Tag Archives: lightroom

Lightroom 4 Beta Initial Thoughts and Video Support

By David | Published January 12, 2012

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.

 

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Uploading Images To Your WordPress Blog Using Lightroom

By David | Published January 2, 2012

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.

 

 

 

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My Current Fascination With Lightroom Yellow/Blue Split Toning

By David | Published June 27, 2011

Split toning refers to the process of tinting the highlights of an image in one color, and the shadows in another. In the days of film, it was often applied to black and white images, but it can be applied to color images, as well.

My current process involves tinting the highlights with a warm color (yellow) and applying the opposite, a cooler color (blue), to the shadows. The steps are pretty simple, but I’ve also included a downloadable preset at the end of this post for you to download to get started.

In Lightroom, open up your image of choice and head in to the Develop module.

In order to see the effect of split toning most clearly, it helps to play with it on a black and white image, so under Treatment at the top of the Develop options, click Black & White.

Now, slide down to the Split Toning section.It may be collapsed if you haven’t used it, so click on the triangle top open it up.  You will see two similar sets of options, one for Highlights and one for Shadows.

The basic steps are to first select the color you want to use for the Highlights or Shadows, and then select the level of saturation, which determines the level of tinting that is applied. Depending on your image and the colors you are using, you may find that you need to increase the saturation of either (or both) the Highlights or the Shadows to actually see the effect. Finally, you can adjust the Balance slider to more heavily lean the adjustment one way or the other.

The reason I recommended to first convert to black and white is because it makes it easier to see the effect when you don’t have all the other colors in the image. As you can see in the image below, I’ve warmed up the highlights using a yellow hue, and cooled the shadows using a blue hue, and I adjusted the saturation of each until I saw those colors in the image. I typically start out at 50 for both the Highlights and the Shadows, and adjusted the values from there.

Once you can see the effect in the image, switch back to the color version of the image, and you’ll see the Split Toning applied to the color image.

Below are side-by-side , the original image on the left and the split tone version on the right. I typically apply the effect subtlety, but you can see the cooler tone of the fence, and the warmer tone on the skin and shirt. The final image also has a mild vignette and some clarity applied, as well.

Below, you can download the Lightroom preset. It includes the yellow/blue split tone, as well as a little clarity and a slight vignette. I’d recommend just using it as a starting point, because different images react differently to the colors and saturation levels in the preset. I have a few different levels of saturation in different presets so that I can use whichever one is closest to where I want to be with the final image, and then just adjust from there.

Enjoy!

Download the preset here: LR3 YellowBlue SplitTone Preset.

 

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