Lightroom Workflow

I do not pretend to be a Lightroom© Master, and I do not like to spend an inordinate amount of time processing my images, but because I shoot in RAW I do have to process my images. RAW means that the camera does not do any processing, like it does to .jpg images. The advantages  are a wider color gamut and greater resolution than .jpg which is a compressed format designed for use on the web. 

I currently have 2 versions of Lightroom©. An older version, Lightroom6, on and older desktop computer and Lightroom Classic© on my laptop computer. Both are easy to use because they mostly involve using sliders to adjust color, exposure, etc. and for more robust editing work, Lightroom works seamlessly with Photoshop©. 

My editing work in Lightroom follows a pattern or workflow such as Crop/Straighten>Clean Up>Correct Exposure>Optimize Vibrance and Saturation>Sharpen>Correct for lens distortion and, if needed,  adding a slight vignette. These are global adjustments and I try not to overdo anything like saturation or sharpening which can lead to unnatural looking photos. Local corrections may be needed to bring out details in parts of the photo.  In more detail my workflow: 

Cropping

 Looking at the photo on a computer monitor is better than what I can see in a viewfinder or viewscreen on the camera and it is rare that I do not need to crop to improve an image. In the develop (shortcut to get to the develop module is keystrke "D") module I use the keystroke "R" to activate the crop tool. If there is a horizon or other feature which should be horizontal or perpendicular I may need to straighten that.  I will use an older image as an example:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This sunset is the file that I captured in camera.  The first thing I want to do is straighten the horizon so the lake is not draining off the page. 

 

Just below the Histogram in the upper right corner is a crop and straighten tool. In this case I click on the level icon for angle and draw a line along the horizon. This automatically straightens and applies a crop to "square up" the image. Selecting Done will apply this edit. If there is anything on the edge that does not belong that will immediately get cropped out. This is the crop frame tool and can be retain a size ratio if needed. I forget about this feature often and may end up doing this manually.

Clean Up 

From time to time my sensor will collect dust and when shooting something with a sky or even a white board, these dust spots will show on the image. Here, I like to use the spot removal tool, shortcut "Q" to zap these spots. Here is an image of a plane, not the greatest image, but it shows the dust spots.  Hint: you can click on the image to see a larger image.

After opening the Spot Removal Tool you can see the spots even better if you select visualize spots in the lower left corner.

After opening the spot removal tool (Q) a box will open. Here you can choose between clone and heal. Clone will take another area of the photo and paste it over the spot. The area to clone is chosen by Lightroom, but you can click and drag that area around. Heal will use pixels around spot to "heal" the spot. You can also set the size of the brush, feather amount and opacity here also. So,  in my image with visualize spots selected (above) I will click on the white dots which are really black spots on my image thereby zapping those spots away. It may take some practice and sometimes I have to resort to using Photoshop because it does a much better job. Well, actually I don't have to fight Lightroom© to zap the spots to my approval.

Exposure

Next looking at the exposure, the histogram shows a slight overexposure near where he sun is which is to be expected. This is shown by the lighted arrow in the upper right corner - a warning that your image is outside of the range of the sensor. The pixels going off the right side of the graph shows the same thing.  I used the Auto White Balance setting on my Nikon D850 camera which usually does a pretty good job. The one exception is shady conditions which are often too blue for my liking. On this image I want to darken the highlights a little and increase the contrast just a tad. This brings back some of the color in the sky close to the sun. I also like to drop the blacks a little as this will help with contrast. I do not like images that are muddy or lacking contrast. 

 These are changes I have made in the treatment dialogue box. Now I am ready to adjust the "Presence".

Presence

There are 3 sliders in the Presence box: Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation. I usually adjust each. For clarity it is between 15-20. Any more than this an the image looks for lack of a better term "fuzzy". I adjust vibrance to just below 20 unless the image is really lacking color such as a photo taken in fog. And Saturation may be between 2-7 depending on the image. Vibrance and Saturation adjustments are done by looking at the monitor which is calibrated so hopefully What I See is What I Get. Now the difference between vibrance and saturation is the vibrance will saturate colors that are not already saturated more than those that are already saturated. Saturation will saturate everything equally regardless of whether that color is already saturated.  Remember these are global changes affecting the entire image and I do not want to overdo. Oversaturation is to me a common mistake that leads to unnatural looking photos of nature.

 Sharpening 

Skipping over the Tone Curve box because I have already done most of this work above,  the HSL box which stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminance  and the  Split Toning Box. I move down to the Sharpening box.  Now, sharpening is really an illusion created by adding a dark area around each pixel. Overdoing sharpening is another mistake that many make.  I will generally move the Amount slider around 100 for sharpening with no changes to the other sliders.  This may vary by lens and camera for you.

Lens Corrections

If my lens profile is available I will next Enable Profile Corrections. This will help to remove any distortions caused by the lens as well as any excessive vignetting (darkening edge and corner areas). With the "Profile" highlighted selecting Enable Profile Correction will automatically correct for any lens effects. 

 

Newer versions of Lightroom© will undoubtedly have more lens profiles, and if you can find your lens you can add the profile. If it does not have your lens, not to worry, this is not a huge adjustment that most will notice if it is not applied.  The exception would be with extreme wide angle lenses which can have a lot of distortion.

 Effects

I tend to skip over the Transform box unless I have major corrections to make. I move on to the final box which is Effects. I like to use the Post-Crop Vignetting to add a slight vignette to some images. For example darkening the edges slightly to make a butterfly stand out. Caution: this too can be easily over done. I like to move the Amount Slider left just enough so that it is not obvious. Somewhere in the neighborhood of  -10.  It is not really needed on my example image as I don't have a subject to highlight. 

 Finally

I may have left some small details out, but that was due to time and space. Lightroom is a very complex and powerful editing tool and you will discover some of the nuances as you work with it such as local edits..... 

 Local Edits

I am mostly done will all of my global edits and would normally move on to local edits on portions of the image that require more work. That will be in the next blog post. Stay tuned................  

A Photo Day at Seven Bridges Natural Area

 

Most of my household chores were completed and it looked to be a beautiful fall day, so I grabbed the camera gear and off I went to the Seven Bridges Natural Area. I had been thinking of photographing the cedar trees there since my trip to the UP in late September.   There I watched as fellow photographer Nick Bristol worked a scene along the AuTrain River which included cedar trees.

The cedars at Seven Bridges are very unique. Their root collars are exposed and there is a grove of cedar where there is little ground clutter. Little did I know just how good the shooting conditions were going to be that day. 

 I started with a small area of cedars and had to work around groups of teens passing through. That was o.k. as the light at times was just too bright leading to unwanted hotspots. The one advantage though was the lack of wind. It was unusually calm and when the sun ducked behind clouds photography conditions were perfect.  For most of the photos I used a white balance setting of cloudy. This yields a warmer tone to the images. Yes, I was shooting RAW files and could have changed white balance when processing.  By presetting my white balance enabled me to see what I was getting. Almost all photos were shot using ISO 100.  The photo here was shot at f/4.5, 1/10 sec. @ 40 mm with a 24-70 mm Nikor lens.  I did extensive processing in Lightroom and I will explain my processing in another blog post later.

 

 

 

Continuing my work in the cedar grove I really liked the two photogenic cedars framing the grouping further back. I was very conscious of keeping the bright sky out of the images. It added nothing and only served as a distraction.  ISO 100, f4.5, 1/8 sec. @ 40 mm.

I have been to Seven Bridges before and it is very difficult to shoot down the entire river due to the depth of the river and rapids. Too the trees crowd the edge of the river. So, I decided to work with what was available. And the trees with their exposed roots became prominent in many photos. Such as this one. ISO 100, f/14, 1.6 sec. @34 mm. Have to love all the lichens and mosses on the trunk and the ornate roots. Too I decided to include a little of the river and liked the other cedar hanging on the river bank. The fall leaves on the ground added a nice touch too. This is the essence of Seven Bridges.

There are a number of bridges that cross the river., and I have never really stopped to count  ISO 100, f/14, .6 sec., @24 mm  

 

 

 

And shooting from these bridges is really the only way to capture most of the river unobstructed. As luck would have it that day, late afternoon sun was spotlighting a fall-colored beech and reflecting in the water. I waited for a few people to cross the bridge as it was bouncing. And too, after shooting  a few horizontals, I knew I needed a vertical to show the motion of the water in the foreground. The wind was still calm so I had not problem with dancing leaves. ISO 100, f/14, .8 sec @ 32 mm. I love the warm/cold colors and the motion in the river in the foreground.  

 

After a pizza dinner in Kalkaska I headed home to process the images. I did the processing on my older desktop computer which still has Lightroom6.  Some of the cedar trunks were a little too yellow, which is not natural,
so part of my processing was to use the paintbrush to change the color temperature to a colder and less yellow cast. There was a little work too with adjusting exposure and a light touch of vignetting on the edges. As always when shooting RAW, I made adjustments to the vibrance and saturation along with working on contrast through highlights, shadows and blacks. Much like Ansel Adams who did extensive post-processing from his negatives, myfinal images were a process of work in the field and a lot of work in my digital darkroom. This last image was ISO 100, f/14, 2.5 sec. @31 mm.