We’ll start in Lightroom. I’ve just returned from a trip to China, and I managed to take a variety of photos while I was there. I returned, and imported the images into Lightroom.

Some of my images were bracketed, so I elected to merge them to HDR using Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, one of my personal favorite plug-ins. The process is straightforward, highlight my bracketed images, right click, and choose Export, then select my HDR Efex Pro preset:

In HDR Efex Pro, I make my adjustments, then click Save to return the processed image back to Lightroom:

Now, we get back to Lightroom, and… no image! Where it the world did it go?

Sometimes, the answer is that you have a specific User sort order set, and the image goes at the end of the list. Not the case here, as we can see the bottom of the grid and the image clearly is missing.

A closer inspection of the grid shows something strange is definitely going on. The images were in a stack:

But, notice the first image says “1 of 4.” If you hover over the second, it shows “3 of 4.” What gives? The returned processed image from HDR Efex Pro should be “2 of 4,” but it isn’t showing.

The answer, and this is what gets everyone from newbies to more experienced but forgetful users, is found in the left hand pane, which was closed in my example. Let’s open the left pane and take a look:

And, here we see the issue. We are viewing “Previous Import!” Previous Import is a special kind of temporary collection, that shows the images from your last Import session. For whatever reason, any image created by an external editor and saved back into Lightroom does NOT show up in Previous Import.

Let’s open the Folders, and navigate to the folder where we asked the files to be placed during the previous import session. In my case, this is very easy, because I let Lightroom organize the files by date (it’s an import option, which I strongly recommend unless you have a good reason to organize them another way… and of course, many people do have a good reason).

Here’s the view of the folder, and there’s our image, right where it is supposed to be – in position “2 of 4” in the stack. When we view the folder, we see all the items in the folder, which is where HDR Efex Pro returned the file. When we were viewing Previous Import, we did not see the file because external editing, even though it re-imported the new file, did not count as an “Import” worthy of inclusion in “Previous Import.”

Here we see that the file was never missing at all, we were just looking in the wrong place – at a filtered list of files that didn’t show the whole picture.

This very same problem can occur in other similar circumstances:

• When you send a file to Photoshop for editing, or to any other plugin that returns a different file from what was sent.
• When you are viewing a collection and send files for editing, the returned edited files aren’t automatically included in the collection.

So, the next time you’re doing some post-processing in Lightroom, and wonder why your image disappeared, look to the left hand pane. Chances are, you’re viewing Previous Import, or viewing a Collection. Go back to the Folders, and you’ll find your image!

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In my previous post, I briefly mentioned the changes to the Basics tab in the Development module.. with the familiar Fill Light, Recovery and Brightness sliders making a departure and Highlights, Shadows and Whites making an appearance.

Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4 Beta Basics tabs

The advice from Adobe is that you should learn how the new sliders work from the beginning and not expect them to work as they do in LR3 (Process version 2010). This is not as complicated as it sounds and quite easy to pick up with a few examples below.

All sliders set to the default zero

Brightness and Exposure Sliders

In Lightroom 3, the exposure slider affected the whole of the histogram and the brightness slider affected the middle of the histogram more than the highlights & shadows.

Lightroom 4 Beta on the other hand, creates a new and improved Exposure slider.. that has all the benefits of the the Brightness controls from LR3. The new Exposure behaves more like film, with a graceful fall off with the highlights.

In the photograph, my histogram is a little too far to the right.. with blown highlights and no deep blacks in the image.

Histogram of the unedited image

Bringing down the exposure just a little gives us a good starting point for the edit.

Exposure set to -1.10

As you can see in the Histogram below, the exposure has been brought back to reveal a little of the detail in the sky.

Recovered highlights

The image is now in a good starting position with all the data falling within the histogram, from here it is on to the Highlights and Shadows sliders

Highlights and Shadows

These two new sliders affect the bright (highlights) and dark (shadows) areas of the image.

First I reduce the Highlights to bring out more detail in the clouds.

Darkening the Highlights

As you can see, this has brought out the clouds

Cloud Detail

Now to the Shadows..

Lighten the shadows to +59

This brings out the detail hidden in the shadows..

Increased shadow detail

and now we look at the Whites & Blacks

Whites and Blacks

These sliders cover each end of the histogram. Whites are brighter than highlights and Blacks are darker than shadows. This may seem a little confusing as most photographers are used to referring to the very right of the histogram as the highlights, but it makes sense that the Whites slider plays the opposite role to the Blacks.

In my example image, I did not need to adjust the Whites as there are no blown highlights. The Blacks on the other hand could do with a little adjustment to increase the contrast.

Darken the Blacks to -11

This gives a little more contrast in the lower range of the image..

A little low end contrast thanks to the darker blacks

The image is almost complete now with just a touch of Clarity needed.

Clarity

In Lightroom 4 Beta, the Clarity brush has also been improved dramtically. The old LR3 Clarity had a tendency to create halos if over used. The new slider in LR4 Beta is much better at controlling artifacts and halos.. so much so that Adobe has also increased the strength of the slider. The advice from people at Adobe is that the Clarity slider in LR4 Beta is approximately twice as strong as that in LR3.. so expect to use lower settings to achieve the same affect as LR3.

Clarity is an intelligent contrast for the mid range tones on the histogram and can add a nice pop to an image.

Clarity settings

now you can see the difference in the Before and After screenshots

Before

and

After

I hope that you have found this look at the new Basics panel from LR4 Beta to be useful. My one piece of advice if you are coming from a previous version of Lightroom is treat the sliders as completely new. A quick 30 min play with the new sliders will give you more insight than trying to use familiar settings from LR3.

As always, please feel free to ask questions or comment below

Scot

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I’m sure in time that both the Map & Book modules will become an important part of our workflow, but for me, I am more excited by the changes to the Basic panel and the Adjustment Brushes.

LR3 and LR4 Beta Basic panels

As you can see from the screenshot above.. Fill Light, Recovery & Brightness have been replaced with Highlights, Shadows and Whites. This is not just a change of titles but how each slider works.. for example, even the Exposure slider now functions differently. I must say that although there is a small learning curve associated with these changes I am really pleased with the results they produce.

Anyway, on to the meat of this post..

one of most annoying things to deal with in post production is trying to colour correct an image with mixed light sources. In LR3, there was a workaround where you could paint the contrasting colour to warm or cool a part of the image but this was based on colour knowledge and guesswork.

Lightroom 4 Beta has a better solution..

This image has mixed light sources

As you can see in the image above, there are 2 sources of light in the image. The church is lit by warm lights while the cooler light from the windows can be seen in the background.

Changing the White balance sliders would never produce a ‘correct’ white balance so we need to look at another solution.

Adjustment Brush panel

Clicking on the Adjustment Brush (as indicated by the blue arrow) brings up the new and improved local adjustment panel. The big changes here are the Noise slider and the White Balance sliders. With these changes it is now possible to paint on colour correction.

Paint the Adjustment Brush where you want to colour correct

Paint on the image with the Adjustment Brush, using the keyboard shortcut ‘O’ to display the mask. I have painted the mask where I want the colour correction to take place. Make sure at this point that all of the sliders are set to zero, press the ‘O’ shortcut to hide the mask.

Now change the Temp and Tint sliders to colour correct the image..

Colour corrected background

As you can see I have warmed up the background of the photo using the Temp slider to a value of 92 in this instance. It is as simple as that!

I went on to increase the colour temperature of the little girl and boost the highlight values to help her stand out a little from the background..

Colour correcting the foreground

The final before and after image is below

Before and After

I hope you have found this little look into the Lightroom 4 Beta helpful and if you have any questions please ask them in the comment section below.

The Lightroom 4 Beta is available to download from the Adobe Labs web site. It is worth understanding that this is not the final version of the software and therefore subject to change. I would also advise that if you want to try the LR4 Beta, that you use copies of your images rather than your original files.

Till next time..

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If you didn’t already know, Lightroom allows you to create multiple copyright presets in the metadata panel of the grid or expanded view (press either G or E to view these modes and if you can’t see the Metadata panel on the righthand side press F8, click on the dropdown arrow to expand the panel if it isn’t already open).

Looking at image 1 You will notice that on the top right that there is an option box (I tend to have it set to EXIF IPTC as it shows most of the information I need there) please set this to whichever you wish as all have access to setting the necessary copyright information.

It may be worth pointing out here that your copyright information is recorded as IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council http://www.iptc.org/site/Home/) data in Lightroom and that EXIF data is information about what the camera did when you pushed the shutter button.

Anyway, the very upmost box of the metadata panel is the preset box (see image above). If you don’t have any copyright information set up this will say none or be blank. Clicking on the down arrow will show all the available presets and an option to edit presets.

If you don’t have a preset click on “edit presets” and it opens a very large set of options. Now I can’t tell you what to fill and not to fill in here as I’m not a copyright lawyer and copyright varies from country to country but I would at least add contact details and set copyright status to copyrighted. What I can tell you to do is, once you have filled in your information to press the “check filled” button at the bottom of the panel as this means that any information you have put will be added to your preset and anything without information will be excluded. Once you are finished entering your data click on the preset dropdown at the top of the panel and select “save current settings as a new preset…” you can then name the preset as you wish.

Now when you import photographs remember to add the copyright data from the metadata options in the import dialog (Lightroom has a sticky memory for this and will always use the last used set of info) and you can always add the copyright information there or edit the set you are about to use.

Next year when you come to update your preset all you need to do is select “edit presets” choose this year’s preset from the top dropdown and change the dates to 2013 and save as a new preset, easy! Of course Lightroom 4 will probably have been released by then (the public beta of Lightroom 4 was released yesterday ) and things may have changed by then but…

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In this video tutorial I’m going to take a look at how you can use the Library Filter to drill down into a Lightroom catalogue or collection and find photo’s based on certain criteria. For example we’ll look at how you can see photos that were taken on a certain date, or discover just the photos taken with your favourite lens or even find just the photos taken in portrait format.

All this and more can be done with just a few clicks and could save you a tonne of time.

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For example, the image below is of a sunrise on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, UK, Europe.

so adding the location based keywords of ‘Skye’, ‘Isle of Skye’, ‘Scotland’, ‘UK’ & ‘Europe’ would have to be added individually using the normal methods within Lightroom. This can get very tedious and is prone to many errors such as ‘Isle of Sky’.

With a little fore thought and preparation the job of creating a nested or hierarchical group of keywords can make tagging your images much simpler. In this example, I will be able to add just the keyword of Skye and have the ’Isle of Skye’, ‘Scotland’, ‘UK’ & ‘Europe’ added automatically. This is able to work because ‘Skye’ and ’Isle of Skye’ are two names to describe the same thing and ‘Skye’ is within ‘Scotland’, which is within the ‘UK’ etc.

Creating a nested keyword structure in Lightroom is easy enough as can be seen at the beginning of Michael’s tutorial, although Lightroom does make this quite tedious when trying to input and organise complex nested keywords.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I have already created a basic nested keyword structure. Creating a large nest list like this is very time consuming, so I prefer to use the following method.

Lightroom maintains the list of keywords in a structured text file. it is possible to export and import these keywords and then edit them with a simple text editor.

Clicking on the Metadata tab from the menu, scroll down and click the Export Keywords..

Save the keywords text file and open it within your favourite text editor..

As you can see, the text file contains the keywords from our catalog. The keywords are nested using the ‘Tab’ key.. so in the example above Shanghai and Beijing are part of China, which is in turn part of Asia.

So now we can create more entries within the keyword file, using tabs to sort the hierarchy of the table.

Once the changes have been made, save the file as a .txt file format and import it back into Lighroom.

The file that has just been edited and you should now see the added keywords appear in your keyword list.

So having added a nested structure of keywords, how do we make it so that ‘Skye’ and ‘Isle of Skye’ are treated the same within LR? The answer is Synonyms, LR allows each keyword to have other names. This can be accessed by right clicking (or cmd click for macs) on a keyword and clicking on the option Edit Keyword Tag.

By doing this, typing either Devon or Devonshire will tag the image with BOTH tags. To do this in the text editor we need to add the synonym using the { and } brackets as seen below

Save the text file and import back into Lightroom as per the instructions above.

Lightroom keywords should now look like this.

and now to the Magic, we will know add a single keyword to an image and all the nested parents will also be tagged.

NB! I have the 'Will Export' option to show tags that will export

I hope you have found this useful and although the initial setup is a little time consuming, editing the txt file and creating nested keyword tags goes a long way towards maintaining a clean effective image database.

two further little notes before I finish.

(1) using the [ and ] brackets creates a keyword that does not export

and (2) importing keywords adds to the list that LR already has, rather than overwriting the existing keywords.

NB! it is always wise to back up your catalog before making large scale changes to your image database.

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1) if I can keep my editing within Lightroom I maintain a completely non destructive workflow and continue working with all the RAW image data for the best results

2) While Photoshop is the answer to more complex editing requirements, not everyone has the luxury of owning both pieces of software.

In today’s tutorial, I would like to show how simple it is to change the background colour of a studio shoot. Below shows the before and after images

Take an image with nice clean lines between subject and background

Open the Develop module and Choose the Adjustment brush icon in the top right of the screen (shown below). Make sure to select the Auto Mask option (also shown below) so that when we paint the background mask, the Lego man is not painted.

Pressing the letter O on the keyboard allows us to see the mask as we paint it. At this stage the effect settings for the adjustment brush do not matter as we are only creating a mask to be used later.

Using a large brush size around the edges of the image and reduce the size of the brush as needed when painting the details close to the subject. Using the ‘[' and ']‘ keys allows you to change the brush size quickly and easily.

Once you have painted the mask, it is always worth going in for a closer look. Use the Z key to zoom in to the image and fine tune your mask.

Once you have made sure that your mask is as accurate and as clean as possible it should look like this.. (Pressing the Z key again returns you to the full size view)

Now the fun begins..

At this stage the mask is displayed and not any of the adjustment effects. To turn off the mask view, press the letter O again to toggle the mask off.

In the adjustment effects panel, there is a little rectangle labelled color. Click this to bring up the colour box

Now select a colour for the background, such as Blue shown above. As the background is currently quite bright, it is possible that the colour will be very faint. This can be adjusted using the adjustment sliders for exposure and brightness as shown below.

as you can now see, we have changed the background colour and luminosity to create a dark blue background. Now that the hard work of creating the mask is done we can change the background colour whenever we want.

From a subtle yellow

to a more vibrant and bold green.

There are quicker and more accurate ways of achieving this within Photoshop, but sometimes Photoshop is not the answer.

Two things to consider when using this technique. First is that the more accurate your mask the better your results, and second that the more you push the Exposure & Brightness sliders, the more noticeable your mask edges will be.

I hope you’ve found this useful and have fun trying it for yourself. One more little tip, Don’t think that this technique is just about colour.. you can now use any of the adjustment sliders to affect just the background

If you’d like to see how I created the DIY mini studio used to create this Lego photo, check out my latest Zooming Feet Blog

As always, Questions and comments are welcome below

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One of the great things about Adobe Lightroom is its ability to speed up a photographer’s workflow. There are many ways to do this within both the Library module and the Develop module, but there is an often overlooked method when Importing. It makes sense to have your image looking as good as possible before editing actually starts, especially when it involves less of our precious time.

I’m sure that many readers of TipSquirrel are familiar with the Development Presets that can be applied to an image. Some will also be aware of the Camera Calibration tab that allows (amongst other things) the image on screen to closer resemble what you saw on the back of your camera. In this tutorial, I plan to show how to apply both of these at the point of import. This allows changes to be made to the images as it is being imported into Lightroom.

One of the major benefits of this method, is that if you have the client viewing the images while shooting tethered, they will see the photos that look great ‘straight out of camera’

First we need a preset to apply on import. This could be one that you have already downloaded, one of the standard LR presets or one you create yourself. in this example, I shall create a new preset that I can use on many imports to come.

In the Develop module, I tick the Enable Profile Corrections box in the Lens Corrections tab of the right hand panel. I also choose the Camera Landscape profile from the Camera Calibration tab below.

These settings are the basis of my Import Preset that will be applied to every image that I import. Now we need to create the preset, by clicking the + icon in the Presets tab in the left hand panel.

This will bring up the Preset Dialog box as shown below

Only check the boxes for the settings you want to apply on import. In the case of presets, less is often more.. more useful that is as then you can mix an match your use of presets.

Once you have named your preset, click the Create button. I find that it useful to create a few different import presets based on what I am shooting, whether it be weddings, outdoor portraits or landscapes etc.

Now that the presets are created it is time to apply them to an Import.

Go to the Import Dialog box by clicking File/Import Photos

this will open the Import Dialog box, locate the photos you wish to import and look for the Apply During Import tab on the right hand side panel.

Click on the Develop Settings to bring up your choice of preset to apply

You can choose any of the presets that exist in your Lightroom Catalog but for this example I want to apply one of my Import presets.

Fill in your import details as you normally would, ie your filenames, keywords etc and import your images.

The preset chosen will apply to all of the images imported, so that the first images seen by the client have had any lens distortion removed and that the camera profile looks like the back of the camera.

The image above shows the before and after of applying the preset on import. the differences are quite subtle in this case but you can apply any preset creating quite dramatic images straight from import.

As always, feel free to add any comments or questions below

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This will be a quick and short tutorial today, to show you the benefits of a sharpening mask within Lightroom.

I have had a couple of  people ask me about noise in high ISO images and how to maintain details while removing the background noise, so I thought this may interest you. The image above was shot at ISO 1600 and seems relatively noise free until we look a little closer.

Noise made worse through sharpening

As you can see the image above shows a fair amount of noise with the default LR settings. if you notice that sharpening has been applied (as default) to the entire image. This sharpening is wanted around the details such as the eye and the glasses but less so with the background. In this case, the sharpening is actually making our noise problem worse!

We could turn down the sharpening, but doing so would leave the details looking a little soft.

ALT + Masking

The solution is to apply a mask to the current level of sharpening, but how do we know how much  to apply. The answer is simple, although a little hidden.. Holding down the ALT key while dragging the Masking slider displays the mask. As in Photoshop masks, White reveals, Black conceals.

Moving the masking slider so that there is very little white in the background of the image, and plenty of white over the eyes and glasses.

Masked Sharpening

As you can see the noise levels in the background has been reduced as we are no longer sharpening it, yet the eyes are not softened. At this stage we have not applied any luminance noise reduction, so we apply a small(er) amount of noise reduction

Luminance noise reduction & Sharpening Mask

The noise levels are now minimal and well within an acceptable range.

Some people will no doubt say why not just apply the noise reduction and not bother with the sharpening mask.. That would leave an image like this below..

Luminance noise reduction only

As you can see, the original noise levels have been sharpened meaning a higher noise reduction would have to be applied leading to a softening of the whole image.

Final Image

At screen resolutions, it is not possible to see the difference in the levels of noise, but try this technique out for yourselves when you have high ISO images that need a more intelligent noise reduction.

NB! the ALT key trick also works on the other sliders in the sharpening panel.. so have a play and see what a difference it makes.

I hope you have found this useful and as always, feel free to comment below

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