I would appreciate some feedback on this shot as it is the first time I have editied in RAW. I downloaded the trial of lightroom 5.2 today and had a play. I'm happy with it for a first effort but would like your opinion.= and any tips or tricks you know about in lightroom that would help?
Also, really how do you all have time to edit everything from RAW, this took me best part of an hour (took me 10 minutes to work out how to upload the picture to be honest and another 5 to work out how to save it as a jpeg!) Do those of you who use lightroom have any advice on how to speed up the process? Do you have standard ways in which to edit every photo or do they all get the individual treatment?
i'm not an expert so i am not going to even try to comment on your edit... i probably would have tried a bunch of different things, but everyone has their own editing style and one isn't necessarily better than another...
two things i wanted to say:
1 - my first try i was just like you... who has time for this?? now i can edit a basic shot quite quickly, and if you're editing a whole bunch from one shoot you can easily synch the settings and that's a huge time saver...
2 - do i have a standard treatment? yes - basically go down the right side menu bar... white balance, clarity, vibrance (rarely play with saturation now), tonal stuff, sharpen, deal with noise (both under detail) and then the lens corrections including fixing perspective...
you'll need to experiment a bit to find out what works for you and probably you're style and editing choices will evolve over time (mine certainly have)... there's definitely a learning curve and i know i've still only scratched the surface of LR and processing from RAW... but i really like the flexibility of it...
fwiw, i tried RAW back in the summer of 2012 and quickly gave up because of the work involved... went back at it again after i messed up a beautiful shot because there just wasn't enough data to rescue it from some lighting problems... went back to the same locale the next day to shoot RAW and never looked back :)
it's not for everyone, but give yourself some time to explore the potential and you'll likely find that it's not as cumbersome as it is seeming just now...
I am learning as I go along along but absolutely love shooting and editing in RAW much more flexible. I always start by confirming the colors of the white balance..I usually keep my camera on cloudy and its usually pretty close to accurate however changing the white balance on the fly has fixed things for me right off the bat when its the wrong choice. I like looking at my histogram to see where I am at on exposure and often test what the program will do by letting it do a auto tone first and you can edit from there or go back to manually selecting what exposure is proper. In your shot being a landscape with killer clouds you could drop your highlights down all the way towards the left and its great for pulling details out of clouds even on skies that look blown out. I noticed a bit of halo effects around the vehicle were you using an adjustment brush?
@northy thanks very much - really helpful. It has actually amazed me to se the difference you can make in RAw as compared to jpeg
@loztsoul I didn't know there was an auto fix, i will have a look at that - might be a useful place to start. I have tried a few other shots and am really just moving the sliders with a rough i dea of what they do nd waiting til i get something i like. might be useful to know what i should be trying to achieve. I was using the adjustment brush and increasing the exposure and clarity. in subsequent edits i have been better at magnifying and keeping within the lines! is there a better way to do it?
@gwhit123 possibly you already know this, but you can change the size of your brush as well as the amount of feathering... for something like that, you probably don't want any feathering... and possibly a smaller brush... also, if you type "o", the bits where you've painted will come up in red which helps you see if you've gone over the lines, and there is an eraser tool to fix this...
@gwhit123 I think you are on the right track there are some great lightroom tutorials even on youtube etc...when it comes to the adjustment brush I have used it very selectively myself still feel I need to learn it more...there are ways to change your brush size as well as its feather/impact etc so in your case I think what you are doing with practicing is good and just finding that proper way to fine tune it....had I not been working on edits as much as I have I would not have really noticed the halo's but my eye is just trained to zoom in to things like that now. Lightroom is a great program and I think the best thing is stick with it and not only dabble but see what kind of tutorials will help you perfect steps or even help you save time on doing everyday type tasks and there are many many presets that are out there and a lot of free ones too boot
Interesting reading. I have Lightroom 4 but I also have Photoshop CS6. I edit all RAW files in Adobe Camera RAW. I seem to stumble around in Lightroom but I hear that once you master it people love it. Maybe I will have to check out some tutorials.
Really, Lightroom (Photoshop and Camera Raw too) handles just about everything automatically so you don't really have to do anything special when adjusting RAW versus jpeg. Except that you should notice you have much broader and subtler tone and color adjustments available to you. And noise reduction is so much better, keeping your raw images much crisper than a corresponding "out of the camera" jpeg.
Lightroom is amazing, and I think I may have given up weddings without it! I will select all the files I want to keep using adobe bridge and then import those to Lightroom. I aim to spend no more than a minute, two at the most, on each image. Then when I'm done, I export the lot to a chosen folder as jpegs.
Touching up each image can be done with presets, either purchased or free, or with some tweaks on just a few of the settings, like contrast, saturation and sharpness. Don't try to complicate things. Lightroom will produce some lovely jpegs, and you can always push an individual image a little more afterwards with photoshop or something similar!
@northy Thanks for this info. I'm waiting for Year 2 to tackle RAW, but I got LR5 in May and I'm still trying to really use it appropriately. So much to learn.
@gwhit123 Photo looks great to me! I don't know the differences with RAW yet, but from what I hear, you have lots of flexibility. Did you notice any specific differences vs. the jpeg images?
Way to go George!! I always shoot RAW...though I must admit I have only (barely) scratched the surface of editing....mostly sliders in Camera RAW (I went halvers with my daughter on CS6 and over here, if you're a student, you get it cheap cheap!!). Haven't tried LR at all, though my daughter loves its organizational ability. @frankhymus is Bridge much different from LR for organization? That's what I use.
@northy thanks very much had more of a play, that is much better
@loztsoul thanks very much for the help, very much appreciated. just watching a tutorial about portraits. It's amazing that even if you kow how to use a tool, thinking of it's many applications is the hard part
@frankhymus thnk you very much frank for the compliment! Where is the fun in using the auto button though? :-)
@vokesy thanks andrew. Not really sure what more you would want to do in photoshop though - is it more like photomanipulation than editing?
@darylo thanks so much. I would say that actually editing JPEGS and RAW is the same process really but you have much more control in lightroom. I have only done about 12 images so far but am really enjoying it.
@lynnb thanks lynn. I havnt even thought about lightroom organising my photos, I am just importing from the hard drive where i normally store my shots
@gwhit123 It may be a bit of work on some colour cast I want to try and remove, or using actions to create a particular kind of effect. Personally I use Totally Rad actions on all of my 365 photos, and on a lot of my wedding photos. Generally though, lightroom can do most of the work that I need it to.
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two things i wanted to say:
1 - my first try i was just like you... who has time for this?? now i can edit a basic shot quite quickly, and if you're editing a whole bunch from one shoot you can easily synch the settings and that's a huge time saver...
2 - do i have a standard treatment? yes - basically go down the right side menu bar... white balance, clarity, vibrance (rarely play with saturation now), tonal stuff, sharpen, deal with noise (both under detail) and then the lens corrections including fixing perspective...
you'll need to experiment a bit to find out what works for you and probably you're style and editing choices will evolve over time (mine certainly have)... there's definitely a learning curve and i know i've still only scratched the surface of LR and processing from RAW... but i really like the flexibility of it...
fwiw, i tried RAW back in the summer of 2012 and quickly gave up because of the work involved... went back at it again after i messed up a beautiful shot because there just wasn't enough data to rescue it from some lighting problems... went back to the same locale the next day to shoot RAW and never looked back :)
it's not for everyone, but give yourself some time to explore the potential and you'll likely find that it's not as cumbersome as it is seeming just now...
good luck!
@loztsoul I didn't know there was an auto fix, i will have a look at that - might be a useful place to start. I have tried a few other shots and am really just moving the sliders with a rough i dea of what they do nd waiting til i get something i like. might be useful to know what i should be trying to achieve. I was using the adjustment brush and increasing the exposure and clarity. in subsequent edits i have been better at magnifying and keeping within the lines! is there a better way to do it?
This image looks just fine to me.
Touching up each image can be done with presets, either purchased or free, or with some tweaks on just a few of the settings, like contrast, saturation and sharpness. Don't try to complicate things. Lightroom will produce some lovely jpegs, and you can always push an individual image a little more afterwards with photoshop or something similar!
@gwhit123 Photo looks great to me! I don't know the differences with RAW yet, but from what I hear, you have lots of flexibility. Did you notice any specific differences vs. the jpeg images?
@frankhymus is Bridge much different from LR for organization? That's what I use.
@loztsoul thanks very much for the help, very much appreciated. just watching a tutorial about portraits. It's amazing that even if you kow how to use a tool, thinking of it's many applications is the hard part
@frankhymus thnk you very much frank for the compliment! Where is the fun in using the auto button though? :-)
@vokesy thanks andrew. Not really sure what more you would want to do in photoshop though - is it more like photomanipulation than editing?
@darylo thanks so much. I would say that actually editing JPEGS and RAW is the same process really but you have much more control in lightroom. I have only done about 12 images so far but am really enjoying it.
@lynnb thanks lynn. I havnt even thought about lightroom organising my photos, I am just importing from the hard drive where i normally store my shots