Lightroom Review - Page Two

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Develop Module

The Develop Module is your digital darkroom and shares a similar layout with all the other Lightroom modules. While the layout is similar, the contents of the left and right panels have now changed. The left panel now offers new drop down panels below the fixed image navigator.

Left Drop-Down Panels

Presets:
Preset provides quick access to special tonal effects such as Aged Photo, Cyanotype, Punch, and Landscapes. Lightroom 2.0 ships with 18 presets and offers an area for users to add their own. A really nice touch here. See video demonstration below:

Snapshots
Snapshots is a feature that I have never seen before in an application. It allows you to take a 'snapshot' of a photograph with changes made to it but without saving the image again (aka, not using up valuable hard drive space). Essentially the snapshots feature works like a saved preset. At any point during the editing process you can save a 'snapshot' of the enhanced image up to that point. Once saved you can continue enhancing the image, start over, try some new ideas and even save additional snapshots. This feature makes it easy to present different ideas to a client without having to duplicate the file over and over again. For example, one snapshot might feature a vignette, another converted to B&W, and yet another with highly saturated colors. Anytime you view that particular photo in the Develop module - the saved snapshots will appear in this column on the left panel. In a future release it would be nice if these snapshots could be 'stacked' with the original photo so that they could be accessed in the Library module as well.

Video Demonstration / Tutorial of Lightroom's Snapshot Feature

History
The History feature, located directly below Presets and Snapshots keeps track of the changes you make to individual photographs. This allows you to step backwards through the changes made in order to correct or alter settings. You can also clear the history to undo all changes made to the image -- all part of the non-destructive editing abilities of Lightroom 2.0

Right Panel

The right panel is where all the Lightroom magic takes place. The panel includes 7 drop-down sections: Basic, Tone Curve, HSL / Color / Grayscale, Split Toning, Detail, Vignettes, and Camera Calibration. Above these drop-down sections are 5 tools including the new graduated filter and adjustment brush tools.

The two newest features, and the ones you are likely to hear about the most, are the new graduated filter and adjustment brush tools. Here is a quick summary on each of these tools:

New Graduated Filter

The Graduated Filter tool duplicates (and goes beyond) what a real graduated filter would do on a lens. In Lightroom 2.0, this tool allows you to click and drag a light to dark gradient over any portion of your image. You can even add multiple graduated filters - for example, one for the sky and one to bring out the details in the shadows - and each filter you add has it own settings. Once a graduated filter has been placed over a part of your photo you are then able to adjust the area's color, contrast, brightness, saturation, clarity, sharpness, and exposure. It's like having an unlimited number of graduated filters available at your fingertips.

Tip: Holding down the SHIFT key while dragging the graduated filter will lock the filter horizontally or vertically.

New Localized Adjustment Brush
The adjustment brush by itself is enough reason to upgrade to 2.0 and is probably a good enough reason to run out and buy Lightroom 2.0 even if you already own Photoshop. The adjustment brush allows you to paint a mask over any area of your photo to which you can then alter one or more settings just to that localized portion of your photo. The same adjustments that were mentioned for the Graduated Filter are the same ones available here (contrast, brightness, saturation, clarity, sharpness, and exposure).

The feature that really makes the Adjustment Brush useful is the new Auto Mask option. When checked, Auto Mask will look at the colors under the cross-hair of your brush and will make sure that your brush only masks colors that match. This makes it easy to mask skin tones without affecting the hair or shirt or a sky without affecting the trees or to change the color of clothing, whiten teeth, or enhance the colors of lips and eyes. What is more amazing is that this can be done to RAW images without ever affecting the original or having to make a duplicate copy first. Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3 features plenty of masking modes but Auto Mask feature is so new that even Photoshop CS3 is a little envious.

The other three tools located on the same row as the Gradient Filter and Adjustment Brush are the crop overlay, spot removal, and red-eye removal tool. The crop overlay allows you to both straighten and crop a photo; The spot removal tool contains both a healing brush and clone tool that allow you to removal dust spots or other blemishes in a photo and are similar to the tools used in Photoshop - although they work a little differently (at least in Photoshop CS2). The red-eye removal tool allows you to drag a circle around each eye to remove the redness and allows you to control the pupil size and darkness of the effect. It is one of the first red-eye removal tools that produces results that look natural (See video demonstration below).

Red-Eye Removal Tool Demonstration / Tutorial

Basic Panel
Below the top row of adjustment tools are seven drop-down areas that allow you to adjust different aspects of image quality. The first area, labeled "Basic," features sliders that allow you to adjust color temperature, tint, exposure, recovery of highlights, fill light, black levels, brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance, and saturation. Each of these options can be adjusted individually and double clicking the title next to each slider resets that slider to its default. The Basic panel also provides white balance correction. White balance can be adjusted using the eye-dropper tool to select a portion of the photo that represents medium gray.

Tone Curve Panel
The Tone Curve allows you to adjust different regions of your image using sliders or with the curves tool. The sliders make it easy to increase or decrease the highlight areas of an image, as well as the light, dark, and shadow areas.

New in Lightroom 2.0 is a way to adjust tone curves by dragging the mouse over a portion of the photo you want to adjust. To access this feature click on the Target Adjustment icon to the left of the Tone Curve graph. Now click over any part of the photograph and drag the mouse up or down (while holding down the mouse button) to make the tones lighter or darker. This new feature is also found in the "HSL / Color / Grayscale" toolset and allows everyone to make adjustments to their image without worrying about how the tone curve works.

HSL / Color / Grayscale Panel
In this panel you are given complete control over the hue, saturation, and luminance (HSL) of you image, as well as grayscale conversion. Like the other panels in Lightroom 2.0, all this power is made simple with the use of text descriptions and sliders.

In the HSL panel you will also find a new Target Adjustment tool which allows you to click over any part of your photograph and adjust Hue, Saturation, or Luminance levels just by dragging your mouse up or down. The adjustments will only affect the colors that match those under your mouse when you first click. A very powerful tool made simple!

A great use for this tool is to alter the levels of a particular color in your photograph. For example, if the subject in a photograph was wearing a blue shirt, you could quickly change the saturation, tint, and brightness levels using the Target Adjustment tool just by clicking and dragging the mouse over the area you want to affect. Lightroom will automatically change the colors necessary to make this happen. See the quick video demonstration below:

Changing colors using the Target Adjustment Tool

In the HSL / Color / Grayscale Panel you are also able to convert images to grayscale while retaining full control over the conversion process. Converting the image to grayscale is as simple as clicking the "Grayscale" label on the drop down title bar. Your photo will now appear as a grayscale (B&W) photo and slider adjustments allow you to control the brightness levels of individual colors in the grayscale photo. Once again, you can use the Target Adjustment tool to alter the luminance levels of any part of the image just by clicking an area of the photograph and dragging the mouse up or down.

Split Toning Tool

Split toning, an effect originally created in the darkroom, is a method of selectively adding colors to highlight and shadow areas, usually of a grayscale photograph, to add more interest and depth to a photograph. Many people are familiar with the Sepia effect, but unlike split toning, Sepia is typically applied to the entire image (both light and dark). Lightroom allows you to quickly split tone photographs and version 2.0 makes it a bit more intuitive with the addition of a new color picker for selecting colors. If you find a particular color combination that you like you can save your color sections in one of 5 presets within the color picker window.

A site called "inside-lightroom.com" has a large selection of freely downloadable Split Tone effects. Once downloaded, these effects can be placed in any folder and imported directly into Lightroom. While in the "Develop Module" right click the "User Presets" option located in the left panel under "Presets" and select "import." Now just locate the folder you placed the download into and select the effect. It will now be available for you to use at any time.

Detail Panel

This panel allows you to apply sharpening, noise reduction, and correct for chromatic aberrations in your photographs. Now that Lightroom 2.0 offers sharpening on export, I would recommend not using the sharpening tool if you can avoid it. Sharpening on export makes more sense as the level of sharpness a photograph has should really depend on the display medium (monitor, paper), paper type (glossy, matte) as well as the size it will be displayed at.

Noise Reduction allows you to control the amount of noise reduction for both the Luminance and Color portions of an image. I would love to see noise reduction added as an option to the Graduated Filter and local Adjustment brush tools as noise is most visible in areas of solid colors (sky and shadows come to mind here). As always, there is a tradeoff between increased noise reduction and the softening of an image - so zoom in and watch the photo as you try to balance noise reduction and sharpness.

The last option in the Detail panel are sliders to correct Chromatic Aberration in your photograph. Chromatic Aberration are sometimes visible as red, purple, yellow or blue fringing in the corners of a photograph, most often in and around the edge of tree branches and leaves. Chromatic aberration is caused "by a lens having a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (Wikipedia)." Lightroom 2.0 features two sliders for helping to reduce or eliminate chromatic aberration One slider affects Red/Cyan the other the blue/yellows. The example photograph below demonstrates the before and after from a crop at 100% magnification, grabbed from the upper left corner of a photograph that I shot with an ultra wide 10mm lens. Chromatic aberration most often happens at the wider end of your zoom range.

Chromatic Aberration: Before and After adding Lightroom 2.0 corrections

Vignettes Panel

This panel does what the name implies. It allows you to correct for lens vignetting caused by some lenses and to add a black or white vignette to your photograph. Lightroom 2.0 also adds a new post-crop vignette tool that works on your photographs even after cropping them. The tool provides control over the amount, midpoint, roundness, and feathering of the vignette.

Camera Calibration

This panel is not one that I have tested but I will provide an explanation. Digital cameras use image sensors that vary from model to model and brand to brand. How an image sensor interprets color is unique and often different than another image sensor. The controls in this panel allow you to fine tune the tine and saturation values of Red, Green, and Blue, the three primary colors that an image sensor (and monitor) uses to represent color.

I would imagine that the best way to make use of this tool is to photograph a standard color chart with your camera under a variety of lighting conditions. Compare the images to the original color chart and if you notice that a few colors are not represented as you feel they should be then import the image into Lightroom and make adjustments in this panel to help correct for any color shifts. Once these are set you shouldn't need to alter these settings again, at least in theory.

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