Lightroom Rocks

I've started using Adobe Lightroom more and more lately. It's a change in my usual workflow. For a long time, I was using Adobe Bridge, a very competent photo organizer, for arranging and previewing all of my photos. Then, after reviewing and culling, I would edit the best in Photoshop.

I changed over to using the Lightroom 2.0 beta (which is free right now) after shooting a wedding and realizing there was no way I was going to process 800 images in Photoshop before the end of the decade. Lightroom sits right between Bridge and Photoshop, a very competent organizer, with flags, tags, and ratings, mixed with a comprehensive digital darkroom. Lightroom covers all global changes you might want to make to an image: white balance, exposure, color, contrast, noise, sharpening, and lens correction, just to name the major ones. It also comes with a number of presets with different styles. The 2.0 beta has also added local changes as well: spot removal and a retouching brush that enables dodging and burning, local saturation, and tinting.

This all leads to a workflow built around rapid prototyping. I can play with white balance, boost the exposure, bump the saturation, increase the contrast, and add a slight vignette in less than five minutes, taking the image from the camera's low contrast, slightly underexposed defaults to a nice, rich photo. Along the way, I can try out different options, building on a preset or looking at what presets other people have used. My Photoshop workflow focused on getting everything just right, my Lightroom workflow still helps me get everything right, but with added creativity because I can try things out quickly and see if I like them.

An example:

This is one of my favorite images, which I wrote about back in September. But I've always felt this image was missing something. Really, it's just a little muddy; there's not enough separation between the foreground and background. I've tried using Photoshop to give it a little punch, but I could never find anything I liked.

So tonight I decided to give it a go in Lightroom. Fortunately, I'd kept the RAW file around, so I still had the color information. Since I'd been doing a lot of color correction in the wedding photos I have been processing, my first idea was to try and get the color balanced properly. Before when I'd worked with the color version of this file, everything had been too warm, mainly because the two main lights are flames, with a very orange light. I used the white shirt in back as a reference to get a good color. This turned the background slightly green, from the street lamps, while keeping the skin tones on the performer nice and warm. I then added a style that I am fast becoming fond of: high contrast, slight vignette, strong colors. With 3 settings changed and a little touch up to tone down the background, I got this:

Something about this pops so much more than the first version, the performer is separated from her surroundings by color and tone. It almost has a cross-processed feel. I've worked on this image a number of times, but without the rapid prototyping that Lightroom offers, I'm not sure I ever would have found a post processing that I could be completely happy with. Now, I'm so happy with it, I'm trying to sell it!

Posted June 30, 2008 - One Comment