Heart of Stone Studio Blog

The Scoop on Adobe Lightroom

I have designed and built my 75-page website, Heart of Stone Studio.com, all by myself. Every week, I post an average of fifty new gemstones to the site that are purchased by jewelry artists and collectors. Until recently, I was doing all the photography myself, which included editing of photos of stones to make sure that the depiction of each stone, especially color, was accurate.

I had thought that Photoshop was the ultimate photo editing program, until I saw Adobe Lightroom on my friend Doug Von Gausig's computer. Doug is a professional photographer (and also mayor of our neighboring town of Clarkdale, AZ), who takes thousands of photos every week and uses Lightroom to organize and edit them.  When he showed me what Lightroom could do, I was immediately hooked. I went out and bought the program,then took a workshop to begin to better understand how to use it. 

The Lightroom working screen is a very sexy black that you can make even more attractive by adding your own personalized logo and company name. Photographers do this because Lightroom is not just a behind-the-scenes type of program; it also can be used create and show very slick slide presentations, with music even, to clients. You can also use Lightroom to set up your photos on a web page. And of course, it's also helpful in preparing to print photos. So it's a real start-to-finish type of program.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. If you've read my previous posts about Adobe Bridge, you'll have an idea of what Lightroom can do because it does all of the things that Bridge does, except that photos have to be imported into Lightroom before you can work with them. (And, Lightroom is an independent program that you have to purchase separately.)

Like Bridge, Lightroom has a main work area with a "filmstrip" of smaller images running across the bottom, showing you everything that you have in a folder. Lightroom is different in that it has two main working modes: "Library" and "Develop."  The Library mode is where you do the main importing, organizing, and exporting, although it also has some quick editing features.

But it's the Develop mode that's really neat: Switch to "Develop," and Lightroom presents you with the same main viewing area, only now you get an expandable column on your right. This is where you can easily access and adjust all the main aspects of a photo--tint, temperature, exposure, white balance, color, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, etc.--just by scrolling up and down and using your mouse to move a point along each slider (scale). You can even select individual colors and instantly adjust them to your liking.

Like Photoshop, Lightroom has a tone curve, that infamous graph with the diagonal line across it. In my opinion, Lightroom's tone curve is more user-friendly--Once you've got it open, you can click and hold on any area of the photo and, using your mouse, "slide" the cursor up or down right on the image to lighten or darken all the tones matching that of the area you've selected. If you want to fine-tune your changes, you can then go over to the sliders in the right column and adjust them individually. You can adjust color and contrast in the same way. In Lightroom 2, you can even replace a washed-out sky using a graduated filter that is easily adjustable. The only thing you can't do is outline (isolate) and select an area of an image to change--That you would have to do in Photoshop. And, as mentioned before, Lightroom doesn't do layers.

But as I don't work often with layers, I'm enchanted with Lightroom. What's really neat is that Lightroom enables you to set up your "before" and "after" images in a split screen so you can compare what you've changed with the original. The left (history) column on the screen keeps track of every change you make, so if you don't like it, you can click on an earlier step to undo a certain change.

The thing I like best about Lightroom is that it allows you to make changes to multiple images at once. You can do this two ways. One is by the Copy and Paste buttons: Say you have a dozen photos that you shot indoors, all of which need to be lightened and have their white balance corrected so that they're not all greenish from the overhead flourescent lighting. You can select one representative photo, correct the white balance with a single click, make your other adjustments, then hit the "Copy" button, which makes a complete copy of your changes. You can then select one, some or all of the other photos and hit the "Paste" button, and they'll all instantly be adjusted exactly the same way.

Another way to do this is to pre-select all the similar problem photos by highlighting them, make your changes on one photo, then click the "Sync" button, and all will be immediately synchronized and adjusted the same way. Can you imagine how this will speed up your work flow? It's fabulous!

The main thing that makes Lightroom responsive and just plain fast is that, believe it or not, even though you've imported your photos into Lightroom, it's not your actual photos that you see on the Lightroom screen. They're not really sitting backstage in the program. They're virtual! And all the editing changes you make in Lightroom, well, they're virtual, too. They're just a set of instructions that Lightroom saves and assigns to that particular photo file. This is so cool because it means that even though you have tons of photos copied into Lightroom, because they're only data files, not real photos, they take up hardly any room on your computer.

That means that, despite what you do inside Lightroom, your original photos--be they jpegs, tiffs, or even Raw images--are sitting untouched in another folder on your computer. The virtual changes that you make in Lightroom become real when you go back to the "Library" mode and hit "Export." Then you're presented with dialogue boxes that allow you to save your changed virtual photos as real .jpg, .tiff, or .xmp files for Camera Raw photos, and you can assign them new file names if you want, or over-write and change your existing jpg and tiff photo files. So when you're done with the Export, you can close out Lightroom and go to your target folder and there are your photos, all cleaned up, corrected, and perfect.

The capabilities I've mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Lightroom can do. Again, this program is not for someone who just wants to print quick pix for the family photo album. But it is a wonderful new tool for those of us who have lots of photos to review and adjust. If it's something you're interested in, I suggest dropping by Adobe.com, where you can sign up for a free 30-day trial download.

 

Adobe Bridge: An introduction

     Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom are, at their roots, sorting programs. They allow you to review lots of photos at once and organize them. But they also do so much more. You can use either program to edit your photos, and if you hit Control-R (Command-R in Macs) while you're in Bridge, it will take you to a special page where you can quickly edit Camera Raw photos and save them any way you want, in any folder you want.

     In fact, these programs seem so similar that I asked our workshop teacher, Markus Pfitzner, why we had to learn both. Here's essentially what he explained: Adobe Bridge allows you to quickly access any photo file without having to go through the extra step of importing it. Just select the folder you want to see, and Bridge opens all the photos in it for you. Plus, you can do most of your photo editing right in Bridge, although it can't do selections, masks, and layers like Photoshop does.

  Bridge is linked with Adobe Photoshop, which means that it's automatically installed when you install Photoshop onto your computer. That also means that a double click on a photo displayed in Bridge will open that image in Photoshop, and conversely, when you're already in Photoshop, hitting Control+Alt+O (Browse) will open Bridge.

    You can set up Bridge to label each photo and add copyright information to it (which is crucial if you're sending it out into the world), plus, you can add keywords. Keywords are little descriptive tags that you type in about that photo. For example, I have some of the flower shots that I took at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens on my Heart of Stone Studio website (to drop by and take a look at them, click here: Judy's Photos). The Dahlia photos I took could have been assigned keywords such as: dahlia, flower, garden, California, Mendocino, Botanical Gardens, etc.  Typing in keywords might seem like extra work to do just when you'd prefer to spend time admiring all your photos, but it's not so bad because Bridge and Lightroom will assign the same keywords instantly to a bunch of pictures if you select them ahead of time.

     And the absolutely coolest thing about keywords is that you can use them to search for and pull photos for you. Say you shot flowers like I did in Mendocino, but over the years you also shot them in Hawaii, Kew Gardens, Vermont and in your own backyard--but those photos are scattered around different folders on your computer. If you go to Bridge and do a keyword search and type in "flower", Bridge will rummage through all your files and pull up every photo of a flower that you've ever taken, assuming that you had entered in "flower" as a keyword for each of them. Isn't that neat?

    In addtion to organizing, labeling, and basic editing, Bridge also enables you to crop and size your photo before saving it, and gives you options which enable you to save a copy for your files and a smaller copy for e-mailing or posting to the Web. And it does all of this while hovering over your photo files like an alien spaceship, grabbing a hapless file here and there (at your command), making changes, and plopping it back wherever you direct. It's quick and easy.

    So, you say, if Bridge is this great and it comes free with Photoshop, then why should I consider investing in another program like Lightroom? "Ah," I answer, "there are lots of reasons, the main one being that Lightroom does everything Bridge does, but also does so much more..."

   And I'll discuss Lightroom in my next post.

What is Camera Raw and why do I care?

     The workshop I attended in Mendocino last weekend was based on Camera Raw. You might have heard this term bandied about...What exactly does it mean? Basically, it refers to an image that is taken using every part of a camera's sensor and not altered or edited in any way by the camera or its programming. You might have thought you're already doing that when you take a picture, but no, not when you're taking the usual JPEG photos.(You'll know you've taken a JPEG when you load your images onto your computer and each photo will have a file number followed by the following tag: ".jpg")

    JPEGS (pronounced Jay'-pegs) are the product of an editing program approved by a group of professional photographers and photo editors. What JPEGs do is edit an image down to a manageable file size so that it doesn't take up too much room on your memory card or computer. The editing is, simply put, automatic, based on a set of rules that reduce detail by grouping similarly-colored pixels together. For example, if you have a little area in your photo with two yellows that are very close in color, JPEG will go ahead and combine those into just one color yellow, thereby halving the amount of information coding needed in that area. Most of the time, this automatic editing is not especially noticeable, although there is one major drawback: Each time you save a JPEG on your computer, you apply the automatic editing program once again, and so that means that with each save, you lose information. That means that over multiple saves, edges within the image soften, the focus is not quite as crisp, and details are modified or even lost.

    Some photographers don't like that loss of information. If anything is going to be cut out or modified in their photos, they want to do it themselves, and be in control. That's where Camera Raw comes in. Camera Raw photos are exactly everything the camera saw when you pointed the lens and pushed the shutter button. The majority of family cameras are not equipped to shoot Camera Raw; only the fancier models do. (If you're in doubt, check out your user's handbook). Camera Raw photos have no editing, no compression, and no alterations beyond the aperture opening, shutter speed, and related settings that the photographer set the camera at.

   Now, if you're following what I've been saying, your next observation will be: "Well, with no editing and no compression, that means that the file size of each photo will be a lot larger than usual, right?" and you'll be absolutely correct: Camera Raw files are humongous. Fortunately, gigundo memory cards are coming down in price, as is the cost of additional memory for your hard drive, or even for external hard drives. And to serious photographers, it's worth it.

   This weekend was the first time I shot in Camera Raw, and to give you an idea of how much space Camera Raw takes up, I shot 262 photos and I still hadn't filled a 4Gig memory card. So the Raw photos aren't impossibly big.

But let me tell you some other things I learned about Camera Raw:

1. Camera Raw photos can NEVER be changed. Sure, you can delete them, but you can't alter their content. Well then, how do you edit them, you ask? Well, you need a professional-level photo editing program, such as Photoshop CS3, or Lightroom 2.

Here's how it works: You import a Camera Raw photo into one of those Photoshop programs, and as you edit it,  the program can be set up to save your editorial changes to what's called a "sidecar file," a little file with an ".xmp" tag that gets hooked onto the Raw file and travels around with it (on your sayso). When you open the Raw file, its sidecar .xmp file kicks in and applies your editorial changes, which you then see on your computer screen. Better yet, these programs also give you the option to either save your edited image as a JPEG or a TIFF (uncompressed) file, both of which can be easily read by your and other people's computers. But even with your new, edited JPEG, you'll still have that unchanged Raw photo stored on your computer. Or better yet, you can set up an external hard drive and store all your Raw images on that, like a museum archive.

2. This whole idea of storing unchanged Raw photos in an archive can be really appealing, except that there's one catch: The particular Camera Raw format you use is tied into the particular model of camera you're using, and five or ten years from now, especially if your camera model is discontinued, new versions of photo editing software may no longer recognize your camera's Raw images and you won't be able to open or edit them using the new software.

How do you get around this? One way is to set up your camera to take a Raw image and a JPEG image simultaneously. No extra clicks of the shutter; it's all done automatically--more professional cameras can be set to it easily, just look under your "Quality" topic on your camera's menu. You can edit either image, but save a master copy of your JPEG untouched as your long-term archive photo, because those will always be accessible.

Or, here's another idea: You can import your Raw images into Lightroom with the special instruction that copies them and converts them to digital negatives, or DNG format. The DNG format is very similar to Raw, except that it is considered "open source," which means that any program will be able to open it, now or later in the future. Once in the DNG format, your images can easily be edited and saved.

3. One last thing that I learned the hard way: Microsoft Windows won't be able to "see" your photos. In other words, they won't open up as photos in Windows Media Player or any of its other photo organizers. That's because your computer just sees your Raw images as batches of data; there's nothing to translate them into color pictures for you. So don't get crazy (like I did) when you can't see your Raw photos on your computer--You'll have to import them into a program like Photoshop CS3, Adobe Bridge CS3, or Lightroom 2, and then you'll be able to see and work with them.

That's the scoop on Camera Raw. Next, my take on Bridge and Lightroom.

   

About Adobe photo editing programs: The pros and cons of Photoshop

   I've recently returned from a photo-editing workshop at the Mendicino Art Center. Taught by Photoshop specialist and educator Markus Pfitzner, the workshop dealt with photographing pictures using the Camera Raw format, then importing, organizing, and editing them using two Adobe programs: Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom. I want to discuss the neat things I learned at this workshop.

    But first, I want to point out that the major photo editing program in use today is Adobe Photoshop. CS3 is the most recent version, and is by far the most powerful. You can buy a beginner's version of Photoshop, called Elements, for not much money at big box stores, but if you can at all afford it, I suggest making the investment in CS3. Even buying the previous version, CS2, online at websites like eBay would be a better investment than buying the much more limited Elements. I know of people who have a family member who is a faculty member or student and ask them to buy the educational version of CS3--It's essentially the same as the professional version, but at a fraction of the price.

   Photoshop is an incredibly impressive, amazing piece of software. You can edit photos with it, add type, and even convert your photographs to artworks because you can add texture, use brushes, layer and mask images--It's all there. Having sung Photoshop's praises, I will add that it is not a user-friendly program. I have often said that someone could get a Ph.D. just in Photoshop, and still not know everything there is to know about this program. So if you just want to crop and size photos for your family album, skip Photoshop and stick with the software that came with your camera. But if you are serious about your photography and want to really master digital photo editing, Photoshop is the way to go.

   Once you get the program, load it onto your computer, and open it up, it's pretty bewildering. Plus, what you see on your screen is just the tip of the iceberg. That's why I suggest you hunt down as many video tutorials as you can: Search your local library; check out eBay; borrow from friends, etc. Even one good tutorial on a CD will get you started moving your mouse around the space and getting an idea of which button does what.  After tutorials, check out books on Photoshop. Starting with the books was, for me, pretty overwhelming. Plus, I was impatient and just wanted to "get to it." That's why I suggest getting your feet wet by following a step-by-step video.

  All I ask is that you stick with it for several months. During that time, if you've given Adobe permission to send you information, you'll probably receive e-mail invitations to lecture and workshops. If the topic appeals and you can afford the time and registration cost, try one out. But be forewarned: The official Photoshop workshops offered in big cities like Phoenix routinely have 500 or more people attending, so you won't be getting any individualized attention. A better place for that is your local community college, university, or art center. By signing up for that level of workshop, you get the opportunity to have a Photoshop expert in the same room with you to answer your questions--which is worth its weight in gold.

    But once you've mastered the basics of Photoshop, you'll never want to use anything else. You'll see why it's the preferred choice of photographers, artists, illustrators, and web people.

    Next, spotlight on Camera Raw, Adobe Bridge, and Lightroom.