Dana in Geeksville

Painting Exposure to Get the Lighting Right

To say I like the new Lightroom 2 (LR)  by Adobe is putting in mildly. I absolutely, positively love the upgrade from 1.4 to 2. Not only did they improve the tools we already had in LR, but they've added this cool adjustment tool that allows you to paint in exposure, clarity, sharpness, and a number of other things. This means you don't have to go to Photoshop and do layer masks. It means you can simply adjust an area of the photo, no matter how big or small, quickly, easily and simply through a few moves of the mouse. I love it!

This photo was taken at a beach in Washington state. While I had successfully captured the coloring of the sky, composed nicely, etc, some of the foreground, especially the rocks and details were overexposed. If I had exposed for the land, then my sky would have been blown out. Of course, in Photoshop CS3 I could combine an underexposed with an overexposed version, and using masking to bring the photo to life. But that would take some time and effort. As it turned out, the problem  was easily corrected in LR in a just a few minutes.

This week I can focus on getting a nice print of it for hanging in my house.

Of course, LR can't do anything about a bad composition, or uninteresting scenery, but I am impressed what this program does for photographers from organizing photos to adjusting exposure, white balance, and a number of others things, specific to certain areas in a photograph.

In this next photo, I really liked the play of light on the rocks and the brighter area in the background. But because of the slow shutter speed to get the soft water effect, I had blown out the light on the rocks in the foreground. Again, I painted in some variation of exposure just on the rocks. This took away this blinding glare that had been captured, and left in it's place the normal reflection of light you'd expect on wet rocks. If I had used Photoshop to do the same thing, and I could have, it would have taken a few layers, some masking, and a whole lot of time. Instead, I  changed the rocks in just a minute.

When Lightroom first came out, I liked it a lot for the easy of use of it's tools and the ability to add key words, create catalogs, and organize the photos easily. But I never imagined such a wonderful improvement to the next version. If you are a serious photographer, get Lightroom. You won't regret it.

You can see the rest of these photos that I took in Washington on my photo website Dana Nourie's Digital Imagery.

Posted at 10:27PM Aug 17, 2008 by dananourie in Photography  |  Comments[0]