Hello! For those that don't know me, my name is David Park and I'm a junior in Kairos (was previously in a2f Blue). I've been doing photography for about a year now and I'm going to give a quick introduction to Adobe Lightroom (LR).
The purpose of this post is two-fold.
- Explain my workflow in post-processing (by which I mean everything between taking the picture and making it available to the public).
- Give some of my subjective feedback on Adobe Lightroom in light of my experience with iPhoto and Picasa (which are free alternatives programs like Lightroom or Aperture).
My Workflow.
Lightroom is different from photoshop in that it was created to be more of a workflow and organizational tool than anything else.
You can see on the top right the five modules (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web). I usually only use the first two which organizes your photos and edits them (respectively). The above screenshot shows the Library module. The folders you see to the left are exactly how the folders are also set up on your computer, which means when you make changes in Lightroom, the changes will be reflected in Finder or Windows Explorer.
Lightroom makes it pretty easy to import your images. It's just a matter of plugging in your camera and clicking import.
After importing my images, I make an initial visual scan of all my pictures. The awesome thing about Lightroom is that it allows you to easily flag your pictures either as Pick, Unflagged, or Rejected (using the hotkeys P, U, and X). After going through it once, Command+Delete will delete all the "Rejected" photos, clearing up your hard drive of unwanted pictures. You can already see how Lightroom would help in organizing photos. There are also a bunch of other keywording, tagging, and other labeling options available in Library mode that I don't use.
The above screenshot shows you what the Develop module looks like. The left sidebar has a bunch of presets that come with Lighroom. You also have the option of creating your own presets. Basically if you click on a preset, it changes the sliders on the right to whatever you chose that preset to be beforehand. The sliders to the right are the brunt of the editing that Lightroom allows you to do. They're taken from Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for those of you familiar with that plugin.
From this point on, I'll take you through the editing of this image (I chose a JPEG though I shoot exclusively in RAW. I think a lot of people still use JPEG so I'll work with the limitations of JPEG. The JPEG vs. RAW discussion is another discussion that's worth a whole new post).
Here's the original unedited JPEG. In all pictures, I check composition, white balance, and exposure.
- Composition: The question is... should I rotate or crop this photo? In this photo I chose not to do anything.
- White balance: My first thought is "it's good enough." Unless the white balance is really off or unless I'm trying to intentionally make it warm or cold, I sometimes just leave this until after I work on exposure. I may want to make this picture a bit warmer, but for now I'll leave it as is.
- Exposure: When I took this, the baby was in the shade and the background, which happens to be the ground, was in the sun so this left the baby underexposed. I want to increase the exposure to properly expose the baby.
Since the background on the picture is well exposed, just increasing the exposure will completely blow out the background. So instead, I pushed up the fill light slider which lightens up the darker areas. I also increased the "recovery" slider which takes bright highlights (the background) and makes them darker. This results in a very "washed out" looking image since the contrast (difference between darks and lights) has effectively been reduced. To compensate, I increased the contrast slider also.
Changing the sliders can often cause colors to look unnatural and in this case, I wanted to take away some of the color that came in because of increasing contrast. So I lowered the vibrance slider (this would be equivalent of decreasing saturation on the new iPhoto and checking "avoid saturating skin tones." In addition, I increased the clarity, which adds more detail and looks the picture look a bit more "gritty" (this is called "definition" in iPhoto).
And with those adjustments here is the final image:
The great thing about Lightroom is that you can take specific edits that you did on an image and save them as a preset. You can also easily do batch editing. For example, if I took pictures of an indoor event and had to consistently underexpose and had incorrect white balance, then I can just edit one picture to correct exposure and white balance and then batch edit the rest, no matter how many there are.
Side note: all the edits I did on this picture, I kept limited to edits you could replicate in free programs such as Picasa and iPhoto. I'll write another post later on showing you the edits I did using the more powerful tools in Lightroom which is what gave me this picture:
However, I do want to say that I believe the Lightroom basic adjustments work better than either iPhoto or Picasas. That is to say that if you did the same exact adjustments using iPhoto, you wouldn't get the same result. Of course, the saying "you get what you pay for" does stand even in the case of post-processing. I'm really happy with Lightroom and what I can do with it and I "can't go back to iPhoto or Picasa" because I've grown used to it. However, whatever program you use, it's about getting used to that program (iPhoto '09 is actually VERY powerful for a free program). That is all for now!
