Feature: Adobe Lightroom has some very fine Color and Lighting controls
Idea: In this review 10 Fall images demo those editing tools
It is my belief that Adobe Lightroom provides not only a great photo workflow environ but also some of the most versatile Color and Lighting controls. My brother Greg has graciously offered me 10 great New Hampshire October Hiking pictures in camera raw format and has said "flail away" to test out and demonstrate some of those Color and Lighting tools. The idea is to show the range of edits that are possible with Develop step in the Lightroom workflow.

Here are 10 edits hot off the slides .... uhh images. What this review cannot convey are two things. First, the speed at which I was able to work. Lightroom was very fast on what is getting to be an older machine. Second, because of the speed I was able to try a lot of different settings. I tweaked and flitted up and down on the sliders and settings. I changed among the different before and after views. I was constantly hitting the TAB button to see the image in expanded view; then TAB again to return to the normal edit layout. Adobe has really made Lightroom easy to work with. Now, without further todo, here are the 10 Lightroom edits.

NH1 - Maple-Covered HeadStones

The New Hampshire series of images starts off with a wonderful Maple covered headstones shot. My first temptation was to punch up the colors with brightness and saturation. But instead I lowered the Exposure prior to adding back overall Brightness. This allowed me to increase the Vibrance substantially. Here is how Adobe describes Vibrance:
"Adjusts the saturation so that clipping is minimized as colors approach full saturation, changing the saturation of all lower-saturated colors with less effect on the higher-saturated colors. Vibrance also prevents skintones from becoming over saturated."
The result is that the under-expressed orange and yellow tones come out more without warming over or punching up the whole image.

NH2 - Candy-coated Birches

In this shot of birches/aspen/poplar, I wanted to rescue the washed out greens and give the overall picture a candy-coated lollipop look. So first I cropped the image by 10% on the left emphasizing the tumble of white trunks. Then I went to Lightroom's Hue Saturation and Lightness set of controls and pumped up the green hues. This was followed by added lightness in the Highlights and Lights. And voila - candy-coated birches/aspen/poplars.

NH3 - Rich Yellow-Orange Glade

Here the problem is that the camera raw image is a tonal average. So right away I added 14% more fill light (this was jostled around from 5 to 30% before settling on 14%). So then I upped the Black by 12% to give me room to add some Lightness and Saturation. And as you can see from the screenshot, there was no reluctance here - Brightness up 16%, Contrast 35%, Vibrance 22%, and Saturation 27%. In the Before and After you can see the richer tones. This is a wonderful shot to work with in Lightroom because it offers users many different ways to paint in the richness - one could easily have adjusted the HSL settings used in NH2 to bring out some of the more subtle hues.

NH4 - Downhill Skiing

This is a great exposure - not much work to do here. I added more Blacks, a poor man's Contrast increase and once again returned to Vibrance to add more subtle saturation. But really the original is hard to beat - and staying with the original image is not a bad option.

NH4 - Blacked Out

So many panorama shots get darkened down by the lightness in the sky and some contributing foreground lightness. Hues in between get lost in the darkness as in this shot. The first thing was to crop off the light foreground rock croppings. Then I really had to work on this shot because as I raised either the Brightness or the Exposure, the sky tones would just wash out. So using 29% Fill Light certainly helped with that problem; but now neutral grays tend to predominate. So 4% Black added back cheap contrast. Then I lorded on the Vibrance and Saturation settings. Better but still not best. Going to Photoshop and using a mask to cut out the sky would really help in the processing of this image.

NH6 - Another Kick at the Cat

This shot is similar to the one before except no cropping was required. However, one can see the utility of Ansel Adam's Zonal system for processing this image. There are really 4-6 big yet different color zones in this image. It is almost a sure case for using standard Photoshop's masking and feathering features.

Nonetheless, after increasing the Exposure to 0.42, Brightness by 16% and Contrast by 24%, I spent the bulk of my time increasing the individual colors' Hue and Saturation levels. It is simply trial and error - but Lightroom's Before and After view really helps in the tweaking.

NH7 - Hue Flare

This is another natural shot. But again the camera raw image leaves the image with a gray sheen. So this is a simple edit. Up the Vibrance by 60%, the Contrast by 30% and the Temperature by 5%. The result is an image with a bit too much pop. So then I go to the Curves tool available in lightroom and make the adjustment there. But instead of using the Curves diagram directly I go to the Curves sliders below. And after trying a few settings I settle on Highlights down 18% and Lights down 4%. Even with this the image is bright and proud, like a Hue Flare.

NH8 - Overcasting

This picture has a distinctly overcast sheen given the cloud cover. So bring up the Light: Exposure higher, Fill Light up 5%, Contrast up a whopping 56%. Bring up the Color: Vibrance up 39% and Saturation up 34%. But now we have a problem, the sky is just washed out. So look at what Adobe does for you with the Recovery tool:
"Reduces the tones of extreme highlights and attempts to recover highlight detail lost because of camera overexposure. Lightroom can recover detail in raw image files if one or two channels are clipped."
I found Recovery effective at bringing back detail but there is a color shift towards warm which one can correct for. Again, a better image is the result.


NH9-Rays of Light

This is my favorite image of the group because the Sun has been caught at the top of the big granite massif with the result that there are dozens of shafts of light emanating from the corona. The trick is to preserve these linear flares while picking up the foreground colors. Again this image cries Photoshop for its masking capabilities, but Lightroom did quite well.

First, note that I did a little grooming and removed the clump of grass in the foreground with Lightroom's retouch tools. Next the combination of positive Exposure and Fill Light setting brought out the foreground colors enough such that Saturation and Vibrance were not needed. But to preserve the shafts of light, I had to play with the combo of Blacks and Contrast settings to get the best delineation of the sun flare. In sum Lightroom did much more than I expected getting the image very close for final, masked edits in Photoshop.

NH10 - Hotel and Spa

The last color correction in the New Hampshire series turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. I thought the image with its darkened foreground would be a devil to get right because of the relatively close hues in the hotel and sky. But I tried Fill Light at a relatively high 26% and to my amazement it popped right on except for the graying effect of Fill Light as you add more. Adjustment of Contrast around 12-20% worked well, reducing the graying - so I settled on 15%. For color spice, 13% of Vibrance was added. Das schmeckt fur mei.

Summary

This New Hampshire exercise shows the wide range of tools available to designers in the Develop step of Lightroom. Colorcasts, exposure corrections, warming/cooling tints, and the tough exposure adjustments have 2-3 approaches on tap with Lightroom. Seven of the ten photo adjustments were just fine - and only two, NH6 - Another Kick at the Cat plus NH10 - Rays of Light, would I be tempted to start from scratch within standard Photoshop. But even with these images, Lightroom produced large improvements.

But what is hard to convey is how quickly corrections get done in Lightroom. Look at all the Before and After views available that help to guide the corrections closer. Also I have tried to convey the amount of tweaking done for each edit. The GUI design and layout of Lightroom really encourages this. And the speed of operation on 6-10MB image files was very fast on a 1GB of RAM system operating with 4 other open programs - Snagit, Dreamweaver, Firefox and Photoshop Extended. Finally I have not even mentioned the many ways that edit steps can be automated in Lightroom. In sum, if you do a lot of image work - say 50 or more images per week, the time saved just on the Develop step of your workflow will pay for Lightroom very quickly.

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