March 2014 - Digital Group - Lightroom

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
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March 2014 - Digital Group - Lightroom

Post by spb » Sat Mar 08, 2014 12:19 pm

We devoted the entire evening to our guest speaker, Phil Binks of Bodoni Systems in Watford. He spoke with great knowledge and enthusiasm about Lightroom 5's Develop Module and also how it can interwork with Photoshop.

Tutorials for Lightroom are well-covered on the web (for example here) but I did note the following points that seemed to be of particular interest or surprise to the audience;

- Whilst all adjustments are reversible, they do not rely upon being applied in a particular order. For this reason it is possible to re-visit any adjustment without impacting those applied later.

- The Clarity slider affects highlight contrast. It can be turned up for greater impact but when turned down, can be very effective to soften skin texture.

- Virtual Copies are useful to save a moment in time in the development of an image and occupy very little disk space.

- So-called 'Input sharpening' is applied to the raw file non-destructively. The sharpening masking feature can automatically limit sharpening to detailed areas only (eg not to clouds). Further output sharpening eg for projection or printing, can also be applied in Lightroom or Photoshop (where it will be destructive).

- Sensor spots are revealed as 'doughnut' shapes by the Visualise Spots feature, after which they can be removed and, if necessary, the removal can be automatically synchronised across many affected images.

Images can be transferred from Lightroom into Photoshop for editing and in this case, when saved, will automatically be saved back into the Lightroom catalogue.

A question on colour spaces when interworking between Lightroom and Photoshop Elements was left unresolved. Phil recommended ProPhoto RGB when interworking between Lightroom and Photoshop CS/CC.

Many thanks to Phil for an entertaining and inspiring evening.
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My subsequent thoughts now....

Lightroom clearly has many well-designed features but it's not a panacea for everyone. As we have discussed before, it may be especially suitable for photographers who want to optimise the image that they originally captured. It will also be particularly suitable for professionals and those who need to batch-process many images taken under similar lighting conditions.

An image editor such as Photoshop Elements is necessary for making significant changes to the original image, combining images, making creative changes, distortions, adding text or making many detailed corrections to image elements.

Roughly speaking, Although the interface is rather different, Lightroom equates to the Elements Organizer plus Adobe Camera Raw. It stops where the Photoshop editor begins. If you are going to invest a lot of time in learning one program it's important to make sure it's the right one for you!

These are complex programs and I have some pragmatic advice for beginners; avoid raw files and stick to jpgs until you have mastered the basics of your camera and software. Similarly, set everything to sRGB colour space and forget about this issue for the time-being. I believe that the benefits of other colour spaces are far out-weighed by their inherent dangers. Prophoto RGB is so large that it encompasses colours beyond human perception (!) whereas your screen, your printer, the club projector and the internet are limited to sRGB (at best).

As Phil said, "the best software is the one that you know". If you aim to take your images purely in the camera and/or you need sophisticated image management software, then Lightroom is a great product. If you will be going beyond the camera image in any way, you will need an Image Editor such as Photoshop Elements and when combined with a viewer (such as Faststone) or an organiser (such as the Elements Organizer), Lightroom is superfluous (burn me at the stake if you like).

Hopefully Adobe will eventually combine these powerhouse programs into one, and this issue will go away.

Cheers, Steve

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