metadata tab at the top, and make sure that “Automatically write changes into XMP ” is unchecked. And while you’re at it uncheck “Include Develop settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files” also.
Now in Lightroom 3 I do recommend—highly—that you check these boxes. To understand why, and what all XMP stuff means, we have to talk about some fundamental aspects of how Lightroom works, so if you want to delve into these details read on.
Lightroom is a non-destructive editor, which means that when you make changes to a photograph’s appearance, Lightroom does not modify the original Raw or JPEG file, but rather writes a set of instructions about how you want to the image to look. Those instructions don’t get applied until and unless you export the image out of Lightroom (like when you take it into Photoshop, or export a JPEG to put on a web site).
Those instructions are automatically written into the Lightroom database, and can also be written into the image file itself with JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and DNG files, or with other Raw files (NEF, CR2, etc.) into a sidecar file with a .xmp extension. So with Lightroom 4 you want avoid writing writing those instructions into the image file, or a sidecar file, because those instructions won’t be compatible with Lightroom 3, and may not be compatible with the final version of Lightroom 4. But with Lightroom 3 you want to write those instructions (the metadata) into the file or sidecar file so that if Lightroom catalog ever gets corrupted those instructions, your edits to all your images, won’t be lost, because the information will be stored with the image itself. Also, that information can be read by other programs, namely Adobe Camera Raw and other copies of Lightroom.
So with that said, have fun playing with Lightroom 4, and I’ll be back with more after I’ve given it a thorough test drive.
(Click here if you have trouble viewing this video)
Can you create HDR images in Lightroom? Yes! Well, sort of. Lightroom only works with one photograph at a time, so you can’t blend different exposures of a scene together. But you can handle some high-contrast scenes in Lightroom, without HDR software or Photoshop, by using Lightroom’s tools to exploit your camera’s full dynamic range. I explain how in this latest video.
Like many inventions, this technique was born out of laziness. I wanted to avoid the sometimes tedious process of blending exposures manually in Photoshop, with HDR software, or my favorite plugin, LR/Enfuse. I also try to keep my adjustments flexible by using Lightroom’s non-destructive workflow whenever possible.
This technique only works with Raw images, and scenes where the contrast isn’t extreme, but I keep finding more and more situations where it does work. If you try it, let me know how you make out!
As always, be sure to view this in high definition (720p) to see the tools and sliders clearly.
Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author and photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, plus the eBook Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom. He has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.
Lightroom has grown up. I’ve made 30×40 inch prints from this image using only Lightroom (except for the final print sharpening). Yet Photoshop can still do things that Lightroom can’t.
“Should I get Lightroom or Photoshop?” This is a question I get asked a lot, usually by people who own Photoshop Elements and are thinking of upgrading to either Lightroom or the full version of Photoshop.
Six years ago this was an easy decision, because Lightroom didn’t exist. If you wanted to upgrade from Elements, the full version of Photoshop was the only real choice. But then Apple launched Aperture, Adobe countered with Lightroom, Nikon and Canon upgraded their software, and a host of other companies added even more options.
For now I’m going to keep this simple and just talk about Lightroom and Photoshop—mainly because these are the two most popular choices, but also because they’re the two applications I’m most familiar with, and they’re natural choices for people wishing to graduate from Adobe’s other photo-editing program, Elements.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
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