Adobe Ligthroom

Lightroom CC – close but no cloud

This is probably not an unusual scenario for many users of Adobe Lightroom: when travelling away from home you bring a laptop together with you camera. This allows you not only to back up photos from your memory cards, but also to import them into Lightroom for sorting and maybe some initial processing, or even … Read more

Lightroom Beta 3

The Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 has been released for download. I’ve been playing around with it for an hour or so, and my first impression is: no revolutionary changes, by a lot of minor improvements. Just to mention a few: More intuitive import function Publishing directly to Flickr – not with all the features of … Read more

Cure for Lightroom blues

In the posting “Lightroom blues” I whined about LR’s poor JPG-export capabilities.  In a comment Carsten Fredsted proposed a solution, which has proved to be very convincing. First of all, you should install Mogrify. This is a program, which will convert from one picture file format to another, with a lot of user settings. However, … Read more

Lightroom blues

Try taking a look at the two pictures below. They look the same. But click on them to enlarge and see the difference:

Lightroom version

The original RAW-file was imported into Lightroom, cropped, converted to monochrome and exposure was adjusted. After that, the ways departed:

The version to the left was exported to JPG directly from Lightroom – without any sharpening applied (both “clarity” and “sharpening” set to zero). JPG quality was 100 – that is: no compression. The picture was downscaled from a width of a little more than 2000 pixels to 500 during export.

The version to the right was exported to Photoshop CS3 as a full size TIFF. In PS it has been downscaled to a width of 500 pixels and a suitable amount of “Smart sharpen” applied. Finally it was converted to JPG with “Save for web” with a quality setting of 70.

The funny thing is, that when you look at the version to the left, there is a distinct halo around the person in the picture.

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Adobe Lightroom – not quite there yet, sadly

Lightroom is Adobes newest photo-handling software. It is based on at least two very good ideas: firstly, its meant to be a complete, integrated package for a digital workflow. It’s packing a RAW-converter, a picture-database, basic editing and several other functions into one program, with a very nice and functional user interface.

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