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
Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom Classic version 12 along with the corresponding versions of Lightroom Desktop, and Photoshop Camera Raw. All of these feature some significant improvements to masking and other new features. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m only going to talk about Lightroom Classic.
I’ve just published a new photo essay over on my Photo Stories blog. I had visited a nearby urban farm back in May and taken lots of photos, and I was captivated by the colour and texture that images of nature. You should check out the blog post here before you carry on. As I try to keep my Photo Stories blog relatively gear and “technical nerdy stuff” free, I wanted to talk about the technicalities of the images here.
This is a little trick I stumbled across the other day - almost by accident. I was working on editing a photo in Lightroom, and I had made quite a few edits, but I just couldn’t get it where I wanted it. I said to myself: “I wish there was a way I could just dial all the adjustments back a little”. Then it occurred to me - there actually is a way to do that. It requires a few steps and a little roundabout thinking, but it essentially gives you a way to adjust the overall amount of your adjustments with a single slider.
Someone recently asked a question on my Facebook group that, I thought, was actually such a good question that I should write a whole blog post, or perhaps even a series of blog posts about. For a long time, I’ve covered just about every aspect of working with Fuji files in Lightroom Classic, but I’ve never really covered some of the techniques for the non-classic version of Lightroom. While most things are broadly similar, many operations are also slightly different or in slightly different spots, so may be confusing to beginners. So in this post, I’m going to cover some of the fundamentals: how to change the film simulation mode, how to set the film simulation mode to what you shot in-camera on import, and how to use the “enhance” function to get better quality images.
So, way back when Lightroom first came out, many moons ago, one of the complaints from long time Photoshop users was that you couldn’t do a basic Levels adjustment in the software. Well, you actually can, and that is with the whites and blacks sliders. Adjusting the black and white sliders can be useful for a lot of things, but there’s one particular case that I think needs special mention. When working with low contrast scenes, it can be useful to adjust the contrast with a Levels adjustment rather than the contrast slider. Let me explain why.
Adobe has just announced its June photography updates, and this includes new versions of all versions of Lightroom as well as Photoshop and Camera Raw. In this article, I’m only going to be focusing on Lightroom Classic, which is now at version 11.4. This release actually has quite a few new and improved features for a point release, and I’ll outline the key new features in the post (and video) below.
Some people prefer posting their photos to instagram using a frame, with white borders surrounding the image, n order to preserve the original aspect ratio. People are quite divided as to whether or not this is a good thing to do or not, but if you want to do it, there are lots of ways to go about it. If you use Lightroom, there’s actually a pretty easy way to get the white border effect inside of Lightroom, without having to use plug-ins or go to Photoshop.
Lightroom Classic used to have a terrible reputation for performance. Certainly, older versions of the software had some serious speed issues, but over the past few years, Adobe has worked to improve the responsiveness of the application. It’s now it’s a far cry from the way it used to be. However, If you have a modern computer, and you’re still experiencing a slowdown with Lightroom, there are a handful of common issues that could be causing it.
The Enhance function in Lightroom has been around for a while now. It was originally called “Enhance Details” but changed its name to just “Enhance” when the super resolution feature was added. For Fuji shooters, Enhance offers a way to get improved demosiacing inside of Lightroom without having to use third-party software. Using it on Fuji RAF files can provide significantly better rendering of detail in Fuji files, but it does come with some downsides.
When I closed my old digital download store a few years ago, I stopped selling most of my Lightroom presets. I figured that the market for these was pretty much saturated and that there wasn’t really any point. However, recently I’ve been receiving some requests for some of my older packs, and after using m T-Pan set on the most recent episode of Street Photo Diary, I’ve decided to make T-Pan available again.
In colour grading for film and television, there is an age-old technique that is often used to make your footage look more cinematic or film like. The trick is to desaturate the shadow parts of an image. In fact, old versions of Final Cut (before FCPX) even had a specific plug-in for doing this called “desaturate lows”. In most modern colour grading and video editing tools, you have tools which let you control the saturation directly in relation to the brightness values in a scene, but in Lightroom, and other photo editing tools, this is one of the few tools you don’t have. Or do you?
If you’re a Fuji shooter, you shoot RAW and use Lightroom Classic, then you probably regularly use the Fuji Film simulation colour profiles when processing your images. However, what if you want to customise those profiles? What if you’re not 100% happy with the colour balance for example, or you’d like to match some customisation options that you’ve set in-camera. Well, it’s actually easy enough to create your own custom versions of these colour profiles and in this video I’ll show you how!
Just a quick PSA - if you’re in the market for a new Adobe subscription, they’re currently offering 20% off the All Apps plan (this is the one I use) in select European, Middle East and Asian countries. Read on for more details.
Ever since it came out last week, I’ve been getting lots of questions about Pure Raw 2. I had outlined a first look at the software last week, both here and on my YouTube Channel, and I’ve had lots of comments and queries on various aspects of the application. So, I thought I’d try and address some of the key things people had questions about in this post.
If you’re a Fuji shooter who regularly uses different film simulation modes when shooting with your Fuji camera, then you may also want to regularly try different film simulations when working on your RAW files. Lightroom has profiles for all of the film simulations that come with various fuji cameras, but to get to them you have to go into the profile browser. While this is fine, you can actually make access to these a little easier, and there are two ways of doing this.
The topic of how best to process Fuji raw files has been a long-running topic on this website. I’ve covered it extensively in the past, including a previous version of this article. However, over the past two years since the last time I updated this, there have been a few changes to the landscape, and so it’s time to write an updated version. So, what are the best options for Fujifilm raw processing in 2022? (In my opinion)
I’m not sure how I missed this, but there was an issue with Lightroom and Camera Raw for Canon shooters that I had been reporting on for some time, that has finally been resolved. For some reason, Adobe hadn’t been adding camera matching profiles for newer Canon cameras. Specifically they hadn’t been adding profiles for cameras that used the .CR3 file format. Thankfully, Adobe has started addressing this.
Adobe really made some great improvements to Lightroom in 2021. The new masking architecture is a great upgrade and it’s changed the way I use the software. In the past Adobe has been criticised for not doing enough with Lightroom, but over the past few years they’ve really taken the breaks off and made some good improvements. There can always be more though, and so, here is my modest wish list of things I’d love to see changed in the application.
