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Adobe Lightroom - Develop Module
Article
12 of 100
The
Adobe Lightroom Develop Module has the same basic layout as
the Library Module but instead of a central viewing area that
can inhabit a whole grid of images for processing it holds
only the image that is being developed. The image either fills
the central viewing area or can be magnified to 100 percent.
The
left hand panel is a Presets Browser
that allows you instantly convert your image to either Cyanotype,
Direct Positive, Flat, Grayscale Conversion, Lightroom Defaults,
Tone Curve - Lightroom Defaults, Tone Curve - Linear Contrast,
Tone Curve - Medium Contrast, Tone Curve - Strong Contrast,
Antique - Grayscale, and
Sepia Tone. Custom Presets
can also be added for instant conversion.
Presets
can be viewed instantly by passing your cursor over the Presets
listings and effected to the image in the main viewing area
with a simple click.
The
right hand panel contains a whole series of Developing
tools
(that will probably number in the hundreds once the plug-in
developers get up to steam), including the current Beta 2
tools, Basic, Tone Curve, Crop & Straighten, Grayscale
mixer, Split Toning, HSL Color Tuning, Detail, Lens Corrections,
and Camera Calibration.
Basic
- This tool covers the basics of Color, Range and Tone, with
a White Balance selector that lets you choose between, As
Shot, Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent,
Flash, and Custom.
Tone
Curve
- The choice is between Compression and Luminance of the Highlights,
Brightness and Contrast of the Midtones, and Compression and
Luminance of the Shadows. There are also two slider controls
at the bottom of the graph that allow you to adjust the shadows
and highlights directly. I chose a picture with a very deep
shadow in the face for this article and was able to get a
somewhat pleasing balance using the Highlights and Shadows
sliders. If this was a picture that I had to use commercially,
I would export it to Photoshop CS for some localized editing
of the image.
Crop
& Straighten
- This is an extremely simple but very useful tool and will
eliminate a lot of having to go to Photoshop CS, just to crop
an image. There are a number of constrained crop settings
and custom image sizes are easily entered in by the numbers
or dragged into place with the crop overlay indicator. I figured
the best way to explain it was to demonstrate it, so just
take a look at the image above and you will get the (cropped)
picture.
Grayscale
Mixer
- The Grayscale Mixer is quite nice, I have not yet gone beyond
using it on automatic but it gives very nice results, almost
instantaneously. There are seven color adjusters that allow
you to find just the right shade of gray.
Split
Toning
- This tool allows you to set the Hue and Saturation of Highlights
and Shadows separately.
HSL
Color Tuning
- The HSL Color Tuning tool allows for very precise tuning
of six separate colors in separate Hue, Saturation and Luminance
control panels.
Detail
-
The Detail tool quite simply allows you to set the amount
of Sharpen, Smooth and De-noise in your image. I expect a
lot of plug-ins in this area.
Lens
Corrections
- The tools are Reduce Fringe with Red/Cyan reduction and
Blue/Yellow reduction. The lens Vignetting sliders allow you
to set Amount and midpoint. I also expect a lot of plug-ins
in this area and suspect that DxO will continue to dominate
the market with their lens correction tools, which can produce
DNG files that are compatible with Adobe Lightroom, Bridge
and Photoshop CS.
Camera
Calibration
- this tool is not only Adobe Lightroom's link to specific
Digital Camera native RAW settings in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)
but it also allows for personal adjustments to Shadows Tint,
and Red, Green and Blue Primary Hue and saturation settings
for your camera.
Below
the develop panel we have buttons for Sync,
Copy from Previous, Reset and
a choice between the hand, dropper and
crop tool
for the main viewing area image.
We
will go into more detail on all of these Develop tools later,
there might even be some more tools on the Develop pallet
before the month is out.
P.S.
Please do not get upset if your personal experience and views
are different from my own. These opinions are mine exclusively
and do not reflect the views or policies of any of the manufacturers
mentioned in this article...... George
Mann |
