Lightroom inSights

Is expose-to-the-right method 'dangerous' advice?

"Exposing to the right" is now common wisdom when you're setting the exposure for a digital photo. (The right being the histogram's right side where your exposure's brightest/lightest portions are displayed.) This standard advice says that your histogram should skew as far right as possible—without wiping out details in any areas except the scene's pure whites.

But it's really tough hitting that perfect exposure  point where only the utterly white whites are blown out (as in this example). That's especially true in the field when making shots and checking them on the back of your camera (even using a scope). For one thing, the little histogram on the camera screen isn't nearly as accurate as the one Lightroom generates on your computer. The difficulty's compounded when you're shooting raw files since even raw-capable cameras display their previews as JPEGs.

As a former slide film shooter, I tend to play it safe by making a slightly darker exposure to make sure I don't lose highlight details. Expose-to-the-right champions contend, however, that that approach has its own problems. If your photo comes out too dark and needs to be lightened, they say, you wind up adding a lot of noise into the photo. The right-is-right crowd maintains that it's better to risk a bit of over exposure and darken the photo in post-processing since that generates less digital noise.

The Online Photographer's regular columnist Ctein has jumped right into this thicket of left and right wingers by calling expose-to-the-right "bull." In an admittedly provocative post, he goes on to call expose-to-the-right advice "dangerous" since you run the risk of losing crucial highlight details that no amount of post-processing can bring back. As for warnings about the noise generated by post-processing lightening, Ctein says such fears are overblown.

He backs up them fightin' words with some pretty convincing example photos that show how much detail can be lost by pushing exposures to the right. In the end, he suggests a method not far from my own: exposing a bit left of right. Definitely worth reading, and making some test shots of your own.

With care, iPhone photos can go big

I used an iPhone 4 to shoot this page's previous banner image of a utility pole peppered with staples. With iPhone photos weighing in at a measly 5mb, you might think it'd be a stretch to use them for full-page banners. Especially since the super-horizontal crop required zooming in on just a sliver of the original photo.

In this case, however, it works fine. Here's why.

For one thing, it's a relatively high-contrast scene. Leaving it that way, by skipping a lot of Develop mode work, immediately tells the viewer that this is not a traditional portrait or landscape shot packed with tonal detail. I also converted it to black and white, using a Lightroom preset. Together, the changes serve to shift the photo to an illustration, which our eyes don't expect to include realistic details.

The final step of adding type—by choosing Photo > Edit in > Edit in Photoshop—completes the transformation. The take-away: Used in the right circumstance, small-file photos can punch well above their official weight.

Goodbye 2, Hello 3: Final Release Still Holds Surprises

Peachpit Press has just posted an article I wrote for them comparing Lightroom 2 and 3. Read it if you're hestitating about upgrading from version 2 to version 3.

Or, if you've already made the leap, read it to see just how smart you were. ;-)

Topics covered include improved printing choices (shown in the photo to the right), integration of audio/video, noise reduction, Flickr, and Lightroom 3's very useful Publish Services.

How good is LR3's new noise control?

It's one thing to hear that Lightroom 3's new processing engine does a superb job of controlling the digital noise that can mar low-light images. It's another to see the effects up close, so let's have a look.

Seen within the Lightroom Develop module, this wedding reception shows typical levels of noise. Lit by the flash, the bride and her father look fine, but in the shadows the blotchy noise is obvious.

In Lightroom's Detail panel, the left "Before" version shows big-time noise in the 1:1 window.  In the right "After" version, the Luminance and Color sliders have been moved to 14 and 19 respectively. The Detail slider for each has been used to keep the photo from becoming a noiseless —but totally smudged—watercolor. Yet even with this relatively conservative correction, the color noise is completely gone, with just a hint of luminance noise remaining (the pixelated edges visible in the black area).

After slightly boosting the Luminance slider to about 20, see how smooth the black jacket and blue shirt behind it have become? Like I said, the effect's startlingly good—even on a snapshot like this. Just imagine what your results will be with a DSLR.

Quickly: What’s New in Lightroom 3

You’ll find lots of improvements throughout the program. Here are some of the most important changes:

• Backup when quitting: It sounds like a little thing, but it embodies the kind of smart improvements you’ll find throughout the new version. Now, when you quit Lightroom 3, you’re asked if you want to back up the catalog. If you’ve been doing lots of work, it’s the most logical time to back up. Previously, you had to back up when you launched Lightroom.
• Tethered shooting: Greatly expanded from version 2, Lightroom 3 supports a tethered connection to most current Canon and Nikon DSLR cameras. Adobe is regularly expanding that list, enabling more photographers to control shots with Lightroom and have the results imported and displayed automatically.
• Imports: The import process has been redone from the ground up, thank goodness. It’s now much more intuitive, and it’s always clear what you’re importing from where. You can save frequently used settings as an import preset. You also can use Loupe view to inspect photos before moving them off the storage card.
• New process engine makes for greater noise reduction: A major under-the-hood reworking of Lightroom’s process engine means big improvements in noise control. Luminance and color noise reduction are now as good as, or better than, all the major third-party plug-ins. Low-light, high-ISO photos now look much better.
• Tone Curve: Lightroom’s new ability to switch to Point Curve enables you to shape the tone curve directly. Photoshop veterans will feel right at home.
• Lens correction: Still a work in progress, the Develop module’s lens correction feature offers the prospect of automatically correcting perspective and aberration based on the lens used. The list of supported lenses remains small, but it is growing. A downloadable manual option makes it possible for you to create a custom calibration for each of your lenses. Here is a video that makes it clear how useful this can be.
• Other develop improvements: The Develop module has been smoothed and buffed from top to bottom. Collections now appear right in the Develop module, eliminating the constant switching to the Library. The Adjustment Brush can now apply “negative sharpening,” which you can use to creatively blur parts of a photo.
• Videos: Increasingly, our cameras shoot stills and video. No, you can’t edit videos in Lightroom yet, but you now can import them into the catalog. That lets you rate them, apply keywords, and use all the organizational tools that make Lightroom so handy for stills. If you have ever accidentally deleted a video off a storage card because you forgot it was there, you will love this.
• Slideshows: Audio and video are becoming full citizens in Lightroom slideshows. You can take your stills and export them as a video. Soundtracks can be embedded into your slideshow, and it’s easy to sync the length to match the number of photos you use. I'll be posting some examples in the coming days.
• Watermarks: Lightroom 3 includes a simple watermark that you can quickly add to photos used in slideshows, Web galleries, or prints. Better yet, it includes a full-fledged Watermark Editor, similar to the Identity Plate Editor, for creating custom text- or graphic-based watermarks of your own.
• Printing: Creating custom photo packages has become as simple as grabbing and rearranging photos on a layout. There’s also a rotate-to-fit option to help you build paper-saving layouts. Maximum print resolution has been boosted to 720 pixels per inch from the previous limit of 480 ppi.
• Publish Services: Combining aspects of the collections feature with semi-automated exports, Publish Services enables you to track and update images exported from Lightroom. You can export directly to your Flickr account to share photos over the Web. Or export to folders that you use to sync photos with a mobile phone, a screensaver program, or even Web-based storage sites such as Dropbox.