Essential Development 20 Great Techniques for Lightroom 4

Seán McCorm

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ESSENTIA

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ELOPM

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20 G

REAT TECH

NIQ

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Seán McCorm

ack

ESSENTIA

L DEV

ELOPM

ENT

20 G

REAT TECH

NIQ

UES FO

R LIGH

TROO

M 4

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

1 UNDERSTANDING THE HISTOGRAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 BACK TO BASICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3 CAMERA PROFILES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

4 MAKING WHITE WHITE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

6 DODGE AND BURN FOR BEAUTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

7 CROSS PROCESSING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

8 ACHIEVING A FILMIC LOOK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

9 IMAGE TONING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

10 CROPPING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE IMAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

11 STRAIGHTENING PHOTOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

12 FIXING SKIES IN LIGHTROOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

13 TILT SHIFT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

14 EFFECTIVE SHARPENING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

15 REDUCING IMAGE NOISE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

16 CORRECTING LENS ISSUES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

17 DRAWING US IN: VIGNETTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

18 PRESETS: MAKING, USING AND SAVING, PRESETS AS BUILDING BLOCKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

19 FIXING MORE THAN ONE PHOTO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

20 EDIT IN PHOTOSHOP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124Click page numbers on bottom left to return to this page.

Lightroom could manage and work with

your raw files, just as if they were any other

photo file, like a JPG or TIFF. You have to

consider that back then you’d practically

need to open each file in a raw convertor

and then in Adobe Photoshop before you

could work on it. If you messed up, you’d

have to start from scratch. Batch processing?

If you’d a few spare years, maybe! If you

wanted to manage your photos, you’d need

an additional DAM program (that’s digital

asset management), like iView or Portfolio.

Lightroom helped change that environment,

allowing you to process and manage your

raw files (and other photo formats)in one

program. To work efficiently and allow a high

degree of versatility, Lightroom uses a type

of editing called parametric editing. What

this means is that settings you make are ap-

plied to a fresh preview of the file and saved

internally as a series of instructions. Imagine

the original file being the block of marble,

with the settings being the instructions on

where to chisel to make your statue of David.

Due to this methodology, you can easily

change settings at any time. It’s only when

you go to the output modules, or export/pub-

lish that Lightroom takes the original file, adds

the settings, and chisels a new file from them.

Photoshop, on the other hand, destructively

changes pixels, making it hard to go back. Yes,

you can use Smart Objects and Smart Filters,

but there comes a point when doing this to

a batch of images becomes unwieldy, not to

mention the massive files sizes involved.

Develop is the heart of Lightroom. It’s where

the photos come to life. The left panel is

more about management: Presets, Snapshots,

History and, of course, Collections. The right

panel is about the settings that control the

look of the photo. Together they make a re-

ally powerful tool to draw the very best from

your photos. Develop itself is directly tied

to Adobe Camera Raw. In fact the version

numbers have a general correspondence.

Lightroom 3.6 matches Camera Raw 6.6, 4.0

matches 7.0, and so on. Occasionally a bug fix

may require a temporary version jump, but

it gets back in line quickly. They also share

common code, so any settings you can apply

in Develop can be applied in Camera Raw.

In this eBook, my aim is not to have a

rundown of what a tool does, but rather

what we can use it for. Obviously there

needs to be some explanation, so there is

some of that. Even if you do understand

a tool, there will be additional things like

shortcuts that aren’t commonly known,

so you’ll still pick up something as a

more experienced user. So let’s begin!

INTRODUCTION

Adobe Lightroom has been my favourite photo software for over six years now, right from when it was a day old as a public beta. Back then you couldn’t even crop with it. Still, it had one thing going for it.

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Well, the histogram is a graphical view of

all the colours and tones in your photo. It

moves from the darkest tones on the left,

to the brightest tones on the right. The

distribution of the tones and colours can

tell us a lot about the photo. For example,

if we shot against a grey background as

in our first shot, we should see a spike in

the middle of the photo that looks grey.

If there are three spikes of red, green, and

blue there, instead of one solid spike, we

know that the white balance is off, because

grey is equal parts red, green, and blue.

If there are a lot of tones to the

left of the image, and few to the

right, it’s probable that the image is

underexposed (of course, if all the

colours in the image are mid grey and

below in tone, then it may be okay!).

Our second image has a histogram

like this, but the image is correctly

exposed. If the tones are mostly to

the right, with few on the left, the

image is probably overexposed.

1 UNDERSTANDING THE HISTOGRAM

At the top of the right panel in Develop is the histogram. You’ve possibly seen one on the back of your camera in the preview modes. What does it all mean?

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This night shot might appear underexposed as we look at the histogram, but it’s exactly right.

On average, most correctly exposed histograms will have tones that go from left to right with a concentration in the middle.

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Develop goes one step further with the

histogram—it allows you to drag sec-

tions to change how the image looks.

There are five sections that correspond

to blacks, shadows, exposure, highlights,

and whites, from left to right. This is

for the new Process Version 2012.

Process Version refers to the method Lightroom

uses to convert the raw information into the

rendered photo. The year of the Process Version

indicates when it was introduced. The original

rendering had no name, but became Process Ver-

sion 2003 when a new version was introduced in

2010. Process Version 2010 had the same controls

as 2003, but had more control with better im-

age quality. Process Version 2012 is a complete

departure offering far more control! If you’ve

upgraded from an older version of Lightroom,

any files you’ve worked on in Develop will be

an older Process Version. If you’re happy with

the look of these files, do NOT update them. The

translation between Process Version 2012 and

older versions is not exact and may radically

alter the photo. Usually it’s fine, but if you’re

making an edition of 25 gallery prints, best to

keep them identical! The quickest way to update

your image to the new process version is to click

on the warning near the bottom right of the im-

age and press Update. You can also find it in the

Camera Calibration panel, or the Settings menu.


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In addition to the five

control areas, there are also

two triangles on the top left

and right of the histogram.

Hovering over the left

triangle will show where

the blacks are clipping in

blue (i.e. going to full black

with no detail), and the

right triangle shows where

the whites are clipping in

red (this time full white

with no detail). You can

make them stay on by

clicking on the triangle, or

use the shortcut key J to

toggle both on and off.

What does this mean for our

photo? Well, often highlights are

more important than shadows, so

a little shadow clipping might be

okay. If the shot is a face against a

sky on a dull day, it’s probably fine

to clip the highlight detail in the

sky to correctly expose the face.


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Here we’re discussing the Tone section in the middle of the panel. Before we start, you may want to increase the size of the panel, which gives more precision

in the sliders. Go to the left edge of the right panel. The cursor will change to a double-headed arrow. Click and drag the panel over to the left. If you’re totally

mad and want an even bigger panel, hold down the Alt key on PC, Option key on Mac and then drag; you can get past the halfway mark of the screen with this.

T H E S L I D E R S

Exposure is the key slider to correcting

images in Lightroom. It’s not a digital copy

of camera exposure, which will hard clip

highlights if you go too far. It’s much gen-

tler than that. As you increase exposure,

it will try to protect highlights as much as

it can. Think of Exposure as your midtone

control and you won’t go far wrong. Where

Exposure is set does influence the rest of the

controls, and there is overlap between them.

Contrast controls the depth of tone in the

photo. Increasing contrast will make the

blacks darker and the whites lighter. Decreas-

ing it will make the photo more grey and flat.

Highlights controls the brighter areas in the

photo, all the way from above the midtones

to the brightest parts of the images. There

is overlap with both Exposure and Whites.

In fact the whole set of controls is adaptive,

meaning that changes in one slider will alter

the range of another slider. Changing expo-

sure means that the Highlights controls work

on a different range of the image. This is what

makes Lightroom so powerful. If you have a

small amount of highlight clipping that you

want to fix, try Highlights before Whites.

Shadows controls the darkest parts of the

image right down to the blacks. You can even

clip the image with it. Again, this is part of

that overlapping I talked about earlier. Blacks

and Shadows overlap a bit, but Shadows

has a wider range. For this reason, you

should aim to use Shadows before Blacks.

Whites is next and covers the extreme

lightest part of your image. Generally,

Whites should be used after the overall

balance of the image has been set using

the previous controls. It’s great for pulling

back that last bit of clipping, or just push-

ing the last bit of range into a photo.

Blacks is the final slider for basic image

control. It works on the absolute dark-

est parts of the image, and is great for

pulling back that final bit of dark, or for

blocking up to create a darker mood.

Because of the overlap in controls, once

you’ve done a pass-through, you may need

to go back and tweak some of the previ-

ous settings. This is absolutely normal, it

doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.

One key point about the Tone sliders (barring

Contrast) is that they all darken their part of

the image when moved to the left, and light-

en it when moved to the right. Older versions

of Camera Raw and Lightroom, along with

most other raw convertors, have varying slid-

ers, so I feel this adds greatly to the intuitive

feel Lightroom now has for raw processing.

2 BACK TO BASICS

Armed with our histogram knowledge, we can now use it to fix and enhance our photos. The Basic panel is designed to be used with a top-down approach, working in pairs of sliders.

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G E T T I N G T H E M O S T F R O M T O N E

Even if you’ve nailed the correct exposure, the limited dy-

namic range of most digital SLR cameras means that you can

still tweak your photo to bring it closer to what you saw, or

closer to how you visualized the image as you shot.

First let’s look at fixing exposures using a mechanical method

rather than visually guessing. We’ve already seen that drag-

ging in the histogram will alter settings (and move sliders).

2 BACK TO BASICS

If you hold down the Alt key (Option on Mac) and aim for either

the Blacks or Shadows in the histogram (or grab their sliders),

the main image area will go white. If there’s nothing clipping in

the darker parts, the whole area should be white. Any other vis-

ible colours indicate the shadows are clipping at those points. By

dragging Blacks or Shadows to the right, these will lessen until

the whole image becomes white. Depending on the photo, there

may still be a few small sections that never become white. Usu-

ally these are areas of deep shadow that we would never expect

to see with our eyes. And like I mentioned before, the eye is

more forgiving of blocked shadows than clipped highlights.

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Speaking of highlights, the Alt/Option

trick works on Exposure, Highlights, and

Whites too, except that the image goes

black, with clipped areas appearing white,

or whatever colour mix is clipping. If there

is a lot of clipping, begin with reducing

Exposure, then Highlights, then Whites.

Why this order? If the image is very overex-

posed, then reducing the overall exposure

should be the first step. If you eliminate

the clipping using only Exposure, often

the rest of the image is too dark. Better to

have Exposure do the heavy lifting, then

finesse with Highlights and Whites.

A final trick for the speedsters out there.

Using the period (.) and comma (,) shortcuts

in the Basic panel will move you from slider

to slider forward and backward respectively,

while + and - will decrease or increase

them. A bezel (screen message overlay)

will appear as you change between sliders

to let you know which one you’ve moved

onto. Finally, semicolon (;) will reset the

current value to zero. This goes for all the

sliders in Basic, not just the Tone section.

2 BACK TO BASICS

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FA K I N G H D R

High dynamic range

photography is really

popular, and we’ll look

at it more in our bonus

section on Photoshop.

Lightroom does offer

a way to get that look

without the added need

for a series of bracketed

photos. The trick is

simple. Set your exposure

as required, then put

Shadows to +100 and

Highlights to -100.

Then tweak the Blacks

and Whites to suit!

2 BACK TO BASICS

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The Profile options are Lightroom’s equivalent to the Picture Styles or Modes you get in camera. They allow a specific rendering to be applied to your photo, giving it a “one-click” look. They’re designed to emulate the Picture Styles and Modes with similar names, at their default settings.

The Profile menu is tucked away in the forbidden zone (i.e. the Camera Calibration panel).

Here we see the Canon profiles, including Adobe Standard.

Simply click on the one you want to use and that’s it!

3 CAMERA PROFILES

Here’s a before and after with Adobe Standard as the

before, and Camera Landscape as the after.

You can make your own profile using a tool like the ColorChecker Passport

from X-Rite. Basically you shoot the Passport under the lighting you want

the profile for, then run the plug-in that comes with the Passport. It creates

a new profile, which becomes available when you restart Lightroom.

Hard-core fans can play with the DNG Profile Editor

(http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles).

For instance, if you have an infrared converted camera, Lightroom’s white

balance doesn’t go low enough. By creating a DNG of an infrared file, you can

set the white balance much lower in the DNG Profile Editor and save it as a

profile. I’ve posted a video explaining the process on my blog :

http://www.pixiq.com/article/creating-an-ir-camera-profile.

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http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles

http://www.pixiq.com/article/creating-an-ir-camera-profile

So what is white balance, and why should we care? After

all, white is white, isn’t it? Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s

influenced by the light we see our white object in. White

paper in tungsten light is actually yellow, while in shade

it’s blue. Under fluorescent lights it can even be green.

Even though our eyes and brain see it as white, the camera

will see it with these different tints and temperatures.

Before Camera Raw and Lightroom, fixing colour

issues could be complex, so let’s look at strategies for

getting good colour. The first place to start with white

balance is in camera. In addition to lighting presets

like daylight, flash, tungsten, etc., there’s also a custom

setting. To use this, shoot a grey card and use this to

set the custom white balance in the camera. You can

also use tools like the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport to

set white balance and have a colour record. It can even

make camera profiles, but which we mentioned earlier.

If you used an auto white balance setting, or an

inappropriate setting (like tungsten after moving from

inside to outside), it’s okay, we can still correct that.

Lightroom has three ways to set white balance in

the white balance section of the Basic panel. You can

use the shortcut W to access this section. The first

method is a drop-down menu of preset colour.

The second method is an eyedropper tool and finally,

there is also a set of temperature and tint controls.

4 MAKING WHITE WHITE

Back in the days of film, you had two options. You could have tungsten film for indoors and daylight film for outdoors. Anything else required carrying gels to change the colours of lights, or even filters for when you had the wrong type of film in the camera.

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To use the presets, click on the name that most accurately

represents the light you shot in: As Shot, Auto, Daylight,

Flash, Fluorescent, Shade, Cloudy, and Custom. As Shot

is the camera setting. A quick word on this: different

cameras use slightly different numbers for the same colour

temperature. The camera might say

5000k, but Lightroom might say

5200k for the same photo. What’s

happening is Lightroom is matching

the camera colour to Lightroom’s

colour. It’s not actually changing

the file. Also, when you try and

sync white balance across files, As

Shot won’t change the files at all

(assuming they haven’t already

been changed manually) because

they’re already at their “as-shot”

values. Simply change the preset to

Custom, and then they will sync.

If the preset settings aren’t close

enough, click on the eyedropper

icon. To get the best out of the

tool, turn the toolbar on (either

from the View menu, or with

the shortcut T). This is where

the eyedropper settings live.

To use the eyedropper tool, select part of the image

that you know to be neutral grey (anywhere from black

to white). Be warned that some things that appear

white may not be white. Paper usually has bleaching

agents and colorants that make it slightly blue, for

example. If you’ve used a grey card or a colour checker,

you can click on the grey to set the right balance,

which can be copied or synced to other photos.


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By default, a single click will apply the new white balance and release the eyedropper. Great if you got exactly the right colour on the first go, but not so much if you need a few clicks.


This is where the toolbar comes in. The first option is

Auto Dismiss. Clearing this checkbox means you can try

a few target areas to find the right one. The next option,

Show Loupe, gives a grid that zooms in on the area at the

cursor tip, so you can see at the pixel level what you’re

actually choosing. The Scale slider lets you change the

size of the area Lightroom uses to calculate the white

balance. At the bottom, RGB percentages show the colour

balance. For any neutral colour, all three should match.

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If you don’t have any neutral colour in the photo, then

the sliders in the Basic panel are your final option.

The sliders’ colours provide a visual representation of

how they work: to make a photo cooler in tone, move

the Temperature slider into the blue area (i.e. left) and

to warm it, move to the yellow area (i.e. right). Tint

works the same way but with green and magenta. Tint

is more subtle, so you need to be careful with it.

When you’ve got the white balance right, you can copy

the settings easily. In the filmstrip, select the photos to

which you want to copy the white balance settings. Use

the left and right arrow keys to make sure the image

that’s been corrected has focus—it will be lighter.


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Then click the Sync button, choose only White Balance, and all the other files will have the new white balance.

One cool addition to Lightroom 4 is that the Brush tool (in the tool strip under the histogram) now has

Temperature and Tint sliders; we’ll discuss the Brush tool in fuller detail in the next section. This means in

mixed colour situations (for example a shot near a window indoors mixing yellow tungsten light and blue

daylight), you can correct the overall white balance and then fix the areas with different lighting.


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For example, here’s the Martin Tea-House Folly, lit by an LED torch. The colour of the sky is way off, so we correct it using the Temperature and Tint sliders.

We could try clicking on the stones in the building, but then we’d have to correct the sky with the Brush tool, and it’s much larger.


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After we’ve fixed the overall white balance, the Tea-House Folly is now a rather bad shade of green. The grass has changed too, but it still looks natural. Click the Brush icon under the

histogram, or use the shortcut K to open the brush. By setting the brush to roughly the opposite temperature and tint as the main white balance, we have a starting point to fix this.


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Paint precisely along the edge of the monument with a small hard brush, which you can set by decreasing both the Size slider and the Feather slider. I’ve done it without Auto Mask,

but you may find it helps. Auto Mask is designed to find edges and only allow the brush to paint areas similar to where you start painting with the brush. A large brush will do for the

rest, use Size to increase. Where the monument meets the grass isn’t as critical, so a soft edge will do for this. Set the Feather Slider to 100 to soften it. Here we have the final look.


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By pressing O, we can see the mask. Even from here we could also brighten the Tea Folly and perhaps even warm it up more.


21

While high-end retouching is primarily the domain of pixel editors like Photoshop, there are still loads of things that can be done in Lightroom for beauty retouching. Blemish removal, skin softening, and even digital makeup are all possible. In this section we’ll look at most of these, and in the next we’ll look at using dodge and burn for face shaping.

B L E M I S H R E M O VA L

The first thing that needs to be done in a beauty retouch is blemish

removal. The Spot Removal tool works very well for this, although it

wasn’t originally designed for it. It’s located in the tool strip under

the histogram, and has the shortcut Q to toggle it on and off.

Spot removal works by sampling a local area when you

click on a point to be fixed. You can also manually choose

the area it samples from. The spot removal panel contains

only a few options: Clone or Heal, Size and Opacity. Clone

copies the sampled area and feathers it over the point

you click. Heal blends the point and the sampled area.

Size controls how large the spot removal is, while Opac-

ity sets the level of transparency of the corrected area.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

22

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

And now in English. If you click

anywhere in the image, the Spot

Removal tool automatically picks an

area to copy from. Sometimes it gets

it wrong, but you can simply drag the

source circle (the thicker of the two

visible circles) to somewhere better.

23

And now in English. If you click anywhere in the

image, the Spot Removal tool automatically picks an

area to copy from. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but

you can simply drag the source circle (the thicker

of the two visible circles) to somewhere better.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

If you want to choose the point

yourself, when you click, hold the

mouse button down and drag to the

point you want. If you need a larger

spot, use the Size slider (or use the

square bracket keys [ and ] to change

size). If you want to make an exist-

ing spot larger or smaller, hover at

the edge of the spot until the cursor

becomes a double headed arrow, then

click and drag in or out as required.

24

My favourite trick is one I

haven’t seen mentioned any-

where. I found it by accident, but

I’ve tweeted it and blogged it, so

I thought I might see it more.

Spots come in all sizes, so rather

than constantly changing size, I

hold the Command key on Mac,

Ctrl key on PC, then drag across

my spot. The size changes dy-

namically as you do this. Finally,

you can also change the spot

size using a mouse scroll wheel.

For blemish removal, I always select

Heal rather than Clone and I always

leave Opacity at 100. Start at the top

of the screen at 1:1, and use the Page

Down button to move down the

screen. When you hit the bottom of

the image, pressing Page Down will

then move across to the next section

at the top, and so on. Page Up does

the reverse. I wish Photoshop did

this! This way we can systematically

go through the whole photo to fix

blemishes (and dust spots too—they

still happen in studio!). How long

should you spend? That depends on

the value of the image. If it’s a quick

snap, not long. If it’s a magazine

cover, then perhaps much longer. If

it’s an average retouch, set yourself

a time limit and work with more

obvious blemishes first, then smaller

ones if time allows. Retouching is a

time sink and you have to manage it.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

25

You can hide the spot removal circles without turning off the Spot Removal tool—use the shortcut H. Using it again toggles the circles back on. Sometimes people use H and forget, wondering why the tool seems broken! This also works for brush and graduated filter pins.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

26

T H E B R U S H T O O L A N D S K I N S O F T E N I N G

Perhaps one of the most versatile tools in Light-

room is the Brush tool. We touched on it lightly

in the last section, but we’ll look at it in detail

here before progressing to skin softening.

The Brush (or Adjustment Brush to be precise) is locat-

ed on the right of the tool strip. As mentioned before,

the shortcut toggle key is K. The brush panel is quite

large, so generally I keep it closed unless I’m using it.

There are three sections in the brush panel: Mask, Effect, and Brush.

The brush effectively paints a mask of the effect. Mask controls

whether you’re editing the current mask, or making a new one.

Effect can be set in two ways, either with a preset that con-

tains a combination of settings from the effect sliders, or by

manually setting the sliders. If you change a slider when you’re

painting the mask, clicking New in Mask will revert the set-

tings to what they were when you started the previous mask.

We’ll come back to the actual sliders shortly. You’ve

seen the white balance sliders already, but the com-

ing sections deal with various ones anyway. Right now

it’s more important to talk about the brush itself.

Right at the top of the Brush section are two brushes: A and

B. These can be entirely different. A could be large and soft,

B small and hard, for example. Use the shortcut key / to al-

ternate between them for speed. There’s also an Erase brush,

which can have different settings again. The easiest way to

erase is to hold down the Option (Mac) or Alt (PC) key to

temporarily make your A or B brush into an erase brush.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

27

The Size slider changes the size of the brush. As with

the Spot Removal tool, the square bracket keys [ and ]

also change the brush size. Feather sets the hardness of

the brush. Shift+[ and Shift+] also adjust the feather. 0

is hard, while 100 is soft. As you look at the brush, the

inner circle represents the size, and the outer circle repre-

sents the feather. At 0 feather, the circles come together.

Flow controls the rate at which the effect is applied

with each brush stroke. With low flow, you can brush

over an area to build up the effect. Personally I prefer to

leave this at 100 and add an additional mask if needed.

There’s nothing wrong with using low flow, though.

Auto Mask attempts to keep the brush to areas of similar

colour. It’s good for edges, but very processer intensive.

I prefer to leave it off and use it only for tricky edges.

Finally, there’s Density. This sets the maximum level

an effect can get too. I prefer to keep Density at 100.

Imagine you have Clarity at 100 and Density at 50.

When you paint, you get the effect of Clarity at 50.

I’d rather leave Density at 100, and set my Clarity

to 50. Again, there’s no wrong or right with this.

In terms of working, I use large soft brushes (my

A brush) mostly, except on edges where I use

smaller, harder brushes (my B brush). For erasing

I usually use a medium, slightly soft brush, unless

I need to erase back a hard edge, then I make

it smaller and harder for more precision.

Now that we’ve seen how to set the mechanics of

the brush, let’s go back and talk about the effects.

We’ve seen Temperature and Tint already. Exposure,

Contrast, Highlights, and Shadows are local versions of

the Basic panel controls. We’ll look at using Exposure for

dodging and burning in the next section. Clarity controls

the softening or punch in the midtones, while Satura-

tion controls local colour boost. Sharpness can add or

remove sharpness in an area, or even add lens blur. Noise

controls local noise reduction, rather than noise! Moiré

removes pattern-based noise caused by digital capture.

And finally, Defringe lets you work locally on fringes.

You can combine these sliders in any way you like.

That’s why there’s the drop-down menu at the top of

the Effect section, to help you make and manage presets

of these settings. Here’s a mix of default presets, some

of my own presets, and some presets I’ve downloaded.

To make your own, simply select Save Current Settings

as New Preset.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

You can

combine these

sliders in any

way you like.

That’s why

there’s the

drop-down

menu at the top

of the Effect

section, to

help you make

and manage

presets of these

settings.

28

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

To soften skin, we’ll use the default Soften Skin

preset. This sets Clarity to -100 and Sharpening

to 25. The negative clarity removes contrast

from the skin, while the sharpness retains

texture. Personally I find this preset a little too

strong, but that’s fine, we can dial it back after

in one move, even though two sliders are used.

To soften the skin, use a big soft brush all

over the skin. Avoid brushing into facial

features like eyes, eyebrows, lips, nostrils,

and even the edge of the cheek. If you do,

simply use the Erase brush to remove it.

To see what I’m doing, I press O to show

the mask that I’m painting, Shift+O will

cycle through pink, green, white, and

black. I prefer to leave it on pink, unless

I’m working on a pink object, like a dress.

29

Once the mask is complete, I press O again to turn

off the mask view, and show the finished effect.

If the settings are too much, hover over the con-

trol pin (press H if you can’t see it!) until it looks

like the double-headed arrow you saw in the Spot

Removal tool. Now click and drag to the left. Both

clarity and sharpness reduce proportionately.

Dragging right will bring them back again.

5 BEAUTY RETOUCHING

30

To dodge, you would cut out cardboard roughly the size of the

area you wanted lighter, then move it up and down as you

ran the lamp. To burn, you would use a larger card that hid

areas with enough exposure, allowed the remaining areas to

become darker. It was a time-consuming process that meant

only the most persistent could ever be called Print Masters.

Lightroom has dodge and burn built in as part of the

Brush tool. From a technical standpoint, dodging is

a reduction in exposure, and burning is an increase

in exposure, both localised in the photo.

Dodging and burning can be used to darken areas that you

want to draw attention from, and lighten areas that you want to

draw attention to. To be more precise, darkening an area makes

it recede, while lightening an area will highlight it. Lightroom

doesn’t have a liquify tool, but we can change shape by

darkening and lightening the face, for example. In fact dodge and

burn is probably the most-used technique of high-end retouchers.

Take a look at our face example to see standard contour areas. Yes, this is an exaggerated version. In reality the edges are much softer and the shading is far more subtle! To make an area slimmer, we darken it, to highlight it, we lighten it. In makeup, this is called contouring. In retouching, it’s referred to as face carving. Settings-wise, start with +/- 0.2 on the Exposure slider with a small-medium soft brush. These settings are good for most of this work. Once you’ve clicked to start a mask, hover over the pin to get the double-headed arrow to change the settings by dragging, and to see the area that’s been painted. You can also use smaller amounts and add more layers by clicking New. Some prefer to use lower flow and build up that way. I find that it creates bumps where strokes overlap, so I prefer to work with lower exposure and 100 flow.

6 DODGE AND BURN FOR BEAUTY

Back in the film days, you could cheat the exposure you made on film by varying the amount of time sections of the paper were exposed to the enlarger lamp.

31

To slim a nose, darken the sides and highlight the centre. You can widen it by doing the opposite, but I’m not sure people prefer that!


32

For the eyes, darken close to the nose, and highlight the area under the brow. The darkening will push the socket back, and the highlight brings the brow bone forward.


33

For cheeks, lighten below the eye to make them strong. If you’re working on a wider face, you can thin the cheeks by darkening below the cheek bone. Imagine a line between top of where the ear meets the face and the corner of the lips. Use a large soft brush along this line to pull the cheeks in and thin the face.


34

Dodging and burning works for lips too. Dodge the top of the bottom lip lightly and darken underneath to plump it up.


35

For wider foreheads, you can reduce the impact by darkening the edges along the hairline and lightening the centre. A larger brush will help here. It’s like a vignette for the forehead!


36

Necks can also be worked this way.


37

Our whole aim here is to be subtle. There’s a good chance that you won’t see the differences as you work, but switching the brush on and off from the bottom left of the panel will quickly reveal the differences.

Note, there’s no skin softening applied to this version of the image, just to help make the dodge and burn adjustments clearer.


38

In addition to the face carving we’ve just shown, you can also dodge the iris and the white just outside it to highlight the eyes even more. Set the brush to around 0.5 and paint semicircles in the iris, away from the inside and outside edge.

For the whites of the eyes, only paint the white parts around the edge of the Iris. Start with a setting of 0.2 exposure and tweak to taste when you’re done.


And here’s the completed dodge and burn for our image.

39

Prior to Lightroom 4 you only had one tool for

this: the Split Toning panel. With Lightroom 4

we now have RGB curves to play with too.

Before we delve into the how to’s, we should look at the

whys! Cross processing comes from the old film technique

of using the wrong chemicals to develop your film.

Negative chemicals (C41) and slide chemicals (E6) perform

differently, so can have unpredictable effects when you

use them on the wrong film type. I know my local lab will

still allow me to process slide film in negative chemicals,

but it’s much harder the other way around. In fact, it’s

quite hard to find labs that process slide film (and even

more so with medium format film). With a film like Fuji

Velvia, you end up with strong green shadows and yellow

highlights. You also need to overexpose the shot to get a

proper exposure. Other films have a more cyan shadow,

but generally speaking the shadow range is green-blue,

while the highlight range is yellow-green. Cross processing

also tends to increase contrast, so a little tone curve work

will be in order as well as using the RGB tone curves.

S P L I T T O N I N G

Split toning allows you to add a colour to both the

highlights and the shadows of an image. The Saturation

slider controls the strength of the colour, while balance

controls which slider set is dominant in the photo.

Let’s create a Velvia preset. First, open the Split Toning panel.

There are five sliders. One pair on top to control

highlight colour, one pair on the bottom to

control shadow colour, and a balance control to

change which one has priority in the photo.

Each pair in Highlights and Shadows has a Hue and a

Saturation control. Hue controls the base colour, while

Saturation controls the strength. A great speed trick

is to hold down the Option key on Mac, Alt key on

PC, then move the Hue slider. As you do this, it acts

as though Saturation is at 100, and you can see the

effect more vividly. In reality the final tone will be far

more subtle, but it helps in selecting the base hue.

7 CROSS PROCESSING

Retro is big right now. Maybe we’re all nostalgic for the summer of ’76 or something, but the faded and toned looks of the past are really in. Instagram bagged a fortune when it sold, so somebody somewhere thinks it’s worth a packet. Lightroom offers a few ways to get these awesome looks.

40

7 CROSS PROCESSING

Holding down Option or Alt, we move the Highlights Hue slider until we find a yellowish tone.

41

7 CROSS PROCESSING

Repeat for the Shadows Hue, this time with a strong green.

42

7 CROSS PROCESSING

Next, we need to increase the saturation on each to taste. In this case it’s slightly over 50, but it depends on how strong you want it. I want the highlights to have a slight priority, so I push the Balance slider to +13.

Finally, I go to the Tone Curve panel, and choose Strong Contrast from the Point Curve drop-down menu.

43

7 CROSS PROCESSING

To save the preset, I click the + beside Preset and call it Velvia XP in the Preset dialog box. Because I only want the settings that create the look, I select only Tone Curve and Split Toning, then click Create.

44

7 CROSS PROCESSING

A good starting point for your own custom split tones is to choose a cool colour for shadows, and a warm one for highlights. Take this screen shot as an example.

U S I N G T H E T O N E C U R V E

With Lightroom 4, we can also change

the colour of our image using RGB

curves. Reset the Split Tone panel by

double-clicking each slider name to

reset it. Then go back to Tone Curve.

At the bottom right is a tiny icon

highlighted in the capture to the right.

Click on it to bring up the point

curve control. Initially you have the

RGB curve, which controls contrast

in the photo. Click on the Channel

drop-down menu to reveal the red,

green, and blue channel curves.

45

Let’s start with the red channel. Pushing the curve up at any point increases the red in the photo,

pulling it down increases the opposite colour, in this case, cyan. So let’s go for a cyan tone in the

shadows. First click a point in the middle, then pull down another point in the shadows. Finally

add a third point in the highlights and use it to flatten the top part of the curve.

7 CROSS PROCESSING

Now let’s go for the green channel. Here, increasing adds green and

decreasing adds magenta. Lightly lift the midtone in the greens.

46

Finally, the blue channel. You’ve probably guessed that it’s blue for the increase and yellow for

the decrease. Click a point in the midtone. This time click and drag a point in the highlights

down to make yellow highlights. Finally, even off the shadows with another point.

Voilà. You can make as many points as you like and drag them all over the place for funky effects.

7 CROSS PROCESSING

FA D I N G AWAY

The final thing we can do with

the Tone Curve here is to fade the

image a little. Go back to the RGB

curve and double-click to make a

linear curve; don’t select the Linear

Curve preset, it’ll wipe the settings

you have selected so far! Now drag

the leftmost point up from the

corner, and the image will fade.

If you want to save the look as

a preset, you only need to select

Tone Curve in the preset dialog.

47

Even though our cameras can shoot with black-and-white presets,

the raw file always shows up as colour image. Fortunately, Lightroom

gives us a few ways to convert our photos. It also helps give them a

more film-like look with the Grain control in the Effects panel.

8 ACHIEVING A FILMIC LOOK

There’s nothing quite like a black-and-white photo to concentrate the viewer on form and subject. And of course, traditionally it was the only film for a long time.

48

B L A C K - A N D - W H I T E C O N V E R S I O N

I sat in a Scott Kelby seminar a long time ago, agreeing with what he said, so I’ll repeat it.

“The simplest black-and-white conversion is to remove saturation and boost contrast.”

Desaturation gets criticism as a conversion method, but try this before you move on.

It really works. In the Basic panel, put Saturation at -100 and boost Contrast.


I use that for loads of my black-and-white conversions and it forms the basis of some

of my presets. But let’s move on the Lightroom’s dedicated black-and-white tools. To

get a black-and-white photo, press V. This changes the Treatment setting from Color

to Black & White, and activates the B&W section of the HSL/Color/B&W panel.

49

By default, this applies an auto black-and-white mix, but I prefer to turn this setting off. You need to go to the

Presets tab in Preferences (Mac: Lightroom > Preferences, PC: Edit > Preferences) and clear the second check box

(Apply auto mix when first converting to black and white). Why? I find it more miss than hit, and if I have to

move sliders anyway, then I’ll just do it from scratch myself.


Each slider represents colour in the unconverted

image. As you move them left and right, you can

start to darken to remove attention from a section,

or lighten to bring emphasis to it. There’s a far

more visual way of doing it though. Notice the

tiny target icon on the top left? That’s the Target

Adjustment tool. Click on it to activate the tool.

50

By clicking and dragging the shirt, I can make it black by pulling down. I

can also darken the makeup around the eyes the same way. Note that it’s not

just the colour I’m dragging that’s affected, all similar colours are affected.


51

G R A I N

To finish off the look, let’s add grain. It’s

at the bottom the Effects panel.

The grain sliders are aptly named: Amount is the quantity of grain, Size controls how large the grain particles are, and

Roughness controls how fine or rough the grain is. I find it better to view zoomed in to see what’s happening. Grain will

have an effect on the apparent sharpness of an image, but it can equally help smooth banding and hide blemishes.


52

S E P I A

For single colour tones, I prefer to colour the shadows only.

9 IMAGE TONING

In addition to straight black and white, it’s also possible to create toned and duotoned images in Lightroom. Popular looks include sepia toning and selenium toning. These are done in the Split Toning panel, which we’ve already seen as part of cross processing.

53

Using our trick from cross processing, hold down the Alt or Option key and start to drag

the slider in the warm tones. I find somewhere in the 30-40 region for shadow hue provides

the best results. Remember that the final colour will be far more subtle. Here, 38 looks good.

Bring up the saturation slowly. 15 will give a subtle tone, while 35 is far more pronounced.

9 IMAGE TONING

Sometimes that subtle tone is just enough. I’ve split the difference here.

54

S E L E N I U M

Selenium was used to help stop fading and can vary from a reddish brown to a purple.

9 IMAGE TONING

By setting the shadow hue to 360, and Saturation to 15, we can get this effect.

55

C YA N O T Y P E

Cyanotype is a blue toning. Usually it’s a heavy cyan blue, but can be lighter too.

9 IMAGE TONING

To get enough of the blue you do need to use both shadows

and highlights. Here the settings are evenly matched.

56

9 IMAGE TONING

D U O T O N E

Duotone simply means two tones. Historically it came from cyanotype, and we’re going to do just that.

With our previous photo, make the highlights warmer by setting them to Hue 44. Next set the Balance

towards the shadows, say -14. This reinforces the blues to give a nice complement to the warm highlights.

57

To the uninitiated, Lightroom’s Crop tool might feel a little backwards. You see the crop window stays in place, but you zoom and rotate the photo behind it. It helps to think of the aperture window on a mount. Basically you’re making the photo suit the crop.

W H Y C R O P ?

While there are purists that never want

to crop, there are numerous good reasons

for cropping photos. First up, a lot of

cameras don’t have a 100% view through

the viewfinder, so what you see as you

frame isn’t the full photo. You may find

things at the edge of the frame that dis-

tract from your original viewpoint.

It may also be the case that the crop ratio

of the camera (3:2 for DSLRs for example)

doesn’t suit your final output or frame.

Traditionally headshots and portraits are

printed at 8 x 10 inches, so need a crop to

fit from a DSLR. You may need a widescreen

shot for a video you’re making at a 16:9 ratio.

You may also want to emulate other crops,

like 6 x 4.5 or 6 x 6 from medium format.

G E T T I N G S TA R T E D

The quickest way to get to crop, espe-

cially from outside Develop is to use the

shortcut R. C was already taken with

Compare, so they went with cRop.

Inside Develop you can click on the crop icon

in the toolbar under the histogram. You can

also apply crop ratios in Quick Develop, but

this is very basic, applying a centred crop to

the image. We’ll talk more about this shortly.

10 CROPPING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE IMAGE

Once in crop, there are a number of options available. As you hover over the photo, the cursor changes to the crop cursor and you can drag out any crop you like immediately.

58

To constrain to the current ratio, click the lock icon to lock it

or use the shortcut A. If the lock is open, you can temporar-

ily lock aspect by holding down the Shift key and dragging.

You can also drag from the corner or sides. Note that Light-

room will keep the crop within the bounds of the image.

To select an alternative crop ratio to the original, choose one

from the Aspect drop-down menu. If you need one that’s

not available, click Enter Custom in the list. Enter any ratio,

even screen resolutions, and Lightroom will distil it down

to a ratio. The menu will remember your last five custom

ratios. Examples of ratios that are not default include 2:1

panorama, 851 x 315 for Facebook, and 20 x 8 panorama.


59

Here are two useful tricks before we look at batch cropping. First, if you want to have the sides,

or top and bottom, move in evenly, make sure the lock is off (shortcut A) and hold the Alt or

Option key, then drag in from a side or top/bottom.


To have the entire image crop in towards the centre, make sure the lock

is on, or hold Shift+Alt or Option and drag a corner or side.

60

The second trick is useful when you want to change a vertical image to a horizontal, or vice versa. Originally you

had to pull off to the side away from the photo until it flipped, but fortunately all you need to do now is press X.


B AT C H C R O P P I N G

Photoshop has started to allow cropping like Lightroom, but the place that

Lightroom shines is cropping more than one photo at a time. We men-

tioned using the Quick Develop crop ratio for centred crops. The best way

to use this is to compose for that centred crop. For example, when shooting

headshots, remember to leave room at the top and bottom of each shot.

Let’s say you’ve batch ap-

plied a crop in Quick De-

velop and want to refine it.

Press R to go to crop and

refine the crop. Instead of

pressing Enter to apply the

crop and going to the next

photo, where you need to

start crop again, simply

press Command+> (Mac)

or Ctrl+> (PC) to move

to the next photo. The

crop will be applied, and

it’ll speed your refining.

61

Lightroom does try to protect us from ourselves when we

crop by keeping the crop inside the bounds of the image.

Sometimes when we rotate a photo, we end up cutting

into an important part of the composition. It may be

that the opposite part of the photo can easily be repaired

in Photoshop, so we may not mind cropping outside the

bounds of the photo. This can be done, but not in the

Crop tool. To do this, go to the Manual section of the

Lens Correction panel. The bottom slider in the Trans-

form section is Scale. This lets you zoom into the photo,

or zoom out past the image bounds. Once you go below

100%, the extra space gets filled in with a grey border.


62

11 STRAIGHTENING PHOTOS

63

As you click to start rotating the photo, the grid will change to a set of small squares,

to aid in lining up parts of the photo that you know should be level.


Another thing you can do with the Crop tool is straighten. If you hover close to a corner, the cursor will change to a curved, double-headed, arrow, allowing you to rotate the image.

You can also rotate the image using the Angle slider. By clicking on the ruler icon in the

Crop panel, you can also draw a line along something you know is vertical or horizontal

in the photo (like the horizon) and Lightroom will apply that as the angle.

64

One downside of Lightroom crop is

that it only works as a screen view,

not 100%. To get around this I often

drag my horizon line up to the edge

to the module picker to see how far

from straight it is, while zoomed into

100% in Loupe view. I then go into

crop and straighten. Once the crop is

applied, our view should go back to

a 100% view allowing us to see how

close we are. I find this helps accuracy.

To make it even quicker I use another

shortcut. By holding the Command

key on Mac, or the Ctrl key on PC, the

crop cursor changes to the ruler, so

you can straighten without needing to

activate the ruler icon from the panel.

As well as the ruler in crop, you

can also rotate your photo inside

the Lens Correction panel. In

the Manual section of the panel,

there’s a Rotate slider. It’s different

than the ruler in that it’s aware of

whatever lens corrections you’ve set,

and rotates with these in mind.


65

I love skies so much I included them in my landscapes

website name: http://skywaterland.com. Of course

balancing skies can be troubling for most photographers.

In a nutshell, most skies are brighter that the landscape.

This makes choosing the best exposure in camera

harder. It’s not all doom and gloom though.

In the field, photographers use resin filters called graduated

neutral density filters. These look grey at the top and

clear at the bottom. How gradually these go from clear

to grey determines whether they are a “hard line” or

“soft line” filter. My preferred filter in the field is the

0.6 hard graduated neutral density filter. The 0.6 means

it’s a two-stop filter. 0.3 means one stop and 0.9 means

three stops. Don’t ask me why they pick that naming

convention. Good graduated filters are not cheap. And

because they’re plastic, they’re prone to scratching.

12 FIXING SKIES IN LIGHTROOM

Blue skies, grey skies, everyday skies. It’s hard to take a landscape or location shot without them.

66

http://skywaterland.com

Fortunately Lightroom also has a graduated

filter that can be used to perform the same

task in software. It’s also impossible to scratch!


67

To use the graduated filter, click the gradient

rectangle in the tool strip under the histogram

(Shortcut M). Click on the horizon to drop

the filter in place. The graduated filter has

three lines: the centre line, which is what

you drag to move or rotate the filter, and

two outer lines that define how quickly the

effect happens. If you don’t see these lines,

press H to show and hide the lines. The

top line shows where the effect is full, and

the bottom shows where the effect stops.

The distance between determines how

hard or soft the change is. The closer the

lines are, the harder the effect. A final trick

that can help setting the graduated filter’s

position is holding the Shift key to keep

the filter edge straight when dragging.

Of course, to see any effect you need to have

something set. If you want to emulate the

commercial filters, simply use the Exposure

control to reduce the brightness of the sky.

Here I’ve dragged a -1 Exposure graduated

filter down to just over the horizon. I’ve kept

it hard because we’re right at the horizon.

For a more natural look, a lower value might

work better, but I like the drama in this.


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In addition, you can also apply a colour from the colour swatch at the bottom of

the graduated filter panel, like blue to help a sky, or a yellow to give a warmer tone,

reminiscent of CSI: Miami. Other settings that can help a weak sky are increasing the

Contrast, Saturation, and Clarity sliders.


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Lightroom 4 does also offer local white balance, so you could change

the sky colour using these settings instead of using a colour swatch. I

think these look more natural than the swatches. Here’s a version using

a cooler white balance vs. the swatch in the previous image.


And here’s a warmer version. The graduated filter has been extended over

the water to give the feel that the water is reflecting the warmth in the sky.

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Alternatively, you can use the Brush

tool (Shortcut K) to paint in the effect

you need. We’ve looked at the brush in

the Beauty Retouching section, but the

controls apply to darkening skies and

creating contours in landscapes too.

You can also mix the gradated filter with

the Brush tool. Often the horizon isn’t

exactly straight, so you can use the brush

tool to bring back areas that have been

over darkened by the graduated filter.


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Reducing exposure in skies is not the only thing you can do with graduated filters. You can also control sharpness or even use lens blur.

The Sharpness slider in the graduated

filter (and in the Brush tool) runs

from -100 to +100. Above 0 increases

sharpness, but below 0 has two

methods of operation. From 0 to -50,

the slider is removing sharpness that

already exists in the photo. From

-51 to -100, the operation changes

to that of lens blur. This means

we can blur edges, for example by

putting a graduated filter on each

edge set to -100 sharpening.

The other thing we can do is have

selective sharpening in a photo.

Tilt-shift lenses are generally

used to either adjust perspective

when photographing architecture,

or to extend depth of field at a

given aperture. More recently,

people have been using the tilt function to

reverse this, giving a miniaturized look.

Tilt-shift lenses are very expensive, so being

able to replicate their effects using software is

a boon. Photoshop CS6 now has a Blur tool,

onOne Software has FocalPoint, and Alien Skin

has a product called Bokeh. All of these give

extensive control over lens blur, but we can still

get more than adequate results from Lightroom.

13 TILT SHIFT

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First, decide what area of the photo is going to be the focal point of our tilted image. Here I want the people at the dock edge and the boats at the bottom to remain sharp. Set the graduated filter

to -100 Sharpening, with all other sliders and swatch at 0. From the top of the image, drag down to above the focal point, our boats. The transition on blurring is a little tight, so spread it a bit.

13 TILT SHIFT

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Repeat for the bottom of the photo.

13 TILT SHIFT

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Now, add two more graduated filters, one top and one bottom, this time with the centre line further away, and with a much larger gap. The reason for doing it this way is that with tilting, the further

away you go from the focus point, the greater the amount of lens blur, more so than normal “out of focus” blur. You may even want to add a third pair of very soft graduated filters to finish off the look.

13 TILT SHIFT

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Once you are done, save the result as a preset. That way you only need to move the centre lines on each new image.

13 TILT SHIFT

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This look can also be used on people. A photographer named Mark

Tucker was one of the people who popularized this look in film with

his “plunger cam” (http://199.237.236.200/plungercam/).

Now it’s much easier in post-processing!

13 TILT SHIFT

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http://199.237.236.200/plungercam/

Again, start with the Sharpening slider in graduated filter set

to -100. Draw as many pairs of filters, top and bottom as you feel

you need. I’ve used four here.

13 TILT SHIFT

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Makes sure the eyes remain in focus.

13 TILT SHIFT

79

When you shoot a photo on most cameras, the light passes through a filter called

an anti-aliasing filter. When you remove dust from the sensor, the anti-aliasing

filter is what gets cleaned, not the sensor itself (there are some cameras where

this isn’t true, though). This filter reduces moiré, which is a distracting pattern-

based noise. It has the side effect of blurring the photo, so all photos need some

kind of sharpening to overcome this. This is called capture sharpening.

The main tool for sharpening in Lightroom is contained in the Detail panel. The

four main sliders are: Amount, Radius, Detail, and Masking. To use these, it really

helps to have an understanding of what each one does. There’s also a preview box

to show what’s happening at 100%. You can drag around inside the box to position

it, or click the targeting icon and drag it to the area you want in the box and click.

14 EFFECTIVE SHARPENING

For a long time Lightroom had nothing more than a simple sharpening slider, meaning that if you didn’t like how it worked, you had no choice but to go to an external editor like Photoshop to sharpen your photos. Fortunately that’s no longer the case, and Lightroom has no less than three different sharpening options.

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Amount seems pretty obvious, but

there’s a little more to it than that.

First up, the raw default is 25, which

by and large is perfect for capture

sharpening on most photos. In fact,

the default on all four sliders is good

for basic capture sharpening. It also

means that sharpening has been ap-

plied whether you intended it or not.


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Originally this was conceived

as a 0–100 scale, but because

people wanted the option of over-

sharpening, it was increased to 150.

Up to 100, Lightroom will try and

protect the image from sharpening

artefacts, but above it, the image

degrades. Not good for capture

sharpening, but useful for grungy

creative sharpening. Realistically, I

don’t really go over 70 in normal use,

and this is normally combined with

masking to make it more selective.

The type of sharpening Lightroom

applies here is akin to luminance

masking. That means that the

sharpening works on the luminance

channel, and doesn’t affect the

colour. To see how this works,

hold down the Alt key on PC,

or the Option key on Mac, then

move the Amount slider. The

image will appear black and white,

showing only the luminance in

the image as you sharpen.


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The next slider is Radius. Radius

determines the area outside the

edge being sharpened that gets

affected as you sharpen. Generally

speaking, sharpening works by

increasing contrast at an edge to

make the edge more pronounced.

Radius determines how far it

extends. As with Amount, you can

hold down the Alt or Option key

to see the effect. As you move the

Radius slider to the right, the visual

effect becomes more pronounced.

Radius defaults at 1; sometimes a

lower value is good, but I rarely go

above 1.5 unless it’s for effect.


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If Radius, Detail, and Masking are not

active, chances are you’re looking at

a rendered file like a JPG or TIFF. On

these files, the default Amount is 0,

so you need to increase it (even to

1) to make the other sliders active.

Detail is obvious. As you push to

the right more high-frequency

detail gets sharpened. What’s high

frequency? Think leaves on trees,

or houses in a wide city scene. Any

photo that has loads of small edges

has high-frequency detail. But Detail

has another use: reducing halos.

So what’s a halo? Well sometimes

when you sharpen, edges with a

light/dark transition get increased

lightness on the lighter edge. This

bright line looks unnatural and is

reminiscent of the halo around saints

in old icons. Pushing Detail to the

left reduces these. Sometimes that

means having to choose between

detail and halos. To see the Detail

slider in operation, hold down the

Alt or Option key. As you move right

you’ll see the increase in detail.


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The final control for capture

sharpening is Masking. Masking

allows us to select which edges are

sharpened. By default everything is

sharpened. Masking is also the only

slider where it’s hard to be accurate

without using the Alt or Option

key. Hold this down as you drag the

Masking slider. Initially you will see

only white, but as you move left,

more and more black is introduced.

Eventually you see only an outline

of the features of your photo. In

this case, all the white areas get the

sharpening applied. None of the

black areas have any sharpening.

This means you can prevent skies, or

even just skin from being sharpened.

To me, masking is probably the most

important slider after Amount.


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The second type of sharpening

in Lightroom is more creative

sharpening. We’ve already seen the

tool for this before: the Brush tool.

The beauty here is you can select

the amount of sharpening and

paint in specific areas—great for

sharpening eyes or your focal point.


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Low-light situations like churches, concerts or even just late-evening shots often require the use of higher ISO values. With higher ISO comes higher image noise from the signal being amplified to get the exposure.

Of course, as camera technology improves, noise is becoming

less of an issue. There are still times when we need to deal with

it, though. Originally, Lightroom had very basic controls and

required the use of external applications for noise reduction, but

fortunately it now handles all but the most extreme of cases.

There are two distinct types of noise that can be fixed: colour (also called

Chroma) and luminance. Colour noise is most readily visible as a mixed

red, green, and blue in areas that are supposed to be one colour. Luminance

noise is unevenness in the brightness of sections of the image. By default,

Lightroom applies a default of 25 to the colour noise. This setting isn’t a

fixed setting per ISO. In fact, 25 is designed to be the optimum at each

ISO. I rarely find a need to change it, but we will look at how it works for

those times that require it. No luminance noise is applied by default.

Noise reduction is part of the Detail panel.

15 REDUCING IMAGE NOISE

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While I’d prefer to use concert photos to show this, it’s much harder to get permission to use those images, so we’ll use a landscape that was accidentally shot at ISO3200. Despite this, it’s not terrible. Because 25 is the default for raw files, and therefore noise reduction is applied, set Color to 0.


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Colour noise is easily visible in the rock and sand. Slowly bring the Noise slider to the right. Look for the point where the colour noise is gone. In this, around 20 gets rid of the pixel colour noise. There’s still additional green in the grey of the rock, so we need to go further.


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Up at 45 there’s still colour bleed, but going further starts to take colour out of the clouds.


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Check at 100 and all the colour noise is gone, but colour gets lost in other parts of the photo. Detail will help bring back places where the noise was along edges.

Bring Luminance up to 100 to see what it does. It effectively blurs the image trying to make areas a similar brightness.


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Bringing it back to 50, there’s still some edge blur, but the sky is nice and smooth. Use the Detail slider to bring back lost detail—it’s like a threshold control for the noise reduction and contrast to bring back edges.


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The final part of noise reduction is sharpening. You have to sharpen to bring back edge detail. Use masking to ensure only edges are being sharpened, then increase the amount to taste. By comparing with the pre-noise-reduction history step (right-click on the step and select Copy History Settings Step to Before), we can ascertain whether we’ve gone too far.


93

Here less luminance and masking helps bring back detail in the sand, along with an increase in luminance contrast.


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One thing that the switch to digital has done is make us really aware of the limits of our lenses. With film, there was some forgiveness, but digital really shows us the flaws in intimate detail.

Barrel and pincushion distortion, coloured fringes, and even the bizarrely named moustache distortion all serve

to spoil our masterpieces. Fortunately all is not lost. The distortions in a lens are easy to map and store in a

dedicated file. Originally all the distortion was in these files, called lens profiles, but with Lightroom 4, chromatic

aberration has a separate section in the Lens Corrections panel. There’s also control over lens vignetting, which is

the darkening that happens at the lens edges. Let’s jump over to the Lens Corrections panel and get started. With

the panel open, there are three section headers, each revealing a different panel view: Profile, Color, and Manual.

P R O F I L E

This is the section where you apply lens profiles, that correction mapping I’ve mentioned. There are three sources

for these files: Adobe, lens manufacturers (usually via Adobe), and users. You can actually make and download your

own lens profiles via the Lens Profile Creator at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/

(this also contains the Lens Profile Downloader).

Adobe keeps a list of compatible lenses, along with some notes on their usage, at

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/lens-profile-support-lightroom-4.html.

To apply a profile, simply select the Enable Lens Profile Corrections checkbox. Most of the time, Lightroom will

read the lens data from the embedded camera data and match it to a profile. Here, our before shot is from a Canon

15mm fisheye lens, which the lens profile will de-fish. I’m using it because the difference is immediately obvious.

16 CORRECTING LENS ISSUES

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http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lensprofile_creator/

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/lens-profile-support-lightroom-4.html

If Lightroom doesn’t apply a lens profile automatically, there are a series of options for setting one up. First go to Make, and choose the lens make.

Then choose the model. Older cameras often didn’t write metadata from lenses correctly, so sometimes Lightroom needs a hint.

You can make life easier by going to the Setup drop-down menu and choosing Save New Lens Profile Defaults. Every time you open up a file with matching lens data, Lightroom

will now apply the saved defaults.


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If a profile doesn’t show up, there could be another reason.

Most of the available profiles are for raw files and you may

be trying to apply them to a non-raw file. You could simply

go to Manual and try to fix it manually. There is a way

around this that requires a little hacking of text files. If you

don’t like delving around inside the Library or ProgramData

folders, this is not for you!As per the Lightroom help file:

Lens profiles are saved in the following locations:

Mac OS: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/

CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0/

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\

Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0\

Windows Vista or Windows 7: C:\ProgramData\

Adobe\CameraRaw\LensProfiles\1.0\

Go to the folder and find the raw version of your lens

profile. It’s usually in a folder matching the lens maker.

Open the file in a text editor. Using the Find & Replace

tool, search for the expression stCamera:CameraRawProfile=

”True”. With Replace All, replace this with stCamera:Camer

aRawProfile=”False”. Now save the file with a new name by

replacing RAW in the original filename with JPEG. On Mac,

I had to save to my user Library: /Users/[User Name]/Library/

Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/LensProfiles/1.0/ and

then into a folder called Downloaded. This folder was there

because I had actually downloaded another profile from the

Lens Profile Downloader. If it’s not, create it yourself.

On PC, create a folder called Downloaded in the folder

mentioned above and save your file there. Restart Lightroom.

Now Adobe does say that there will be some problems with

cameras that apply lens corrections to JPG files. However, there

are many cases where this isn’t true. And if it is true for your

lens, simply don’t use this profile. I’ve edited the Raw profiles

for my Mamiya lenses, because I shoot film on them and scan

the results. Hence needing JPG versions of these profiles.

In the case of lenses from companies like Olympus,

you may simply have to make your own. Personally,

I do, and I will be uploading them shortly.

The final controls in this panel are the Distortion and

Vignette sliders. Set in the middle (which is 100%)

by default, you can add or remove either to taste.

These settings are also saved in the Setup preset.

C O L O U R

Chromatic aberration is the name given to the fringes of colour

you see along the edges in a shot. This occurs because light gets

bent as it passes through a lens, and the different wavelengths

of light don’t all focus to exactly the same point, either on the

focal plane, or along it. Most lenses contain additional glass

to try and correct this, and some are better than others.

There are two forms of chromatic aberration, Axial or

Longitudinal, and Transverse or Lateral. Big words, but they

simply refer to purple/green fringing and the blue/yellow or red/

cyan edges you see in photos. The latter is really easy to fix, and

has been in Lightroom for a long time. In our case, you simply

select the Remove Chromatic Aberration checkbox. Nothing

further required. If you want more detail on chromatic aberration,

check out http://toothwalker.org/optics/chromatic.html


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http://toothwalker.org/optics/chromatic.html


Purple fringing (and its

rarer brother green fringing)

is a different matter. To

solve this we now have

a new tool: Defringe.

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To use it, click the eyedropper

and zoom into the offending

photo near a highlight edge.

Make sure you’ve selected the

Remove Chromatic Aberration

checkbox first—you don’t want

to be trying to fix the wrong

fringing! The eyedropper has a

loupe similar to that of the White

Balance tool. Click on the centre

area of the fringe. Lightroom will

then calculate the width of the

fringe, and remove it from all

edges in the photo. Sometimes

it may overestimate, and you’ll

see additional colour on the

darker edge. In that case, tweak

the points on the Hue slider. For

example, when removing a purple

fringe, you may need to tighten

the first Green Hue point away

from the green. Even having

afternoon tea in a five-star hotel

didn’t save this shot from terrible

fringing. Clicking the eyedropper

on a purple edge, then a green

edge, recovered it quickly.

99


I did have to manually

tweak the Green Hue

slider slightly to remove

a slight desaturation on

the green edges. The final

image looks much better.

100

M A N U A L

This set of controls allow you to visually fix lens distortion/vignetting, as

well as vertical and horizontal distortion caused by having your camera at an

angle. In addition, you can scale the image (which we mentioned in the Crop

section) and rotate it (mentioned in the Straighten section). Let’s get fixing.

If there’s no profile for your lens, the first slider, Distortion, is a real boon.


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Moving it to the left fixes pincushion distortion, and to the right, barrel distortion. A grid appears onscreen to help line up items as you make a fix. Fixing barrel distortion introduces new edges to the photo. These appear as areas of grey around the photo.


In fact, most of the sliders here will do this. Fortunately there’s the Constrain Crop checkbox, which will crop down past the grey.

102

The Vertical and Horizontal sliders fix perspective in that direction. For the example shot, here’s a scene in Alcudia with the camera pointing upwards.


103

To fix it, drag the Vertical slider to the left, watching the side edges of the towers along the grid.


104

To remove the extra grey edges, click on Constrain Crop.


105

For the next part, scale out to 87 to bring the sky back in. You can also use the Rotate slider to fix a slight angle and apply some distortion correction.

Just a final note on Constrain Crop: Turning it off doesn’t reset the crop, you need to go back to the Crop tool to do that.


106


L E N S V I G N E T T E

The Lens Vignetting tool lightens or darkens the edges of the photo. Moving

the Amount Slider to the left darkens the edge, and is good for creative

effect—but only on uncropped photos. You need to go to Post-Crop Vignetting

in the Effects panel for cropped photos. To correct the vignette in an

uncropped photo, move the Amount Slider to the right, to lighten the edge.

The Midpoint slider controls how far in from the edge the effect occurs,

and only becomes active when the Amount slider is moved from zero.

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Originally the manual Lens Vignetting tool in Lens

Correction panel was used for this, but it only worked with

uncropped images. Adobe added a Post-Crop Vignette tool.

But to be honest, it sucked. Badly. They fixed it though,

and gave us an even more sophisticated tool to work with.

The Post-Crop Vignette tool is part of the Effects panel,

along with the Grain tool. There are three styles available

in the Style drop-down menu: Highlight Priority, Color

Priority, and Paint Overlay. Paint Overlay is Lightroom’s

original Post-Crop Vignette. It’s ugly and looks fake. Avoid.

The other two are variations on the normal lens vignette.

Highlight Priority protects highlights along the vignette

edge, whereas Color Priority protects colour along the edge.

Let’s play with our other controls. Amount and

Midpoint are the same as in the Lens Correction panel.

Roundness controls the shape of the vignette, but it’s

easier to see it if Feather is set to 0 first. In fact, with

Feather at 0, Roundness at -100, Midpoint at 0 and

Amount at 100, you get a cool rounded white border.

In the last section we looked at fixing darkened corners caused by deficiencies in lenses. Here’s the rub though—darker corners look great and help focus attention to the centre of the shot.

17 DRAWING US IN: VIGNETTE

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Changing Roundness to +100 will give a small circle in the centre of the photo. Setting Feather to 100 will completely soften the edge of the vignette.


109

Setting Roundness back

to -100 gives a soft edge.


110


To draw attention to the

centre of a photo, bring

the Amount slider down

to taste, then play with the

midpoint to change the

depth of the vignette from

the edge. Use Roundness

to control whether the

vignette holds to the edges,

or fills in more. Feather

the edge to make it look

reasonably natural (unless

you really want an effect!).

Finally, use the Highlights

slider to bring back lost

highlight detail in the

darkness of the vignette.

I’m going to fess up here.

For years I hated vignettes

on photos. I thought they

were tacky, cliché, and way

too ‘70s. Which they can be.

But I’ve learned to love how

they can hold a scene in. So

much so that many photos

in my first exhibition on

canvas featured vignettes.

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One of the biggest benefits of how Lightroom stores and applies settings is the ability to turn them into presets. Presets are looks that can be applied by simply clicking on the preset name in the Presets panel in Develop. As you can see to the left, I have quite a lot.

18 PRESETS: MAKING, USING AND SAVING PRESETS AS BUILDING BLOCKS

In Library they can be accessed from the Saved

Presets drop-down menu in the Quick Develop panel.

They can also be applied automatically on import.

Lightroom ships with quite a large

variety of presets, so you can get working

with them right away. To me the most

useful feature of presets is preview. As

you hover over a preset in Develop,

the photo preview in the Navigator

window will change to reflect the settings

contained in the preset. This means you

can quickly run through a list of presets

to see which ones suit your image.

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The factory presets are quite

basic, so let’s look at how to

create practical presets which

can be used as building blocks

to a range of different looks.

Firstly, making a preset is

easy—click the + on the right on

the Preset panel header, or use

the shortcut Shift+Command+

N on Mac or Shift+Ctrl+N on

PC. If you’re making a bunch,

definitely learn the shortcut!

This will open the

New Preset dialog

box. Give the preset

a name, decide on

a folder for it, and

choose what settings

are applied by the

preset. Most people

leave it at the default

of all settings, but

this is really only

good for total looks,

and not for creating

useful tools. In fact

I’d go so far as to say

that presets made

this way only look

good on images

similar to the ones

they were made on.

So what can we do instead? Easy—create your presets to target the

specific changes you need done in the photo. For the most part,

avoid adding the whole Basic panel to your preset. If you want

to create a preset to pop colours, only add Vibrance or Saturation

to it. Why? Well not all photos are correctly exposed, so adding

Exposure in a preset can overwrite work you might have done

to correct this, or with the Highlights/Shadows/Darks/Lights for

that matter. Instead, build incremental presets that only have the

minimum settings required to achieve your aim. Take Exposure.

Build a series of presets with Exposure at 1/3 stop intervals. That way

you can preview the change Exposure will make in the Navigator,

rather than taking guesses by randomly moving the slider.

So here’s your homework. Create a presets folder called Toolbox-Basic.

Set your Exposure to -2 stops and create a preset called Exposure -2

in the Toolbox-Basic folder, with the Exposure checkbox selected.

Make sure the other settings, except Process Version, are not selected.

Repeat at -1.67, -1.33, -1, -.67, -.33, 0, .33, .67, 1, 1.33, 1.67, and 2 with

corresponding names.

As you make them,

ensure that only

Exposure is selected

in the Presets dialog.

When you’re done,

hover along the preset

list, to check that

they’re all working.


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Next up, create some Contrast presets

at intervals of 33 from -100 to +100,

this time with only Contrast and

Process Version selected. Repeat for

Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation.

This will give a great start to getting

your image finished in Lightroom,

because you can see the results in the

Navigator, without having to go to each

and every slider. It also means that looks

are repeatable without being based on

the original image used to create them.

For other sections of Develop, e.g.

Tone Curve, Split Toning, and B&W,

make a variety of presets based on

these. In the case of toned black-and-

white images, make sure to include

the black-and-white conversion with

the split toning. With grain, I’d create

a set of dedicated grain presets to

add to my black-and-white presets.

Now this doesn’t mean that I don’t also

have presets that include everything

but the kitchen sink. I do, but as

an addition to the building blocks.

In fact, by combining the building

blocks, you can build more presets.

There are also many good presets

available online. Sometimes you

have to weigh the costs and benefits,

though. There good free ones, and

sometimes the cheap preset packs

can be excellent. If there are specific

looks you prefer, create a new folder

in the New Preset dialog and call it 00

Favourites. This puts it on the top of

the list in Develop. Drag your favourite

presets into it for quickest access.


114

A U T O S Y N C

With more than one photo selected (either in Grid view or in the filmstrip),

click on the little switch beside Sync. The button will become Auto Sync.

Now as you change settings on the main photograph, all other selected

images will have the same changes made. Be warned that large numbers

of selected photos will slow the computer down, so this is best for smaller

numbers of photos. Also, if you paint a mask on and the photos aren’t quite

lined up, it can be a bit messy fixing this. Another problem that can occur is

you can forget that Auto Sync is on and end up making a mess of the other

selected photos. I’ve done it and I know loads of people that have too.

P R E S E T S

Presets can hold all the settings from a photo, as we’ve seen. You can make a preset and then apply it to many other photos. The problem with this is that

often we’re only going to use a preset for a given set of photos. Repeatedly using this method will clutter up the Presets panel with temporary settings.

C O P Y A N D PA S T E S E T T I N G S

The Copy Settings dialog box looks similar to the New Presets dialog, and works in much the same way.

19 FIXING MORE THAN ONE PHOTO

We’ve seen how to use the Sync control in Making White White, but it’s not the only tool for getting settings from one image to another, or to multiple images. Presets, Auto Sync, Copy and Paste settings, and Previous are the other tools that can do this.

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P R E V I O U S

With only one image selected, there’s no Sync button, instead there’s the Previous

button. This copies every setting from the last viewed photo onto the current one.

By using the filmstrip or grid, you can select non-consecutive photos.

Select the checkboxes for the information you want to copy across to other

files. To get the dialog up, either go to the Settings menu and choose Copy

Settings or use the shortcut Shift+Command+C on Mac, or Shift+Ctrl+C on PC.

To paste, select the photos you want the settings applied to and

choose Paste Settings from the Settings menu, or use the shortcut

Shift+Command+P on Mac, or Shift+Ctrl+P on PC.

19 FIXING MORE THAN ONE PHOTO

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L I G H T R O O M - R E A D Y H D R

With Lightroom 4.1 came the ability to process

HDR TIFF files. This means that you can now use

the entire process pipeline on a HDR file, giving

more options than with traditional HDR programs.

But you need an external program like Photoshop

or Photomatix Pro to create these files.

In Grid view, select the files you’ve shot to make the HDR.

For our example, we have three photos shot at -2, 0, and

+2 EV via auto exposure bracketing on a Canon. Other

cameras let you do more, so just select the range for that set.

20 EDIT IN PHOTOSHOP

Okay, so Lightroom can’t do everything. It can process HDR TIFF files, but it can’t make them. It also can’t make panorama photos either, so let’s look at how the Edit In menu can help.

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Go to the Photo menu in Library, then from the Edit In menu, choose Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop. Have a cup of tea, and put your feet up. When the

process is done, and the Merge to HDR Pro dialog is

open, change the Mode from 16 bit to 32 bit.

You’ll now have the 32-bit file with the full dynamic range visible.


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The whites look blown out, so

move the white point all the

way to the right. You’ll need to

do this for all files to have the

full range inside Lightroom.

Finally, click OK to open the file

in Photoshop. Save the file and

close Photoshop. The new 32-bit

TIFF will automatically open

in Lightroom where you can

apply any Lightroom tool to it.

These files are not small. Our

example file is 240 MB. But

this is offset by not having to

wait to render the file again if

you want to make changes.


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PA N O R A M A

Sometimes the beauty in a location is in the width. The sky or the foreground adds little. Times like these call for a panorama.


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Select the photos in Grid view. Go to the Photo menu in Library, then

from the Edit In menu, choose Merge to Panorama in Photoshop.


Generally I keep the horizon in the centre when creating a panorama set. For this reason I usually

select Cylindrical layout. You can of course choose Auto too. I select all the checkboxes and click OK.

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Now it’s time for more tea and maybe some social media!

After the processing is done, you should have something like our Photoshop capture.


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I prefer to do my crop here in Photoshop and to make any fixes needed. The file is rendered at this point, so it should be at its best when we save it. Cropping

here also gives the benefit of Content Aware Fill should you need to fill in edges. When finished, save the file and it will automatically appear in Lightroom.


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With each new version, the software matures more and more, requiring

less and less need to go to Photoshop to finalize our photos.

One thing you should definitely do with all of the tools here

is set them to extremes. Usually Lightroom will try to prevent

horrible things, but it’s more than possible to deliberately mess

up, knowing that Undo (Ctrl/Command+Z) is there to save us.

Enjoy.

CONCLUSION

Hopefully you’ll have gleaned some new tricks and a deeper understanding of Lightroom’s Develop module through this eBook.

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