Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Lightroom
Adobe has just released a major new version of Lightroom that includes some significant changes. The biggest and most notable one is the inclusion of new Raw and “Creative” profiles. However, there are also some major changes under the hood. Specifically, they have changed the file format that presets use. If you have any of my guides or presets, you may be wondering what happens.
I’ve been busy working on my latest set of Lightroom presets, and I wanted to give you a taste of what I’ve been creating. It’s actually been a while since I last made a set, so it’s good to get back to it. My inspiration for this was to come up with a way to creatively grade some photos I had taken in a forest I had visited a while ago. That’s where it started and it kind of snowballed from there. I have made a short video giving you a demo of the work in progress.
Whenever I set about editing an image or a whole shoot, I usually break the task down into two passes. First, I do any necessary corrections to the picture, and then I do more creative editing. I use this approach regardless of what software that I’m using, and by doing this, it makes it a bit easier to manage your editing process, and also to make multiple versions of an image. Let me explain a bit further.
In this Lightroom Quick Tip video, I sow you how to convert your Lightroom presets for use with Photoshop Camera Raw. It’s a fairly straightforward process and only takes a minute.
I was playing around with some photos in Photoshop earlier today, and I was also using Luminar as a plug-in, when I stumbled across something cool, almost by accident. It’s one of those things, that seems kind of obvious on hindsight, but I had never thought of trying this before. You can use Luminar non-destructively within Photoshop if you use it on a smart layer.
Yesterday Adobe released the much-hyped “speed most” update to Lightroom. The new version, which had been previously released to a number of websites in beta also has a few new features in addition to the performance improvements. So is it any good?
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I go through periods of wanting to put the effort into it and then wondering if its worth the effort. On the one hand, it’s the platform of choice at the moment for photographers, whether you like that or not. On the other hand, ever since Facebook took over and started integrating its algorithm, I now only see a fraction of the posts from the people I follow, which is infuriating. However, I’ve decided to give it one more push before I give up. With that in mind, I was researching various techniques and tips for growing the platform, and I’ve come across some interesting ideas.
A couple of sites have been reporting over the last few days about the upcoming 7.2 release of Lightroom. Adobe have decided to focus on performance for this next release, and as a testament as to how important they feel this is, they’ve sent beta copies to various photography websites and news organisations ahead of time to show how serious they are about it.
I recently wrote about and made a video demonstrating Lightroom’s new AI-based automatic settings. If you haven’t seen it already, Lightroom now uses artificial intelligence when applying its automatic settings, and it’s much improved over the previous incarnation. However, after I had talked about that a reader sent me an interesting question: “How do you sync this auto option across multiple images?”. At first, I thought you would just use the synchronisation button at the bottom of the develop module, but it turns out, it’s not that straightforward. There are a few ways to do it, but they require a little work to find.
When Lightroom first came out, one of the biggest complaints that people had, was that the colours would change when importing RAW files. This led to the inclusion of colour profiles, designed to mimic a camera’s various picture modes, and this seems to address the problem. However, as time has gone by and Lightroom has supported more and more cameras, the quality and accuracy of the included colour profiles have started to vary significantly. If you find that, even with selecting a colour profile that matches what you shot in camera, the colours are still quite a bit off, then this trick may help you resolve the problem.
If there’s one complaint I hear again and again about Sony cameras, is that the colours are not pleasant. This is the most common complaint that people have when trying the camera. I have certainly grappled with this myself in the past when first using Sony cameras. The thing is though, it’s not strictly true. There isn’t really anything inherently wrong with Sony’s cameras though. The problem often comes from either a poor white balance or the calibration. If you’re shooting RAW and using Lightroom, there’s another issue: Adobe’s calibration for Sony files in Lightroom is awful.
I have to say, I’m having somewhat mixed feelings about Adobe’s new Lightroom CC. When I tried it initially I didn’t like it at all. I thought it was way too limiting and I didn’t really see the point of it. My mind has shifted somewhat, after the most recent update, and now I just don’t know what to think anymore.
One of the things that struck me about the new artificial intelligence based automatic function in Lightroom was that it sounded a lot like Luminar’s accent AI filter. I was curious to see how they would compare, so I made a quick video see.
Adobe has issued some updates for both version of Lightroom today, and they add a few new features as well as the usual round of new camera support. Of particular note, Lightroom CC now gets some of the features that were missing, including a point curve tool, and a split tone tool. Of note in the new camera compatibility, is the addition of Sony A7RIII raw file support.
Ever since Lightroom CC was announced - The new cloud based cut down desktop version - not to be confused with the old normal version - I have been thinking about ways to get around some of its limitations. The solution was to create a set of presets that allowed you to apply some of the effects that Lightroom CC is missing.
A little while ago I put up a poll on the site here, asking if people were planning on using Lightroom CC or not. It was in part, to answer my own curiosity as to whether or not people were going to use it, but also to gauge interest for supporting it in the future. Now that it’s been up for a while, I thought I would share the results.
Lightroom Classic is essentially Lightroom 7 in Adobe’s weird new naming scheme. If you look in the about box, you will see the version number is listed as a 7.0 release. While a numbered upgrade like this is normally a major feature release, Lightroom Classic seems to offer relatively little in terms of new features since the previous version. The main areas are the new masking tools, improved importing and overall performance improvements.
I have been going back and forward on whether or not Lightroom CC is something I should bother investing any time in. On the one hand, I do think there are certainly uses for it, but given the lack of features, it’s kind of limiting. Having said that, I do have some ideas for how to get around some of them. However, before investing any time and energy in these, I wanted to know if anyone was actually planning on using it.
