lightroom

Lightroom 4 has been out for a while but I didn’t really spend too much time tinkering with it until last weekend and a little this weekend too. While there doesn’t seem to be much new, the processing engine has seen quite a step up in performance so much so that a few of my older images really benefited from further tinkering.

The photo above was taken a couple of years ago at the Edinburgh festival. I always liked it but never really got the detail out of it I wanted without bringing in too much noise. The edited photo, while I’ve maybe taken it a bit far, I really like. More contrast and highlights areas like the kilt far more effectively. I don’t think I could have pushed it as far in Lightroom 3.

Similarly this shot from the Cobbler climb in 2010 was a favourite but now with some tweaking in Lightroom 4 I can get some better definition. Slightly confusing was the first time I opened an older image in Lightroom 4. The new develop settings were missing but on anything new brought into Lightroom I could see them – Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks instead of Recovery, Fill Light and Brightness sliders. After a bit of searching I found you had to change the Process Version to 2012 instead of 2010. Applying that to the whole library opens up the newer develop panels for all my photo’s.

Even this shot of London taken from inside now looks better. Previously I struggled to increase the clarity and it always looked a bit washed out but I found it easier to tweak in Lightroom 4. There are other new features like book support, proofing and printing improvements, video support and a great way of geotagging photo’s but it’s the improvements in the process engine that really stands out.

Shamefully I’ve hardly been out and about this year with my camera but that will change soon. Promise.

Since moving to the Mac managing most data has been fairly easy. My doc’s are all straightened out, music is in iTunes capable hands and photo’s are thrown into iPhoto and it’s easy to sync and publish from the one app. Lightroom has changed all that.

I started using Lightroom at Christmas and I love the finer control I get on my photo’s. However all my photo’s prior to Christmas are managed in iPhoto. The only way to get the photo’s from Lightroom into iPhoto would be to export from Lightroom into iPhoto and keep two separate sets of the same photo. Grrr. I hate duplication and I hate over complicating processes.

iPhoto’s most annoying feature is that it moves photo’s into it’s own library. I would love to have it create a library of images from across my drives but leave them in their location just like Picasa does. I tried Picasa when it came out for the Mac but iPhoto was by far the better tool for me.

So that leaves me with two photo libraries at the moment and none of my new photo’s on the iPhone as I didn’t want to create duplicates. There’s a couple of options in iPhoto for changing the editor which is a bit clunky in practice and for copying items into library but all that does is change the import from a move to a copy. I just hope iPhoto 10 has the options to manage files out with the library. That would be an update worth paying for. I guess there’s nothing for it but to export and duplicate the files I want to view on the iPhone into iPhoto. At least then I can take advantage of the new face tagging features as well. Or is there another option that I’m missing?

Tag: lightroom

Photo Management