Scott's Column
Lightroom
May 3, 2013
By Scott Lewis
This month is all about Lightroom. I am really getting into it and
trying to pay more attention to my photography.
Last month I told you I bought Lightroom. A friend turned me onto it.
You can find all kinds of information about Lightroom on the web. There
are lots of people saying how great it is, and it is a very good
program, but it is intimidating as well.
Overall I like it. There is a lot to do and there is a learning curve.
Keeping in mind that it is a catalog system for photos is a big concept
to take in. If you let it do its thing it removes some of the burden of
keeping track of your photos. You should be able to use Lightroom to
import your photos from your memory cards or your camera itself, and
then you just concentrate on working with the photos.
For me I have always had pretty good organization to my photos. I have
all the photos from my Canon EOS Rebel T2i. I have a "parent" folder
called
Photo Projects. In this folder I have a
sub-folder for each "event." I name these folders
YYYY -
Event Name. For example, I went to the Grand Canyon back
in March, so I have a folder called
2013 - Grand Canyon.
Lightroom makes it easy to import existing photos, and keep them in this
file organization. In fact, it is quite good using this design. When
importing new photos I still put them into a folder using this same
naming convention. This makes it easy for me to find them when I am not
in Lightroom.
All was not perfect when I started actually importing photos into
Lightroom directly from my Camera. I built an
Import Preset.
You can do many things at the time you import photos, such as apply a
default develop preset, or process, to photos. I don't know if I will do
that, but I might. As of now I just add basic copyright info to my
photos when I import them.
Where I had trouble was in establishing a naming convention for the
photos as they come over from my camera. I could just use the camera's
naming... IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc. However, I have already rolled this
number over in my camera. Meaning I have taken more than 9999 pictures.
I wanted to prevent (or at least minimize) this since Lightroom makes it
easy to rename files on import. I saw that Lightroom allows up to 5
digits in its numbering. With a prefix of "pic_" I was trying to get
pic_00001, pic_00002... pic_99999.
It took some experimenting. I do not remember exactly what I did, but
the first attempt showed me a preview (of the filename) as pic_00001.cr2
(cr2 being my camera's filename extension, which I did not want to
change). However, when I imported the photos I got pic_00001.cr2,
pic_00001-2.cr2, pic_00001-3.cr2, etc for all the photos I imported.
Yuck!
Like I said, I did not know what options I picked to get this, but
eventually I settled on the filename template
{Custom
Text}{Image # (00001)>>}, which gave me the results I wanted. I
practiced with the same 5 photos over and over. I eventually added
folder info to the Import Preset to defaulted to a folder "LR Import,"
but with a sub-folder of RAW (more later). Once all this was done I
imported a bunch of crap photos and deleted them to get the number up to
the number of photos I imported with my first import.
The driving force for getting into Lightroom was really about
standardizing the way I process my photos. I read an article that showed
what Canon does to its photos when it stores JPGs on the camera. It adds
some processing to them. All manufactures do this. The article was
trying to show you how you can improve on what Canon is trying to
accomplish. But I took it as a chance to create a Preset that matched
what Canon did. I did this in Bridge and Camera RAW (part of Photoshop).
It is a cumbersome effort to try and create presets for Bridge, by
modifying an image in Camera RAW, and then finding the "Previous"
setting file and moving it to a particular folder so Bridge will see it
as a preset.
Also, there are very few Bridge/Camera RAW presets out there. However,
there are lots of Lightroom presets. So my initial goal with Lightroom
was to be able to import RAW images and apply a Canon Default process to
them as a starting point. This is much easier in Lightroom than in
Bridge.
I found an article that showed me how to "import" a Camera RAW Preset
into Lightroom. OK, so you can't actually do it. What you can do is go
into Camera RAW and modify a photo (in this case with my Canon Default
preset). Then exit Camera RAW and go into Lightroom. Import that photo.
Lightroom will read the XMP "sidecar" file (that Camera RAW creates to
store the changes it makes to the photo). Now look at the imported photo
in the Develop module, and save a new preset. Lightroom will save the
changes in that photo as a Lightroom preset. I took this one step
further... I changed the photo to use the 2012 process (instead of the
2010 process that my version of Camera RAW uses... part of Photoshop
CS5). Lightroom 4 has new sliders for the Basic section of the Develop
module. It is what is referred to as 2012 process. So I select that
which looking at this photo, and now I save a new preset again, this
time naming it Canon Default - LR4, so I know it is specific to
Lightroom 4's presets.
So... with importing and applying some defaults to photos out of the
way...
what don't I like? Initially I had a bit of
trouble importing my collection. I was getting errors on a couple of
photos, and I didn't know how to get the detail information. It took a
while, and in doing so I also discovered that Lightroom does not import
duplicates. Yet I have folders where I have extra copies of photos...
such as if I want to have a folder full of images to be used by a Mosaic
application.
So it took me a while to straighten out all this duplicate nonsense. I
would have preferred Lightroom just import the duplicates... or at least
tell me about them. It just ignored them and I wondered for a long time
why the import was not working.
The next problem I touched on last month. I would keep my RAW photos in
one folder, and create sub folders for JPG and PSD files. When you
select a folder in Lightroom it shows you everything in it and its
subfolders. This made it very hard to tell quickly which were RAW
images, and which were previously exported JPG or PSD images.
I got around this by putting my RAW images into a RAW sub-folder
(mentioned above in setting up my import preset), so I can look at the
RAW sub-folder, or the PSD sub-folder, or the JPG sub-folder. The
problem with this work around is that I cannot take advantage of the
export feature to export images into a sub-folder for you. That would
just create a JPG folder under the RAW folder, which I don't want. I
have to setup my export presets to prompt me for a folder and then I
have to manually create/select a JPG sub-folder. This makes exports a
little more work.
I tend to export photos to store on my iPad. Since I do not need these
exported JPG files in my Lightroom catalog, I created a specific folder
for these photos, and created an Export Preset that exports to this
folder and does not add the images to the Lightroom catalog. This makes
it easy for me to later just go to that one folder and drag and drop the
photos to the folder my iPad syncs with.
Then I got really pissed. It turns out that if you set your camera to
take photos in RAW+JPG (where your camera saves both), Lightroom has an
option to automatically STACK these photos when it imports them. So you
will see a folder full of stacked photos, each stack is 2 images.. the
RAW and the JPG.
This is exactly what I want... to automatically stack my RAW and JPG
files and just keep them in the same folder. And here is where I got
pissed... it doesn't work like that. It only works when you are
importing RAW+JPG. You can't get it to stack anything else
automatically. Crap! This has got to be my biggest gripe with Lightroom.
And the problem is... they will probably fix it in the first version of
the program that you have to get by way of a subscription. Crap!!! I
just assume buy it once and use it for as long as possible.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel... I think. As it turns out
you can develop plug-ins for Lightroom. They have an SDK (Software
Development Kit) and an API (Application Program Interface). How hard
can it be to get Lightroom to look at a single folder and stack all the
RAW, JPG, PSD & TIF files with the same base name. I do not know yet...
but I will find out. I think I can do it, I just need the time to read
through their documentation and start working on it. I'll Keep you
posted.
As I mentioned earlier... there are
a lot of presets out there
and I went preset crazy looking for free presets. Hey, I found two
placed that have good quality and fairly inexpensive presets, but I
figure I could start with free and go from there. Keep in mind... there
is little you can do in a preset that is rocket science. Once you start
working in the Develop module of Lightroom and start finding tweaks you
like... just save that as a preset. If you see a preset out there you
like, just apply it to a photo with no previous tweaking and examine the
sections in the Develop module to see what was done. If you want to
tweak it further... just do it and save it as another preset.
Well, I must have downloaded a few hundred presets. My next step is to
put together a small collection of photos (a landscape, and person's
portrait, a car, a nice scene, etc.) and use them to test presets and
see if I like them. Since they are so easy to get/change/delete, I want
to make it easy to evaluate them and get rid of all the crap. And settle
on a couple dozen really good presets that can help me define a "look"
for myself. I want to have a few "go to" presets that I use on most of
my photos. But this is getting ahead of myself. I still haven't
developed a photographic style yet.
I stumbled upon a weird thing with Lightroom's exports. I went to a
Balloon Festival and exported a dozen photos to put on
my iPad. When I did that in Lightroom the photos were between 8 and 15
MB. Wow, that is really large for a JPG which is a compressed format. So
I did a little digging. I took one photo and had Lightroom save the
Develop settings as an XMP sidecar. With the sidecar file Bridge &
Camera RAW could see it. I opened the photo in Bridge, and used my
export preset there to save a JPG for my iPad. Hmm, 2.6 MB. I exported
that exact same file in Lightroom and it was 12.3 MB. WOW! I double
checked... and both applications were set to save the image at full
resolution and highest quality. So... I went back to Lightroom and
changed that iPad Export preset to save at 80% quality and got file
sizes about the same as Bridge. But why? What is Lightroom doing to that
Bridge can't?
Before you think I might want to export at the highest quality in
Lightroom (and deal with the large files) for better print quality...
no. I will create a separate preset for exporting for printing. And that
won't be needed much anyway. I plan to do as much of my printing in
Lightroom itself, so I should not need to export a photo for printing
unless I am sending it off to be printed by a service. Currently I am
just printing for myself on my home printer.
Overall I like Lightroom. I can recommend it. It's full price is about
$150, which is way below the full price of Photoshop. And you can do so
much with Lightroom that it may be enough that you don't need Photoshop
for the vast majority of your photography.
Conclusion
Sorry I only covered Lightroom this month. I have been spending the last
few months taking my photography more seriously. I did a "senior" photo
shoot with my son at the resort we stayed at for the
Balloon
Festival. I was very pleased with the number of really good
pictures I got. A couple of people told me I should think about doing
this as a side business.
I am thinking about doing just that. So I plan to spend a good deal of
time in Lightroom over the coming weeks. I need to do some tweaking to
my workflow. I spent way too many hours working on my son's senior pics.
I need to improve that time, without sacrificing quality. If I am going
to charge people, I need to be able to get as much quality work done in
a timely manner as possible. I can't have paying clients waiting.
I also
hate the way the iPad shows off photos. If you
are using a Mac with iPhoto you are set. You can create photo albums and
put photos into a specific order and they will display exactly as you
want. However, I am
not using a Mac or iPhoto. So I
can't do that. All I can do is put photos into a folder and hope for the
best. Basically the iPad is supposed to show pictures sorted by date...
oldest to newest. But I have had trouble with that. I tried saving them
one by one in the order I wanted them to display, and it still changed
the order some. If I have time I want to look into photo "management" on
the iPad. It will be more important if I have to use my iPad to show
potential clients my work.
With all that said... I do not know what next month will bring. I do
know that Iron Man 3 & Star Trek Into Darkness come out in May, and I am
also taking my sons to Dallas Comic Con in May. May should be a fun
month.
See you after that.