Lightroom 4 Beta Initial Thoughts and Video Support

January 12, 2012 by David | Leave a comment

Well, include me among the eager Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users looking forward to the next major release of our image management and editing tool. When Adobe announced the initial beta release for  Lightroom 4 this week, I had it downloaded and installed in very short order.

Installation was easy enough, and LR4 is riding along side my main LR3 instance, each with their own catalog. I imported all of my pictures in to the LR4 catalog, and because I export the XMP data automatically, LR4 shows the edits I did in LR3.

The big thing for me is that it appears that I can keep my current workflow with LR4. There’s nothing worse than having to change the sequence of events or learn a new flow in order to upgrade to a new version of a piece of software, but it appears that LR4 kept the same feel (so far). As a result, working with LR4 felt very natural. In develop mode, there were a few changes to the Basic edits, clarifying and streamlining things a bit. All of my presets from my previous version of Lightroom where there and useable, too.

One of the big, new features that I’m excited about is better support for video inside of Lightroom. Sure, you could import video files in to your catalog , but that was about it. LR3 used an external video player, and you couldn’t really do anything with the video.

Lightroom 4 changes that. Not only can you play the video inside of the application, but you can do some basic editing of your video files. Now, this isn’t going to replace Premiere, After Effects, or Final Cut, just like Lightroom doesn’t technically replace Photoshop. But just like you can do a good chunk of your work in Lightroom for photo processing without going in to Photoshop, you can do the same for video files. You can trim and crop video files, sure. I mean, I can do that on my iPhone. But in LR4, you can also do some basic adjustments to the video files; things like adjusting exposure, correcting white balance, and, yes, applying some of your photo presets to video files!

Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode

The video editing options come up when you select a video file (here, from my iPhone backup). As you can see in the image above, the movie timeline shows up below the larger still from the movie, where you can play and trim the video file. On the right column are the controls for applying edits to the video. You can apply a custom white balance (more limited options than you get with a video file at this point), adjust the exposure up or down, or apply a preset. On that front, if your preset includes adjustments that are unsupported for video files, you are presented with the dialog below.

Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode Preset Dialog

That dialog gives you a list of the types of presets that you can apply to a video file that, honestly, is pretty impressive and covers a lot of the basic edits you would do to a file, for example, that you were going to upload to Facebook or your blog. Again, if you’re doing a wedding video or something more heavy-duty, Lightroom 4 probably won’t get you there. But it might be great for previews.

In the image below, I applied a split-toning preset to the video file. After I applied the preset, I was able to play the video inside of LR4 and see the video played with my adjustments without having to encode or export the video.

Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Mode Preset Applied

An interesting note, though, is that while you can apply a preset to a video file, the Develop module, at least in this first Beta, does not support video files. So you’d have to create a preset, then apply it to the video file. You can’t make individual edits. Not a deal breaker, but certainly something that can be improved.

Lightroom 4 Beta - No Video In Develop Module

Exporting a video was also straight forward. File > Export, and there is a new “Video” tab that includes a few options, such as quality and format. Exporting the 8-second video below took under a minute on an older MacBook Pro with LR3 and a bunch of other applications running.

Lightroom 4 Beta - Video Export Dialog

 

My initial impressions of Lightroom 4 are pretty positive. On the video side, even the basic adjustments that I’m able to do inside of the application are really going to give me a simple way to clean up and tweak my videos before I upload them. Granted, I only used small iPhone videos here; I’ll likely use some larger videos in different formats down the road. But I figure 90% of the videos I’ll be editing in this way will be from my iPhone, so I’m pretty pleased.

Here is the exported video with the preset applied.

 

Posted in lightroom, Uncategorized, video Tagged , , , , , |

Make This The Year Of “Go”

January 6, 2012 by David | 1 Comment

 

Last Christmas, Santa brought be a D7000, my first video-capable DSLR and Nikon’s first DSLR produced after they realized the Motion JPEG probably wouldn’t be the standard for…well, anything, really.

Within minutes of unwrapping my present, I was exploring the wonderful world of video that I had only read about in magazines. I learned about the 180 rule, compression, codecs, and lot’s of cool new terms to add to my already impressive glossary of photographic terminology. I ordered the largest, fasted SD cards. I cleared out some hard drive space for the annoyingly large file sizes. I put together my first video, 2×30, taking it from capture through post in Adobe Premiere and uploaded it to my brand-spankin’-new Vimeo Pro account. I created another video studiously documenting ISO performance of the D7000 in video mode that actually received a few “Likes” on Vimeo. I was riding high, waiting for more inspiration. Or for Hollywood to call. Sadly, neither happened, and my video production stalled.

I still listened to the new podcasts I found, though, and studied movies a bit more, noticing camera angles and lighting choices. Thoughts of “that would be cool to shoot” continued to pop up in my head, and I’d think to write the ideas in my journal, but I never would. Like the Higgs boson, video inspiration would blink in and out of existence in an immeasurable fraction of time.

And then the year ended, and I looked back disappointed that I hadn’t done more. In the creative communities, 2011 was the year of not being afraid to do something, anything, and to put yourself out there, and I wasted it.

Enter 2012.

Maybe 2011 was meant to fill up my tank, and 2012 is the year that I start my engine and actually drive. Not only did I start jotting down my ideas in my journal instead of just thinking about jotting them down, I took it a step further. Yesterday, I created a story board for one of those ideas. I had an idea for a short video of my son and I playing Nerf hockey, and I worked through the idea, breaking it down in to scenes, taking notes on my ideas for the different shots. When I got home, I grabbed some lights, the camera, and started capturing video, knocking out the scenes one at a time (and loving every minute spending time with my son, who was very patient and cooperative for a two-year old). At the end of it, I had a handful of clips, enough to assemble in to…something.

After he went to bed, I loaded the images in to the computer. I started noticing things that normally would have caused me to quit the project all together. One of the shots of me was out of focus. The crop was wrong, the angle was wrong, the lighting was wrong. The 2011 me would have just packed it up, defeated. But I pushed through, flaws and all. I remember someone saying somewhere that H264, the format my camera records in, was a great compression technology for the web, but horrible for video editing. I did some research on how to convert it to a friendlier format, but I didn’t seem to have any of the codecs that the higher-end, more professional blogs were referring to. ProRes what? Avid DNxHD doesn’t install on OS X Lion? Roadblock after roadblock came up before me. Again, normally I would have been frustrated and stopped. Instead, I figured that these clips weren’t really that big, so maybe I could push through in a non-edit-friendly format on my substandard computer, which I did. And I’m glad I did.

Too often, I feel like I’ve had it too easy, and that since there are no consequences for not figuring something out, it’s way to easy and enticing to quit. So I quit. Meanwhile, at work, or being a father, if I need to figure something out, my expert troubleshooting and reasoning skills almost always bring me to a logical conclusion, and I find that I’m better off and more informed by going through the process of figuring it out. Well, news flash, its the same even when a paycheck isn’t involved. And who knows, maybe the stuff that I figured out because I wanted to, not because I had to, will come in handy somewhere down the road. You know, when Hollywood calls.

Hollywood may not call because of this video, but I’m proud of pushing through my roadblocks to actually get something done and putting it out there. Whether it’s a new year, or simply a new day, it’s an opportunity to do things differently. Seize that opportunity and just go.

You can see the final video below. Enjoy.

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Uploading Images To Your WordPress Blog Using Lightroom

January 2, 2012 by David | Leave a comment

Last year, I stopped using Flickr to host my images and, instead, started hosting images myself.

First, you’re going to need the LR/Blog plugin for Lightroom from the Photographer’s Toolbox. It’s free to try, and the £8.00 price tag for the full version is well worth the convenience it provides. If you’re unfamiliar with how to install a plugin for Lightroom, the website provides the basic steps, although it’s basically navigating to your plugins in Lightroom, clicking Add, and then pointing to the downloaded file.

For WordPress users, you’ll need to update your site configuration, basically enabling outside applications to upload images and create posts. The LR/Blog plugin uses WordPress’s supported mechanisms for doing this, so you’re not going to far outside the box. But it does require enabling this functionality, which the PT website describes here. The plugin does support other blogging platforms, as well, including Blogger and TypePad. The PT website includes configuration details for them, as well.

Once the LR/Blog plugin is installed, and WordPress is ready to accept uploads, the next step is to define your blog and upload settings inside of Lightroom. I have a few different blogs that I run, so for easy organization, I created a folder called Blogs and I have an export profile for each of my blogs, which you can see in the image below.

Quickly running through the different options…

Each of the profiles has, at the top, the URL for each of the different blogs. Easy enough. Next up, you can have LR/Blog only upload the images, or upload the images and insert them in to a new blog post. By default, I have the plugin upload the images. If you want to use the WordPress Gallery feature, make sure you have LR/Blog create a post. For whatever reason, if you upload images to WordPress, then separately create a post and insert the images, those images don’t show up in the Gallery tab of the post and, therefore, you can’t use them in an inserted gallery. This isn’t an LR/Blog limitation, it’s just the way WordPress works. If you want to use a gallery, have LR/Blog create the post, then you can go in to the draft post and move things around, remove the inserted images (they will still be “associated” with the post), and then insert a gallery.

The other options I changed were the file naming so that I can change the name of the uploaded image to make it easier to find inside of the media library of the blog (and/or SEO). I resized the images to the maximum size I’d need, changed the Quality to 75 and Output Sharpening to Screen. This seems to work for the way I use most of the images, although if you’re looking for more portfolio-sized and quality images, you should adjust accordingly.

 

 

 

Posted in lightroom, workflow Tagged , , , |