Why is Lightroom doing things in a specific way. Covers LR2 and LR3
Spring is just around the corner and it's time for a good spring cleaning. Sometimes, actually often, Lightroom can become very messy. A good wash and cleanup can help a lot. The larger the catalog, the messier Lightroom gets.
The Files
The Photos
The simplest and the best way to speedup everything is to delete all the “so-so” photos. All the photos that you have never looked back at since taking them. These are the mediocre photos. These photos do not have a sentimental value and they do not have any technical value.
What's the difference between the headline, the title, or the caption and what about the description?
The problem is that the difference depends on which standard is used. You would think that the IPTC would be the standard. IPTC or Adobe? Let's face it, Adobe is bigger and more important. IPTC is used by a few hundred organizations, Adobe (Lightroom and Photoshop CSx) is used by millions of people and I would not be surprised if millions of organizations would be using Adobe.
IPTC stands for the “International Press Telecommunications Council.” It's an organization based in London, UK. It's a study group of news agencies and various news organizations so they use some common standards to exchange data among them. There are problems with the IPTC standards. There are a few versions and they conflict with each other because they renamed some fields and made some other data obsolete. Then the next problem is that they have the “core” and the extensions.
I decided to crash my computer on purpose! The question is: “Why am I so dumb?” Am I a masochist? No, not really, I do not enjoy pain. I've been having many small problems lately. The biggest and the most frustrating problem was sound. No sound. Sound was working a few weeks ago. Then suddenly it stopped, actually it just became the buzz of a drone. Not the military drones that are in the news but the drones of the bumblebees, aka the male bumblebees. I tried everything to fix it...
So it's time to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything.
Lately there has been many blog posts on backups, how to backup, the hardware... Some blog post started it (I don't know which one) then everybody repeats it. Most of them are repeating the BS from the "semi-techies" / sales people. So I had to call, at my own expense I may add, the famous Debunking Unit to cleanup some of the mess.
Notice that almost everybody talks about backups and very few people talk about recovery and restoring.
Hardware
- "You need at least one RAID device to store your images." RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
By now, you must have heard that Adobe will release Photoshop CS6 in the first week of May. One of the big new feature is the cloud! I see and read a lot of "misunderstanding / misinformation" about the cloud. People use the word "cloud" just like people used the "information super highway" expression in the years 1996-1997.
- What's the cloud? When they talk about the cloud, they either mean that the data and/or some programs are on computers/servers that are accessed via the Internet. In the "good old days," the data and/or the programs were stored on the local network. You could walk to the server room and see the computers, the lights, the cables and some techie that was looking after the whole "shebang." The advantage and/or the problem with the cloud is that you do not know what's inside, how it's configured…
Now that Adobe has changed how Lightroom 4 treats the flags, labels and ratings, virtual copies have become much more important.
To create a virtual copy, select a photo, then: Menu > Photo > Create Virtual Copy or Ctrl-L / Option-L
What's a virtual copy?
It's an "almost" copy of a photo. It's not a copy of that photo, it's a different version of that photo. You can have many virtual copies/versions of the same photograph. Personally, I prefer the term "version" to "virtual copy."
Usually, when importing photos into a Lightroom catalog, the Do No Import Duplicates is checked on. The question is what's a duplicate? Everybody in their right mind would assume that 2 duplicate photos are 2 identical photos. It turns out that for programmers, 2 identical photos are not the same as 2 identical files.
What Lightroom really mean is 2 identical files. What are identical files?
- The same name like: charlie-20111129-1234
- The same file extension like: .cr2
This means that charlie-20111129-1234.cr2 and charlie-20111129-1234.jpg are not identical files.
Adobe created the DNG format: Digital NeGative, we are at version 1.3. According to Adobe:
Key benefits for photographers:
- DNG format helps promote archival confidence, since digital-imaging software solutions will be able to open raw files more easily in the future.
- A single raw processing solution enables a more efficient workflow when handling raw files from multiple camera models and manufacturers.
- A publicly documented and readily available specification can be easily adopted by camera manufacturers and updated to accommodate technology changes.
Lightroom has so many ways of doing the same thing, the problem is that they results in something that is often different. Duh! Of course it's different because they have different defaults/settings. The problem is that most people do not see the difference and then struggle to figure out why is the output not what they wanted/expected.
There are 4 ways of generating the JPEGs in Lightroom:
- From the Library module, export JPEGs with the various settings.
Every so often I get an email asking me about the difference between the exposure and the brightness in Lightroom.
- The exposure slider makes the photo darker or lighter. The exposure affects everything: the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights.
- The brightness slider affects mostly the shadows and the mid-tones. The brightness slider makes the photo sparkle and jump out of the screen without burning the highlights.
Some people like to first set the exposure/recovery/fills and blacks then deal with the brightness.
