An Intro to Lightroom…

MR Photography WorkshopPark Place Porsche in Dallas

August 23, 2014

LR can do almost everything you want; most people say they can do at least 95% of their editing in LR. Each new version adds tools that expand its capabilities.

The “normal” view in LR looks like this, but you can change it:

There are 4 panels surrounding the central image. There is a lot of information in these panels! This information allows you to control LR:

• to assess your images• to change your images• to manage the GPS data associated with images• to create, save & order books• to create, play, & save slideshows• to print images• to create & save web galleries

Each of these panels has a small, grey triangle that points outward:

If you click on these triangles, the respective panel slides away. When all 4 panels are hidden, it looks like this:

The 4 triangles are still there. They now point inward and are composed of dots instead of a solid grey color [they are hard to see in this image]. You can click on them to bring any panel back. Also, if you hover over the black border where the triangles are located, the related panel will return, temporarily. You can use it as long as you don’t move the mouse pointer outside the panel. If you move the mouse pointer outside the temporary instance of a panel, it hides again. But you can get it back by just moving the mouse pointer back to the black border.

There are keyboard shortcuts for many common operations. Here is a diagram that shows the various LR screen components and the shortcuts to hide/unhide some of them:

The most important shortcut is the one at the bottom. Hitting “Shift-Tab” hides all the panels; that’s much easier than clicking on 4 triangles or hitting 4 function keys! The LR Window and the Menu Bar cannot be hidden.

There is a small panel that is just above the “Filmstrip” and contains tools you can use. It’s called the “Toolbar”. To hide or unhide it, type “T”. You can select which tools it shows, by hitting the down-arrow on the right. Here is the “Toolbar” with all the tools selected:

The Library Module is selected in this example. The tools are different if you select another Module.

A handy shortcut is the ability to rate images [1-5 stars] by simply typing 1-5 on the keyboard. A box will pop up confirming your rating, since you can’t see the filmstrip at the bottom which shows the star rating when the panels are hidden.

Until you learn keyboard shortcuts, the dropdown menus at the top are available; but remembering that 1-5 sets the star rating seems pretty intuitive. And you will do this a lot when you first import pictures [more on that later].

Although this is not exactly on topic, 3 of the 4 panels can be resized. My first image shows them at their nominal/minimum size. If you have long folder names or tags, you can grab the inside edge of the right and left panels and pull them inward to make them bigger so that the entire names/tags show. The filmstrip at the bottom can also be made smaller and larger. When you drag the upper border of the “Filmstrip”, the size of the thumbnail images change.

A Basic Lightroom Workflow:Did I mention that LR is primarily not a photo editor, but rather a Digital Asset Manager. We call these type programs “DAM Software”. Here is a simple LR workflow:

Select the Library Module. That’s where the DAM stuff is done. You will start out just using it to Import your pictures. When you Import, the Library module will allow you to:

• Specify where the images are coming from; you will probably insert a flash media card, but you can import from anything that your computer can access.• Specify where the images will be stored and what the name of that location is.• Select which images are to be imported [for example if you forgot to format your

media card prior to taking some pictures and there were some old images on it, you can select to Import only the current ones].• Create duplicate files and specify where they are to be saved.• Apply editing actions.• Insert metadata [For example, you can put your name, address, e-mail address,

website URL, phone number, etc in every image imported].• Attach keywords.

You can use Speech Recognition to insert metadata. It has been included since Windows Vista. Apparently, the Mac is behind, but Apple is working on this issue [they recently bought Novauris].

Import your Images. When you click on “Import” at the bottom of the left panel, the Import Screen will pop up. It will show any folders that have previously been imported. If this is your first Import, that list will be blank. On the right side, you should select a disk drive and folder where you will be saving your photos. There is an option to create a sub-folder. Slow down: Go through all the options for Importing. If you don’t, you will undoubtedly import to some strange place and you will have difficulty finding your pictures! LR “remembers” your previous choices and they probably are not relevant to your current importation!

When you have checked everything in the Import Screen, there is another “Import” button at the bottom-right that actually imports all the selected images into LR. When LR imports, it creates a “sidecar” file associated w/ each image file. That “sidecar” file holds everything that LR needs to work with. Note that the “sidecar” file doesn’t have your original image; instead, it creates a smaller image. This small image is compressed to make the size smaller, so that it will read and write quickly. You can choose to have LR render a 1:1 preview during importation, but this will take some time and make the sidecar files larger. If you choose to let LR do the standard size preview [2048 px on longest side], importation is faster. If you zoom into 1:1 later, LR will render a larger image on the fly. If your processor speed is high, you won’t notice any delay.

When you are Importing, there will be a status bar in the upper-left corner [in the Top Panel]. Since LR is doing some additional work, this can be a bit slow. Be patient or find something else to do.

As LR works, it will intermittently start populating the center area with thumbnails. If you have a multi-core processor in your computer, you could start working during the importation process. You could take the first image and start editing it, but a better plan is to first go through the images and rate them according to their quality and interest. It’s silly to blindly start editing everything! First pick the best images and then only edit the good ones [or at least ones that have a chance to be good after the editing]. Again, you can start rating them while the Importation proceeds.

Rate your Images. Until you learn more, just use the “stars” for a rating. If you still see the thumbnail matrix in the center, click on the “one image” icon [it’s the 2nd one from the left in the toolbar]. Then hit “Shift-Tab” to make the panels hide. You will be left with a BIG version of your 1st image. Critically look at it and make a judgment; 0 through 5, where 5 is the best and 0 [zero] is unrated [bad]. If you find any images of your feet, other ugly body parts, the sky, or anything totally OoF, just go ahead and hit the Delete key. A box will pop up asking whether you want to just remove the image from the LR catalog [I’ll talk about catalogs later] or totally delete it from the disk; do the latter. You can right-click on the image and select “Remove Photo” from the list that pops up. I think hitting the Delete key is easier and faster?

When you have looked at and rated every image that was imported…

Select the Develop Module. The right , left, and toolbar panels will change. The highlighted [selected] image will appear in the center [if it wasn’t already]. At this juncture, you should make a decision about your ratings. Do you want to mess with the 1’s and 2’s? How many images do you really need? Whatever star number you initially pick, it can be changed at any time. To start, try “3”. To do this, look in the top border of the “Filmstrip”. Over on the extreme right is a “Filter:” control. Initially, it will show “Filters Off”. Click on the up-down arrows at the right and a box will pop up. Click on “Rated”. The Filmstrip” will now only show images that have a number rating. All the rated images will show in the Filmstrip, regardless of the number rating. Click on the 3rd [middle] star. Now only images rated 3+ will show in the Filmstrip.

To remove a rating, select the image in the “filmstrip” and type “0” [zero]. To change a rating, select the image and type the new rating.

Whatever you choose for a star rating, the selected images should be the ones you think are the best. Those are the ones you will now edit. Be critical! Don’t waste time on so-so images.

Edit your Selected Images. If the right panel is hidden, hit “F8”. There are 9 sections in the right Develop panel. Each of these sections can be collapsed via the triangle at the extreme right, with the exception of the Zone Tools, which never collapses [because it would be the same size]. Here is a look at them [collapsed]: For this lesson, I’ll not cover all of these!

Start by expanding the Histogram and Basic sections.

Example 1…

Look at the Histogram. It shows an image w/ mostly mid-tones.

Here is the image:

It’s got possibilities, but needs some work. This picture was taken w/ a mirror lens, which has low contrast; I bumped the contrast up to +40. I then added my normal Clarity and Vibrance presets.

Noticing there were no blacks in the Histogram [which is understandable, since there was little in the picture that is supposed to be black], I sampled the bottom of the watch band and got a value of 10. I wanted the 10 to be 0, so I moved the “Blacks” slider to -45. Turning on the black clipping indication [click on the left square in Histogram] and zooming in, I saw I had gone too far: The blue areas are where the data is 0, 0, 0

[clipped]. I didn’t want this much clipping, so I raised the “Blacks” to -24, which left only a tiny sliver of clipping under his right hand, which is OK.

I chose to leave the “Whites” at zero because the day was dim and dreary; making the picture brighter would spoil the “feeling”.

Minimize the “Basic” section and expand the “Details” section where Sharpening and Noise Reduction can be set. This image is pretty clean and doesn’t need much NR, so I set a minimal amount [25]. It did need some sharpening, so I set the “Amount” to 100, “Radius” to 1.5, and “Detail” to 50. This brought out some noise, so I went back and raised the NR setting to 50. The “Details” panel looks like this after my adjustments:

Minimize the “Detail” section and expand the “Lens Corrections” section. Be sure that “Enable Profile Corrections” is checked. I used a Nikkor 500mm f/8 mirror lens, but Adobe doesn’t have this lens listed, so I picked the Nikkor 500mm f/4 ED VR lens profile. Most of your lenses will be listed; so you won’t have to search for an equivalent. All you have to do is be sure they are automatically chosen. Modern lenses have a microprocessor that identifies the lens [and a bunch of other stuff too]. This data is stored in the EXIF area of image files. When LR loads the image, it will usually know which lens you used, but you should initially check to be sure.

The mirror lens I used is VERY old and is obscure enough that Adobe doesn’t have any incentive to include it. There are three types of lens corrections you can make: Distortion, Vignetting, and Chromatic Aberration. There was a tiny distortion correction made, but the biggest change was to reduce the vignetting. The “Vignetting” slider on the bottom of the Profile” section doesn’t do much. There is another control in the “Manual” section:

The “Vignetting” control in “Manual” is much more sensitive. I moved it to +25 to make the corners as bright as the center of the picture [new on left, old on right]:

I decided to leave the Aspect Ratio at 3:2 as in my original picture, thus I left the setting at “Original”. If you click on the arrows to the right of “Original” a drop-down list will appear. It will have some popular aspect ratio choices plus give you the option of creating a custom aspect ratio. I created a 5 x 5 crop and some long, skinny ones. To use this tool simply mouse over the image and drag a box around what you want. When it’s approximately right, stop dragging. You can now use the “handles” to refine the image. The handles on the sides change the crop symmetrically about the center. The handles in the corners change the crop about the diagonally opposite corner. Placing the mouse cursor outside the crop box allows you to rotate the image under the box [the cursor changes]. This image was level, so I didn’t need any rotation, but I wanted to put Tony’s face in the upper-left corner [his left eye is at the 1/3:1/3 location: LR overlays a 3x3 grid over the image to help in positioning].

The final change is to crop the picture; it’s much too centered. Cropping should have been the 1st step, but in this instance, it was obvious that there was adequate real estate to crop it any way I wanted. The wild animal surrogate is looking to the right, so I decided to leave more room on that side. To crop, select the dotted-box icon in the Zone Tools near the top. When you do, 8 “handles” will appear on a white border around the image in the center and a “Crop & Straighten” fly-out will appear below the Zone Tools box. The Zone Tools will look like this:

Here is what the cropping looked like before I said “Do it”:

There are 3 ways to “execute” a crop:

1. Double-click on the picture2. Single click on the Crop & Straighten Tool icon3. Click on the “Close” button

Now the final image looks like this:

[aside] In case you wonder what all the little white circles are, they are OoF objects [mostly grass seed heads]. Mirror lenses are little telescopes and the light path is folded by two mirrors. The result is that light rays from the center of OoF objects do not reach the sensor, leaving a “doughnut”. Some people HATE this; others LOVE it. There is an obscure Japanese term for this: “bokeh”, which is difficult to translate to English. I say that it means, “The feeling you get when you look at OoF areas in a photograph”. Thus, all photographs that have OoF areas have “bokeh”, but by itself, “bokeh” is meaningless. It’s like saying a picture has “color” or “texture”. Properly used, “bokeh” is always preceded by an adjective, as “good bokeh”, “smooth bokeh”, “spikey bokeh”, or “holy bokeh” [in the case of a mirror lens]. [end aside]

We are through editing this picture. There are of course many other things that LR can do, but this image didn’t need anything else done to it. You can now exit LR and what you have done will be available when you next launch LR. There will be no delay. You won’t have to confirm that you “really” want to exit the program. When you return to LR, it will be exactly where you were when you exited.

Or you could edit another picture…

Example 2…

Look at the Histogram. It shows an image that is under exposed. Most of the brightness values are in the 35% range. Even Kathy’s white jacket is about 60-70% .

My quick assessment of the other problems:

• WB is too cold [blue]• Bad reflections at top

My first change is to sample that white coat and make it actually white. I used the “Eyedropper” tool and clicked on her top-left grey collar. The WB went from 5900 K -3 to 8,700 K -3; a big difference:

Next I brightened the image [Exposure]. I wanted the whitesto be about 96%. You mouse-over something in the imageto get the RGB percentages under the Histogram:

I have a few Presets that I use. This image was taken at 800 ISO, so I clicked on my “800ISO” Preset. This does 3 things:

•Clarity and Vibrance to +25 and +18 respectively•Corrections [geometric distortion and vignetting]•Sharpening and NR appropriately for an 800 ISO image

After these changes I wanted more contrast. The picture was

Taken in deep shadows so the light is very flat.

I set Contrast to +20.

The Histogram and Basic panels now look like this:

And the image like this:

But there is one last change. Do you notice the dark smudges on the doors? No, I’m not OCD, it’s just a chance to show you how to fix this [in case YOU are OCD] …

LR has two tools that might be used: the Spot Removal Tool and the Adjustment Brush. In this case, the Spot Removal Tool is easier. It’s the 2nd tool from the left in the Zone Tools, directly underneath the Histogram. Click on it. A drop-down will appear. Be sure that “Clone” is bold. Select a Size and Feather. Leave Opacity at 100.

Here are the values I used:

To the left is the image before I clicked on “Close”. It shows [if you look closely, that I used the tool 8 times to get all the smudges covered:

The final step is to crop the image:

Well, actually, the final step is to do something w/ those window reflections…

I desaturated it to make it a B&W. For extra credit, ID the object(s) being reflected…