I use it almost exclusively. I import everything in to a few general categories and then organize by shoot and date. I'm not big on a lot of post processing so LR works fantastic for me, I go to PS if I need to stitch a pano or remove something big from the pic. LR is great for RAW and you can edit pretty much any aspect of the image, Adobe describes it best as a digital dark room. Let me know if you have any specific questions.
Chris, maybe I am way off base....but.... I'm a casual user of photo shop, but thru moves, computers, my job at sea, and life at home, I've got hard drives, zip drives, et al..... and photos everywhere.... I need to get organized... Apple has Iphoto, but seems difficult to use for organization.... Does Lightroom help with that as well.....? I'd like to build one big library from the hundreds of little ones... Thanks...
For organizing (not editing) you may also want to have a look at Googles Picasa - It's free and pretty darn powerful. The facial recognition stuff is worth it alone IMO and it's great at "finding" and indexing pictures spread all over the shop. Cheers, Ian
I took some star pics with my house in the pic as well. All the xmas light is way overblown compared to the rest of the images. How to I reduce it to look normally, if it is possible. Adjustment Brush in PS isn't giving me a nice result :-/
I've had it a little over a year now.. At first it seems like a large mountain to climb... It took about a month to not be intimidated , and I am still finding processes hidden within. Truly a remarkable tool as all 3 digitals that I have shoot Raw and I have not taken a shot out of raw since day one.. This is truly a crown of work in the Digital photo age! Highly recommend
I'll show you guys how I have my stuff set up. Right now everything is running off a 1TB Firewire 800 drive. The best way when you start is to get everything set up with your folders as you wish them to be and all of your photos in the right places. You then import the folder that encompasses the sub-folders and LR will organize how you have it and leave all the organization in tact on the drive. What LR does is simply store your edits and only your edits in the program files. So if I go to my drive and open some pictures they are there as they were right out of the camera and you use LR to export the edited photos. When I insert my SD card LR automatically opens and allows me to put the photos where I want, including creating new folders etc. Here are some screens for how I set everything up and how it looks in LR and in the actual file. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Favorite organization tips: After I import new photos I go through each photo and click the "p" key to flag the photos I like and those that I want to edit. I can then only view the flagged photos and it makes it much easier. There is a feature called "quick collection" which allows you to dump random photos in for easier export. Say I'm looking for all my Ferrari photos with water in them to post here on Fchat, I can get to all those photos and all the good ones should be flagged and then all I do is hit "b" and it will toss that picture into a sort of temporary collection to export. "Virtual copy" is very useful, it duplicates the selected photo in the program to allow for multiple edits on a single photo and keeps your from having multiple photos in the folder. "Export" is extremely useful for here on fchat because of the size limitations, attached is a screenshot of how it should be set up, I have it set for the exact size needed and it export perfectly sized photos with no compression. Image Unavailable, Please Login
I had the same issue before I started using LR, your best option is to pick some general categories and then more specific folders for each and organize them before importing to LR and it'll keep that organizational structure within LR.
I use lightroom for every photo that pass through my laptop, it is the best thing that adobe created since the creative suites.
Thanks Chris.... getting ready to anchor off of Bombay for a day or so waiting for the dock to open up.....got a chance to read up... Thanks again... and great info !
I too use it almost exclusively. I generally manually WB my camera before shooting (with exceptions where it's not practical), but will adjust by using a still of the white and gray card in LR that I then apply to all appropriate stills. The only reasons I go to PS are: 1) Panoramic stitching 2) Layer adjusting (dodge/burn) LR is far more efficient, and that efficiency scales with number of photos to be processed. It also gives a nice database to boot. However if you already use bridge and you don't manually post-process your photos, it may not offer many additional benefits. And previews, meta data, etc.
Does manual WB give you a much better result than using LR? I've noticed lately I've had a few where the in camera and auto were significantly off. Any tutorials online on how to do it?
Brian try these two sites. Great for learning everything about photography software and techniques.http://kelbytraining.com/ http://movielibrary.lynda.com/allcourses
It can be. I often still have a yellow or blue cast (depending on lighting) after balancing the camera that LR is able to correct. When I white balance the camera, I fill the frame with my whitecard, and I believe the camera does some sort of averaging for whatever lighting differences may exist (which ideally should be slight, but if there are multiple light sources - which is often the case for me - may be significant). LR, on the other hand, balances based on a single picked point (I don't believe it does any further analysis, but I could be wrong). As such it may be more accurate in the region of your subject, unless your subject fills the frame and is hit by multiple light varieties Note that when you balance the camera, the camera is assuming you are referencing white, but when when you balance LR, LR is assuming you are referencing *neutral grey* (see page 74: http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/1.0/help.pdf). That can account for some differences, but in principle they will be slight. It is, however, easy to pick highlights (overexposed points that show as white) and get a completely wrong color balance. I use 8X10 cards (http://www.amazon.com/Opteka-Digital-Balance-Photography-Reference/dp/B002P5DNY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1324408296&sr=1-1). I have black, white and gray. Never used the black card. I meter the camera to the gray card, white balance the camera to the white card, then shoot (or sometimes I'll color balance after the fact and adjust in post). In PS, I'll WB to the gray card. If little changes, I call it good. If there is a significant difference, I'll have to do a little extra to get it right (and if I don't remember what it looked like, I'll usually start looking up reference kelvin values for the light sources and seeing which is closer between the manual balance in camera and the picked gray in LR). Either way you go, it's nice to have both white and gray in your actual lighting environment for each sequence of photos. I've only recently started doing this since I've been shooting a lot of my son indoors, but I wish I'd always done it. Going forward, I'm going to start also bringing a color guide as well (like this: http://www.amazon.com/CowboyStudio-Color-checker-Exposure-Balance/dp/B003YV5GI8/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1324408296&sr=1-5), so that I can compare what I see on screen to what I see in my hand. Hope that helps. Edit: Not sure how useful these pics will be. They're screen shots taken of a remote session. I can see the difference, but it may be exacerbated by the color profile of my phone, let alone your monitor. One is balanced in camera, one in LR. And the final result:
I swar by Lightroom. It is absolutely incredible (especially if you shoot in RAW format). If you haven't tried it out yet, go to Adobe's website and download the free 30-day full trial before you buy it. Play around with the filters and such; absolutely a terrific piece of software. -G.B.
Do you know how many pictures I saved...yet the originals would have been cast away with out LR... Many shots I choose not to use a flash because it will kill the shot.. I purposefully shoot aperature mode wide open. The shot is surely too dark. low lit Yet by lifting the exposure and brightness controls adding in a little recovery, de saturate and sharpness, not to mention crop and scale it...oh and a little less temperature and contrast.......Voila..saved! The control is next to infinite...works on pics that are too bright as well. This marks the jump to sonic speed.. When they have a product that can re focus post production that loads into this LR , we make the jump to light speed.. Top pic as taken..bottom corrected BTW..this was a panasonic 12 mp with a 12 mm 2.0 lens Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Thanks for the links I will check them out once stuff have calmed down here You know my name or remember it from having read it somewhere on here? Or know me from other sites?
Here is the pic in question. Unedited apart from converted to JPEG from RAW and saved to web. File Name IMG_5078.CR2 Camera Model Canon EOS 7D Shooting Date/Time 17-12-2011 22:31:33 Shooting Mode Bulb Tv( Shutter Speed ) 40 Av( Aperture Value ) 3.5 Metering Mode Evaluative Metering ISO Speed 640 Auto ISO Speed OFF Lens EF-S18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Focal Length 18.0mm Image Size 5184x3456 Image Quality RAW Flash Off I need to reduce the bright xmas lights on me house and make sure it still look decent enough. They are light icecycles. It's the only light I want reduced, and maybe the bit in the lamppost. Image Unavailable, Please Login
If you have access to the program right now, try reducing the brightness in the lights of that photo by loading it into Lightroom and selecting the brush tool. Set the brightness to a lower setting (experiment with different values) and brush over the lights and whatever else you want to reduce. This might help. Good luck! -G.B.
I looks like it's overexposed (white pixels). Not much you'll be able to do in that case with LR. Easy check: pull the exposure down for the entire image. Does that block of light stay?
This is about the best I could do, I could spend a few more minutes on it, but I don't think it would do much good. I did: A mask on the lower 10% or so with dropping the brightness and exposure, and a warm color. 100 on recovery and -.9 exposure and 20 on fill light. -100 Highlights -17 lights +16 darks -56 Saturation blue to get rid of the blue tint on the lights You could do a lot better if you're working with the original RAW. Just noticed my watermark on your pic, sorry about that, does it auto for my fchat photos. Image Unavailable, Please Login
