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Lightroom Blues

René — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:59:00 +0000

You want accurate or pleasing?

Sometimes you won’t get both. I shoot a lot of performing arts under gelled stage lighting: Color temperatures of the lighting is mostly in the 3000K range, but color gels and moving heads add a different light to the mix. Of course the colors are there for a reason: the band or light tech liked them to have that color. However, our camera has a lot harder time in spanning across the region of possible colors then our eyes do.
Some stage colors are hard to photograph. Most people think red stagelighting is hard but usually, in my experience, purple and blue can be equally hard, if not harder to fix. These sometimes lead to very weird transitions or colors “blocking up”.
While Lightroom 3 is markedly better then Lightroom 2 in some aspects, it still has a few issues. An unfixed adjustment brush bug for one, and, at least at default settings, “the Lightroom Blues” for another.

This article is about the blues

Not the color, but the feeling you get once you open certain images in Lightroom.
One of the first problems is the default DNG profile that LR uses: Adobe Standard.
While quite a bit better then the older “ACR” default, it still ~~sucks~~ has it’s drawbacks for this kind of shooting. As can be seen in the first two images in a previous blogpost There are more blogposts floating around on the internet, and the main problems are in the transitions, as can be seen in this excellent writeup by Todd Owen Young comparing Lightroom 3 to Nikon Capture NX-2. However there’s a bit more to it in some cases, at least with Canon Raw files.

Blues

The color this time. Or Purple. Or a mix of the two.
Why I came up with the term “Lightroom Blues” is simple: This is what happens sometimes if you use the ACR4.4 profile on a Canon Raw file with “somewhat” blueish lighting:
And no, this is not the cliping warning. It’s what the file would actually look like if exported out of Lightroom at these settings.

That image was shot using a Whitebalance of 3300K in camera, since the show was mainly lit using tungsten. Not in this case however: A blue gelled moving head (which has a much higher color temperature even without a filter) lit the scene. So technically speaking, the whitebalance is far from correct. And the ACR profile apparently breaks apart at the far edges of extreme conditions.

As said before, the newer AdobeDefault does a much, much better job (no other changes made, only a different profile in the Camera Calibration Tab!)

Lastly, the one I prefer to use as default: “Camera Neutral dcpTool Invariant”. More detail in the guitar and other places, at the expense of a shift from pure blue to a more purple tone. Since I do not care so much about accurate color as I do about pleasing images, I don’t see this as a problem. If you think different, use the normal “Adobe Standard” profile or, better yet, create your own. Finally, if you want to know more about invariant profiles, have a look here, here, here or download them here

Remaining problems

That’s almost a completely different image, isn’t it? If that were all there were to it, it would have been hardly worth a blogpost. Just saying “Do not use the “ACR” profile, but use “Camera Neutral” instead” would have sufficed. However not all is well yet: The hair goes solid blue, the transition in the top left does not look good at all, and neither do the transitions on her arms. Not to mention the clipping warning (which showed no clipping when using the ACR 4.4 profile and minimal clipping when using “Adobe Standard” or “Camera Neutral”) now shows quite a bit clipping indeed.

Disclaimer

This is not meant to be a technical write-up, nor will it present you with a fixed solution for every image. The goal is merely to make you aware of some of the options that Lightroom offers, and the way I use them. So YMMV.
By the way, since I’ve tried not to litter this post with even more screenshots and images, and for those of you who feel adventurous and want to give it a try for themselves, I’ve decided to make the Raw files I used available for download. Please respect my copyright, and only use the image for evaluation purposes.

The first Raw file can be downloaded from here.

Possible solutions

First thing to normally do, would be to correct the Whitebalance. That would also take care of the clipping channel in this image. However, in that case we would miss some interesting (at least to me) bits of info that are good to know. Better be surprised now and prepared later. So let’s leave WhiteBalance “as shot” for now.
The blown channel can be fixed by either lowering “Exposure” or using a bit of “Recovery”. Since the image has more or less the brightness I want, I normally would try “Recovery” first (in fact, I use about 15 Recovery as a default). For this post, I decided to compare both however.

Recovery and Exposure. And weirdness

One thing you will see when you start moving either of those sliders, is that a weird thing can be observed: As you slowly add “Recovery”: With the slider at 8, there is less clipping then with the sider at 9. The biggest visual change (ignoring the clipping warning, which is pretty useless anyway) is that after the “jump”, the hair is now white instead of solid blue… If you add more recovery still, details that weren’t visible before, start appearing out of the “fog” in the left.
Same if you slowly decrease exposure for this image: the clipping warning becomes less until you reach -0.34. Then it jumps back up at -0.36. However, you have to use a pretty big negative exposure correction to get the same “details” to appear. You could compensate by adding (a lot of) Fill, but the hair has gone blue again at this point and the clipping is back. Surprise upon surprise: Adding Fill causes highlights to clip in this image. No idea how exactly the math used inside LR works, but it might be time for some bits to be revisited at the outer edges of it.
Give it a try for yourselves, and if you can come up with a good explanation, I’m all ears in the comments…

Now for a more real world approach

As said, I’d usually get the Whitebalance at least in the ballpark where I want to be, before adjusting anything else. So let’s do that now as well to get rid of at least some of the weirdness in Lightroom. On this image, 6100K, Tint -32 seems about okay.

Looking better already:

I then add about 20 Recovery to get some transitions to shape up and add some Blacks, Brightness and Contrast to make up for the ‘flattening’ caused by the Recovery.

Still not happy with some of the blown bits (for instance in the arm), so we have to work on that a bit more.
When we lower Vibrance a bit, here comes another surprise out of Lightroom: The image lightens. Not a bad thing in this case. Adding a bit of saturation mainly affects the (warm) background of the image, but I like it.

A bit of sliding is done in the Camera Calibration Tab, to fine-tune. Last thing that’s done is cropping and adding a vignette. Done.

Red

Since red light seems to be a problem for a lot people, so I’ll include that as well. There is no “one fix” for all red images in my experience, so here’s another YMMV.
For those wanting to try: here is the raw file.
If you shoot under stage lighting, which is likely to have a fairly low color temperature by itself, and a red gel is added to the mix, things tend to get rather monochrome indeed: Rather warm color temperature + red gels + warm skin = a lot of red.
So the problems you’re facing probably include clipping and saturation issues causing loss of detail. And, because we’re talking about Lightroom, some weird transitions in the highlights get thrown in for fun.
In these cases, the camera profile used matters less: They all have more or less the same problems, although they do differ in color and contrast. I sometimes find myself liking a different Camera Profile better after editing the image. For the sake of consistency however, I used the same defaults as before: “Camera Neutral dcpTool Invariant”, all else at (my) default.
That gives us this:

One obvious way to handle the red clipping and over-saturation, is to lower red / yellow saturation, using the TAT tool for Saturation in the HSL tab. Shortcut Shift-Cmd-Opt-S. That would leave you with an almost monochrome image though:

Not the best option.

Something else to try

You can also ~~muck about~~ adjust some settings in the “Camera Calibration” tab.
I tend to lower Red Saturation a bit, yet be subtle about it: the image very likely only consists of red tones, so a slight change goes a long way. In the Green and Blue primaries on the other hand, you can move in big steps. You mainly want to tackle bad transitions and bring back detail here, not completely alter colors. Use small steps in the Red hue to compensate for the image going to magenta or yellow. If you have a nasty transition somewhere, lowering saturation of the Blue or Green primary might help. After going back and forth for a bit (in my experience, red images vary more then for instance blue or purple ones, and everything influences each other), here’s what I ended up with:

That gives us this:

Purple

Can sometimes be even worse then Blues, because of the transitions. Even when using the “Camera Neutral” profile. (In this case, just about any Camera Profile in LR tends to misbehave rather badly, albeit differently for each).
The raw file used here can be downloaded as well
Typically what you could see in an image at default, is something like this:

Simply adjusting Recovery, Vibrance or Saturation isn’t going to cut it. Sure, you get more detail in the left, and the transition in the lights are better, but there still are some (very) nasty transitions. For instance on the girls face.

Even the TAT tool won’t help sufficient here. It will lower saturation, but won’t remove the harsh line.
What we need to do to get those nasty transitions out is adjust the sliders in the Camera Calibration tab. Adjusting Hue for “Blue Primary” to -10 has biggest effect on that hard purple line, but this is what I ended up with:

Green

Main problem with green lighting is not necessarily weird transitions or colors going fully saturated. But it does tend to look ugly on skintones. You don’t want to see The Incredible Hulk performing on stage. A bit better looking Hulk can be downloaded here

In most cases, all that’s needed is to yellow it up a bit. I usually use the Tint slider for that. In this case, a simple change of some Basic settings helped a lot:

Then a small change in the Camera Calibration tab, to get the skintones a bit warmer, the blacks a bit less green and the hair a bit less “solid”:

That gives us this:

Experiment!

As said, there’s no one solution that will fix any situation. So try a few different options and use whatever gives best results and works easiest for you.
And don’ forget the Fifth Rule of Lightroom: Enjoy!

Lightroom local adjustment bug, and workaround

René — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:59:00 +0000

The bug

This is not a new bug: In fact, it was already present in Lightroom 2. However, since it’s still unfixed in LR 3.5 I decided to put it on the blog anyway. Surprisingly few users know about the bug, so it might help someone.
If you are using the Local Adjustment Brush or Gradient tool in Lightroom 2 or 3 with any kind of exposure correction (even a negative value!), you might be in for a surprise: No matter where you brush, highlights will clip in the entire image.

Example

Here’s an image, straight out of the camera, Adobe defaults applied, except that I’ve set “Camera Neutral” as DNG profile. Note that parts of his temple are not quite blown.

Here’s the image after I applied a local adjustment of -0.32 exposure (Default “Burn” setting in LR3) to the lower left corner: Entire temple area blows out big time.

The Local Adjustment Brush didn’t even come near the face:

The workaround

… is actually quite simple: Do not adjust “exposure”, but use “brightness” instead in the Local Adjustment Brush.

Like this:

The final image, with added brightness as a local adjustment applied to the face:

Not unknown

Adobe is aware of the issue, but it’s taking them a very long time to fix: It was a known issue already in 2009. Let’s hope LR4 and ACR7 finally get this bug fixed…

Another old bug

The other bug (not a big issue in my opinion in LR3) is that in PV2003 the noise reduction is broken, possibly affecting the dark area’s on some images: If you apply any color noise reduction using PV2003, your black clipping will change. In some (very specific) cases this might leave you with “blotchy” blacks.

Before:

Same image, only difference is the setting of the Color Noise Reduction slider: It went from 0 to 10.

The solution

Easy: Don’t use PV2003. It sucks anyway compared to PV2010. Obviously, if you are using LR2, this might be another reason to upgrade to LR3.

Final image:

“Hacking” Grain settings into ACR and more

René — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:37:40 +0000

Noise

While most people in this digital age seem overly concerned with noise, and mainly want noise reduction, I tend to like grain: It can really improve a digital image, and even make it appear sharper. Until now I had to simulate it using Photoshop for instance.

No longer: Recently, Adobe released ACR 6.1 and LightRoom 3. In these there was a new option added: “Grain”, with three controls: “Amount”, “Size” and “Roughness”. It produced some pretty nice “film like” grain. Way better then a simple “add noise” in Photoshop for instance.
That could be a time saver and simplify the workflow quite a bit.
Of course, I’d need to upgrade to LR3 for this feature. But, along with the mayor improvements in IQ due to the new demosaicing and processing algorithms (Process Version 2010) that would be totally worth it to me. Some of the other new features would be the icing on the cake.

One problem

I’d need a new Mac to run it: LightRoom 3 and PSCS5 only run on an Intel Mac, not on my Dual G5 PPC.
Since buying a new Mac just for this is a bit over the top, I decided to see what my options were.

A while back, Adobe updated the previous versions of ACR and LR to ACR 5.7 and LR 2.7: These versions also support the demosaic algorithm from Lightroom 3.
From what I’d read on the web, these should render the file as seen in Lightroom3, but not allow you to make changes to the new Develop settings, like “Grain”.

A bit more researching led (as often) to the excellent site of Victoria Bampton, AKA. Lightroom Queen. She had a bit more detailed info: ACR 5.7 should use the same Demosaic, and match the new additions closely. She also mentioned “5.7 can read LR’s settings but there’s no UI to change the new settings.” Sadly, LR2.7 will ignore the new LR3 settings. (Why Adobe, why?)

Then I got an idea when answering a question on POTN. Would it be possible to “hack” an .XMP file to only adjust the Grain settings?

The answer? It is!

All you need is an .XMP file with settings applied in LightRoom3 (thanks Anouk!) and a text editor.
It really is that simple.

An .XMP file is simply a plain text file, with instructions for the Adobe Raw converter: “Set this slider to this value”.
The part we are interested in, is this:
58 30 59

All you need to do is copy-paste this into a “blank” .XMP file.
To do that, open a Raw file (not a DNG) in ACR 5.7. Then go to the “flyout” menu and choose “Save settings…”.

To make life easy on yourself, only save one set of parameters, for instance “sharpening”.
The advantage of doing it like this, is that all other settings will remain the same. So if you’d already made adjustments to the Raw, they will remain.

Close ACR.

Open the .XMP in a text editor. I like Smultron.
That gives you an .XMP that looks like this:

xmlns:crs="http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-settings/1.0/"> 5.7 5.0 62 +1.0 8 81 True

Delete the “Sharpening” settings, and replace them with the “Grain” settings you want.

You get this:

xmlns:crs="http://ns.adobe.com/camera-raw-settings/1.0/"> 6.1 5.7 50 30 60 50 True

Save this under a new name. “Grain50_30_60″ seems a logical choice in this case. You can of course save a number of different settings under different names.
Open a Raw file, apply the preset, and BOOM. You just added Grain

But wait, there’s more

So, what if you want to alter just one of the settings? Do you need to open a text editor every time?
No. It’s easier to create a few more presets, each only adjusting 1 parameter.

I created separate presets for GrainAmount, GrainSize and GrainFrequency, in different values.
So, if I open an image in ACR, it looks like this:

Then I apply three presets to set the Grain I want.

In this case GrainAmount80, GrainSize20 and GrainFrequency80. Not as flexible as sliders, but pretty close.

The other way around

In LR3, there’s another new addition that is lacking in LR2.7: There’s a point curve added.
In LR2, you could only adjust the (wrongly named) “point curve” as the ACR “Parametric Curve”. So it was not possible to create a curve to invert the image or set the black and white point to something other then 0 and 255. (Something quite a few people like to do, which makes absolutely no sense to me).

There’s a way around that as well: Open a CR2 file in ACR, adjust the curve as you like, and click “Done”. You just created an .XMP file with all the info you need.
Open that .xmp file in an editor, and look for the second entry for tone curve:

0, 255 255, 0

the first entry for “Tone Curve” is the Parametric Curve. Don’t mess with it, since LR allows you to adjust that.

0, 0 32, 22 64, 56 128, 128 192, 196 255, 255

Now, in LightRoom2, create a new Preset. Use only the “Tone Curve” setting,

Open this preset in a text editor as well.
It will look different then an xmp, but will be plain text as well.

s = { id = "847A699E-AEA0-4E00-BF19-F6E681D5EBD7", internalName = "Negative", title = "Negative", type = "Develop", value = { settings = { ParametricDarks = 0, ParametricHighlightSplit = 75, ParametricHighlights = 0, ParametricLights = 5, ParametricMidtoneSplit = 50, ParametricShadowSplit = 25, ParametricShadows = -5, ToneCurve = { 0, 0, 32, 22, 64, 56, 128, 128, 192, 196, 255, 255, }, ToneCurveName = "Medium Contrast", }, uuid = "F2FF3CF0-C863-43EA-B051-B624A8113D3A", }, version = 0, }

Remove the stuff you don’t want, and change it to this:

s = { id = "847A699E-AEA0-4E00-BF19-F6E681D5EBD7", internalName = "Negative", title = "Negative", type = "Develop", value = { settings = { ToneCurve = { 0, 255, 255, 0, }, ToneCurveName = "Negative", }, uuid = "F2FF3CF0-C863-43EA-B051-B624A8113D3A", }, version = 0, }

Restart LR2, apply the preset. You just inverted the image

Of course, there might be a number of other things you’d want to “hack” into either LR2 or ACR 5.7. Just give it a try! And be sure to post any nice results you get in the comments!

Canon DPP or Adobe Lightroom?

René — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:55 +0000

Or: Why I shoot Raw

I shoot a lot of Performing Arts. That often involves “difficult” lighting: Different light sources, with different color temperatures. And to make matters worse, they are fitted with colored gels most of the time.
While I mostly try to go for “pleasing color”, rather then “neutral skintone” (the lighting was done a specific color for a reason I think), this still poses some challenges every now and then.

Simply setting ‘tungsten’ white balance is an okay starting point, but with certain types or colors of lighting, I need to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the image where I want it.

For that reason, I choose to shoot Raw: Gives me the most flexibility, and allows me to change whitebalance without causing too much harm.

Raw converters

Most of the time, I use Lightroom 2 for editing these images: I prefer the workflow over using the combination of DPP and Photoshop: I can do local edits on the Raw file in LR, and I can save the DNG with all edits included. With DPP/PS, I have to save a layered psd file of each image (which might be about 100Mb or so. With hundreds of images, that eats up HDD space rather fast).
This might not make sense to everybody, but makes sense to me.

DPP offers better noise reduction and sharpening in my opinion, but most of the time LightRoom is good enough for the intended purpose (images for the web).

Sometimes not

Occasionally however, I come across an image that simply will not give decent results in LightRoom. Blue gelled lights often give problems: For one: No way to reduce noise without obliterating all detail on the process. A while back I processed one of those images.

Here’s what it looked like in LightRoom at my default settings (Camera Neutral):
Not the best rendering. Obviously, the purple causes some problems by “blocking up”, and the blue does horrid things as well: Details and sharpness are gone. (notice the faces? A bit further down are the images up close.)

One thing that might help some colors (but not blues in my experience) is switching the camera profile. In this case, “Adobe Standard” didn’t exactly help, and the ACR4.4 profile was so bad I won’t even bother posting the screenshot…

Adjusting white balance and using specific HSL adjustments helped the image quite a bit, but still, the details in the shadow stayed absent.

Time to try a different Raw converter…

DPP

Canon’s own DPP is a very different piece of software then LightRoom: It has no DAM capabilities, and only offers global adjustments. So any local editing must be done in Photoshop. For instance by doing multiple conversions and use masks in PS.
Also, the user interface is very different and seems to be a case of “you love it or you hate it”.
Most importantly however, it rendered this image quite different from LightRoom

DPP “As shot” looks quite “neon”, but it clearly contains more detail:

The lack of detail in LR is not caused by noise reduction: If NR in LR is set to 0, the difference is still apparent. Setting Color NR higher then about 7 does obliterate any detail that was left however. Clearly, LR Color NR is not just targeting color noise… Luminance NR doesn’t help the image, but doesn’t destroy it either.

In comparison, DPP does much different: you can set a fairly high amount of Chroma NR before you start losing detail, and it actually removes color noise. However, setting a Luminance NR of something as low as 2 visibly removes detail: Avoid this like the plague.

Finishing up

Setting a higher color temperature, different color tone, and using “tune” to shift the image toward green/yellowish helps colors in DPP, although some transitions in the beams of light still look quite harsh. LightRoom does better in that respect.

The most striking difference (apart from the loss of detail in LR) is that the smoke appears to be almost gone in DPP!

Sometimes neither works alone

So, this appears to be a case were neither Raw converter gives satisfactory results… DPP gives detail, but no smoke. LightRoom gives smoke, better transitions, yet no detail. RIT handles the image like DPP does, apart from the fact that is seems to do some noise reduction by default, with no (working) option to turn it off. So no sense in going that route: RIT is a bit more constricting then DPP (you can only adjust what you could adjust on the camera) and the user interface is horrid.

I finally decided to open both the LR and DPP conversion in Photoshop, and blend them together, thus getting an image that contained both detail and smoke:

If anyone wants to give this image a try, the Raw file can be downloaded from here.

Please respect my copyright, and only use the image for evaluation purposes.

Tethered shooting with a Canon camera

René — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:36:49 +0000

Why should you?

If you are shooting portraits or architecture, it can be very useful to be able to view the images on a larger screen then that on the back of your camera: You can better judge focus, expression, exposure and composition for instance. Not only because the screen is bigger and of better quality (not to mention calibrated!), but also because the software you use might have some visual aids (clipping warning, grid, 100% view, stuff like that)

What do you need

Obviously a camera and the proper cable: USB for most consumer models and the Eos 1D(s)3, Firewire for the Canon 1D(2) and 1D(s)Mk2(n).
Apart from that, you’ll need some software to connect the camera to the computer and some kind of viewer or raw converter.

The software

There are a few options: Capture One Pro is highly regarded, and does all in one package, but the price is fairly steep.
Then there’s Bibble Pro. Quite a bit cheaper and supports more (older) cameras then C1Pro. Both of these support Nikon and Canon. Bibble also supports other brands. Both are available for Windows and OSX, Bibble also for Linux. Neither allow remote control of the camera, but Capture one allows you to fire the shutter remotely.

Free

Lucky for us that Canon also offers a free solution: Eos Utility. It came on the disk with your camera. If it didn’t, or you lost the disk, you can download it, following the instructions here.
Once installed, you’ll also need a viewer. I prefer to use DPP on my laptop, since that’s ~~a dinosaur~~ an old Powerbook G4 with a 12″ screen. Others prefer to use Lightroom. I’ll explain how to use both:

Step by step

First, start Eos Utility and go to the preferences: (Do this before connecting the camera. On my Mac (OSX 10.4.11) at least, it won’t complete start up, and needs to be force-quit otherwise)
Since I use DPP mostly for tethered shooting, I set up my Folder and filenames to be meaningful here. If you use Lightroom, you can skip this name customization.

The name is pretty self-explanatory I think. I use 3 lines for Year/Month/Date, since the preset “Shooting day” will add a few underscores I don’t want.

Again, pretty obvious naming scheme: My initials, the date and a short description.

Then set DPP as Linked Software.

Now for the shooting

Exit the prefs. That get’s you back to the main window. Choose “Camera Settings / Remote Shooting”

You get this: Note that, unlike other tethering software, Eos Utility gives you complete control over the camera. Very, very nice if the camera is at a position where you can hardly reach it (high on a tripod for instance).

Take a shot. If the “quick preview” window opens, click it away, since you won’t be needing that. It will stay gone as long as you don’t restart Eos Utility.
The image will now automatically open in DPP, in thumbnail view.

That’s not my preferred way of working. So I hit Cmd+A (select all) and Cmd+right arrow (open in edit image window; no shortcut for it on PC). That gives me this:

Cmd+T gets rid of the tools. All consecutive images will open in the edit image window now. At whatever zoom factor you choose.
You’re all set. So shoot away.

Lightroom

In Lightroom it’s a bit ~~more complicated~~ different.
Set everything the same in Eos Utility, except of course the linked software. As said, you also don’t need to worry about folder naming, because that is taken care of in Lightroom:

Then open Lightroom. It will open with the images you last edited / imported. Enable Auto Import, and set up a watched folder like this, in the very logically named “Auto Import Settings”:

Note that your images will get moved (not copied) by LightRoom into the folder you specify here. No way around it, so the whole naming scheme for folders in Eos Utility is kinda redundant in this case. I’d strongly recommend using a meaningful foldername. You can use either LR or Eos Utility to manage the filenames, depending on what you prefer.

Take a shot:

Note the image in the background is still the old image. If after the shot you get “No Photo Selected”, click a thumbnail in LR.
That’s it. Lightroom will now keep an eye on that folder, and import every image that lands in there. A bit slower on my laptop then DPP, but it works okay.

The drawbacks

Tethered shooting causes the battery of your camera to drain faster. With some cameras (the 1D comes to mind) that’s not something you desire…
Obviously, you also need to lug a laptop with you, but IMO that’s well worth it.
Lastly: Eos Utility does not like it when the camera goes to sleep, or is disconnected: It’ll crash. No idea why it’s buggy that way, probably because it’s free.

Sharpening in Lightroom 2

René — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:00:11 +0000

How does it work?

Lightroom 2 has two kinds of sharpening: Capture sharpening and output sharpening. Capture sharpening is used to neutralize the blurring caused by the Anti Aliasing filter in your camera.
Output sharpening is dependent on output (print or screen, what size) and meant to overcome the softening caused by resizing or happening when printing.

Differences

Output sharpening in Lightroom is simple: You get 4 options when you export the image: Off, low, standard or high. All else is taken care of by Lightroom. Ease of use for sure. Drawback is that you cannot preview it, so you’ll need to experiment a bit. After that, it’s “set and forget”.
Capture sharpening on the other hand, requires a bit more user interaction. The settings will depend on camera used, subject and personal preference. You can preview it, but only at 100% or higher magnification. So you either need to zoom in, or you can view sharpening in the ~~microscopic~~ small “preview window” Lightroom 2 has for this purpose.
(There is off course the workaround I mentioned in an earlier blog post)

The “Detail” Tab

…in Lightroom is where it’s at: You get 4 sliders for sharpening: Amount, Radius, Detail and Masking.
Some of these are quite self-explanatory if you know a bit about digital imaging, the others might be new to you. Let’s go over them one by one, using this image:
Notice I have the small “preview” window in the detail tab open. If I didn’t, Lightroom would show an exclamation mark, signifying that “a zoom level of 1:1 or greater is required to see these effects”:

Amount and Radius

These two are pretty obvious: Amount lets you set how much you want to sharpen. Scale goes from “0″ to “150″ (Which is red for a reason: In most cases it will be too much). The default setting is “25″.
Radius lets you set how wide you want the sharpening halos to spread out. Scale goes from 0.5 to 3. Default setting is 1. A higher setting will give you wider sharpening halos.
As with a lot of sliders in Lightroom, you get some “visual help” when you press the Option (Alt) key:
Press Option while sliding the Amount slider, and the image goes grayscale, to better show what the sharpening does to the luminosity values in the image.

Press Option while sliding the Detail slider, and you’ll see just the sharpening halos you are creating.

Detail and Masking

Detail (0 to 100, default 25) suppresses these halos.
A setting of 0 will undo quite a bit of what you did in the above sliders. Again, pressing Option while sliding will give you a fairly accurate idea of how much detail you’re allowing to be sharpened.

Masking does exactly what the name implies: It builds a mask on the fly (which is pretty nifty if you ask me) The default of 0 masks nothing so everything is sharpened, the maximum of 100 will sharpen only the big edges in the image. Press Option while adjusting the slider and, contrary to the other settings above, you’ll be shown the mask, not the effect on the image. Probably Adobe figured that it was less ambiguous that way. (And they were right)

Noise Reduction

… is also present in the Detail tab.
There’s a slider for Luminance NR and one for Color NR.
Color noise consists of randomly colored pixels in an image. Luminance noise is more like “film grain” and less of a problem in my opinion.
That’s good, since in most cases, Color noise is fairly easy removed in Lightroom. Luminance Noise reduction is not. At least, not without loosing detail in the process.
Unfortunately, the Lightroom engineers didn’t provide a “visual aid” for noise reduction, so you’re down to good old WYSIWYG.

Here’s the image again. First without sharpening or noise reduction (notice the “switch” in the top left of the “Detail” tab is in the “off” position):

Next, with sharpening but without Noise Reduction. Pretty big difference.

Let’s see what just Color NR does. Notice the random “blobs of color” that were present in the previous image are about gone. And that with a fairly low setting:

Finally. with both Color and Luminance NR. Notice we are already losing detail in the last, while there’s still Luminance noise present.

Finally, here is the exported image, with “standard” output sharpening for screen:

Hope this has shed some light on the subject of sharpening in Lightroom.

Clipping Warnings in Lightroom

René — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:05:58 +0000

And why they deceive you

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, like many other Raw converters, has a clipping warning.
The purpose of it is to give you a visual warning (apart from the histogram) of what parts of an image might be clipping.

What is clipping?

A pixel is clipping when it reaches a value of 0 or 255 in one or more channels, and “should have gone further”. Since it cannot go lower then 0 or go higher then 255, it remains at those values: Detail is lost if one or two color channels clip, part of the image is solid black or white if all 3 channels clip.

The effect of color space

As with anything in digital imaging, the color space used has a big influence: A wide gamut color space (such as ProPhotoRGB) will have lower values for the same color then for instance sRGB. So a color that is clipping in sRGB, need not be clipping in ProPhotoRGB!
This color for instance, has sRGB values of (250,40,30). The ProPhotoRGB values are (177,76,36) for the exact same color.

This means that you have a lot more “headroom” in ProPhotoRGB before you hit the “clipping wall”.

So what?

Lightroom uses MelissaRGB internally (ProPhoto RGB with sRGB Tone Response Curve).
The histogram in Lightroom is based on its internal working space. So when you are exporting images for a web gallery, the images might be clipping big time while Lightroom is not warning you!

An example

I opened a DNG file in Lightroom 2.4 and in ACR 5.4. These have basically the same raw conversion engine. The exact same settings were used in both Raw converters.

Here is the image, histogram and clipping warning in Lightroom. (click image to open bigger).
Almost no clipping indicated (It makes no difference what output color space you choose): Just a bit in the lower right that goes almost black, and absolutely no clipping highlights according to Lightroom:

Here is the image in ACR 5.4. Output color space is ProPhotoRGB: About the same clipping warning Lightroom is giving.

Here is the same image in ACR 5.4. Output color space is sRGB: major clipping!

For reference: Here is the image exported out of Lightroom: Clipping indeed:

Workaround

Is there a workaround? No (except using ACR that is).
Simply ~~sad~~ said, the only thing you can do is watch the histogram, guess, and use your eyes. If your screen has close to sRGB gamut, clipping in sRGB might also be visible on screen (as can be seen from the above screenshots in Lightroom).
If you use a wide gamut screen however, you might see quite a difference between the Lightroom “Develop” module and the actual exported image…

Lightroom

René — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:42:47 +0000

How to see what you’ll get

for a web gallery.
Normally, Lightroom will only let you preview sharpening and noise reduction at 100% view. This is a good thing™ in my opinion, since it is capture sharpening, meant to negate the effects of an anti-aliasing filter in front of the sensor. You’d get all kinds of moiré without an AA filter, as can be seen in the hilarious story Eamon Hickey wrote about the NC2000.
Since the AA filter softens the image a bit, you need to sharpen it. This is input sharpening. So it should be judged at 100%. Unlike output sharpening, which is better judged at reduced size, at least: For print. For web view at 100% and WYSIWYG.
Or is it?

A workaround

I recently was processing a few ISO 6400 images, which had severe noise in them. Here I ran into the problem that the NR isn’t shown at “fit window” view. So I had no way to judge what the images would look like online.
(all images can be clicked for a larger version)
This is the image as shown in the develop module:

This is part of the image at 100%:

Clearly, no NR is shown in the “Fit screen” view.
What works however, is to create a 1:1 preview (In LightRoom > Library Module > Library > Previews > Render 1:1 previews), then look at your image in “Loupe” view (shortcut: “E”) at fit to screen. Bingo. Both input sharpening and NR are applied. There is no way to get LR to preview output sharpening.
This is the image at fit screen in the Loupe view before and after creating a 1:1 preview:

Web Gallery

The beauty of this is, that it also works for the web gallery: If you preview it in LR after making 1:1 previews, you will see the image as it goes online (minus the output sharpening that is)

The image in the web gallery preview in LR, before and after creating a 1:1 preview: An even bigger difference:

This is the final image as it was exported by LightRoom. Inclusive output sharpening.

Pretty neat, huh?