| Adobe
Digital Photography Workflow - 16
by George Mann
username (George
Mann)
Nikonian
in Thailand
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16.
Adobe Lightroom -
Working with the Develop Panel Tools in the Develop Module
Article
16 of 100
There
are so many tools in the Develop Module that today is going
to be a graphic overview of those tools with a few notes attached
(from the Develop article of a few days ago). Just like the
Adobe Lightroom software this tutorial series in in the Beta
stage so don't be surprised if I repeat a few things or even
contradict myself a few times.
I
will get back to a more in depth analysis of the tools themselves
one at a time in later articles, after I have finished with
the overview articles on Adobe Lightroom (Beta 2). I am assuming
there will probably be more tools or at least changes to these
in the next version of Lightroom.
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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.
I
don't often find that I am off on the White Balance
because I am pretty carefull when I am shooting but
it is good to know that with RAW image files I can correct
my images after the fact if I dfo make a mistake. On
the other hand, Saturation, Range and Tone are tools
I often find myself experimenting with but tend to use
sparingly.
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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.
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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.
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Split
Toning
- This tool allows you to set the Hue and Saturation
of Highlights and Shadows separately.
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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.
I
have tried it on a few photos now and found that in
the case of the Quoddy Loop lighthouse (seen on other
pages) I like it a lot better with the reds set to a
much lighter shade, otherwise they look much too black.
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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.
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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 third party plug-ins in this area.
I
hope they include the Photoshop unsharpen tool in the
next version.
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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.
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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 digital camera.
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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.
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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 |
