Lightroom from Import to Output Lesson 3

This week we’re going to take a look at some of the other tools available to you in the Develop Module. These tools include Cropping and Straightening, Red-eye removal, Spot and Dust removal, Camera Calibration, and Vignettes. We’ll also look at creating Virtual Copies. Cropping and Straightening Although you can crop and straighten in Photoshop or Elements, the tools in Lightroom are much more flexible, and they can be done on an individual file, or a group of files. The primary advantage is flexibility. Like other adjustments done in Lightroom, cropping and straightening are non-destructive. When you crop in Photoshop, everything outside the crop is gone forever. Not so in Lightroom though. You can go back at any time and either change the crop, or remove it completely. To make a simple crop in Lightroom, select the Crop tool and drag out a selection. The cropped area will stay in clear focus, while the area to be removed will have an opaque look (figure 2).

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Once you’ve created your crop, only the active area will be imported when the file is opened in Photoshop, or when you export the image to a file from within Lightroom. The crop can be modified as well by dragging a selection handle – top, bottom, sides, or corners. If you’re dragging a corner handle and want to keep the proportions of your crop, hold down the shift key while dragging the handle. You can also rotate the crop. By moving the mouse just outside the crop area at any point, the mouse pointer will change to a curved arrow. Now, drag to rotate the crop (Figure 3).

FIGURE 3

As you rotate, you’ll notice that the crop rectangle might change size. This is because Lightroom will not let you select an area outside of the image borders, something you can do in Photoshop and Elements, that will leave you with blank canvas in that area. After rotating my crop (Figure 4), I can press enter or double click on the image to apply the changes (Figure 5). FIGURE 4

FIGURE 5

So far, this acts very much like Photoshop and Elements. But, click on the Crop tool again, and you’ll see that your entire image is still there, and the crop can now be edited again. To remove the crop from your image, right click on the image and select Reset Crop, or click on the drop down list of Aspect options for the Crop tool and select Original from the list of size options. NOTE: You can also click on Reset at the bottom of the crop tool options (Figure 6). Note that this will remove the crop and any straightening you’ve done.

FIGURE 6

You can also set specific sizes for your crops from this same drop down list. When this is done, the cropped file is automatically sized to those dimensions when the file is converted. Click on the list, and choose one of the preset sizes (Figure 7).

FIGURE 7

You can also create a custom crop aspect ratio. When you do this, the new size will be added to the Aspect drop down menu at the bottom of the list. To do this, select Enter Custom (figure 8). Like the other options, any crop you drag out with this setting will automatically be set to those dimensions.

FIGURE 8

Also in the Crop tool options you’ll see a padlock icon. When the lock is closed, the crop will be constrained to fit within the selected aspect ratio. In other words, if you have a 5x7 aspect ratio selected, you can’t crop anything except these dimensions. You can create a free crop with no specific ratio by clicking on the padlock to unlock it. Now any crop you drag out will be free of constraints. Straightening is actually a form of cropping. With the Angle tool, you drag a line in your image that should be either horizontal or vertical or you can adjust the angle by using the slider. Lightroom will rotate your image enough to make the line straight, and crop to keep the image dimensions within the borders of the image. To use the Angle tool, Select it, and then click on the starting point for your line. In Figure 9, I’m using the ground to straighten this image. The changes are more extreme than I need, but it helps to show the tool in action. Now, holding down the mouse button, drag to the other end of your line.

FIGURE 9 When you release the mouse, Lightroom will create a rotated crop that, when accepted, will give you an image with a straight horizon (Figure 10).

FIGURE 10 The finished image is cropped to the maximum dimensions that will fit while still giving you a straightening that you’re adjusting for (Figure 11).

FIGURE 11 Just like the Crop tool, Straighten can be redone, or removed just by setting the Angle adjustment to 0. And, pressing the Reset button will remove the angle adjustment as well as any crop you’ve made. Red-Eye Removal If your image has a problem with red-eye, you can use the Lightroom Red-Eye Removal tool to correct this (Figure 12). I prefer to zoom in on the problem to make my selections easier to see (Figure 13).

FIGURE 12

FIGURE 13 After zooming in, select the Red-Eye Removal tool and click on the eye to correct by desaturating all the red pixels under the tool (Figure 14). You can adjust the size of the brush by using the [ and ] keys but Lightroom isn’t picky about the size – it will do a very good job of correcting any red eye that it finds under the brush. If you make a mistake, you can click on the red-eye correction area (the circle around the eye), and press the delete key to remove it,. You’ll be rewarded with a fun little poof animation and the adjustment will be removed. Like the other tools in this area, clicking the Reset button will remove all of the red-eye adjustments in one operation. You can also resize the correction by hovering your mouse at the edge of the correction and dragging to a new size.

FIGURE 14

Dust & Spot Removal The next tool we’ll look at this week is the Dust and Spot removal tool. If you’ve used Photoshop or Elements, you’re probably used to the Clone tool. This is the Lightroom version of that tool. This is one time where Photoshop is a clear winner over Lightroom though – with Lightroom, you can only clone or heal in circular patches – there is no brush to paint the correction on. For typical dust spots, this is fine, but if you have anything more complicated to correct, you can plan on a trip to Photoshop. Dust on your sensor usually shows up as a gray spot on the image. To use the Spot removal tool, click on the icon shown in Figure 15. Spot removal has three controls. You can choose whether to Heal or Clone, and set the size and opacity of the adjustment.

FIGURE 15 Heal works by examining the areas around the adjustment and trying to apply similar texture and color to the adjustment. Clone works by copying a specific spot over the adjusted area. To start we’ll use the Heal tool, which is the one that I normally use. Figure 16 shows the image I’m starting with – you can see several dust spots in the sky (there are actually a number of them, but two are obvious here).

FIGURE 16 In this example, you can see two circles – a thin white one with a + in the center, and a one with a bold outline. The thin line circle is the area that is being corrected, the bold circle is the area that Lightroom is sampling from to correct the spot.

FIGURE 17 While the size can be adjusted by using the Size control, it’s much easier to drag the circle to the needed size. Just hover over the source circle (the one with the + sign), and drag the mouse to make the circle larger or smaller. Lightroom will automatically select a location to sample from. If the area selected by Lightroom isn’t correct, you can drag the bold circle to a better area. Figure 18 shows a correction near the horizon line. The spot Lightroom selected is using ocean and sky to correct, which looks obvious in the image. So, I’ll drag the sampled area down into the ocean to correct this. You can also change the distance from the source by doing the same thing – drag the sample circle to the location you want to use.

FIGURE 18 If you don’t select the circle correctly, a new adjustment will be made on the image. You can either undo (Control/Command+Z), or click on the red circle and press delete. As before, clicking Reset will remove all the spot/heal adjustments from the image.

Camera Profiles New to the latest versions of Lightroom are camera profiles. Adobe has a number of them available for different cameras. If your camera supports picture styles, like the Canon and Nikon bodies, you’ll be able to use settings that are similar in Lightroom. Scroll the Develop Module options to the bottom to find the Camera Calibration panel (Figure 19), and select the Camera Profile you want from the list (Figure 20). If your camera isn’t supported yet, you’ll be limited to the Adobe profile.

For the camera used in this image, a Canon 1Ds Mark II, here are the different profiles in use: Adobe Standard

Camera Faithful

Camera Landscape

Camera Neutral

Camera Portrait

In order to create your own profiles, you need to use a separate program. Creating new profiles is beyond the scope of this class, but having access to profiles that mimic your in-camera style settings is a useful tool to get a specific look to your images. You can fine tune existing profiles by using the Red, Green, Blue Primaries Hue & Saturation sliders, as well as the Shadow tint slider. If your camera has a tendency to record images with a colorcast to them, making adjustments to these sliders can correct for this. I have yet to find a camera (and I use a lot of different cameras in my testing) that has needed an adjustment for this, but it can be used if you do happen to have a consistent issue with your camera. Vignettes The next set of adjustments is in the Vignettes panel (figure 21). There are two sets of controls here – one for lens correction, and the other for creative adjustments. Some camera and lens combinations can lead to lightening or darkening in the corners of the frame, so Lightroom lets you adjust for this.

FIGURE 21 In figure 22, the image is showing obvious darkening in the upper right corner (it’s the same in all corners, but easier to see in areas like sky). To correct for darkening, we’ll increase the Lens Correction amount slider to lighten the corners.

FIGURE 22 By increasing the Amount to +38, the sky tones are evened out, removing the vignette from the corners. Although I don’t need it for this image, the Midpoint control adjusts where the effect begins – moving it to a lower setting makes the vignetting adjustment start closer to the center of the frame, while higher numbers move the effect further towards the outer edges of the frame.

FIGURE 23 The Lens Correction adjustments work only on the entire image. If you’ll be cropping you need to use the Post-Crop adjustments to have the corrections applied correctly (although if you’re cropping in from the corners, the vignetting is usually reduced or removed by the crop. Post-Crop adjustments are used for creative purposes as well. With these controls you can add some creative framing effects to your images. Figure 24 shows the image I’m starting with. I’ve cropped this shot, so I would need to use the Post-Crop adjustments if I wanted to do any work on this. But, the corners aren’t a problem with the image. I want to try some creative adjustments to help add an older look to the shot.

FIGURE 24 To create a white vignette, use a positive Amount – in the example shown in Figure 25, I’m taking it all the way up to +100 to get a solid white at the corners. The Midpoint is moved to 24 to fit the edges of the typewriter, and Roundness is set to -46 to get the shape I want.

FIGURE 25 Here’s the same image with the Amount set to -100 to give me a black vignette. All other controls are set to the same values as the previous example.

FIGURE 26 With these examples, I’ve kept a soft feather setting of 50 to make the effect more gradual. With a lower setting, the edge transition becomes much harder. In Figure 27, I’ve set the Amount to -100 for black, the Midpoint to 0 to move the adjustment into the frame as far as possible, the Roundness to -100 to make the corners as small as possible, and the Feather to make the transition abrupt.

FIGURE 27 Virtual Copies So, what do you do when you want more than one version of your image? Of course, you can Export the file to create a new TIFF or JPEG image, but then you lose the advantage of working with RAW images, and you start to use up large amounts of disk space. Lightroom lets you get around this by using virtual copies – a new preview version is created and the adjustments are stored in a new file. This uses up only a couple of KB of disk space rather than MB of space for a full copy of the file. To create a virtual copy, select the image you want to copy and choose Photo > Create Virtual Copy (Command/Control + ‘), or right click on the image and select Create Virtual Copy. Lightroom will create a new copy of the thumbnail with a folded page icon in the lower left corner, and the original will add a number in the upper left corner to show there are multiple copies (Figure 28).

FIGURE 28 The copy inherits the settings from the original, so any adjustments you’ve made will be applied to the new virtual copy. You can either modify these adjustments, or hit the Reset button at the bottom of the Develop module panel to revert to the original settings. The other copy will not be modified. In Figure 29, I’ve created another virtual copy, giving me three versions of the file – the original and two virtuals. In the third file, I’ve converted to a sepia tone using the Sepia preset that is included with Lightroom (we’ll cover presets next week).

FIGURE 29 If you want to save space in the Library thumbnail view, you can click number icon in the master image to collapse the images into one stack. You’ll see a single thumbnail now with the icon in the upper left indicating it’s a stack of 3 (or however many) images.

FIGURE 30

Assignment Using existing images, or ones that you shoot specifically for this assignment, try the crop, straighten, red-eye, spot removal, vignette and camera profiles, along with any other adjustments we’ve covered so far. When you upload your images, at a minimum, please remember to include information on what adjustments you’ve made, and if possible include the before and after versions to help the others and me see what has changed. Next week we’ll cover some creative techniques, and how to work with multiple images at once, Presets, use Photoshop for external editing, and using the Compare tool.