Lightroom Rocks!

ORIGINAL IMAGE

Last weekend at the Waco Fly-in I took about 180 photos. Many of these were sent to the bit-bucket because of blur. I had the Canon 40D on high speed drive mode at six frames per second, so there were going to be some slacker shots. The one above though was with an EF 24-105 f/4 L IS lens and those all turned out nice for the most part.

The word nice was used because this is all it was. A nice snap-shot but not a complete image. Shooting in RAW has its benefits in that there is so much more information available in post production that the image can be made to really pop and look as vibrant as you saw it at capture. Shooting in jpeg is a faster process to an image but does not allow the photographer the same flexibility in post than does a RAW file. Not to say the jpeg can not go through post production but rather if it does the file has already been compressed once by the camera.

The adjustment panel above is what was done to the RAW file at the top of the post. A well exposed image needs very little adjustment to look stellar. Typically the white balance is checked, clarity, vibrance, noise correction, and sharpening are all that are tweaked. The next most likely tool that is use would be a slight tone curve adjustment as this works over the contrast in a localized area.

So those items were done to the image above to end up with the image below. A vignette is not always appropriate in an image but after the above adjustments, the sky and grass area were a little brighter than I liked. Enter Lightroom 2.0 Graduated Filter. Pulling one down from the top deepened the sky and then another from the bottom darkened the grass. This was an artistic decision on my part in that by doing so I was able to focus your attention to the airplane and not other light objects in the image.

FINISHED IMAGE

All those adjustments become very tedious after the first 15 or 20 images. Adobe created a valuable asset in Lightroom that allows repetitive adjustment to be not so tedious. Lets all stand up and give a round of applause for the Presets Panel. Not only does Lightroom come with a good amount of presets, it allows users to define new presets.

These presets allow me to make a slider adjustment very quickly while still allowing me to adjust the slider manually. In my PDP Treatment presets I have at least two adjustments for my most common settings. Some even have a reset function so I can back out of that particular setting. The first adjustment is titled A-CV N75 S100 TC-S V20. With one click of the mouse I can make the following adjustments every time:

• A mild amount of Clarity and Vibrance
• An overall noise reduction of 75%
• A 66% boost in sharpness
• Slight S-Curve adjustment in tone curve
• A 20% vignette

Magic!

Hey, that's long enough for today so TTFN... Doug