From Darkroom to Lightroom

Transcription

1 From Darkroom to Lightroom By Ken Milburn I couldn t resist the title I gave this PDF because it so gets across the intention Adobe had in giving Lightroom its name: This is a program for photographers to use as they massively migrate from the darkroom to Lightroom. In fact, Photoshop got many of us out of the darkroom years ago. What Lightroom really does is go a long way toward solving the major workflow roadblocks we face when moving to digital namely, it offers intuitive and efficient image management and highly sophisticated nondestructive image adjustment. This PDF introduces you to the Lightroom workflow, its four modules, and its particular appeal to Raw shooters. Contents Some General Lightroom Observations..2 What makes Lightroom so fast? What about plugins? What about Camera Raw? The Lightroom Experience...4 What you can t do What you can do The Lightroom modules: Library, Develop, Slideshow, and Print It s a Wrap...20 Is Lightroom a replacement for Photoshop? Find more at pdfs.oreilly.com

2 From Darkroom to Lightroom I couldn t resist the title I gave this PDF because it so gets across the intention Adobe had in giving Lightroom its name: This is a program for photographers to use as they massively migrate from the darkroom to Lightroom. In fact, Photoshop got many of us out of the darkroom years ago. What Lightroom really does is go a long way toward solving the major workflow roadblocks we face when moving to digital namely, it offers intuitive and efficient image management and highly sophisticated nondestructive image adjustment. That s right, even though the product is far from complete at the time of this writing and will likely have many (Adobe s word) new and changed features by the time it is released, it can make a major change to your workflow right now. And while it s still in beta, it s free. Don t expect that to last for long. Furthermore, although the product isn t finished, it s extremely productive. It will do quite a bit more than Camera Raw, and will do it at several times the speed and with a lot more workflow efficiency. Unlike its major competitor, Apple Aperture, Lightroom is destined to run on both Windows and the Mac. At the time of this writing it runs only on the Mac and has just been upgraded to run in a Universal version that would take full advantage of Apple s new Intel CoreDuo processors. It s not the hardware hog Aperture is, either. Some General Lightroom Observations Before I get into details of how you work in Lightroom, I d like to address some general observations. I think you ll get a better picture of the overall feel of working in this very cool program. What Makes Lightroom So Fast? What will strike you first about Lightroom is how quickly you can page through images, examine at 1:1 for focus and blur, and then instantly find what you re looking for. When you make a change in an image, there is no time lapse. The first time I saw Lightroom demonstrated, I thought to myself, Oh, sure, and they re running it on a $5,000 PC with four processors. Actually, all you need is a single G4 (or a Pentium 4, when the Windows version is up and flying) and three-quarters of a gig of RAM. The other thing that makes Lightroom so fast is that it generates previews as files are imported. That is because five or six previews in different sizes are generated for each imported file. Granted, the slowdown at the import stage is a bit annoying, but it s what makes life such a high-speed pleasure once that process is over. From Darkroom to Lightroom 2

3 The above caveat aside, what makes Lightroom so slapdash instantaneous? It s really a database program. All the sorting, arranging, and managing are done with text and numbers. Nothing whatsoever actually changes in the file you re processing even if it s not a RAW file. So it s like the difference in speed between transmitting text and images on the internet. I can t stress enough, though, that it s not even this speed difference that s really important. What matters the most is that Lightroom does all its work completely nondestructively, whether it works on a RAW file, a.dng file (Adobe s open source RAW format), a.psd file, a.tif file, or a JPEG file. If you want to work with other bitmapped file types, you ll have to convert them into one of these formats first. You can do that in Photoshop. Note At the time of this review, Lightroom did not handle CMYK or Lab mode files, regardless of file type. What About Plugins? Adobe has provided software development kits (SDKs) to third-party developers with the idea that there will be more new capabilities available for Lightroom than anyone is currently dreaming of. However, these won t be plugins. They ll actually be add-ins that become a part of the program s code and overall capabilities, so they ll use little in the way of extra resources and won t affect the program s speed. At this time, no other manufacturer had officially announced what any of these products might be. However, it s a fair guess that Lightroom is well on its way to becoming the production tool for photographers. What About Camera Raw? Lightroom does everything that Camera Raw does, and then adds a whole lot more, as you ll find out by reading the rest of this PDF. You can send files back and forth without losing a thing. The only difference is that code instructions embedded with some of the files processed in Lightroom might have no effect in Camera Raw. In any case, in both programs the file will look the same as it did when the last adjustment was made in the program used most recently. Once you have Lightroom, there s no need to use Bridge or Camera Raw at all at least not on the same computer. (Again, unless your ultimate workflow involves other programs in the Creative Suite, in which case Bridge might still be useful.) Right now (and likely till near the end of 2006), the Lightroom beta is free. If you have a Mac, you might as well download it now. If you are running Windows XP From Darkroom to Lightroom 3

4 or later, keep your eye on O Reilly s new Inside Lightroom website ( for the latest announcements. The Lightroom Experience I tested Lightroom for this report on a G4 laptop with no special gear to soup it up. So I know that speed and performance are all they re claimed to be. What You Can t Do Honestly, I can t answer that question for you, as I haven t evaluated anything but an early beta. By the time you can buy it, it may walk, talk, and crawl on its belly. For now, here s the list of what you currently can t do: At the moment, you can t do layers, retouching, or curves (though you actually have a more practical level of control over regional brightness and contrast). There s no feature that corresponds to Stacks (several different shots of the same subject) or Versions, but rumor has it both will appear in the final version, as they are at the top of nearly everyone s suggestion list. So far, there s no official capability for two monitors, but it sure would be nice to be able to put all the panels on a small, cheap monitor and the various preview layouts on a larger and very high-definition monitor. You can, however, connect directly with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. So you can do all the basics completely nondestructively, then pass it on to either of those two programs to do what simply can t be done nondestructively layers, retouching, extractions, and filter effects. Note Some photographers will need integration with Adobe Creative Suite 2, previewing PDF, InDesign, and Illustrator documents and workgroup management tools. For those purposes, some of us will also use Bridge and Camera Raw. What You Can Do First of all, Lightroom lets you do anything with photos that you can do with the combination of Bridge and Camera Raw. So it s not what you can t do with Lightroom, it s the fantastically fast, easy, and fun things you can do that count. The program divides itself into four modules: Library, Develop, Slideshow, and Print. I will take you through each of these modules and show you screen captures of everything. In Figure 1, you see what the Lightroom screen looks like the instant the program opens. From Darkroom to Lightroom 4

5 Figure 1. When Lightroom opens, you are initially in Library mode Regardless of which module you re in, you ll see a large preview window in the center of the screen. On each side are panels that let you control what happens to the images while you re working in that module. You can modify a panel to any width by dragging its borders. If you drag a panel, the length of its sliders changes proportionately. Drag the panel wider, and the sliders get longer; this lets you finetune the slider position with more precision. Because it always saves disk space to throw away an image you know you won t use, you can delete a selected image at any time by pressing the Delete key. You can also see clipping indicators regardless of which module you re in. These look just like the clipping indicators in Camera Raw. Clipped highlights turn bright red, and clipped shadows turn bright blue. You can toggle them on or off at any time by simply clicking on their keywords at the top of the right panel. There s also a hot key that turns the clipping indicators on and off, which makes it really easy to take a quick look any time you want and then get them out of your way. Whenever you want to work on an image in Photoshop, regardless of the module you re in, just choose Photo -> Edit in Photoshop. Lightroom will hand off a tonemap text file to Photoshop to tell it how to adjust the image from the get-go. Now let s go through the Lightroom modules; I ll explain what each one can do for you and give you some suggestions on how you might want to use it. From Darkroom to Lightroom 5

6 Library The Library is the image management portion of the program, but you can also perform any of the adjustments that are on the Camera Raw Adjustments tab. Because these adjustments are simple, it s easy to make your adjustments to individual images as you re importing, naming, winnowing, labeling, adding metadata and keywords to, and storing them. Note One of the most astonishing things about using the Library is how fast it is. Once you ve imported your images into the Library and the program has had time to do its initial calculations, there is never, ever a delay in seeing the image perfectly resolved. It doesn t matter if you re looking at a thumbnail or full resolution. It doesn t matter how fast you change images, either. This fact alone vastly increases your productivity over both Bridge and Camera Raw, and even over some expensive third-party RAW processors. You can dim the lights (press L once) or turn out the lights (press L twice) to sublimate or hide the panels. You can hide any part of the window by clicking on any of the margin arrows. You can bring back the panel you ve hidden by simply bumping its window margin with the pointer. When you do that, the panel stays up for only as long as you need to make a change or adjustment. It works this way in all four modules. You can see camera data while in the Library by looking in the right panel. Figure 2 shows Lightroom in Library mode with the lights dimmed. From Darkroom to Lightroom 6

7 Figure 2. Lightroom with the lights dimmed When you import to the Library, Lightroom will read or preview directly from your camera or a memory card. The Import dialog, shown below in Figure 3, gives you all sorts of control over how you import. George Jardine, my Lightroom docent at Adobe, informs me that you ll see even more choices in the final product. You can set up the program to rename files as they are imported either as a batch or individually. Files are organized into Shoots, and each Shoot is stored in its own folder. You can also add keywords and tag a photo with a copyright notice as it is imported. You can also convert a proprietary RAW file to Adobe DNG as it is imported. That way, all your files are in a universally readable format that is likely to be supported for a much longer time than any proprietary RAW format specific to one model of digital camera. It takes about two minutes to do all of these things to all of the files you are importing. Now that s what I call productivity. From Darkroom to Lightroom 7

8 The Quick Develop Panel Although the Library is the image management module, you ll find a small panel called Quick Develop that lets you make basic adjustments. Unlike Camera Raw, Lightroom doesn t auto-adjust your imported files by default. You can see a closeup of this panel in Figure 3. You can use it to make any of the adjustments that are on Camera Raw s Adjustments tab, quickly bringing about an acceptable if not perfectly tweaked version of the image for the purpose of making a slide show, comp card, or contact sheet for quick communication with a subject or client. Note that you can instantly convert any image to black and white by clicking on the check box at the bottom of the panel. Figure 3. The Quick Develop panel You can add keywords to all of the files you re importing. You can also assemble a list of keywords and then just drag and drop them onto individual or selected images. That makes it really quick and easy to add all the keywords that suit individual files within a Shoot. For instance, if you re on a location shoot and happen to take pictures of some backgrounds, trees, and skies, you can add the pertinent keywords to the files. Then comes the really amazing part. At any time, while you re in Lightroom, if you want to see all your skies so that you can choose what you want to composite into a scene with a boring sky (so far, you have to do the compositing in Photoshop), just go to the Search Keyword dialog and type in From Darkroom to Lightroom 8

9 two or three descriptive keywords. In less than a second, you will see a display of every file in your Library that matches those keywords. If you want to create a web advertisement that shows a composite card of several glamour shots, you could instantly find every glamour shot in your Library or only those that are labeled glamour and cosmetics. I bet this capability alone will give me the time to add another $20,000 to my income next year. Note This ease of quickly being able to put together collections of photos that match a keyword category is a great reason to include a gray card in the first shot of any series. There s a good chance that you will have changed the white balance of individual shots in a series for subjective reasons. But suppose you then need to include several of those photos on the same page of an article or a website? You can then use a dropper to match the white balance and exposure for the shot in that series that contained the gray card, then apply the Previous Conversion setting to the image you d chosen to be in the group of shots. If you can do that for each of the images, their white balance will match throughout. You can designate a selected group of images in the Library as a Collection, too. Once you ve winnowed the files gathered by a Search Keyword command and have marked the best shots, you can name the best shots as a Collection. You can then instantly recall all those photos at any time, regardless of where they resided on your system. A photo from any Shoot can appear in any number of Collections. The original photo is always maintained in its original folder. Speaking of Collections, you can make a Temporary, or Quick, Collection by pressing B whenever you select an image. You can even continue to do this as you switch around from Shoot to Shoot. Then click on the Show Quick Collection bar in the left panel, and the whole Collection will show up in the Preview window. You can delete any of those you don t really want and then instantly produce a slide show, or perform any of the functions in the Slideshow or Print modes of the program on all of the images in the Temporary Collection. Imagine that you ve just heard that an agency is looking for someone to shoot a particular assignment. You could make a Quick Collection in a few minutes and the agency a slide show after a few more minutes. No sense in losing any opportunity to make a buck. One of Library mode s purposes is to allow you to compare and winnow images. Although you always want to do some of this to get rid of images that are obviously wasting system resources, there are obvious reasons to do it as you move along. Lightroom is totally flexible in that regard. For instance, you can remove files from a Collection at any time without removing them from your hard drive, From Darkroom to Lightroom 9

10 but you can also remove them from your hard drive by simply selecting the images and pressing Delete. Library mode makes winnowing much more productive by providing instant access to all the tools you need. There are three modes for displaying the files in a Shoot: Grid, Loupe, and Compare. You move from one mode to the other by clicking on their names in the lower-left panel. You can also do it instantly by memorizing the quick keys for each of these modes. Figures 4 through 6 show the screen in each mode. Figure 4. Grid mode shows the Shoot as a scrollable light table; just as in Bridge, you can move any image to any position relative to the others, and it will remain there until you move it elsewhere From Darkroom to Lightroom 10

11 Figure 5. Loupe mode doesn t show a circular magnifying glass view; instead, it shows you the whole image taking up all the space under the loupe, just as you d see it on a light table When you re in Loupe mode, you can cycle through all shots in the Shoot by using your arrow keys. If at any time you want to see a 1:1 rendition of the photo, just click on the photo. In the upper left, you ll see a smaller window. Click on it and a marquee appears, showing you how much of the image would appear in a 1:1 view; the Loupe image is instantly magnified to 1:1 as well, so that you can look for problems with smudge, blur, fringing, and noise. You can navigate around the 1:1 rendition by simply dragging to any position on the thumbnail. (Also, if you click and hold, the image will zoom in and track your mouse movement and then when you release the mouse, it ll snap back to regular view.) To go back to Loupe mode, click again. From Darkroom to Lightroom 11

12 Figure 6. Compare mode lets you select as many images as you like, but selecting only between two and six is a practical matter for comparing them side by side extremely useful when collecting photos for a layout It s not actually necessary to switch to Compare mode in order to see images side by side. All you have to do is select several images at once; they ll automatically appear together in the Preview window. You can also use any of the fonts on your system to create something Lightroom calls a Signature Stamp. You can then place the Signature Stamp atop each slide in a Collection, on each page you print, or in any position onscreen during a slide show. This adds a professional touch. Note George Jardine says that many new features will be added to the Photo Library mode before the program is released. Frankly, it looks stunningly useful right now. I can hardly wait to see what Adobe will think of next. Develop The Develop module is much more powerful than Camera Raw, though it uses exactly the same engine and all the Camera Raw panels also exist in Lightroom. You can see the interface for the Develop module in Figure 7. From Darkroom to Lightroom 12

13 Figure 7. The basic interface for the Develop module Notice that the Histogram is a bit larger and that the Image Navigation window has been moved to the right of the Preview window. On the left is a panel called Presets. It lets you automatically and nondestructively process your image to emulate a number of traditional darkroom processes, namely Antique Grayscale, Cyanotype, Direct Positive, Flat, Grayscale Conversion, Lightroom Defaults, and Sepia Tone, as well as five preset tone curves. The tone curves are exactly the same as those in Camera Raw. You ll also notice that you can add a preset. The Adjustments panels on the other side of the Preview window features a huge expansion in the number of controls available. You can see the presets in Figure 8. From Darkroom to Lightroom 13

14 Figure 8. Some effects produced in the Default Presets pane Perhaps the most important of these changes is the Tone Curve panel. It has Highlights and Shadows sliders that let you change the range over which the curve will take place. You can set your basic curve and then isolate the Highlights and Shadows portions so that you re actually unblocking and controlling the brightness and contrast of exactly the portion of the brightness range in the areas you want. The result is very much like that of using Photoshop s Highlights and Shadows Adjustments command only it s even more intuitive. Unlike Photoshop and Camera Raw, however, there s no way to introduce your own curve points or to drag the curve into any old shape you want. For most users, most of the time, that s a good thing. It prevents the accidental reversals or posterization that often occur when you re trying to draw a curve. If you really want to create some of those strange effects, however, you ll still be able to instantly edit your image in Photoshop. And if you use a Curves Adjustment Layer and don t flatten the image, you can still do it nondestructively. You can see the Tone Curve panel in Figure 9. From Darkroom to Lightroom 14

15 Figure 9. The Tone Curve panel There s also the equivalent of a Levels command, which if you weren t told about it you d probably miss. Look under the Histogram in the right Panels pane, and you ll see Exposure and Blacks sliders. You can turn on the clipping signals by clicking on Show Clipping and then dragging the Highlights and Shadows sliders until you just see a hint of clipping colors at both ends of the image. Then use the Brightness slider to adjust the midtones. You ll find an HSL color-tuning panel that lets you control Hue, Saturation, and Luminance for the primary colors and their complements: Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, and Magentas. Suffice it to say that you can perform careful finetuning of your camera s color interpretation. But there s enough range in these sliders that you can also create amazing, beautiful, and downright bizarre color effects. Figure 10 shows the before and after of one of these extreme effects. From Darkroom to Lightroom 15

16 Figure 10. An extreme color effect produced with the HSL Color Tuning panel; the original image consisted entirely of shades of near white A Grayscale Mixer panel provides you the equivalent of using the Photoshop Channel Mixer with the Monochrome box checked, to give just the tonalities you envision. For an idea of how powerful this can be for black-and-white interpretation, take a look at Figure 11. You see the same image after straight conversion to grayscale and after two other interpretations made with the Grayscale mixer. Note that as soon as you click on the check box to the left of the Grayscale Mixer s panel title, the image converts to the settings already present in the Grayscale Mixer. There s even a Split Toning panel, shown in Figure 11, that lets you color-correct highlights and shadows separately. I even wish they had that in Photoshop. Figure 11. The Split Toning panel From Darkroom to Lightroom 16

17 Slideshow Slideshow is a module that lets you create a slide show design that is somewhat more professional than what you can achieve in Photoshop. However, you can also spontaneously click on a button for any group of images you ve selected in the filmstrip to produce an instantaneous slide show. With the Slideshow module you can take it much further. You can output the slide show to HTML so that you can it or put it on your website. Photoshop can automatically make some reasonably professional-looking slide shows. Unfortunately, though, the scaling of the images is so uniform that, regardless of the work done otherwise, you ll take one look at it and say, Ah, nice Photoshop slide show. Thus, lots of photographers spend big bucks hiring web designers to do something that has their personal look. I won t say that Lightroom can replace the five or ten grand you might pay a web designer, but it does give you scaling and positioning flexibility. You can also choose to include your Signature Stamp in any position you like. Figure 12 shows a slide for a slide show that took me less than a minute to lay out. Figure 12. A Slideshow slide after an almost instant layout I am praying that Slideshow will be even more versatile by the time the program is released. I d especially like to see user-defined image frames and, in the HTML From Darkroom to Lightroom 17

18 version, a user-navigable thumbnail strip in order to make it more practical to publish Collections on one s website. We shall see. Print I can tell you right now that once you ve seen what you can do in the Print module, you re never going to do any production printing straight from Photoshop again. Imagine this scenario; it s just a for-instance, but it gives you some idea of the power that s available to your for the print module: An art director calls you for a portfolio of insect photographs. Now, you re a fashion shooter, but bugs happen to fascinate you, and they provide a stark vacation from the sleek beauty of fashion models. So every time you get a chance, you screw a stack of close-up lenses onto your macro lens and start searching the bushes for bugs. Many of the fashion models in town think you re a little buggy. The worst of it is, in the Lightroom Library your bug pictures inevitably end up in a fashion shoot. Furthermore, you have lots of fashion shoots. No problem. You just fly through your Shoots, and every time you see a bug, you select it and press B. Pretty soon you have all your bugs in one temporary Collection. After a little further winnowing in Library mode and using the Quick Adjustments to make the images match the look you want, you click on Print and find yourself in the Print module. Now you re going to be able to set all the images in a simulated matte, and then scale them so they look good in a Collection. Let s say you have a printer that will make 11-by-14 prints. So you scale the images to fit 11-by-14 paper; add your Signature Stamp, the date, and a caption; and press Print. The printer immediately goes off to printing all 50 of them while you take your partner to dinner. Come back in the morning, drop them in a portfolio box, and messenger them over to the agency. The art director s going to have to figure that you spend a good part of your life as a bug specialist. Figure 13 shows you the interface for the Print module. No bugs! From Darkroom to Lightroom 18

19 Figure 13. The basic interface for Lightroom s Print module The Print module will do all sorts of print projects: straight prints, gallery prints with a selected border and positioned photo, collections of images at a particular size (say, 4 by 6 or 5 by 7) on a larger sheet of paper, and contact sheets. For any of these jobs, you have many choices as to what will be printed under the image: nothing, or any combination of filename, caption, date, or EXIF data. You can also choose to print borders or crop marks. Figure 14 shows you what the example portfolio print might look like. From Darkroom to Lightroom 19

20 Figure 14. You can include any images you want on a job sheet and can specify the distance between images and how they re positioned on the page; this could also be a page or portfolio layout Now, here s an option that s just too good to be true. You can even specify final output sharpening that will be tailored to the resolution of the printer you are using. Potentially, at least, that could mean bye-bye to all that money you were thinking of spending for a really good third-party final output-sharpening tool. When printing contact and job sheets, you can choose Enable Draft Mode. The program will then print from the pre-generated thumbs, which really speeds up printing when quality isn t the main consideration. It s a Wrap Regardless of whether you do your completely nondestructive workflow procedures in Camera Raw or Lightroom, you still need to concern yourself with the rest of the digital workflow. So you may find yourself deciding whether to make the adjustments in Camera Raw, Lightroom, or Photoshop. There are actually times when it pays to do both so that you can tweak the look of highlights, shadows, or midtones to get the overall look just right. Lightroom isn t a total replacement for Photoshop. But many of the basic image editing functions for From Darkroom to Lightroom 20

21 which in the past you had to use Photoshop, can now be applied nicely in Lightroom, without ever leaving the comfortable confines of your managed library and terrific output tools. About the Author Ken Milburn has been a photographer, both full- and part-time, for nearly five decades. He has written over 300 articles and columns for computer magazines as well as 27 books on web design, Flash, and (mostly) Adobe Photoshop and digital photography. Books currently in print include Digital Photography: 99 Tips to Make You Look Like a Pro (from Osborne/McGraw-Hill), Digital Abstract and Macro Photography (from Course Technology PTR), and Digital Photography: Expert Techniques (from O Reilly Media). The second edition of Digital Photography: Expert Techniques is all about nondestructive workflow and releases in September Download the Adobe Lightroom Beta Now! Designed by photographers for photographers, Adobe Lightroom is being developed to help solve your unique workflow challenges. If you want to experience the Lightroom public beta, you can download it right now: From Darkroom to Lightroom 21

22 Copyright From Darkroom to Lightroom by Ken Milburn Copyright 2006 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Not for redistribution without permission from O'Reilly Media, Inc. From Darkroom to Lightroom 22