Tag: Adobe Camera Raw

Why Lightroom?

A brief rundown on the strengths and weaknesses of Lightroom

I remember when I first tried to process RAW files back in 2002.  I had been shooting JPEG up to that point and heard about RAW files, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I used the only RAW conversion program available to me at the time – Camera RAW in Photoshop 7.1.  It didn’t go well.  I couldn’t figure it out, so I continued to shoot in JPEG. 

Then I heard about a product called RawShooter from a Danish company – Pixmantec.  It had just become available and it was free.  With nothing to lose I downloaded it and checked it out.  It was fantastic.  It was so easy to use.  When the company offered the paid version, RawShooter Premium, I was all in.

Then, on June 26, 2006, Adobe announced they had purchased the ‘technology assets’ of Pixmantec for incorporation into Lightroom which was in the third round of beta testing at the time.  Version 1 was shipped in February of 2007 and us Pixmantec customers were grandfathered in.  With RawShooter Premium no longer available and a free version of Lightroom 1, I switched to it and was pleased to see some of the functionality in RawShooter Premium that I especially liked appear in Lightroom 1 that hadn’t been in any of the beta versions. 

Michael Reichman of Luminous Landscape and Jeff Shewe in the Photoshop Hall of Fame put together a video training course which I grabbed up right away.  And my experience with Lightroom was off to an excellent start.

A Brief History

Lightroom was designed from the start for digital photographers.  The core functionality was to be RAW image conversion.  But digital photographers need a lot more than just that. They needed to be able to organize their image files, edit them, categorize them, tag them, export them, print them and more.  In short, professional digital photographers needed to be able to run all aspects of the creative side of their businesses using Lightroom.  It’s tempting to think of Lightroom as a tool to adjust and enhance our images but as you can see, it’s so much more.

The Heart of Lightroom – the Catalog

With the introduction of layers in Photoshop, the notion of non-destructive enhancements was introduced.  The idea is that the original image is priceless and if adjustments change it and they don’t work out, you’re in trouble.  You can’t start over again.  So, Photoshop introduced layers.  Virtually all of the adjustments you could apply to the original file could be applied in layers stacked one on top of the other.

To give the photographer the ability to make adjustments non-destructively, Lightroom took a different approach.  The developers created a catalog that is at the heart of Lightroom.  Understanding how the catalog works is key to getting the most out of Lightroom.

Simply put, the catalog keeps track of virtually everything about the image files.  First, it knows the location of the file – the hard drive it is on and the folder it is in.  When Lightroom creates a JPEG preview file that it uses when it displays the image on your monitor, the catalog knows the name of the preview file and where it is. If you use the star method of ranking files or you flag them or assign a color to them, all that data is kept in the catalog. 

And when you make adjustments such as Exposure or Contrast or Highlights or Saturation or any of the other available adjustments, every one of them are kept in the catalog as a simple list.  This gives you a full history of all of the adjustments.  If you decide to start over, since the original RAW file hasn’t been changed, you can keep the original list and create a new list.  This gives you the ability to try different approaches for an image.  And the original RAW file remains unchanged.

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Color Management Made Simple – From Computer to Print

Color Management can be a difficult topic. But we’re breaking it down for you. This is the third in a series of articles on the topic – from the Computer to the Print. For a full understanding, read all three.

Color Management is the science of getting the colors you want in your photographs – consistently.  And in my workshops I hear all too often that people are disappointed because the colors they get in their prints are not what they saw on their monitors.  They often go to a lot of work preparing an image and when they print it it’s as if all that work was a waste of time.

Color Management is indeed a science and can be very complicated and technical.  But getting the same colors on the print that you see on your monitor is essential if you are to have control over the creative process.  For that, color management is the key and in these series of articles I’m trying to break it down to make it more understandable and accessible for all of us.

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In the previous two articles I presented the concept of a color space and what happens behind the scenes when you move the image from the camera to your computer.  See Color Management Made Simple – Color Space and Color Management Made Simple – From Camera to Computer.  In this article I’ll be covering the all important aspect of getting your prints to look like what you see on your monitor; that is, from Computer to Print.

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Color Management Made Simple – Color Space

Color Management is very important if you want to get prints that look as good as the images on your display. And understanding color space is fundamental to understanding color management.

Color Management is a very complex topic.  And it’s possible to get bogged down in a lot of technical details.  But it’s extremely important, especially if you want to print your photographs.  And it can be broken down into a few simple concepts.

On my workshops I often get asked questions about color management and the topic is huge and a bit technical to get into the details.  So I thought I’d give an overview of the topic in a few blog posts.  Who knows, maybe I’ll create a presentation that can be used during  a workshop.

Color Space

Let’s start with color space which is the whole reason we need color management.

A color space is all the colors that can be rendered using a given technology.  Think if it this way.  You all enjoyed coloring with crayons when you were young. And I don’t know  about you but I was always envious of my friends that had the big giant boxes of crayons with 120 different colors.  They had every color under the sun.

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We can think of the 120 crayon box as being the color space of the real world with every color under the sun.

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Lightroom Tutorial – Importing Photographs

Get post processing started by importing your photographs into Lightroom.

An important part of post processing is importing your photographs into Lightroom.  The goal is to copy the files from your camera or laptop and store them on your desktop computer.  At the same time you also want to make a backup of all of your files.

You might be interested in the configuration of my desktop computer.  It has about 5 terabytes of storage.  This is where the image files will be stored.  I also have several terabytes of external storage – external hard drives.  This is where the backup copies go.

In this example I’ll be copying files directly from the camera.  The plan is to copy the files as they are to the backup storage.  But the files I store on the desktop storage will be converted to DNG format.  More on that in another post.

So with the big picture in mind, let’s get into the details.

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