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I’ve enjoyed using Lightroom since v1.  With the improvements and new editing tools introduced in v2, it’s vastly improved.   And now with v3 on the horizon, the story should only get better.  Lightroom is now my main editing application and I typically only use PS for things that can’t be done in LR (e.g., perspective correction, more complex layer work).

As good a tool as it is for organising your photography database, I think there are a good number of people using LR who still don’t know how powerful an editing tool it is. Everything I did with the photos below can be done in PS and probably PSE and other editing applications. In most cases I find the result is better with the tools in LR and the workflow is faster and more natural. In addition, to do the same things in PS would require, in most cases, using layers to maintain the integrity of the original image which increases file sizes and chews up hard drive space.  First I’m going to show 4 images in a before and after comparison.  You may not like the photos, you may not like how I approached the editing.  That’s all fine.  I think they do show the power of the tools in LR for editing; however.  In all but one case, the only tools used were the Adjustment Brushes, Spot Removal and the Clarity slider.  In one, a slight Tone Curve adjustment was made and in the last a crop was applied.  I wanted to do a couple things with these.  I wanted to highlight the bits of colour in the surrounding evergreen trees.  Second, I wanted to bring out the texture of the Precambrian rock of the Canadian Shield.  Beyond that, I wanted to enhance contrast by darkening certain parts of the water and existing shadow areas without completely losing texture or detail.  In the last, I also wanted to brighten the waterfall itself which was hidden in fairly deep shadow and crop to create a near perfect mirrored symmetry with the reflection.

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Primarily the Brightness adjustment brush was used as a Dodge/Burn tool and the Sharpening brush was used to selectively sharpen or de-sharpen specific areas of the photos.  The Saturation brush was used to ‘pop’ the bits of fall colour from the surrounding evergreens.  The Saturation brush was also used to desaturate some colour in parts of the water and in the last image to reduce saturation of parts of the cloud reflection.  The Brightness brush as a Dodge/Burn tool is superior to any method I’ve tried in PS, including the use of a separate Dodge/Burn layer (which is a very good method).  The ability to selectively sharpen (or de-sharpen) areas with the Sharpening adjustment brush is simpler than doing it in PS – although I still like the High Pass method in PS for global sharpening quite a lot.  The Spot Removal tool (Clone/Heal) is terrific and particularly with respect to healing, is superior to the Healing Brush in Photoshop.  The ability to very finely match the source and destination with both the Clone and Healing features of the Spot Removal tool is terrific.

When you use any Adjustment brush in LR it puts a control point on the image.  The screen captures below show the various control points for these 4 images.

These control points make it very simple to go back and change prior edits without affecting the edit history on the left.  If you hover your cursor over a control point, a mask will be placed in the image to show the area that has been affected by the specific adjustment (image below is an example).

Hover over different control points till you see the mask covering the area you want to go back and work on.  If you then click on that control point, it will become active, the specific adjustment you made (e.g., Brightness, Sharpening, Contrast, etc.) will become active and you can edit the adjustment to your liking – all without having to backtrack in the History.  If you do go back in the History and make a change, you then lose all of the subsequent adjustments (unless you save a Snapshot).  By activating individual control points, the integrity of the History is maintained yet you can still change previous edit adjustments.  It’s somewhat like using the non-linear editing feature in PS (only better and easier).

Using the tools available in Lightroom entails a different workflow than using Photoshop.  But I think taking some time to become comfortable with Lightroom and the editing tools it offers would be time well spent.  Happy editing!

…. or a third…. or a fourth… or….

Sometimes we go out to a location that we’ve read about, researched, investigated and are full of hope for a positive experience and bringing back some terrific photographs. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. At least not on the first look.

A couple years ago, in mid-September, I was on a trek up in the Bruce Peninsula working on my lighthouse project. From Tobermory, I took the ferry over to Manitoulin Island and my initial plan was to take the ferry back to Tobermory to make the trip home. While on Manitoulin, I decided I’d drive off the north end of Manitoulin and come around the top of Lake Huron so I could hit Killarney and the lighthouse there. With this change in plan, I spent the next couple nights researching other places I could stop and found Chutes Provincial Park.  It was in the opposite direction I wanted to go but it looked like a great spot for flowing water and waterfall shooting so I decided to make the detour.  The park is located just outside of Massey, ON.  The day started out well.  Fantastic sunrise that allowed me to get some interesting shots of the swing bridge (one of the few remaining in operation and one of the oldest) at Little Current on Manitoulin and some good shots of the lighthouse on Strawberry Island and I was fortunate have one of the Strawberry Island light shots grace the cover of Dreamscapes Travel & Lifestyle Magazine.

As the day went on, it began to cloud over and become more overcast.  When I got to Chutes, it was pretty much completely cloudy and threatening rain.  A bit of blue sky popped out occasionally but not for long.  Flat, uninteresting light.  I decided that I’d try to shoot with as little sky in the shots as possible, concentrating on the river, rapids, waterfalls and autumn colours.  I also decided that I’d shoot with HDR in mind.  Not because of the need for a wider dynamic range but rather because of the detail enhancing capabilities of HDR that might help ‘perk’ up some of the images and better allow me to ‘create’ contrast after the fact.

I spent a few hours in the park, hiking the Twin Bridges Trail which is about 3.5 to 4 miles in length round trip.  Looking at the shots later that night in my hotel on the laptop, I wasn’t thrilled with what I had.  It seemed that I hadn’t captured what I had envisioned as I was setting up the shots.  Even processing some HDRs I wasn’t getting anything that really enthused me.

After coming back home, I worked on some of the images again on my desktop computer.  Better screen, better calibration, more accurate colours and contrast.  Maybe that was the problem.  Nope.  Still wasn’t getting results that I was anywhere close to pleased with.  I didn’t toss the images in the Recycle Bin; however.

Things change over time.  Our perspectives change.  Our skill set changes.  We learn new tricks.  We become more comfortable with things like HDR or more advanced digital darkroom tools as we learn more and use them more.

In the past few days, I decided to have another go with some of these shots from Chutes.  The single images still weren’t doing it for me.  Off to HDR-land we go.  When I first took these photos HDR was new to me and I struggled mightily with tonemapping.  Over time as I’ve used HDR more I’ve become more comfortable with it (although still not overly good) and was able to end up with some tonemapped images that were at least closer to what I had visualized initially and that were something I could work with.

Various other editing tools were used to come up with the final versions.  Masking parts of single images into the tonemapped files, Hue/Saturation adjustment layers, High Pass sharpening layers with parts of the image masked out for selective sharpening, and then in all cases, final tweaking in Lightroom using the Adjustment Brushes to fine tune the images (I really like the Brightness Adjustment Brush as a Dodge/Burn tool).

Now, these are far from perfect and undoubtedly a more talented photographer and more talented user of the digital darkroom could come up with much better results; but each of these is much closer to what I envisioned as I looked at different ways to approach the shot and as I picked my final viewpoint to set up from.  I wanted the water to be the main feature of each shot and I wanted the little pockets of fall colour to ‘pop’ out from the surrounding evergreens.  I also wanted to try to highlight the texture of the Precambrian rock that makes up the Canadian Shield.  Was I successful?  Well, moreso now than a couple years ago for sure.  But the park is on the list for a revisit at some time down the road.

The bottom line is, sometimes it pays to go back and take a look at things we’ve done in the past with a fresh viewpoint and maybe some fresh skills.