digital darkroom | Photocrati

I have Lightroom, do I need Photoshop?

Mist and Snow, Cummings Creek Wilderness. One of multiple flaws in this image is the convergence of the tree trunks, they're slightly closer together at top than bottom. This could be easily corrected in Photoshop, not so easily in Lightroom alone. — Mist and Snow, Cummings Creek Wilderness. One of the multiple flaws in this image is the convergence of the tree trunks; they're slightly closer together at top than bottom. This could be easily corrected in Photoshop, not so easily in Lightroom alone.

One of the most common questions I get when teaching my Adobe Lightroom workshops, is whether Lightroom is enough. The answer to that question depends on your needs and goals. But it is worth spending a bit of time reviewing reasons a photographer who has Lightroom 2 might also want to invest in Photoshop:

Graphic Design: If you are authoring your own web site or other publications, you may want Photoshop (or other tools) for laying out text over images, and so on.
Healing Tool Differences: There are some really nice things Lightroom can do that Photoshop can’t (like synchronizing correction spots on identical compositions), but Lightroom’s spot removal tool works best on small spots. Photoshop’s healing brush seems a more powerful option for larger scale healing, such as removing linear defects like branches or cracks in scanned images. (more…)

Adobe’s Beta “DNG Profiles” for Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw

Before and After applying the "Camera Landscape" profile for the Canon 1Ds Mark III

Many photographers, myself included, are deeply attracted to the idea of getting great digital darkroom results from a single program. That idea is still a bit of a dream, the capabilities of the various programs out there vary far too greatly. Even when looking at the specific issue of raw camera file conversion, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom will, by default, produce very different results than in-camera JPEGs or raw images converted by the manufacturer’s software, such as Nikon Capture NX or Canon’s Digital Photo Professional. While Lightroom, and it’s brother Adobe Camera Raw, offer nearly unmatched flexibility in raw conversion, Adobe’s conversions have been tailored towards producing (by default) a different consistent “look” across different camera bodies and different camera manufacturers. While an excellent goal, many photographers prefer the “secret sauce” looks provided by those manufacturers, and wish they could easily create those looks within a more general and more flexible program such as Lightroom.

To directly address this need, late last year Adobe Labs released a second beta of their DNG profiles for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. (Despite the name, if you wish to use these new profiles you do not need to use the DNG (Adobe’s Digital NeGative) format yourself. (You will need at least a few DNG images if you with to use Adobe Labs’ associated DNG Profile editor, though, more on that later.) These profiles attempt to match many of the facets of the “look” of a photograph to the look of that image as if it were processed by the camera or the manufacturer’s camera software. (more…)

Negative Clarity

In my last post about clarity, I’d get back to “negative clarity”. Now, despite the firm protests of my students on the last Oregon photo workshop I gave, negative clarity does not require the use of fine California vintages. Instead it’s a feature, introduced by Adobe in Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw, that allows the strength of the clarity effect to be negative as well as positive, and the visual effect of negative clarity is both interesting and occasionally quite useful. In this post, I’ll talk a bit more about it but also suggest an interesting application or two. (more…)

Some Clarity about Clarity

In teaching Lightroom workshops, I’ve found that one of the most difficult controls to explain to photographers is the clarity slider. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate, and people pick up what it does fairly intuitively with a little practice, but I’m going to try in this post to explain what’s going on with clarity with a goal of helping you understand how to use this very useful control (and it’s local adjustment brethern) more effectively. (more…)

Book Review: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book

Every quarter I teach a one-day workshop on optimizing images using ::amazon(“B0018VH8S2”, “Lightroom”):: at the local art league, and in doing so I’m often asked for a good book recommendation on Lighroom, and my usual recommendation is Martin Evening’s book ::amazon(“0321555619″,”The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers”)::. In short, Evening’s book provides a well-written, comprehensive look at using Lightroom, and mostly lives up to its name well. (more…)

Mix ’em Up, Part 2: Focus Blending in Photoshop CS4

This is the second of a series of posts on digital darkroom techniques describing digital darkroom techniques that “combine” groups of images towards various ends.

Focus blending is a technique for combining a series of images of the same scene to create a resulting image with a wider depth-of-field. Focus blending is best-known to aficionados of macro photography, as depth-of-field at close distances is almost always razor-thin even at the tiniest apertures. While best known in macro circles, it could benefit any type of photography where it’s impossible or pragmatic to get enough depth-of-field. (more…)