Tag Archives: Lightroom

'Alo alo… an important 1D MkIV tip

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For those of you lucky enough to have a 1D Mark IV, here as a follow-up to my review a few days ago is another tip.

Canon by default has the “Auto Light Optimizer” set to “ON”, and this is a custom function you may well miss.

If you shoot RAW (as you really ought to), go into custom functions II, function 4, and take that off zero (0=”standard” Auto Lighting Optimizer” setting) and turn that to custom setting 3 (“Disable”).

What does ALO do to your RAW image? Nothing. And you shoot RAW. So why does it matter? Here’s why.

If you set ALO to ON, your camera will, where necessary, apply “fill light” to the data that comes from the sensor, and use the result to make its little embedded JPG. That will make dark areas lighter.

And that little embedded JPG is what you see on the back of your camera.

So when you look, you will see a well-exposed picture. Happily, you shoot more. But in fact, unbeknownst to you, the actual data is darker. You may well be underexposing the dark areas of your picture!  And like me. you wonder why when you import your image into Lightroom (which does not honour that same “fill light” setting) it looks so much darker than on the camera. Or rather, you wonder why the histograms are so different (you should probably not judge exposure just by the image on the LCD).

So when you turn ALO off, the camera no longer shows you an “enhanced mini JPG”; instead, it shows something closer to the real RAW image. And if that is dark, you can fix it by adding light, not by tweaking bits (which can add noise).

UPDATE: Chuck Westfall agrees. See the comment below.

More Black and White tips

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I love black and white, so I thought you might too – in which case you might be interested in the following Quick Tips:

  1. Use B&W when the image is too grainy. In B&W pictures, grain can add, rather than detract – or at least it is less distracting.
  2. Set your camera to B&W – even if you shoot RAW. It will not have any effect on the RAW image (at least, no permanent effect), but you will see what you are getting on your LCD display.
  3. If you shot JPG, shoot in Adobe colour, and convert to B&W later.
  4. Use Lightroom rather than other software to convert. Use the Lightroom Develop module’s HSL/Color/Grayscale tool.
  5. In this tool clock on Grayscale and adjust. Lightroom has a great way of doing the standard conversion.
  6. And now, still in that tool, adjust to taste. Add to the “red” and “orange” slider in order to make skin better. Use other controls as needed to add contrast between your subject and the background.

As an illustration, here is an image converted automatically:

IMG_1080

Here, I have butchered it (and me – ouch) by dragging ‘orange’ and ‘yellow’ down:

IMG_1080-2

Here, I have done more of an appropriate conversion:

IMG_1080-3

See what I mean? This is equivalent to the old red-yellow-green filters. Except much more interactive and much simpler.

Picture Styles: useful?

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BKKphotographer asks:

“Are Canon’s Picture Styles important in your workflow? Do you, for example, create your own and download them to your cameras? I started to get interested in them, until I started using Lightroom. LR does not understand them per se but it attempts to approximate the standard Canon styles with its Camera Calibration Profiles.

If I make my own Picture Style and use it on my camera it gets lost when I import to Lightroom. I think they are only useful in a workflow that is based on Canon Digital Photo Professional.

I find that whole subject very confusing – for example how those profiles relate to LR’s Develop Presets.

I think this area is a prime candidate for your clear concise explanatory skills!”

Well, I’ll do my best. Although In fact I think you are doing very well yourself, in the explanation above.

What are Picture Styles?

Camera Picture Styles are ways to handle (a.k.a. edit) the information that comes from your sensor. You can set these styles on your camera. Contrast, sharpening, colour balance, saturation, even curves are all part of such a style. If, for example, you set your in-camera style to “Landscape”, you get sharper images, with a tad more contrast and ever so slightly enhanced blues and greens. Portrait Style means less sharpness (who wants to emphasise wrinkles!). In a sense, these Picture Styles are like choosing a particular film.

picstyles

What happens to you image in camera?

If you shoot JPG, your chosen Picture Styles settings are applied to the sensor information, and the resulting JPG has them incorporated (e.g. it has enhanced blues and greens, and is sharpened).

But if on the other hand you shoot RAW, the style settings are not “applied” – instead, they are “attached”. (The RAW file contains a field that says “oh, and the user set the camera to Landscape Style when he took this picture). It is then up to the software you use at the other end (on your PC or Mac) to apply the settings.

What happens afterward?

If you use Canon DPP (Digital Photo Professional), it knows the camera’s built-in Picture Styles. So if it sees a RAW image with style “landscape” set in the attached info, it knows exactly how to apply that style. And it automatically does that, so the RAW image looks the way it looks on the back of the camera.

If on the other hand you use Lightroom, or Photoshop, or some other software, it does not know the exact meaning of Canon’s “Landscape Style”. Your camera maker, of course, in its usual controlling manner, does not share this information. (Hey – why would you share stuff that would make your photos better and hence your cameras more popular!)

So now what?

So now you have to do it yourself in software. Take the unaltered file, then enhance the sharpness, apply the right contrast, and so on. This is inconvenient. So Lightroom attempts to do it for you. Adobe has built in (for RAW files for some, but not all, cameras) its own camera-specific develop settings. When I import an image from my 1D, for instance, I can now set it to “Camera Landscape”. That approximates the in-camera setting very well.

But when you have made your own Picture Styles and uploaded those to the camera, as indeed you can, then these are not known at all to Lightroom, so you have to make your own develop settings in Lightroom to mimic your self-developer camera Picture Styles. You can – but is it worth it? It would take a lot of time.

So what does Michael think?

I think Picture Styles are only really worth it if you stick to DPP. I also think that if you shoot RAW,  the main advantage of these Styles is “how you see the image on the back of your LCD” and “how quickly you get to an OK-looking JPG later”. Other than that, why not just do it on  your computer? The Lightroom styles are a good approximation of the Canon styles, I feel.

Important note: I do think it is very important when importing into Lightroom to use the “Camera Normal” (or if you wish, “Camera Landscape”, etc) develop setting (you can do that automatically upon import, or set it later in the Develop Module), and not ACR (the Adobe Camera Raw profile, which does not look as good). When I show photographers this, and the resulting significantly better colours, they usually say “wow!”

So if you ask me “are Picture Styles important to you” I would say “yes – I only set them, or an approximation to them, in software later”. I can do it while shooting but find I might as well save myself the time and do it later.

I could of course write my own, as you have and upload those to the camera, and then approximate them in Lightroom as well. I commend anyone who does – but I have insufficient time to do it myself.

Does that help?

7D – post two

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Okay… so I own a brick, until Adobe or Canon start waking up and fixing the fact that Lightroom, my core tool, cannot yet properly read 7D images. They come up noisy and with awful colour, using a “beta” camera profile and no way to select another. Adobe say they “hope” to get a fix for this into the next update (when? They say they are a long way off). See here.

MVWS9808

Also, I just figured out that movies are ignored by Lightroom. Fair enough but since I use Lightroom to copy stuff off my memory card, which is then ejected and formatted (by me), that ignoring is not clever better would be to copy them for me to some location.

Now I lost the family videos I made yesterday. That is regrettable. Now I need to, from now on, load CF cards into two different apps. Not very desirable – Lightroom lives by the fact it’s the one tool I use for my entire practice, and it is failing here on two counts.

Lightroom file setup suggestion

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A quick post today.

Adobe Lightroom has taken over most photographers’ post-production work. Myself included. Although Lightroom, an application for managing and editing and post-producing your images, takes a few days to learn, this is time well spent. Your post-production time (the time spent on your pictures after you get home) will be cut in half – or better. I recommend it.

When I teach Lightroom, people often ask me “how do you set it up?” – especially with regard to backups. Safety is everything.

So I thought that I might share my suggested file locations and backup methods with you here. Here’s how I do it.

  1. Catalog: The main Lightroom Catalog (which I renamed to something including my name, i.e. MVWPhoto.lrcat) lives on my main computer (in my case, a Mac). That’s standard.
  2. Photos: The actual images (raw) live on an external USB drive, in a folder called “PHOTOGRAPHY” (and within that, per year and then per date). New images go there too. That’s better than on my Mac.
  3. Catalog backups: I make a copy of the catalog every day (you can set up Lightroom that way, in Preferences). That copy also goes to the external drive (in a folder called “LR backups”).
  4. Photo backup: The external drive gets backed up to another external drive.I do this manually every day, or after every import.

To back up the first external disk (Iomega-1TB-1)  to the second (Iomega-1TB-2), I run the following little script:

#Photo disk sync
rsync -a –verbose –progress –stats –delete /Volumes/Iomega-1TB-1/PHOTOGRAPHY/ /Volumes/Iomega-1TB-2/PHOTOGRAPHY/

If you don’t know how to create or run a command line script, just get a computer person to help you with it. It’s that simple!