Pixel Perfect wrote:
Ok DPP is hard to complain about since it's free, but my god it's horrible to use and frankly I can get better results in a quarter of the time with LR3. Colours from DPP might be a bit better, but choose the correct profile from ACR and tweak a little if needed and I can get very close.
Some are happy with DPP, but I'd only use it if I had a new camera that wasn't supported by LR or C1 Pro, another great RAW converter and better colour than LR but not as good for NR.
Good to know. I will need to read up on color profiles for 5D II on LR3
Daan B wrote:
I actually like LR/ACR colors better than DPP. Also the NR and sharpening tools of LR are really great. I never done it, but it should be possible to tweak LR/ACR (calibration panel) to produce DPP-like colors. Anyway, I have used LR since version 1, and can't work without it. If you shoot a lot, it will definitely speed up your workflow over Picasa/DPP.
Looking forward to the improvement in workflow.
abqnmusa wrote:
I would choose DPP for the quality of RAW conversion
Thats my incoming position, lets see if LR3 can convert me :-)
Lightroom is superb, couldn't live without either!
If you don't like the colors out of the box, then first go to the panel Camera Calibration and try out some of the others Profiles on offer besides the default Adobe Standard. Camera Faithful or Neutral is highly recommended for portrait and better skin tones.
You can then tweak the hue and saturation for the Red, green og blue color channels, if you like. But I much prefer to work in the HSL panel. Here you can tweak Hue, Saturation and Luminance on more specific colors - I highly recommend you try out Luminance - awesome for Landscapes. Also note the small dot in the panel! Click on it, then click in the picture itself and move the muse to correct the specific colors you point on. It is so easy and powerful.
Oh, and I would highly recommend Martin Evenings LR-book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers.
Few outside the LR-team at Adobe knows as much as him about the program, and then he is a photographer himself after all. It is more advanced or detailed then you normal Scott Kelby-book, but I mush prefer to fully get to understand what is really going on rather then just getting a cook book, if some of you catch my drift.
I had a few attempts to use LR, but I never familiarized myself with it. It does too many things automatically which I don't want to have. I see the value of LR mostly for photographers who need to do fast batch processing of the photos, e. g. wedding photographers. Here it is certainly a big plus.
But I like to handle each of my taken photos seperately, I rarely use the same processing paramaters to convert my RAW files into TIFF or JPG files. I mostly treat every photo differently. DPP is an excellent choice for me, it is my favorite program so far to convert files and do minor tweaking of the RAW files. I find DPP much more intuitive to use than LR.
A quick contrarian position here. For those of you running Mac, I suggest considering Aperture. It is affordable and has, to a large extent, become a total environment for me. I ran LR and Aperture side by side and went with the latter because of its single window, superior user interface, and the fact that there are now a number of excellent plug ins that allow me to have an all Aperture work flow for stuff that needs to turn fast - read newspaper photos. I like that Aperture is non-distructive, stores all files in a directly retrievable format and with enough horse power is quite fast.
Worth considering.
Robert
I still use PS a lot for more complex work that runs beyond the limits of Aperture. They make an excellent team.
If you don't like the colors out of the box, then first go to the panel Camera Calibration and try out some of the others Profiles on offer besides the default Adobe Standard. Camera Faithful or Neutral is highly recommended for portrait and better skin tones.
You can then tweak the hue and saturation for the Red, green og blue color channels, if you like. But I much prefer to work in the HSL panel. Here you can tweak Hue, Saturation and Luminance on more specific colors - I highly recommend you try out Luminance - awesome for Landscapes. Also note the small dot in the panel! Click on it, then click in the picture itself and move the muse to correct the specific colors you point on. It is so easy and powerful....Show more →
Another option is the xrite passport which integrates with LR. Snap a picture of their special color card where your shooting, export the image in LR which creates a color calibration profile. So far I think it works really well assuming your lighting is somewhat consistent, but I'm still experimenting.
retrofocus wrote:
I had a few attempts to use LR, but I never familiarized myself with it. It does too many things automatically which I don't want to have. I see the value of LR mostly for photographers who need to do fast batch processing of the photos, e. g. wedding photographers. Here it is certainly a big plus.
But I like to handle each of my taken photos seperately, I rarely use the same processing paramaters to convert my RAW files into TIFF or JPG files. I mostly treat every photo differently. DPP is an excellent choice for me, it is my favorite program so far to convert files and do minor tweaking of the RAW files. I find DPP much more intuitive to use than LR. ...Show more →
You really should try LR again. I process every file I take individually and LR is ideal for this.
Did you know you have a whole batch of gradient, local exposure and spotting tools right there in the RAW converter? You can add or subtract individual hues and the noise removal and sharpening tools are excellent.
I use gentle gradients over skies and light or dark areas for local changes, stuff that you can't sniff at with DPP. LR is a fantastic program but it takes some learning to get the best out of it.
Stoffer wrote:
Lightroom is superb, couldn't live without either!
If you don't like the colors out of the box, then first go to the panel Camera Calibration and try out some of the others Profiles on offer besides the default Adobe Standard. Camera Faithful or Neutral is highly recommended for portrait and better skin tones.
You can then tweak the hue and saturation for the Red, green og blue color channels, if you like. But I much prefer to work in the HSL panel. Here you can tweak Hue, Saturation and Luminance on more specific colors - I highly recommend you try out Luminance - awesome for Landscapes. Also note the small dot in the panel! Click on it, then click in the picture itself and move the muse to correct the specific colors you point on. It is so easy and powerful....Show more →
Thank you for the tips! Cannot wait to try it out.
1. Create folder names YY-MM-DD {project}, copy all RAW files into folder, create LR catalog within each folder eg. "12-02-15 bobs basketball tournament catalog".
2. Copy all RAW images into folder, import into LR, delete what I don't need on the fly as I edit
3. Create export profiles for web, print and specify output sub-folders created within project folder.
4. Upload desired output folders to Picasa
5. Copy project folder to archive storage into folders by labeled by year
I find the use of multiple monitors to be handy while editing but overall LR is still a bit sluggish at times. Definitely a few tricks you can do such as applying a preset during image import. The use of SSD has helped but the need for a faster machine is needed with LR. Bibble was really fast, too bad Corel ended it's life. Overall LR is a good choice.
Confused about the first two steps. If you import directly into Lightroom from your card, you can add the folder in the import dialog, and then Lightroom will copy all files from your card (and won't import duplicates that you've already imported), and then they are in the folder you want and already in your LR catalog.
I am not a working pro, so I have my stuff grouped by year (one year for each catalog to keep it moving smoothly), then topic. So, I do a folder called 2012, then topic (People, Nature, etc...) For travel stuff I have Country\Location, etc.. I then tell LR to add a subfolder to those with the image date, and that way locations and stuff I shoot regularly is placed in its own dated folder automatically, and I don't need to even worry about making those folders or such. With the LR4 beta, it handles AVCHD video import as well, which is a godsend since the files are buried in the card file structure.
If you are worried about the import/copy thing, I've imported about 85,000 images this way and have never lost a single file.
I will add that LR is a bit resource hungry. I was trying to use it on my 6 year old laptop for a long time and it was almost unbearably slow.
I had been looking for an excuse to buy a new machine so LR kind of became my excuse. It's running much much smoother with the new machine, but I can still tell it's a bit of a pig.
dennisgibson wrote:
Any LR3 tutorials (videos or articles) people would recommend?
Thanks for any help!
For me LR (compared to PS) is much more difficult to pick-up w/o some good tutorial or instructional book. However, once you learn LR its fantastic. I found the Luminous Landscape video series on LR3 to be a very instructional series. Definitely worth the investment.
Dave
Jman13 wrote:
Confused about the first two steps. If you import directly into Lightroom from your card, you can add the folder in the import dialog, and then Lightroom will copy all files from your card (and won't import duplicates that you've already imported), and then they are in the folder you want and already in your LR catalog.
I am not a working pro, so I have my stuff grouped by year (one year for each catalog to keep it moving smoothly), then topic. So, I do a folder called 2012, then topic (People, Nature, etc...) For travel stuff I have Country\Location, etc.. I then tell LR to add a subfolder to those with the image date, and that way locations and stuff I shoot regularly is placed in its own dated folder automatically, and I don't need to even worry about making those folders or such. With the LR4 beta, it handles AVCHD video import as well, which is a godsend since the files are buried in the card file structure.
If you are worried about the import/copy thing, I've imported about 85,000 images this way and have never lost a single file. ...Show more →
With step 1 and 2, I'm manually creating the folder and dragging the files off the card instead of using LR direct import off the card. Just habit from the past, but the LR direct import works well also. I'll separate video files in a similar fashion outside of the LR catalog, but those all go off to Sony Vegas for post processing.
What people don't realise about LR3 is that the colours are customisable. Or, put another way, the colours in LR AREN'T the colours in LR, but the colours of one of the profiles which LR has for your camera.
PhilDWedding wrote:
What people don't realise about LR3 is that the colours are customisable. Or, put another way, the colours in LR AREN'T the colours in LR, but the colours of one of the profiles which LR has for your camera.
