LR4

Lightroom v4

Lightroom Terms

Lightroom has all kind of wordings, especially in the Develop module. Some of it makes sense, but some of it…

  • Exposure: sets the image brightness.
  • Contrast: Separates the dark and the light tones from the middle tones.
  • Shadows: Adjusts dark image areas.
  • Highlights: Adjusts light image areas.
  • Whites: Adjusts the white clipping.
  • Blacks: Adjusts the black clipping.

Lightroom 4.4

Today, 3-Apr-2013, Adobe has released Lightroom 4.4 as a free update. It's available at:

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/ Search for Lightroom and your platform (Windows/Mac). Lightroom is listed twice.

Lightroom: Metadata Conflict

Some photographers like to live on the bleeding edge of the technology, and some other photographers like to wear both belt and suspenders. I'm more on the belt and suspenders side than on the bleeding edge. That's why I like to have the metadata stored in both the Lightroom catalog and the XMP files: Edit > Preferences > Metadata > Automatically write changes into XMP.

The problem is that sometimes Lightroom screws up, sometimes it's the user that screws up by not giving enough time for Lightroom to write the metadata to the XMP sidecar.

Lightroom: Spring Cleaning

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.

Lightroom: Useful Shortcuts

Some people like shortcuts, some people prefer using menus and the mouse. For the people that like using the shortcuts, Lightroom is full of it. The last I checked, the Adobe techie where at 300+ shortcuts. Every shortcut can be executed via the menus or some context menu. Here are the shortcuts that I use on regular basis, pretty much every time I use Lightroom 4.

Key Purpose
G Switch to the Library Grid view
E Switch to the Library Loupe view
D Switch to the Develop Module
R Switch to the Crop in the Develop Module
P In the Library view, flags the selected images as flagged (Pick)
X In the Library view, flags the selected images as Rejected
U In the Library view, remove any flag from the selected images
Tab Shows or hides the left and right panels
F5-F6 Shows or hides the left and right panels
F7-F8 Shows or hides the top and bottom panels/filmstrip
1-5 Assigns a star rating from 1 to 5 to the selected images
0 Removes any star rating to the selected images
6-9 Assigns a colors to the selected images
B Adds the selected images to the Quick Collection (the selected target collection)
Ctrl / All the available shortcuts for the current module (Windows)
Cmd / All the available shortcuts for the current module (Mac)

Copy External Images from Inside Lightroom

Question: Is it possible to create copies of original files (CR2, NEF, OTF…) within Lightroom

The first immediate answer is: Yes, of course, just create a virtual copy and you have your copy. But no, that's not what I want. I have a file IMG_1234.CR2, and I want to have 2 physical files: IMG_1234.CR2 and IMG_1234-2.CR2.

Lightroom doesn't have a physical copy image function. The “almost” solution is to Export and set the file type to Original.

Raw and Colour Space

Almost all dSLRs (except some of the really, really old dSLRs from the early 2000) provide two colour spaces, the ubiquitous sRGB (standard RGB)1 and aRGB (adobe RGB)2. aRGB was developed by Adobe as a colour space that would cover the full CMYK colour space used by printing presses like magazines…

A raw file has a much larger colour space than either sRGB or aRGB.

  1. sRGB is an 8 bit colour space: 8 bit (256) reds, 8 bit (256) greens and 8 bit (256) blues. ↩

  2. aRGB is a 12 bit colour space: 12 bit (4096) reds, 12 bit (4096) greens and 12 bit (4096) blues. ↩

Lightroom: Controlling the Panels

Everything in Lightroom works with the panels. It's very easy to use, but the panels take a lot of screen real estate. Often, I only need some panel. Everybody knows (or should know) that all the panels can be toggled on or off the screen with the Shift-Tab.

But you can toggle every panel on and off with the F5, F6, F7 and F8 function keys.

Lightroom: Sorting Collections

Lightroom is “funny” in the way that it's such a powerful tool but in many ways it's missing some basic functionality. I'd like to sort the order of the collections. The programming code is already there, since Lightroom already provides the functionality in the Grid view where you can drag and drop the images to change the order of the photos within a collection.

Lightroom: Improve Your Photos

A photo session and 400 or 500 photos later… “Oh! I like that. Oops! I missed that. I really like that photo! This is portfolio material…” My first step after copying the photos from the memory card to the computer is to look for all the out of focus, the screw-ups, the person picking their nose. It's amazing what I get at 8 frames per second, the good, the bad and the ugly.

I also delete all the really ugly, the really bad ones like when the exposure is completely wrong, not even close and can't be rescued in Lightroom, the flash that reflects on a surface that I didn't expect to be reflective. I can already hear:

Check your LCD review

I rarely check the LCD playback for review. I use the LCD playback when using the flash during setup/testing, but in general I do not, because it interrupts the flow from my point of view and from the person that I make photos off.

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