Using Adobe Lightroom

19/08/10

About three or four years ago I happened upon the public beta download for Adobe’s, then as yet unreleased Lightroom. The programme promised to offer photographers a customisable, streamlined workflow for high quantity image post processing and archive organisation among other things. As a, by this time, fairly established Photoshop user I have to admit that I found Lightroom pretty impenetrable and largely pointless to begin with. It didn’t seem to do anything that Photoshop and it’s associated RAW converter Bridge couldn’t do with greater flexibility and power, but worse seemed to have many obviously essential functionalities missing: no layers, no perspective editing, no selection tools, etc. What on earth were the bods at Adobe thinking? Was this really intended as their next generation photo-editing tool? If so then they were surely barking up the wrong tree and no serious photographer would ever find use for such a comparatively primitive editing tool.

Maybe two years went by and by this time I’d long since removed the public beta of Lightroom from my computer as a) I’d found little or no use for it and b) the beta version had long since been deactivated as the commercial release had taken place. One day however a colleague and unashamed software pirate of the first order gave me a CDR with a fully functional but almost certainly dodgy copy of the full release version of Lightroom 2. At first I was a little dismissive on the basis that I’d given the software a go previously and doubted that there would be much to interest me. Since my first encounter with Lightroom there had however been a noticeably growing buzz in the photographic community surrounding the software and I was frankly a little frightened of being left behind in an extremely competitive and fast moving world. Somewhat reluctantly I installed Lightroom 2 and gave it another go. OK, to be frank I didn’t have a huge amount of success this time either, but a little light went on with regard to where Lightroom might begin to fit in with my workflow, particularly with regard to the processing of larger numbers of files – something any wedding photographer has to do on a regular basis. I decided that it was time to take things a little more seriously and to invest in a little help. Help came in the form of a book by Irish photographer Sean McCormack and his book Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy, which I took on holiday to Normandy along with my laptop in the hope of finally getting to grips with this by now well established and fairly well respected tool.

I think that before I go any further Sean’s book deserves more of a mention. In my review for Amazon I described it as like finding the Rosetta Stone for Lightroom, which for me at least was no exaggeration. Over a few hours, with the book in one hand and my laptop loaded with holiday snaps in the other I was able to crack and successfully begin to use Lightroom. Upon my return to the UK Lightroom became and still is my weapon of choice, not only for mass file editing and archiving but also as my choice of RAW converter even for single image processing. With Photoshop and my suite of NIK filters plugged in for more surgical and more extreme processing, Lightroom is now my front end for everything. Sean’s book is logical, informative, well illustrated, well cross referenced and concise. While it serves brilliantly as an introduction to Lightroom, it also provides a useful, fast access reference manual for more advanced users. My advice would be that if you get Lightroom, get this book!

So what does Lightroom actually do? The Lightroom suite has five main sections/pages: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print & Web, which enable you to organise, process, and finally output your images in various ways. Each main page is customisable to allow various menus to be hidden or permanently visible and for images to be displayed in a central window either singly or in groups depending upon which page you are accessing (for example Library can show images either individually or in customisable grids, while Develop shows images either individually or in pairs for side by side comparison).

In the Library section images can be organised as ‘catalogues’ and ‘collections’, which can operate either within your existing folder structure (e.g. a smaller Catalogue within your ‘2010 Portraits’ folder which organises images within this folder) or over the top of your existing folder structure in order to organise entire image archives across an entire drive or multiple drives. Individual files or folders can also be present in multiple catalogues if desired (e.g. the same image may appear in ‘2010 Portraits’ and also ‘Family Portraits’ at the same time). Because all editing is non-destructive, when an image appears in two different catalogues a completely different treatment can be applied in each (e.g. the same file appearing in ‘2010 Portraits’ in B&W may also exist in colour in ‘Family Portraits’ without duplication of the file). Exporting of images either individually, as a whole catalogue or as selected groups (collections) is handled in the Library section. The Library section also allows basic image processing in ‘Quick develop’ along with a variety of rating, filtering, tagging, copyright water marking, ID plating and keyword functions.

Once inside Lightroom’s Develop section you will find the range of basic image processing tools available within a RAW converter such as Adobe Bridge (e.g. Histogram display with highlight & shadow warning, white balance, exposure, tonal balance, saturation, cropping & straightening, sharpening, noise reduction, etc) along with some additional tools for basic image manipulation (e.g. vigenetting, grain manipulation, healing, cloning, grad filters, etc). Now so far we’ve not found anything that isn’t already available in the Bridge & Photoshop combo and frankly a great deal that isn’t. However the ability to apply all of the above non-destructively, without the need to create layers and further the ability to apply processes to multiple images, without setting up a PS Action and generating any resulting additional files, is where Lightroom comes into it’s own. OK when working with individual images this won’t be of particular advantage, but when processing massive numbers of files, particularly when large groups of these will require the same basic treatment (e.g. white balance, saturation adjustment, contrast boost, etc), Lightroom is an absolute Godsend.

Other useful features of the Develop section include the ability to instantly compare an image being processed side by side with any other image in the same catalogue or collection and the ability to create snapshot versions of the same file at different points during processing along with a 20 step fully recallable processing history.

As well as the ability to enhance images using third party plugins within Lightroom (my personal preference is the NIK suite including the amazing Viveza selective manipulation plugin), Photoshop itself can also be used as an editor within lightroom – essential for the more surgical applications that Lightroom was never really designed to perform. Edited copies of the images created via plugins or in PS are appear instantly within Lightroom and can be stacked with their original in order to keep things tidy. Anything that Lightroom lacks in terms of selection tools, layering, more extreme processing and so on, is now readily available.

The Slideshow section of Lightroom provides the photographer with the facility to construct and display fairly elaborate, professional quality slideshows without the necessity to export images and pull them into Power Point or similar packages. Images can be displayed against a customisable background with separation effects including stroke boarders and shadows applied. Intro screens can be added along with watermarking or the display of the photographer or studio ID plate. Templates can be created for even more customisation. Once assembled the entire show can also be exported as a PDF file or as a video sequence (HD or lower resolution), which is a very useful feature if you want to publish as a downloadable file to your website or to Youtube or similar on a regular basis.

Lightroom’s Print section encapsulates a range of tools for printing either to hard copy or to file. These include supplied templates ranging from single image (in a variety of formats) to contact sheets and triptych, which can also be supplemented with user-defined templates if required. Printer controls can be accessed from this section via the ‘page setup’ and ‘print settings’ buttons. A comprehensive set of output controls is provided including zoom, fill, rotate, margins, grids, page guides and printers marks, sharpening and colour management. You can choose to print individual images or whole catalogues/Collections if required.

The final section of Lightroom offers a range of options for publishing photos to the web. HTML, Flash and Airtight (as used on Flickr) web galleries can be created automatically and saved to a location of your choice along with all associated media conveniently arranged in appropriate folders ready for upload via FTP. A variety of excellent templates is available, which can be supplemented with user defined templates. Background colours, boarder colours and so on can be customised and gallery information and watermarks can be added.