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Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

21 Aug

Nobody likes a grainy photo, right? The majority of the time we want less graininess. In the digital world, we see grain as the enemy. But is it really? I’ll tell you now that grain isn’t always bad. I’ll go even further than that and say that grain can actually be something that adds to the strength of your photographs.

Film grain gets a bad rap because it’s often confused with digital noise. The two are, in fact, entirely different. In this article, I’ll talk about the difference between noise and grain. Then I am going to show you how to use Lightroom to purposefully ADD grain to a photo. Get ready. Be bold. Embrace the grain.

It’s grain…not noise

The difference between digital noise (sensor noise) and grain comes down to the light sensing properties of each. Digital sensors convert light into an electronic signal using an array of photosensitive diodes. These are the “pixels” or “picture elements” of the sensor. Digital sensors carry “noise” based on a number of things such as the size of the sensor, its temperature, and the ISO setting.

Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

Digital noise at ISO 5000

Film, on the other hand, uses light sensitive silver crystals which are embedded in the emulsion of the film. The physical manifestation of these crystals is what we perceive as film grain. The higher the film’s ISO, the more crystals are present, hence more grain.

Agfa Vista Plus 200 ISO 800. A cropped section of an image by Akio Takemoto

Grain is an organic characteristic of the analog film process. It’s almost like a fingerprint exclusive to the type of film you’re using. Perhaps that’s why film grain is gaining a growing acceptance among new photographers in this digital age of imaging.

This notion hasn’t been lost on the developers at Adobe and they have given us a way to simulate the grain patterns present in film with our digital images. Depending on your photo, adding some creative film grain can impart a vintage feel of earthiness to your digital image. And you’re about to learn how to do it in Lightroom in…3…2…1….

I hope you enjoyed the dramatic countdown.

Adding Grain in the Effects Panel of Lightroom CC

You can find Grain in the Effects panel of the Develop module in Lightroom CC. It’s where you can do a number of things but for this occasion, we are going to focus on the grain section. You’ll notice there are three adjustment sliders; amount, size, and roughness.

Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

This is how you will essentially replicate those light sensitive crystals found in film emulsion I mentioned earlier.

**Note, it’s wise to apply grain (like most effects) as the last part of your final steps in post-processing.

Amount of grain

The amount of grain is controlled by, you guessed it, the “Amount” slider. Think of this as the number of crystals you are adding to your image. The higher the amount, generally the higher ISO look the effect. Here’s a +40 grain amount on an image shot at ISO 640.

Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

It is a good idea to use a large increase in the amount of grain while adjusting the next two sliders and then back it off from there until you reach the desired amount.

Size of grain

The size of the grain plays a big part in how apparent it will be in your final image. Larger crystals will be more noticeable even at low amounts. It’s virtually the same concept as high and low “grit” sandpaper. Now here’s a +40 boost in grain size from the last image.

Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

Keep in mind that the further to the right you move the slider the larger each grain will become. This can diminish small details in your photo so use with caution.

Roughness

Grain roughness is closely related to grain size. The difference is that the roughness slider controls how raised the grains appear to be from the image. Essentially how rough or smooth their surface appears. The next image shows the same +40 amount of grain with the size set back to the +25 default. This time I increased the roughness to +70.

Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom

Think back to the sandpaper analogy. The more raised the grain the rougher the overall texture and thus the texture of the final grain effect.

Here are a few more examples of using simulated grain in Lightroom. Black and white images have always loved grain.

Black and white image with Grain set to +50 Amount, +71 Size, +50 Roughness

Grain set to +30 Amount, +66 Size, 0 Roughness

Grain set to +60 Amount, +18 Size, 80 Roughness

Final thoughts on grain

Never forget that grain is completely different than noise. Grain is, in some ways, the signature of film. Adding it to your digital images can sometimes, not always, give your photos a non-mechanized flavor that hints back to the organic appeal of analog film.

You can control this effect easily in Lightroom by adjusting the amount, size, and roughness of the grain. The combinations are virtually limitless. Just remember, as with all processing effects, use them up to, but never past the point they were intended. That being said, never be afraid to experiment and “go against the grain”…sorry, I had to say it.

The post Tips for the Creative Use of Grain in Lightroom by Adam Welch appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Video: How to edit photos in Lightroom with a PlayStation controller

12 Aug

Industrious photographer Ben Stewart has demonstrated an excellent way to edit photos in Adobe Lightroom: using a PS3 or PS4 wireless controller. The process, which Stewart explains in the video above, enables Lightroom users to quickly scroll through photos, select tools, and make image adjustments without ever touching their keyboard or mouse.

It quite literally turns curating and editing large photo shoots into a game, and once you get the hang of it, the technique has the potential to seriously speed up your workflow.

Stewart recently demo’d editing an image using a PS3 controller, which had been mapped to various Lightroom shortcuts, and he walks others through the process of setting up their own wireless controller system n the video. His process involves two pieces of software for Windows PCs, SCPToolkit and JoyToKey, though macOS users will need to use an alternative mapping application such as Joystick Mapper. And if, for some reason, you’re not a big fan of PlayStation, you can use wireless controllers from other companies as well.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Throwback Thursday: Adobe Lightroom 1.0

04 Aug

As an amateur photographer, I joined the Adobe Lightroom beta primarily to gain access to the latest version of the ACR Raw converter. I hadn’t expected it to completely change the way I worked.

I can’t remember how I first heard about the public beta of a new photo editing product from Adobe* but, according to Adobe’s Lightroom blog, it must have been after July 23, 2006, when the Windows version of the software became available.

Having used Photoshop since university, I’d seen it become both more powerful and more complicated. I had friends working on their Biochemistry Ph.D.s who were just as dependent on Photoshop as I was, in preparing photos for publication in the magazines I worked on, but who relied on a different set of tools than the ones I used.

I’d quickly become frustrated with the limited software my camera came bundled with

The purchase of a Raw-capable superzoom (one of those decisions I now flinch at), quickly left me frustrated with the experience of using the limited software it came bundled with, so I found myself processing my best images, one at a time, staying late to use my work computer.

Clearly this wasn’t a way of working that was either a) sustainable nor b) scaleable (to use two words that would never have occurred to me at the time). So the idea of being able to access the power of Adobe Camera Raw for free, rather than having to find hundreds of pounds for my own license of Photoshop seemed appealing.

Lightroom meant that, weeks after first processing an image, I could go back and backtrack on some of my changes and, with fresh eyes, produce something better, without the need to fill my hard drive with multiple TIFFs, saved along the way.

As the name hints, Lightroom was intended as an analogue for the film-era darkroom. Unlike Photoshop, which had become all things to a very diverse set of uses, Lightroom was just the tools required for photographers. The terminology of the tools was intentionally photographic: exposure adjustments, measured in EV, white balance measured in Kelvin.

In essence its editing tools were simply those of Adobe Camera Raw, only with the ability to process more than one image at a time. That and a crop tool that, while it seemed incomprehensible and backwards compared with Photoshop’s behavior, quickly began to seem not just obvious, but indispensable**.

The real power of Lightroom, though I didn’t immediately spot it, was in how it imposed a structure on your workflow. It cataloged the images you ‘imported,’ and gave you the tools to sort and tag those images, then pushed you through a logical process of first editing and then outputting your images.

At first I, along with many other beta participants, found the ‘Shoots’ categorization confusingly out-of-step with the way I thought about arranging my files on my computer (the two were connected when you imported files but could diverge if you moved the files or their associations). Adobe recognized this and adopted a more explicitly folder-based pattern with a later update.

What’s this? I can take a series of edits I’ve applied to one image and selectively apply them to others? Mind. Blown. (and, more importantly, time saved).
Used with kind permission from Imaging Resource’s original coverage.

In these early versions, all edits were whole-image corrections: every change you made affected every pixel in the image, meaning its role was very distinct from that of Photoshop. There was some ability to export to Photoshop if you needed to make localized edits, but it meant Lightroom wasn’t quite the ‘all you’ll ever need’ tool I was hoping for.

However, so long as you didn’t immediately rail against being forced to make changes to your workflow, the pattern of importing, sorting, editing and exporting became second nature. So, although I was initially just rushing through the import stage to get to the ‘Develop’ editing module, I quickly found that my life was easier if I engaged with the workflow as a whole.

In those early versions all edits were whole-image corrections: every change you made affected every pixel in the image

By the time I started work at DPReview a year or so later, I was regularly shooting huge numbers of images and appreciating the way adding ratings as part of the import process could help me home straight in on my best shots so that all of my efforts to crop, polish and tweak were focused on my strongest images. I could also take some of the edits I’d made to one image and apply them to similar shots, as a better starting point. It saved so much time, even though I never used the Print or Web output modules.

When the beta finally ended, I thought I’d revert to my existing way of working: selecting and then working-up single images at a time in ACR. But no, once I’d become accustomed to being able to quickly organize, prioritize and process only the best images from every shoot, I couldn’t go back.

I’d discovered that not having a workflow was unworkable

The idea of having to manually trawl through and select images, before processing each one, one-by-one, suddenly seemed exhausting. I’d discovered that not having a workflow was unworkable.

The inability to go back and find or fine-tune existing edits was the factor that finally tipped it for me. I bought a license for Lightroom v1 within a couple of weeks of the beta ending. For a lot less than the cost of Photoshop, it should be noted.

By the time it was launched, Lightroom had officially become ‘Photoshop Lightroom.’

The first full version, launched just over ten years ago now, was still pretty basic. Adobe had learned lessons from the beta, but by today’s standards, it was pretty primitive. Redeye and spot removal tools (cloning, rather than ‘healing,’ if my memory serves me correctly) finally brought the first localized corrections. But brushes and gradients didn’t arrive until v2.0, eighteen months later, so there were still plenty of occasions I needed to export to a pixel-level editor.

It would also be many years before Adobe began to add manufacturer JPEG mimicking color profiles, thus putting an end to a million ‘why do my pictures look flatter in Lightroom’ threads on the DPReview forums. Lens corrections and the ability to add, as well as remove, noise and vignetting were also some years off. But, for me at least, the core concept worked.

The quality of processing and the power and subtlety of the available tools has only improved since then. It’s also, with a few hiccups, tended to get faster over time, which is pretty rare.

Compare this screen-grab from Lightroom v1.0 to the one at the top of the page and you’ll spot a host of additional filtering options.
From Imaging Resource’s original coverage.

It’s strange to find myself looking back so fondly, since my job essentially precludes me from using Lightroom: I regularly shoot with cameras it doesn’t yet support, have to deliver unedited, straight-out-of-camera JPEGs and deal with large numbers of remote files that become irrelevant, the moment a review is published.

Adobe’s monthly license model, to my mind, runs counter to the longevity benefit of building a database around my images

I’m also aware that the latest version of Lightroom is getting to the stage that it has a range of tools I’ll simply never use. That it risks developing the kind of Photoshop-esque learning curve that it was originally intended to circumvent. There’s always the threat that it’ll eventually be permanently ingested into Adobe’s Creative Cloud monthly license model (which, to my mind, runs counter to the longevity benefit of building a database around my images).

Yet, if I found myself with the time to shoot for myself again, the first thing I’d do is to buy a standalone version of Lightroom and pick up where I left off. Because, for all that I’ve tinkered with other Raw converters, I really like what it forced me to do, all those years ago: focus my time on getting the best out of my best photos.

*There’s every chance it was this story
** These days the crop tool in Photoshop mimics the Lightroom way of working

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine

04 Aug

Lightroom is a fantastic tool for organizing, editing, sharing, and even printing photos and is an essential tool in the workflow of many photographers today. Unfortunately, it sometimes gets a bad rap when compared to its big brother Photoshop since the latter can do far more in terms of altering, enhancing, changing, or otherwise editing pictures and images. That’s not to say it is a slouch by any means, and you might be surprised at what it can do when you start to learn to use more of its powerful, yet sometimes hidden, features like Auto Mask in Lightroom.

How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine - rabbit photo

You mean Lightroom has advanced image editing capabilities I don’t know about? Go on, tell me more…

What is Auto Mask and how to find it?

The best way to get started with the Auto Mask feature is to navigate to the Develop module in Lightroom and then click on the Adjustment Brush tool. This lets you change all sorts of parameters like exposure, contrast, clarity, sharpness, and more, but only on specific parts of a photo instead of altering the entire image at once. You can select from various brush presets or move the sliders to create your own adjustments, then click and drag on the image itself to implement those adjustments.

You can even use multiple brush adjustments on the same photo and selectively erase your adjustments in case you want to undo anything. When you look at all the features the adjustment brush tool offers, you can start to see just how powerful and useful it really is. What’s more, at the very bottom of the adjustment brush panel is a little check box called Auto Mask that can dramatically increase both the usefulness and effectiveness of this tool in general.

How does Auto Mask work?

In a nutshell, the Auto Mask option constrains the edits of the Adjustment Brush to a narrow band of colors that are very close to where you originally started brushing in your adjustments. Because the Adjustment Brush is circular in nature it can be tricky to confine your adjustments to specific areas, especially when working with angles or hard edges.

To show you just what the Auto Mask does, I’m going to make a few changes to this image of a water valve. It’s not the most stunning picture and won’t win any awards, but thanks to the Auto Mask feature it can at least be made to look a little more interesting.

How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine - before photo

Editing this is going to be tricky. Or, rather, it would be tricky without the Auto Mask feature.

Using the Auto Mask

In this picture I want the reds and greens to really stand out, and while this could be accomplished with the Color sliders and adjusting the overall saturation of the red and green color values, I want a little more granular control of exactly what parts of the image I’m going to edit. By using the Adjustment Brush Auto Mask feature, I can do exactly that.

To do this process on your own, navigate to the Adjustment Brush panel, select a preset or move the sliders to your own liking, adjust the size of the brush, and then tick Auto Mask. Then click the “Show selected mask overlay” option at the bottom of the Develop window (or press O on your keyboard) so you can actually see where your adjustments are being applied. In the example below, I used this process to apply extra saturation to just the yellow circle. I only brushed on the top-left quadrant and left the Mask Overlay turned on so you can see how the adjustment brush was confined to just within the yellow circle.

How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine

The red portion is just an overlay showing where the adjustment brush was applied. Auto Mask is a great way to make sure you always color inside the lines, just like your kindergarten teacher told you to do.

Auto Mask helps you work fast!

To finish off this particular edit, I filled in the rest of the yellow circle with the same method and within about seven seconds I had a picture that was much improved over the original.

How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine

To finish off the image I applied an adjustment brush to the red portions of the water control valve, and because I used Auto Mask I was able to do it in 34 seconds. Literally. I even used a stopwatch to time it.

The finished picture has adjustments applied only to the red and yellow areas, without anything creeping over into the green background.

The process can be even faster if you increase the size of your Adjustment Brush as far as it can go, making it easy to instantly apply an adjustment to virtually the whole picture at one time. As long as you have Auto Mask enabled, the brush adjustments will be limited to only the parts of the picture that are similar in color to where you actually click your pointer.

Auto Mask with the Radial and Graduated Filters

There’s another way to use the Auto Mask setting in combination with the Radial or Graduated filters, which can be extremely useful if you shoot landscapes, architecture, or other scenarios which often are enhanced by those two types of filters. Frequently there are objects in landscape or architecture shots that don’t necessarily benefit from having a radial filter applied, and yet unless you use the Brush tool with Auto Mask it can be very difficult to work around them.

To illustrate how this works, here is a shot of a building that would be an ideal candidate for using the Graduated Filter as a way of enhancing the sky, except for the columns rising upwards from the structure.

This kind of image is ideal for a Graduated Filter, but the columns make it a little tricky unless you kick it up a notch with Auto Mask.

Here’s the same shot, but edited with a Graduated Filter applied that increases saturation and slightly adjusts white balance.

Adding a Graduated Filter made the sky significantly improved, but also altered the color of the columns.

The issue

The image is much better, but when Show Selected Mask Overlay is selected, it’s clear that a few problems have cropped up.

Showing the Overlay lets you see exactly where the Graduated Filter has been applied. The same thing works for the Radial Filter as well.

At issue here is the fact that applying the gradient to the sky has also changed the saturation and white balance of the building itself, particularly the columns. Normally, the solution to this would involve painstaking work in Photoshop to create and edit separate layers, but Lightroom has an easy solution thanks to the Adjustment Brush tool and Auto Mask.

Auto Mask with the Graduated Filter

With the Graduated Filter option still selected, click the “Brush” option at the top of the panel. Not the icon, but the text option that shows up just to the right of “Edit” (shown below).

How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine

You can now use the brush to apply the same edits in the Graduated Filter tool. But rather than applying more edits using this method I like to remove the effect from unwanted areas, especially with Auto Mask enabled. To fix the image of the building and sky so that the gradient is not applied to the columns or to any part of the building, press the [alt] (or [option] on a Mac) key which causes the brush tool to change from a plus (+) with a circle around it to a minus (-) with a circle around it. Then while still holding down your modifier key double-check that Auto Mask is enabled, and brush the parts of the image from where you wish to remove the gradient (see below).

You don’t have to worry about staying inside the lines. Auto Mask takes care of that for you.

A few clicks of the mouse later and the image now has the Graduated Filter applied only to the parts where you want it, without altering the areas of the photo where it is not needed. All thanks to the power of Auto Mask.

The finished image, with only the sky affected by the Gradient Filter. I also brushed away any traces of the filter from the roof and side of the building.

Notes:

This particular example involved the Graduated Filter, but the same process can be used to modify any edits you make with the Radial Filter as well.

Note: I also want to note that this is only available in current versions of Lightroom, so if you aren’t on Version 6 or the Creative Cloud plan you may not be able to use the Brush tool to edit the Graduated or Radial filters. But the Auto Mask will still work with your Adjustment Brush tool.

Conclusion

While this is clearly a long way from Photoshop’s powerful and meticulous editing capabilities, hopefully, it illustrates that Lightroom is not exactly a slacker in the editing department. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this as well and also know if there is anything I might have missed. Please leave your responses in the comments section below.

The post How to Use Auto Mask in Lightroom to Make Your Photos Shine by Simon Ringsmuth appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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How to Make Creative Lightroom Develop Presets for Portraits

03 Aug

It’s natural for portrait photographers to take lots of photos during a shoot. Therefore, it’s also helpful to have a system in Lightroom that allows you to save time processing your portraits. The easiest way to do this is with Develop Presets.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

A Develop Preset is a record of the processing work you have done on a photo in the Develop Module of Lightroom. The idea is to save the settings you used in a preset that you can then easily apply to other photos. The end result is that you save time and finish developing your portraits more quickly.

Let’s take a more detailed look at how it works.

1. Select a portrait to process

First, select a portrait and adjust it in Lightroom. Alternatively, use a portrait you have already developed.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

2. Create a Develop Preset

Make a new Develop Preset by going to the Presets panel (on the left-hand side) in the Develop module and clicking the plus icon on the right (or, go to Develop > New Preset).

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

When you do this, the New Develop Preset window appears. There are three sections you need to pay attention to, see below.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

A. Preset Name and Folder. Give your preset a name and select the folder you want to save it in. The default folder is User Presets but you can pick another or create a new one by going to the New Folder option at the top of the menu. It’s a good idea to create a new folder for your Preset as it helps you keep your Presets panel organized.

B. Auto Settings. Lightroom gives you the option to tick the Auto Tone box. I recommend you leave it unticked. Otherwise your preset may behave unpredictably when you apply it to other portraits.

C. Settings. This is where you tell Lightroom which Develop Module settings you want to include in the Preset.

Some settings may be unique to your photo. For example, you may have used a Graduated or Radial filter to make the background darker. These won’t work when applied to another portrait with a different background, so you should leave those out.

It’s also a good idea not to include Exposure or White Balance settings. These need to be adjusted individually for each portrait. For the same reason, you should leave the Sharpening, Noise Reduction, Lens Corrections and Transform boxes unticked.

You can tick all the other boxes, as shown in the above screenshot.

3. Apply the Develop Preset to other portraits

The next step is to apply the Develop Preset you just made to another portrait. Open the new portrait in the Develop module. Click on the Preset you just created, which you can see in the Presets panel.

In this case, I created a new Develop Preset, especially for this article.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

You can also apply your new Develop Portrait to more than one portrait at a time. This is useful if you have several portraits that you would like to develop in the same style. Here’s an easy way to do it.

1. Go to the Library Module and select the portraits to which you want to apply the preset. It helps if you have already organized your portraits in a Collection.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

2. Go to the Quick Develop panel. You can access all your Develop presets under Saved Preset. Select the preset you just created from the menu. Lightroom will apply it to all of your selected portraits.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

3. Open the portraits one by one in the Develop module and tweak the settings or retouch them if needed.

The creative power of Develop Presets for portraits

Now we’ve explored the mechanics of creating Develop Presets for portraits, let’s look at some of the creative things you can do in the Develop Module. All of these can be included in presets. Eventually, you will build a personal library of your own presets for portraits.

There are four techniques that are useful for portraits.

1. Apply a vignette

There are two ways to apply a vignette in Lightroom.

The first option is to go to the Effects panel and use Post-Crop Vignetting. Move the Amount slider left to apply a vignette. Use the Midpoint slider to change the area covered.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

Here’s a before and after example.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

The only drawback of Post-Crop Vignetting is that the effect is centered. That leads us to the second way of creating a vignette which is using a Radial Filter. The advantage of Radial filters is that you can put them wherever you like.

Here you can see two screenshots of a Radial Filter I applied to a portrait. The first (left) shows the position of the Radial Filter. The second (right) shows the area affected by the Radial Filter in red.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

I moved the Exposure slider left to make the area outside the Radial Filter darker.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

This is the comparison so you can see the difference.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

2. Adjust colors in the HSL / Color / B&W panel

Lightroom also gives you the option of adjusting the saturation and luminance (brightness) of individual colors. You do this in the HSL / Color / B&W panel.

In my portrait, there is some blue paint on the wall behind the model. You can adjust only that color by going to the Saturation tab and moving the Aqua and Blue sliders left.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

These photos show you the effect.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

3. Split Tone

Split toning isn’t just for black and white, it’s very effective for color portraits as well. The effect is similar to color grading used in TV shows and movies.

One option for split toning is to apply blue to the shadows and orange to the highlights. Another is to apply teal to the shadows and yellow to the highlights. Here are some settings you can try.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

Here are the results.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

4. Adjust the Tone Curve

You can use the Tone Curve panel to create a matte look. That is where the blacks are dark gray rather than black as if the photo has been printed on matte paper.

Lift up the left-side of the RGB curve, as shown in the screenshot below. You can also do the same with the blue curve for a similar effect that also adds blue to the shadows.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

These are the results.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

Adjustment Brush presets

You can also create your own Adjustment Brush presets to make retouching portraits easier. A good example is Lightroom’s own Soften Skin preset, which sets Clarity to -100 and Sharpness to +25.

I like to make the model’s eyes more defined by creating an Adjustment Brush and setting Exposure to around +0.30 and Clarity to +70.

Lightroom Develop Presets for portraits

You can make an Adjustment Brush Preset from those settings by going to Save Current Settings as New Preset at the bottom of the Effect menu. Give the preset a name and Lightroom saves it in the Effect menu. You can also use this preset with the Gradient and Radial filters.

Conclusion

Develop Presets are powerful tools that help you leverage Lightroom’s advanced developing options. With the techniques in this article you can use presets to speed up the developing process and apply creative effects to your portraits.

Do you have any questions about using Lightroom Develop Presets? Please let us know in the comments below.

Are you a fan of the natural / vintage look in portraits? Then check out my Vintage Portrait Presets for Lightroom. There are over 30 presets to help you create beautiful portraits in Lightroom.

The post How to Make Creative Lightroom Develop Presets for Portraits by Andrew S. Gibson appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Lightroom CC 2015.12 arrives with bug fixes, new camera and lens support

20 Jul

Adobe has just launched Lightroom 2015.12, adding support for new lenses and cameras, including the Canon EOS 6D Mark II, Nikon D7500, and Leica TL2. The update also fixes several bugs, including a problem with missing iPhone video GPS data, with the wrong photo being shown in the navigator preview pane, ‘erratic deletion of files,’ trouble exporting to Flickr, and more.

As far as new support goes, users now have access to ‘new color matching camera profiles,’ too.

Adobe advises that some Lightroom customers could still experience crashing problems if they’re using older AMD GPU drivers, and that they should update to Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.1 to fix the problem.

The previous version of Lightroom CC (2015.10) was released in April. The company explains that it decided to skip releasing Camera Raw 9.11 ‘due to the unfortunate events that occurred on that day,’ instead jumping straight to version 9.12. As a result, Adobe went straight from Lightroom 2015.10 to 2015.12 in order to keep the two products’ names in sync.

Lightroom CC 2015.12 adds support for the following cameras:

Canon EOS 6D Mark II
Canon EOS 200D(EOS Kiss X9, EOS Rebel SL2)
Leica TL2
Nikon D7500
Olympus Tough TG-5

The full list of new camera lens profile support can be found on Adobe’s blog.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Adobe updates Lightroom Mobile with new features and interface on iOS and Android

19 Jul

Today’s Lightroom Mobile updates include the addition of the selective brush on iOS, and a new interface for Android users.

Adobe released a major update to Lightroom Mobile for both iOS and Android users today. Each update is unique, offering different features depending on which operating system you use. Scroll down for a summary of both.

Lightroom Mobile for iOS

For iOS users, today’s update includes a new selective brush, improved details tab, and an improved interface for iPad users.

The new selective brush is a much-requested update, allowing you to paint enhancements onto specific parts of your image. What’s more, 3D-touch enabled devices (iPhone 6S or later) will vary the strength of the brush based on finger pressure.

Other improvements include the addition of global sharpening and noise reduction to the Details tab, and a new iPad interface that has been optimized to take full advantage of the powerful processors found in the iPad Pro and iPad Pro 2.

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Lightroom Mobile for Android

On the Android side, today’s update focuses on making Lightroom mobile faster and, in Adobe’s own words, “more Android-y.”

“We wanted to provide the best Android experience possible ,so we redesigned Lightroom for Android from the ground up to be faster, more efficient, and, well, more Android-y,” explains Adobe’s Josh Haftel. “Every screen has been redesigned with the goal of ensuring a natural, native Android experience while providing the highest quality, professional-grade mobile photo editing app ever.”

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To take advantage of these updates on both iOS and Android, either update your Lightroom Mobile or download a new copy off the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Video: Seven ‘hidden secrets’ in Adobe Lightroom

16 Jul

It’ll be a little while before Adobe can deliver on its recent promise to make Lightroom faster, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still figure out ways to make the program work faster for you. Case in point: photoshopCAFE founder Colin Smith has put together this really useful video outlining 7 ‘hidden secrets’ in Adobe Lightroom that will definitely help you get more out of the Raw editor.

Some of these tips are genuinely useful, and we’re going to guess that at least one or two of them will be new to you even if you’ve been using Lightroom for years.

Smith covers the tips in detail (and shows you how to use them) in the video above, but here’s the TL;DW version:

Right click in the panels of the Develop module and enable ‘Solo Mode.’ This only allows one panel to stay open at a time, collapsing the rest.
Click and drag your panel sidebar out to the left to make your sliders longer.
Hold down Command (CTRL on Windows) and double click the center of a shape like a radial filter, and it will automatically snap to the edges of the photo you’re editing.
Right click and uncheck to hide both modules and panels you don’t use.
The Develop module doesn’t work on videos, but you can sync edits made to a single frame of that video onto the full thing. Just pull a frame, edit it, and then select the frame and video both and click Sync.
You can turn any collection into a ‘Quick Collection’ by right clicking it and selecting ‘Set as Target Collection.’ Now you can curate photos into that collection with a single click.
If you have multiple photos selected, you can still see the metadata for an individual photo without deselecting the bunch. Just click Metadata > Show Metadata for Target Photo Only.

And that’s it! Obviously these tips are easier to take in by actually watching the video, so click play, learn a little something and let us know which (if any) of these ‘hidden secrets’ were actually new to you.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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How to Use the Folders Panel in Lightroom

12 Jul

The web is full of articles about Lightroom’s Develop Module. It’s the flash part of Lightroom, making our images look so much better. It truly is the heart of Lightroom, but if you can’t find images when you need them, you may as well have never shot them. That’s where the Folders Panel in Lightroom. Because if Develop is the heart of Lightroom, then the Library module is definitely the head.

The Library module is all about managing your images. It uses a range of tools to do this. Key among these are Folders and Collections. In this article, we’ll be looking at the Folders Panel.

The Folders Panel

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The Folders panel shows a hierarchy that represents folders on your drive which have been imported into Lightroom, either directly, or created when importing images. Because it only contains imported folders, it may not include or show all folders or subfolders available on the drive.

Show/Hide Parent Folder

Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates in the Import Dialog

The key feature of Folders in Lightroom is that they only allow an image to be located in one folder only. This is controlled by the “Don’t Import Suspected Duplicates” checkbox in the Import dialog. There are good reasons for this.

First, physical duplicates take up space on your hard drive, and in backups. Secondly, how do you know if you’re looking at the right file to export if there are only subtle differences between them? You can, of course, create different versions of an image using Virtual Copies (without duplicating the file). The beauty of this is the copy only exists as a preview on disk, taking up very little room, but still allowing a managed set of versions to exist.

With the hierarchy in the Folders panel, you can move up and down the folder tree by using two commands available on each top level folder (the folders in which subfolders reside). These commands are; Show Parent Folder and Hide Parent Folder. The former reveals more of the folder tree on your hard drive, while the latter hides it.

Show/Hide Parent Folder

Add Folder/Subfolder

Click the + Icon for more Folder options

Generally, most of the folders in Lightroom are created outside Lightroom, or as part of Import, but there are also tools to create them within Lightroom. Click the plus (+) icon in the Folders panel header to access the Folders menu. From there you can create a new folder or even a subfolder inside the current folder. When creating a subfolder, you can include images to move into it after its creation.

Find Missing Folder/Update Folder Location

It’s important you remember that Lightroom is a database, so it depends on the information collected upon import to do its job. One important bit of information is the folder’s physical location on your hard drive. If you move a folder outside of Lightroom (or even rename it), Lightroom will lose track of it. You can relink the folder using the “Find Missing Folder” command, but it’s generally best to move single folders and images inside Lightroom. If you want to move an entire tree somewhere else, use the Show Parent Folder command until you’re at the top of the tree. Then in the OS copy the whole tree to the new location.

Click the + Icon for more Folder options

You can quickly get to the top folder on your hard drive by using the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + R for Show in Finder/Explorer. Once the copy is complete, right-click on the top-level folder in Lightroom, and choose “Update Folder Location”. Browse to the new location and select the top level folder. Lightroom will now associate all the catalog information with the new file location. This is great for when you outgrow a drive but still want all your files together, as it allows you to move everything safely without losing any of your work.

Drives in Folders

Folders Drive Icon

Speaking of drives, each disk also has a tab in the Folders panel, showing the name of the drive, and information about it. A graphical LED shows a color to represent remaining space on the drive. Green means okay, orange means it is almost full. Red means critically full, especially for the drive that contains the catalog file. Black means the drive is disconnected, and the drive bar will be dimmed.

Video with More Info

To expand on this article check out my video on the Folders panel. It’s a pretty in-depth look at Folders in Lightroom and covers more than what I’ve gone through here. If you’re a visual learner, you’ll get more from watching. Check it out below:

If you’ve specific questions, don’t be afraid to ask in the comments below.

The post How to Use the Folders Panel in Lightroom by Sean McCormack appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Adobe officially admits speeding up Lightroom is ‘top priority’

12 Jul

Spend any time chatting with fellow photographers about Adobe Lightroom and you’re bound to hear about performance issues. It’s one of the most common and widespread complaints: even with tons of RAM, a great graphics card, and a powerful CPU, many computers still struggle to keep Lightroom running smoothly.

Until now, Adobe itself has stayed pretty much silent on the matter, but in a post on the company’s Lightroom Journal blog, they finally fessed up and are asking for your help.

“I would like to address concerns recently voiced by our community of customers around Lightroom performance,” writes Tom Hogarty, photo product management at Adobe, “as improving performance is our current top priority.”

The post goes on by stating that Adobe already understands many of the worst “pain points” and are “investing heavily” in improving those areas. “Over the past year we’ve added numerous enhancements to address your performance concerns,” says Hogarty, “but we understand we will have a lot of work to do to meet your expectations.”

And speaking of expectations, this is where you come in. Adobe wants to work with customers to identify the most important and bothersome workflow and performance issues that need fixing. So if you’re frustrated by the slow plodding pace of Lightroom and you want to be part of the solution, you can gripe about issues general and specific by filling out this survey.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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