Jeremey's Weblog

Lightroom 2 Addendum: Details

I wanted to follow up on my Lightroom 2 first look post with some additional details and screenshots.

A word about the screenshots... the full shots are reduced from my full screen size to 1500 pixels wide. Each 500 pixel image in this post is linked to the full version, click it and it'll open in a new window. The sharpening comparison shots are PNGs so that JPEG artifacts won't fool with the results. Apologies if you have a braindead browser (older IE) that doesn't handle PNG properly. The 3-up images are JPEGs, linked to 100% crop PNG versions (not all that much larger, but without any artifacts from resizing or JPEG compression)... again, click on them for a new window. The 4-up PNG of the 640 pixel output is small enough to fit on this page.

First, here's a screenshot of the develop module:

Second, the selective editing user interface, the white circles on the image represent handles to separate selective edits, in roughly the vicinity that they were made... very nicely done:

You can click on a circle to select that edit and hitting Delete will delete it. Nice! When you do mouse over a circle (with a delay) or click on one, you see the mask you made:

For grins, here are before and after images showing some dodging of the head, light burning of the eyes, and clarity added to the eyes. The left image is before, the right image is after.

 

Switching gears a little... one of the more interesting features of Lightroom 2 is output sharpening on any export, as part of the export dialog:

Here are some comparisons of the output sharpening results... first, Judah's eye, exporting to JPEG, 80% quality, sRGB, full size... left to right you see Low, Medium, and High sharpening (click for 100% view):

Second, Judah's sleeve, same as above:

Lastly, here is the sharpening applied to a 640 pixel export (i.e. exported from Lightroom at 640 pixels). Upper left is NO sharpening, upper right is Low, lower left is Medium, and lower right is High:

Cool stuff!

Technorati Tags:
photography, photoshop, lightroom, lightroom 2

Lightroom 2 First Look

Adobe released a beta of Lightroom 2 this week, and it's very cool. The Develop module just keeps getting better and better. A few highlights of the new/fixed stuff:

• Non-destructive dodge and burn
• Other non-destructive brushes like clarity (!)
• Much better Photoshop integration (you can open the RAW file as a smart object to allow for later re-editing of the RAW settings)
• Post-crop vignette tool (finally)
• Smart collections

I imported the images from my "6 months old" shoot w/ Judah as a test. Lightroom doesn't have a managed library concept like Aperture does, so I have to get past the less abstracted file management model... so initially, as is always the case with Lightroom, I'm a little irritated with the import process. I REALLY like the project model in Aperture, and after importing into Lightroom, I don't feel like I know where my images are.

Projects make sense to me, why Lightroom has yet to have a mode where you work with projects and not folders on a disk (even if they are folders on a disk) I don't know. I'm fairly certain that I could make the folder model work like projects, but I think I'd be spending a fair bit of effort to do so.

Lightroom's Develop module is fabulous. It is definitely the strongest piece of the application. The non-destructive selective editing brushes (dodge and burn, clarity, etc.) are excellent, and fact that they're non-destructive is a big win over Aperture 2.1's dodge and burn controls (though Aperture's mechanism is generic and extensible by third parties, I'm not sure that Lightroom's is... but Photoshop is Lightroom's extensible editor anyway).

The quality of the RAW processing is excellent... I probably have a hair-thin preference for Aperture's renderings, they're better in the red channel IMO, but the difference is slight.

The other feature I've tried (so far) is the web gallery. I like Lightroom's HTML web galleries (the Flash galleries are unusable, IMO, because Flash itself ignores ICC color profiles). However, I want some kind of permanence to a gallery. I want to create it, name it, and keep it around, to add to later (or whatever). Aperture handles this very nicely and Lightroom doesn't handle it at all. I can cobble together the same effect from creating a collection for the gallery, and then also creating a web gallery preset so that I can reproduce the settings later... but this is hardly "creating a gallery" which I can later modify.

I guess it boils down to web galleries being one-offs in Lightroom, and an integrated feature in Aperture. I prefer the Aperture way by far.

Overall, Lightroom 2 is very compelling as a digital darkroom, but a bit disappointing as a workflow tool IMO. I admit that I may not be "getting it" and I can do everything I want, but it isn't clear to me and because it isn't clear, it doesn't work for me. But I know Lightroom works for a lot of people, so it's more a matter of workflow taste.

Having said that, the new develop features are so compelling that I might consider buying Lightroom anyway, especially if they price it at $199 (where Aperture is).

This is really a 'first look' review... I'll follow up when I've had a lot more time to spend in the app.

Technorati Tags:
lightroom, workflow, lightroom 2, adobe, photography

More Lightroom Beta 4

I've been using beta 4 more now and I'm really liking it. There are a couple new features and notes that aren't obvious at first glance:

• On-photo tone curve adjustment... just mouse over a tone you want to tweak and hit the up and down arrow keys, the corresponding tonal range gets a 5 point boost or cut
• In-histogram adustment... you can adjust the basic exposure settings directly from the histogram
• Brightness/contrast are pre-tone-curve now

I'm sure there are more. The first two are just really nice UI features, very convenient and intuitive. The third is of mixed value, IMO, but it is more like Camera Raw which appears to be the goal. I will say this... once I had a pretty good tone curve on a B&W, it was very sweet to just turn up the contrast with the contrast slider, leaving the tone curve as it was.

It seems like maybe the controls will require (or at least make possible) a few more "inside tricks" than the beta 3 controls did... the beta 3 controls were simpler to me... but I think these are more flexible and I love the four zones (instead of 3). By "inside tricks" I mean that producing optimal images might rely on knowing more about the processing pipeline than is immediately obvious in the UI. For instance, it isn't clear when brightness and contrast apply, or when the ACR curve is applied, and what the relationship between those functions and the tone curve is in terms of when to do what for what effect.

I've used the fill light feature more and it's pretty effective. It had an especially useful effect on a portrait I shot where the background came out a little darker and flatter than I wanted. The vibrancy control is brilliant, it does what you want saturation to do without doing what you don't want saturation to do (is that english?).

All in all, good stuff... I'm liking it. I don't find the controls as intuitive, again, and I miss the compression sliders... I don't see anything in beta 4 that produces the same result as those. Maybe those could reappear in an advanced panel... that would keep the confusion down but also provide the functionality.

Lightroom Beta 4!

Adobe Lightroom beta 4 is out. Woohoo! There are some significant changes, which I'll try to capture some of here. First they've gone to a darker gray UI background in most places and I think I like it. It's more like the Apple 'pro app' look. The largest changes appear to be in the develop module (so far), particularly the tone curve and a few new controls. I'm not completely sold on the new tone curve controls, but in fairness I haven't used them much yet. My concern is primarily over the loss of the compression controls... maybe those are still there in some other form. OK, here's the main exposure and tone curve stuff:

The curve is separated into four sections, highlights, lights, darks, and shadows. You can control the dividing line between each and obviously the value of each. There are also brightness and contrast sliders that do not appear as connected to the tone curve as they were in beta 3, which at this point seems a shame (but again, I haven't had much time with it). The separate lights and darks sections seem like a really good idea.

One huge addition in this release is constant feedback on where a tone in your image lies on the curve, as highlighted here (with mouse over part of the image):

That's much needed and pretty sweet.

There are several new controls in the Basic section also... notably Recovery, Fill Light, and Vibrance. Vibrance is very exciting, it's basically a smart saturation that tries to saturate without blowing out already saturated colors and without murdering flesh tones. I'm liking it a lot so far.

Recovery is a highlight recovery tool for overexposed or blown out images... I haven't used it enough yet to really comment other than to say that the idea is definitely very cool. Fill Light appears to bring some brightness into the darks range on the tone curve, but I haven't used this at all yet except to slide it around and see what happened. So no comment other than it sounds interesting.

Converting to black and white is cosmetically different in that a photo now has two modes: color and grayscale. At this point it appears that the two modes share a tone curve and basic exposure settings... but maybe they'll be separate in the future? Clicking "grayscale" gets you a grayscale image and the grayscale mixer panel appears... I'm not sure the value of this UI change unless it's to make room for separate tonal controls for grayscale and color versions of the photo. That would be awesome, I would use it instantly.

The web module is improved at least in its default template which dispenses with the silly mid-size mode and just goes with thumbnails and image. The slideshow module is disappointing in that there appears to be no way to do a Flash export, only PDF, which Lightroom makes sure to explain will not have your transitions or music. What's the point, then?

Overall this looks like a good update, but I'll reserve more opinion for when I've had more time with the develop module controls. It is definitely disappointing to have no significant improvement to the basically broken slideshow module (broken for export, which is what I'd want it for primarily).

UPDATE: see my next post: More Lightroom Beta 4

Mac Pro and Lightroom Update

I've been putting the Mac Pro to good use with Adobe Lightroom. The machine is fast enough that Lightroom (still a beta and definitely not optimized) runs very nicely. I'm importing lots of old images that I previously had cataloged in iView MediaPro. Images in iView just aren't very useful because they're not immediately accessible. I think Lightroom and Aperture are going to finally put to death all of the arcane workflows people have been getting by with.

From now on I'll be importing directly into Lightroom, and it automatically creates a backup copy of the imported files on my external drive. My Lightroom library automatically gets backed up once a week. What else do I need?

I do look forward to performance optimizations (and fixing the incessant checking of thumbnails), but as far as I'm concerned Lightroom is good to go on the Mac Pro.