OK: Adobe Lightroom...

...is simply an extraordinary piece of software on any number of levels: possibly more so than any other software I've purchased in a long time.

(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)

Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.

1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.

2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.

So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.

Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.

Lightroom is amazing.

Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.

The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.

I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.

These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...

Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.

Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.

When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.

Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.

All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.

Only then does some actual new image come into existence.

And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.

Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.

More later...

RAW Conversion: what's in a histogram?

I shoot Canon RAW exclusively. Last time I directly shot any jpegs it was by mistake, and it was a total disaster -- or almost.

But this means that the RAW files need to be converted into something that's human-decypherable: RAW files in-and-of themselves are inherently non-viewable without some sort of intermediate translation applied.

For RAW conversion I use Breeze System's BreezeBrowser Pro: I'm not professional enough to be able to afford the Adobe Tax(tm).

The single element I work with most frequently (which is to say, on every single photo) during RAW conversion is Exposure Compensation -- and this is adjusted by refering to the histogram for each photo before I convert it.

Here's three micro-adjustments made to one photo before conversion (clicky):

The range of Exposure Compensation adjustments ranges from -1.3 Ev to -1.5 Ev in .1 Ev steps.

Notice that the histogram is greatly similar across all three adjustments, but with a slight and significant difference.

Essentially the histogram represents a graph depicting 255 steps across the range of values within the photo from 0 == black to 254 == white. The taller the vertical bar for a particular value, the more pixels within the image at that value point. Bars at the two ends represent data that is out-of-range and theoretically lost to the image.

(I say theoretically because it is possible to "pull down" the bars at either extremes and redistribute data back into the low or high end of the histogram using the slider.

I'm not sure if the formerly "lost" data in the RAW image is actually recovered or if just an illusion of data recovery takes place, but as the end bars are pulled down the histogram across the usable range plumps-up, so I'm happy).

Most theoretical discussions of histograms talk about lovely symmetrical bell-curves shaped along a standard normal distribution.

That's lovely and all, but I almost never see anything like that in reality.

In fact, the three shown here are more "normal" than most I see in that they've got at least a semblance of a standard normal distribution bell curve in them -- kinda fattish in the middle, and tapering off toward each end. There are little spikey-guys at each end as well. Pretty typical, all in all.

Part of RAW conversion is doing a lot of it, learning to recognize what you've got to work with in a given photo, and making the best of that.

Anyway the three histograms shown have been adjusted by .1 Ev steps from -1.3 to -1.5 Ev -- and if you look not even too closely you can see that -1.4 Ev has the plumpest center section of the three.

(Further reductions or increases in Ev flattened-out the histogram pretty radically -- take my word for it -- see the "as-shot" histogram down below in the postscript).

So here's the image right before I clicked "OK" and "Convert" (clicky):

And here's the finished photo, after cropping and pulling up the low (black) end of the Levels by +5 (clicky):

Not necessarily the greatest Sports Photo of all Time, but a good example of Our Friend the Histogram(tm) in action.

p.s.:

1) Purists will wonder why I'm having to pull down the Exposure Compensation by -1.4 Ev in the first place.

Good question.

I shot this particular photo a little after sundown when I had just reset the EOS 5D Mark II's ISO from 1600 to 6400 in anticipation of the ongoing transition from fading daylight to full lighting by the field lights.

The original photo was pretty over-exposed. Here's the as-shot histogram:

The histogram's as flat as a pancake, and all the data's run off the right (white) end. So by pulling down the Exposure Compensation I pull the data back toward the center of the histogram, and Compensate for the bad Exposure.

Cool, huh?

A little later (probably at half time) I would also switch the White Balance from Daylight to Fluorescent, which seems to be the best compromise for the color of the field lights at Vashon High School stadium.

2) The sharp-eyed will note that I'm saving as an 8-bit tiff.

The immediate project here was to produce tiffs for conversion to jpegs to put up on my web site. 8-bit depth is fine for something that's going to end up as a 600-pixel wide jpeg for web display.

Actually, if I was to get an order for a reprint off of this image, I'd go right back to the original RAW file and start from zero...

Tuesday night's...

...VISC soccer practices gave me a very good opportunity to work on several things I don't usually get to mess with during the course of an actual game.

• A manually-set color temperature of 3300K for the McMurray field lights works about as good as anything's going to get to establish the proper white balance at RAW conversion
• Shot at manual exposure, ISO 6400, 250th second, f5.6, and just let 'er rip: pick up the exposure pieces during RAW conversion and post-processing
  
• alternated between a single center-point-focus and the generic 9 auto-focus points; jury's still out, although I'm still tending to think that the single center-point-focus works best
• alternated between single shot and motor drive; in the past I've found that motor drive doesn't necessarily do any better at catching that One Perfect Moment(tm) than just becoming familiar with a sport and leaving the timing up to my shutter finger

Also I was able to get out on the field, right next to the goal, and get the lights (such as they are) somewhat where I wanted them...

Very first impressions:

The EOS 5D Mark II seems to produce a softer image than the original 5D, very subjectively.

This would be for the soccer photos shot yesterday under very flat light because of the heavy cloud cover.

Also (of course, having to always fiddle with something...) I approached focusing differently from how I've set it up in the past, and that may have had something to do with it

I'm dialing-in a little more sharpness than I previously have during RAW conversion, that being turning it up from "3 As-shot" to 4 of 7...

Now up...

VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA, and Senior's Night 2009:


After re-RAW converting all the second half photos (one of them, above) to a white balance of "Fluorescent" rather than "Auto-As shot" the results are much improved in that they're consistent if not 100% "correct".

I think that if the photos had been originally shot with one specific white balance the outcome would be pretty much spot-on.

EOS 5D; 70-200mm f2.8L with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm; shot at 98mm; White Balance Auto-As shot; Manual exposure 200th at f8.0;

RAW conversion: white balance "fluorescent"; exposure compesation +2; PS levels mid 1.1 high 180-200; fill flash 3 lighter, 35 saturation; Neat Image digital noise reduction 5D @ 1600 ISO 200th f5.6; remove only half of noise

White balance redux...

Just decided to re-RAW convert all the second half VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA photos: kept coming across a few photos where the white balance as first RAW converted (from "as shot Auto White Balance") was so weird that the color rendition was just coming outer space.

:-/

The end product should be much improved.

Girls' Soccer Senior's Night 2009 is up at www.finchhaven.com/vhs/ ... /Girls_Soccer_v_CWA_and_Seniors_Night_102709/Seniors_Night

More on White Balance...

Here's a shot from Pirates-v-Cedar Park that's been RAW converted two different ways:

1) converted as "fluorescent/as shot" or 4000K


and 2) converted as "tungsten" or 3200K in Breeze Browser, which is what I use for RAW conversion.


Fluorescent definitely looks "better" and more "correct".

On White Balance...

Well, the idea that I'd shoot some photos last night at the Cedar Park game (did I mention that the Pirates won, 59-6? No? Well, they did..) while it was "before it was fully dark" turned out to be nonsense. When I got to the high school at 6:30 pm it *was* dark and the only light was the field lights.

Decided to set the white balance at "fluorescent" or 4000K as a compromise/experiment because that's the same color temperature as "standard" metal halide lights, and I figured that having all the photos shot to the same white balance would be better than "Auto" since if fluorescent was off, I could correct duing RAW conversion.

We'll see: I'm burning the *. Cr2 files to DVD right now...