Adobe Lightroom is the only game in town.

Hence, Adobe has zero incentive to fix large bugs. Like this apparent bug: slideshow export fails if both portrait and landscape mode slides are included. It is incredible that a corporation would let a huge bug like that just sit there, but I too cannot make an export of a slideshow that contains both portrait and landscape images. It just hangs at 1% or thereabouts.

On top of that, Adobe tries to force everyone to sign up for the Creative Suite, i.e. online software as a service with regular payments, and pay at least double what you would pay for a simple app.

Don’t be evil, anyone? Adobe does not even pretend to not want to be evil. The global dislike of corporations really is not a surprise, when you look at this.

Personally, I would not mind paying fair prices for Lightroom. Even high prices. But being manipulated and ignored at the same time by a huge corporation leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

As I said in 2016: Today, I present to you an excerpt from my classes at Sheridan College and from my private classes. The subject: “Should I habitually delete my bad pictures?”

And the answer, my photographing friends, is a strong “no”. Deleting, whether “from the camera”, “afterward”, or “instead of formatting”, is always unwise!

So why is that? Let’s look at all three reasons in turn.

[A] Why not delete from your camera?

Well,

• First of all, it is a waste of time. When you spend your time deleting images, that means that you are “chimping”, i.e. looking at the images instead of looking at the things you are photographing! You should use the time you have on location to be at that location.
• Also, by all this looking you are wasting valuable battery power; power you may well need later on in the day.
• And you are losing learning opportunities: why exactly were they bad? The EXIF data usually shows you why—and without the image you may never know.
• It may be As Good As It Gets: The bad image of uncle Joe may be the last image you have of him.
• You may be mistaken: Often, you cannot really tell how good or bad the image actually is.
• And finally, when you make a habit of deleting, you will delete the wrong image soon enough. Guaranteed. Law of nature.

[B] OK. So why not delete afterward?

This too is simple once you think it over…

• Statistics, is one reason. “How many pictures do you take with wide angle lenses? What proportion if your images is out of focus? How many photos has your camera taken? All these are questions you cannot answer if you have deleted bad images.
• As before: maybe it’s the only picture you will ever get of this person, even if it is out of focus. I would love too have an out of focus or badly composed picture of Lee Harvey Oswald the day before he shot the president.
• Processing techniques improve with every iteration of Lightroom/ACR. Maybe that terrible image will be usable 10 years from now.
• They don’t matter. The drawback of “they get in the way and slow things down or make my photos hard to work with” no longer holds at all with modern image resource management tools like Adobe Lightroom.

So you use 1TB of your 8TB drive for bad stuff. Who cares! Storage is cheap today.

[C] OK then. But why not “delete the card when importing”, or “delete after use”?

• Because formatting is much, much better than merely marking as deleted (that is all that happens when you “delete”) . It removes lost clusters, fragmentation, and all the other disk error that occur naturally over time on every disk, even virtual disks. Formatting fixes all these and is much safer. It actually deletes.
• “Deleting when importing” is also unsafe because “what if the import fails”?

But remember, friends, do not format until you have made at least one backup of your images: one main copy, and one backup on other media. All hard drives fail—then question is when, not whether.

So my conclusion: there are lots of reasons to not delete your work. Leave all the bad images intact; format card after backup.

Trust me on this. You will be happy you listened, one day.

Next question.

Q: Should I format the memory card? And where?

A: Yes. After you copy the pictures to a computer and make a backup, and only then: put the card back into the camera and format it. Yes, in the camera, not in the computer. And every time. After your pictures are backed up.

‘Nuff said.

Michael

Shoot RAW? Or JPG? Or both?

I would generally say: “Shoot only RAW”. Why not? It’s just another format.

But why could you do RAW+JPG, or just JPG? What would be valid reasons?

Here are a few.

1. You want to be sure that you have the shot – a pic could be corrupt, but if you have two you may be OK.
2. You may need to print a copy, like on a printer, straight from the card
3. You have to upload loads of pictures quickly, like for a newspaper shoot of a sports match
4. You want backups as in the first example, but you have two memory cards and can write to both at the same time. Every time I shoot, I save RAW to card 1, and JPG to card 2 – that way card 2 can be a 32GB while card 1 is a 64 GB.
5. You want to compare the camera’s treatment of the raw data with your computer’s.

So a you see, there’s quite a few valid reasons. When you see super simple solutions on the Internet, like “Authority Figure X says ‘shoot RAW only” – well, the world may not in fact be that simple. Be wary of simplicity, while you chase it at the same time, because “less is more”.

One of the most spectacular changes in photography over the past decade has been the emergence of Adobe Lightroom (officially called “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”) as the tool for photo asset management, editing and production for everyone from beginners to pros.

Lightroom was conceived as an additional utility that would make “managing your photos” easier.  But it has become much more: rather than just a utility, it is now the centre of a professional workflow that can save 80% of the time you used to take before for the same job. A wedding that took me 8 days to finish in Photoshop now takes a day.

So what does Lightroom do more, or better, than Photoshop?

The question is a little misleading. They are different beasts, aimed at different tasks. Photoshop is for illustrators that need to spend an hour on one photo; Lightroom is for photographers who need to do 100 photos an hour. Nevertheless, they both overlap to some extent: both offer some asset management (using Bridge, in Photoshop’s case), editing, and some production.

Where Lightroom shines is in its practicality. Lightroom offers:

• Non destructive editing. Your original photo is never touched.
• The RAW conversion does not happen until the very end, when you export or print an image, so you can change your mind about any setting at all times.
• Lightroom offers really, really solid asset management. Even if like me you manage a quarter of a million images, you can rank, rate, search, organize, sort, rename, and a gazillion other things to your hearts content.
• Practicality. A typical shortcut in Lightroom is, let’s say, “D” for “Develop”. Not, as in most apps, “Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D”, or some such hard to remember combination.
• Great editing tools for photographers. True, you cannot move a head from one torso to the next, but I consider those functions “illustrator functions”. For what photographers do it is excellent. Especially if you know “the tricks”.
• It works your way – unlike most apps, where you have to work the app’s way.
• Everything you do can be undone, or redone differently, so you never have to be afraid that you are setting things up incorrectly, for instance. You can always re-do it a different way.
• Lightroom is an excellent production tool. Exporting, printing (straight from Lightroom to your paper profile; not via some intermediate file), making web sites: it’s all included, and it has the functions you need.

By now, with Lightroom 6, it is mature and works the way it should.

But you do need to learn it. And like with so much software, it’s the little “A-ha” things; the tips and tricks; the “I had no idea this worked that way” things that makes you a star.

Well, good news. I am teaching Lightroom on 26 February and March 4. In Brantford, Ontario (just 20 minutes west of Hamilton). Morning on both days is “File organization”; afternoon is “Editing”.  So you can take one or two, on either day. Limited to four students each time (plus myself =5).

You can book on meetup.com at https://www.meetup.com/Brantford-Photography-School/ (get a free account, join the group, and book); or you can contact me separately and book in person. But do it soon: as said, space is limited.

Also, stay tuned for other courses in Brantford and in Toronto in the next few months. Unshackle yourself and unleash your creativity!

When it comes to finishing pictures (call it “finishing”, not “editing”) I adhere to a few rules.

• If it is news, only changes in colour, exposure and crop are allowed.
• If it is art, anything is allowed, but that said, I do the minimum.
• If it is portrait work, I am happy to lessen shadows, to lessen contrast in skin tones, and to lessen permanent blemishes, and I am OK with removing temporary blemishes such as pimples. But I do not remove permanent blemishes.

That last one is important. Read it carefully, and you see that I do not want to change people into what they are not. Not like this (and I have nothing against this particular software, I do not doubt that it is wonderful, but I really, really dislike this kind of advert):

“It does wonders to my pictures”? That means that either the photographer does not know how to light them properly, or she makes everyone into some kind of plastic thing that they are not.

And I think that this shows a lack of respect for the person. Like saying “you are too ugly to display as you are; we have to fix you first”. It also gives young women and men the idea that they do not meet society’s beauty requirements.