Learning Lightroom - First Serious Attempt

[Suzan J]

Hello All: I am now trying to use Lightroom exclusively for PP. This is my first serious attempt. I have posted a before and after shot and I'm hoping some of you LR experts can help me with the workflow and the technicalities.

I cropped the image first, then lowered highlights and lifted shadows. I then increased contrast, clarity, and vibrance. I used the adjustment brush to dodge the horses body somewhat. Finally, I sharpened slightly and used a bit of noise reduction. To be honest, I did not detect much change to the histogram, but I would rather be subtle than heavy handed.

There was room on the histogram to move the black point further to the left. I tried to "set it" by moving it to the point where the little warning triangle appeared, but I found that to be much too dark, so I set it back toward the right. It is now at -16

As it was a bit of a frosty morning, I was hoping to bring out the horse's breath to be more noticeable than in the SOCC version. Do you think the horse is sufficiently exposed? I would appreciate any comments and advice as I am still trying to develop a good workflow.

BEFORE





AFTER

[Mike Buckley]

I sure do like the mood.

I don't have much experience making or reviewing images made in this style that employs intentional flare, so I'll only make some very general comments.

Considering that this is your first serious attempt to use Lightroom for post-processing, you picked a particularly difficult style. The lack of contrast created by the relative position of the sun is a characteristic that requires that you decide whether you want to introduce more contrast or leave it as is as a characteristic of the mood. Regarding your overall learning curve, you might want to work initially with images that don't have this particular characteristic even though it is very appealing once it is mastered.

My thoughts regarding noise reduction: When noise is not apparent at 30% viewing size or less, I don't address it; I address noise only when I am going to display at anything larger than 30%. I see no noise in the original, which is what I would expect at such a small display of an image exposed reasonably well, which is the case of this image. The best way to avoid noise is to make a proper exposure and you've done that.

You asked about the horse. The range of brightness depicted in both images is fine. You know the color of the horse in this particular light, so you then only need to decide whether you want your image to be accurate from a documentary point of view or whether you are allowing yourself the latitude of creativity. Once you decide that, you can make the horse appear as you prefer.

Regarding the black point, notice that there are no true blacks in the scene. So, mapping the darkest tone in the scene to a darker tone (that happens when you change the black point to a darker tone) may not produce results that you want in this particular scene. Also, consider that when changing the black point to a darker tone inherently increases the mid-tone contrast. (You can perhaps fully appreciate that only if you manipulate a tone curve to alter the black point and only after you have come to understand the data displayed in the tone curve.) Depending on how you envision the image, this particular scene may be more suited for less rather than more mid-tone contrast.

You also mentioned workflow. I wonder if you are aware of this very helpful CiC tutorial about that.

[Suzan J]

Thanks Mike for the detailed reply! What you say about the black point is making some sense to me now as the scene was a bit misty with low contrast due to the frost. I see what you mean about there not being any true blacks in the image as everything appeared to be in a "browny-goldy" range. I'm working through Scott Kelby's book on Lightroom, so hopefully I'll become more comfortable with the technicalities. And yes, the sun flare was intentional... Thanks for your help.

[Mike Buckley]

It's not just the frost that is reducing the mid-tone contrast in this scene. Even when there is no frost, the relative position of the sun will also reduce mid-tone contrast due to the optics of the lens unless you block the sunlight directly entering your lens (as opposed to the sunlight that is being reflected by the objects in the scene). Doing so will reduce or eliminate the flare, which would go against your desire to display flare. I mention this only so you can be aware in the future of what reduces mid-tone contrast and how to attend to it at the time of capture if indeed you have that desire.

[Polar01]

Susan my two cents, why did you crop first? Lets say that the darkest object was in that area, usually you set the black point on the darkest area but you thru it out in the crop. To my way of thinking the crop is almost the last thing that you do. Keep as much of the data you can until the very end.

Cheers: Allan

[Suzan J]

Hi Allan: I'm afraid I have no good answer for you as to why I cropped first. This is precisely why I need all the help I can get. I guess I just fell into my usual habits. Of course, what you say should have been obvious to me, but was not So, what exactly does Lightroom do when one "sets the white and black point". I'm guessing that it finds the darkest and lightest point and smooths out the exposure based on those reference points? Is that right?

[Polar01]

Susan: Good answer, I am not sure about setting the black and white points in LR as I use the levels adjustment layer or curves adjustment layers in Photoshop to do that to set the final points before printing. I wish I could say however I not as that well versed in LR and as such my not get my wording correct so I will leave that for a LR user.

Cheers: Allan

[Mike Buckley]

At the risk of getting bogged down in terminology...

So, what exactly does Lightroom do when one "sets the white and black point".

All software works essentially the same way. When setting the black point, the darkest tone in the image is mapped to the configured black point. Similarly, when setting the white point, the brightest tone in the image is mapped to the configured white point. All of the tones in between are also mapped according to the changes in the curve that become inherent when you change either the black point or the white point. See my first post about the need to understand the curve display to fully appreciate that.

[Shadowman]

Nice composition. I picked up a tip about photo editing that you should always start with the biggest problem first, if it's noise start there, etc. I've also read a few LR tutorials and some said you can simply follow the order of the Development Module panels. Nothing is written in stone.

[Nicks Pics]

As John mentioned, LR is designed so that the user can follow top-to bottom order in the develop module of making adjustments, as a commonly recommended work flow, though sometimes it can be better to deviate from it. Of course, you don't need to adjust all the available parameters than aren't constructive, but I don't think you over did it anyway. Experimenting with adjustments makes a lot of sense.

Regarding the photo, I do like it, the lighting and subject is very attractive, I don't think shadows are too dark on the horse, but I wonder if raising the highlights again would enhance the back lit glow on the horse and help the frost to glow. I think I might have tried a slightly different crop to exclude the magenta glow on the right, and maybe include a bit more of the open space on the left, but this is of course up to your preference.

[Adrian]

This is my work flow in LR based on a course from a pro tutor. Some may find it helpful. Note: never crop first!

D Processing

This is your image correction process workflow.

These notes are based on using Adobe Lightroom 5. Photoshop is very similar.

Do not start by adjusting exposure or brightness. The steps below will usually take care of this.

If you have shot in raw (always shoot in raw!) then it is best to use sunlight as your default white balance in camera. White balance (colour temperature on a Kelvin scale) can always be adjusted in processing to whatever you want.

Do not crop your images first: doing so just expands the noise when you process the image. Work on the entire image and then crop it at the end.

Using Developing screen in Lightroom:

1 Highlights

This step is to maximise the detail available in the highlights.

Hold down the cheese shaped slider and press alt at the same time. This blanks the image. Adjust slide until highlights just disappear.

2 Exposure

Same procedure as above/

3 Contrast

Adjust until pixels (you can use magnified view if you want) just begin to sharpen. Around 10% typically.

4 Clarity

Expand image magnification to get pixel clarity. Usually around 30% is good. Reduce by say 10% to soften skin tones.

Clarity is similar to sharpening.

5 Saturation

Often necessary to take down a bit, say 10%, to take any colour harshness out.

6 Vibrance

Vibrance targets any colour that isn’t what it should be. Usually not good to adjust the slider up past the clarity level, Often a diagonal line of Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation (saturation being bottom left) works well.

7 Tonal curve

You are looking for a slight s curve. Not an essential step.

8 Tweak hue, saturation and luminance if you want.

9 Sharpening

Comes out of the camera at 25 and often best left alone if the above adjustments have been done well.

Masking: cheese slider plus alt. Chooses whether light bits or dark bits are sharpened. Usually best to leave alone as over sharpening makes images look harsh and digital.

10 Noise reduction

Soften the grey pixels. Try to avoid noise reduction: it ruins photos.

11 Lens correction

This makes automatic adjustments to compensate for lens issues. Most good lenses will be recognised.

Tick enable
Tick chromatic aberration

Change level if you need to, especially vertical.

12 Crop

You can overlay all ratios across the image if you want to see how they look. Using tools, crop guide, overlay.

Select the required aspect ratio, or use none if you are web publishing and want a custom size. Leave some top or bottom apace if you plan to caption on the image itself.

13 Make any corrections, such as dust spot removal with the localise brush.

Adrian

[ajohnw]

I suspect this one went wrong early on. I can't help you with Lightroom as I don't use it but I had a feeling that the colour balance was messed up so did a rather quick fix on that - suddenly it is a frosty morning.



The horses face was rather dark and still is so I also lightened shadowy areas. I feel it's still too dark really but working from a jpg limits how much brightening can be done.

Black and white points cause lots of people problems. As some one mentioned curves are the best way to get a grip of these. On a curve the black point is moved by sliding the extreme bottom left to the right, white point extreme top right to the left. Then make a bit of a mental jump and look at the resulting curve as a hill. The steeper it is the higher the contrast will be over the "area" it covers. So setting either a black or white point increases contrast at the expense of maybe chopping some low or high lights off. More often something like an S or part of an S curve would be used. These basically consist of setting some point at the dark end and dragging it down and some point at the highlight end and pushing it up. The slope will be steeper than it was between these to points so contrast will be increased there but as the slope is reduced past these points the contrast there will be reduced. There is a CinC tutorial which might help clear this up further. The tutorials are off the home page - just search curves.

On this shot a negative black point would probably be best - move the extreme lower left up This will brighten up dark areas but also reduce contrast in the entire image. That can sometimes be fixed by moving the white extreme top right point to the left so that the slope of the line is restored or increased but often shadow recovery is much easier. Same with highlights using highlight recovery. I'm assuming Lightroom has both. These plus colour balance should be your first adjustments from raw. Then the titivation sliders can be used to enhance what should already be a fairly decent result.

I notice that you have posted and Adobe RGB shot. Really on the web you should stick to sRGB. Out of interest I saw a slight improvement as soon as I converted it.

As usual if your not keen on people working on your image say so and I will delete it. It looks like you have mixed colour balance problem with this shot going on the purple flair on the right. It's difficult to do anything about that other than via some rather careful local work that could easily go wrong. I suspect this is why the colour balance of the original seems to be out.

John
-

[davidedric]

This is my work flow in LR based on a course from a pro tutor. Some may find it helpful.

Comprehensive post, Adrian, and completely different from my workflow, not least because mine is image dependent, but there are entire forums devoted to the subject However, I do find this puzzling

Do not crop your images first: doing so just expands the noise when you process the image. Work on the entire image and then crop it at the end.

I can imagine this is true for a pixel based editor, but I can't see how it holds for a parametric editor like Lightroom. So far as I can tell, Lightroom global adjustments are applied to the whole image, not just to the parts "cropped in". Actual cropping of pixels doesn't happen till the image is exported. There seem to me to be so many good reasons to crop first, that this would be worrying. Can you, or anyone else, shed more light?

Thanks,

Dave

[HaseebM]

Your image SOOC is the one I like for some reason. Just because you have software does not always mean you need to process your image.

Each person has a taste or mood for a particular enhancement and is solely left to your discretion. As long as you are satisfied with the outcome, thats what counts.

[Slipper]

Serge Ramelli is very good I think with LR, he has lots of free vids, but he does spam you but worth it.
http://photoserge.com/

He has a lot on utube too I believe.

[Mike Buckley]

John's paragraph shown below might be the single best paragraph I have ever seen explaining the curve display. I urge everyone who doesn't understand the curve display to take the time to review it.

Keep in mind that whether we use sliders or the curve display to make changes, the tonal curve is changing. The advantage of using the curve display to make the changes is that we see not just the changes in the image but also in the curve display. That advantage is not possible when using sliders.

Moreover, I see so many people asking what really happens when only sliders are being used, such as Suzan's understandable question about what really happens when the black and white points are altered. The curve display indicates what is really happening and there is no other display I've heard of that does that. Lightroom provides two methods of using the curve display, one that provides more control than the other.

Black and white points cause lots of people problems. As some one mentioned curves are the best way to get a grip of these. On a curve the black point is moved by sliding the extreme bottom left to the right, white point extreme top right to the left. Then make a bit of a mental jump and look at the resulting curve as a hill. The steeper it is the higher the contrast will be over the "area" it covers. So setting either a black or white point increases contrast at the expense of maybe chopping some low or high lights off. More often something like an S or part of an S curve would be used. These basically consist of setting some point at the dark end and dragging it down and some point at the highlight end and pushing it up. The slope will be steeper than it was between these to points so contrast will be increased there but as the slope is reduced past these points the contrast there will be reduced. There is a CinC tutorial which might help clear this up further. The tutorials are off the home page - just search curves.

[Mike Buckley]

Suzan,

I keep forgetting to mention that leaving the EXIF data in the image file will make it easier for others to help you along your learning curve. The EXIF data is stripped from this image. Sometimes the EXIF data gives clues that can lead to helpful information, even when the primary topic is post-processing as in this thread.

[Suzan J]

Thank you, everyone for the valuable input. The primary "take away" from this discussion will be for me to view the aforementioned tutorials and get a solid understanding of curves and how they work. The book I am following does not really get into the science behind the adjustments.

It boggles my mind that I did not notice the magenta hue in the right corner, yet when it is pointed out it is SO obvious. DUH ! The human brain is quite a puzzle at times. I must have been so focused on working on the subject, that the background was ignored.

I do not mind at all if anyone wishes to re-work an image. It is all helpful to me. Thanks, John for the effort in doing so. Thanks also to everyone for their tips and recommendations and particularly to Mike for hammering home the message that I must learn to work with curves if I have any hope of understanding the PP process.

I am confused as to why my EXIF data is not visible. I do shoot in RAW and Jpeg and work on my images in RAW format. In order to post an image to these forums, I first export to Flickr. The settings in Lightroom show that I am exporting all metadata and gives no option but to export by converting to Jpeg. My Flickr account also shows the EXIF data to be visible. Is there a setting or something I am missing which allows others to see the data? I will have to remember to manually include basic EXIF data when posting again as I realize this is vital for anyone attempting to help me.

[ajohnw]

The exif info is missing because you have posted links to flickr rather than posting them directly on here using "click here to upload etc etc".

I don't think Mike means must use curves only that you need to appreciate that changing contrast in one tone range will change others. The various sliders do the same thing often with added bells and whistles - clarity for instance usually boosts mid tone range contrast leaving the ends of the tonal range more or less alone. Highlight compression flattens the contrast at that end of the tone range allowing more from the raw file to be bought into the final image space. Highlight reconstruction or compensation may literally move the highlights down in the tone range. Shadow recovery does just that but unfortunately often doesn't increase the contrast as well. These all work on the entire image. In this case I suspect the horse needs local work as bringing up it's brightness more than you have will probably brighten the rest of the image too much.

Colin often mentioned levels. An alternative to curves that is much harder to mess up. Moving the centre pointer around on that simply skews the mid range contrast around. It's often sufficient. Moving the black end slider sets where back will be in the output. Same for the white end slider. Often a low tonal range image which this one isn't will show a histogram that is just a hump in the middle and doesn't use all of the tonal range that is available so the black slider might be moved until the dark end of the histogram goes as far left as it can and then the white end slider moved to get the bright end of the histogram as far right as it can go. The general contrast is then set by moving the centre slider about. Dark end too dark - don't move that slider so much, same thing with the highlight slider if too bright.

The problem with levels and curves is that they are very sensitive adjustments and small changes can have a lot of effect so it pays to go slowly and examine the whole image with some care as the adjustments are made. They also inter react to some extent.

On learning little does go into specifics. The only way to learn really is to have an idea what the adjustments do and play around with them. Trying to explain either of these 2 is difficult so you may find that the tutorials of little use.

I find it's best to leave shots alone for 1/2 hr after adjusting and then look again. It's too easy to only look for specific things when adjusting rather than the over all effect - Leaves me wondering why I left the shot I posted as it is now but then it was a very quick 5mins worth. It ;looks good grief did I post that to me now.

John
-

[Mike Buckley]

I don't think Mike means must use curves

To clarify my thinking, John is correct that I do not believe it is necessary to use a Curve tool to make desirable changes to an image. Though I personally like the control that a Curve tool provides, I understand that a Curve tool may not be a good fit for everyone.

However, I do think it is necessary to use a Curve tool to fully appreciate what is happening to the image's tone curve when we use sliders that are not connected to a Curve tool. The Curve tool is a graph, so it's important to understand what the points on the graph indicate; if you don't understand that, you don't understand what is happening to the image's tone curve when the display of the graph changes.

I tend to think of the Levels tool and the Curve tool as one and the same even though technically that is not correct; they are two different tools even when they are included in the same tool as is the case in Lightroom. Indeed, Lightroom's Tone Curve panel doesn't even mention the Levels tool even though it is built into one of the displays in that panel.

I also think of the Curve and Levels tools as one and the same (again, wrongly so) because it is impossible to change any level (any black, white or mid point) without altering the image's tone curve. When your software such as Lightroom displays the Levels and Curve tools within one tool, you will see that that is the case.