Tag: JPEG

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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JPEG or RAW

Which file format is better – JPEG or RAW. Well, it depends….

Our digital cameras give us a choice of two file formats in which our images are stored – JPEG and RAW.  In fact, some digital cameras only store images in JPEG format.  What’s the difference and is one preferred over the other?  Let’s take a look at each.

But before we begin, I was curious what JPEG stands for, so I looked it up.  It’s pretty weird – Joint Photographic Experts Group.  Strange indeed.  But. be that as it may, JPEG is widely used.  Practically every image you see on the web is JPEG although you occasionally see other formats.  If you use a lab to print your photographs, there’s a good chance they will ask you to send them JPEG files.

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Is That What Your Camera Saw?

Should photographic art be what the camera sees? Or something else…?

Occasionally at art festivals a visitor to my booth will point to one of my photographs and ask, “Is that what your camera saw?”  This question points out a common misunderstanding about the physics and art of photography.

Those of us who are serious about our photography capture our digital images in RAW file format.  That’s a format that does a minimal amount of processing on the image before it saves it to the memory card.  It is more like what the camera sees.

The other format is  JPEG and is not what the camera sees but rather a highly processed image that is controlled to a large extent by the settings the photographer sets in the camera – settings like sharpness, contrast and saturation.  So if the photographer likes saturation he just has to up the saturation setting in the camera.

JPEG is much closer to the photographs that were captured in the wonderful days of film.  Each different type of file had its own unique way of responding to the scene.  Kodachrome film was great for reds while Ektachrome was perfect for blues.  Fujichrome was prized for its treatment of greens and its high contrast.

So what did the film camera see?  The question is really, “What did the film see?”  Was it a faithful documentation of reality?  Not in the least.  The same can be said for JPEG digital files.  They are no more a faithful documentation of reality than film was.

The fact is, RAW files are closer to what the camera saw than film or JPEG files ever were or will be.  And, as one workshop participant put it to me, “I don’t like shooting in RAW because the photographs are so plain and uninteresting.”  There you go.  What the camera sees, exactly what the camera sees, is often plain and uninteresting.

So the physics of digital images captured in RAW format is that the images are the closest to what the camera sees.  But from an artistic point of view, these images generally do not speak to us.  These are documentation but that’s not art; art is interpretation.

Now, a RAW file is the perfect starting point from which to create art.  It is neutral, unbiased and open to the artist to express what she saw, what she experienced that inspired her to set up the camera and compose the image, that led to the decisive moment that the shutter was pressed.

In the days of film we relied on our selection of the type of film that would do the best job of rendering particular situations.  In the digital era we have much more powerful tools that we ever had with film – Lightroom, Photoshop, Photomatix and all the wonderful software that we have access to that allows us to express our vision, our interpretation of reality.

So, are my photographs what the camera saw?  Not at all.  They are what I saw.

We do photography workshops.  Come on out and join us.  Click here to check us out.

You can also check out our photography.  Click here.

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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 – From Camera to Computer

Read the second installment in a series of articles on Color Management – taking the image from the camera to your computer.

If Color Space can be described as a box of Crayons as we suggested in  Color Management Made Simple – Color Space,  what else do we need to know about Color Management?  Well, Color Management is essentially about getting the right colors – and here’s the most important word – consistently.

Let’s spend a few moments talking about the ‘right color.’  (I’m inclined to add, ‘whatever that is.’)  The story begins when you press the shutter.  Let’s suppose you are photographing the beautiful redwoods of Northern California.

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The scene is full of rich browns and oranges and vibrant greens.  We can say that these are the right colors, these are the colors you want.  You set up your camera and snap a picture and your sensor captures these colors, pretty much just as they are (the sensor is playing with pretty much the full big box of 120 Crayons). The camera’s processor does its thing and the image is saved in a file to your memory card.  Eventually we’re going to view the photograph on our computer’s monitor and we just might be a bit disappointed.

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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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Thoughts on Raw vs JPEG

I’ve been having a discussion with a friend regarding the benefits and challenges of JPEG and RAW file formats.  There’s already a lot of discussion on this topic out there but here’s a bit more.

The challenge my friend has with RAW is that the images are not as striking as JPEG.  In fact, she says the RAW images are rather flat and she’s right.

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