Fun with Lightroom
Posted by SpikeDec 8
I’m about as far away from being expert in Adobe Lightroom as can be. But I’m working at it, you know?
I have a legit installation of Lightroom on my MacBook but a, um, un-legit version on my PC. Which is not the best set-up because I prefer to edit photos on my PC – no special or logical reason.
So Lightroom 2.4 doesn’t load Panasonic RW2 files. And I don’t feel like spending time learning the software that comes packaged with the Panasonic camera – which will only output in JPG, not do simple conversions. Which means I could use Adobe’s DNG converter. Fortunately, the public beta of Lightroom 3 does load RW2.
I thought the colors in the JPG looked kind of flat. I finally got around to loading the Lightroom 3 beta and loading the RW2 files into it. Anyway, here’s the very first shot that I took with the Panasonic GF-1, about a week ago, RAW, straight outta the camera. Nothing special about the photo, just using it as an example.
Here it is again, after playing around with it in Lightroom for 10 minutes.
The biggest problem I have with Lightroom is knowing when to stop. And having time to really work on the hundreds of photos I take each week. But I save everything – as I said to a friend, “Who knows, maybe two years from now blurry poorly-lit photos might come into fashion!”




4 comments
Comment by Richard on December 8, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Oversaturated (green sign in particular). My experience with LightRoom/Aperture is that you go through a saturation phase, and then you start thinking that all your photos look unreal (rather than “pop”) so you go back dial the saturation down.
Comment by Spike on December 8, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to stop. I brought up the green to bring up the green tiles. But in all honesty, the green on that sign doesn’t bug me.
Comment by Don Quixote on December 8, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Probably shows my inexperience… but I like a little over-saturation.
Hyper-real I call it. And if I’m the one taking the pictures, they should look how I like.
Comment by Richard on December 9, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Absolutely each to their own. My preference is now for slightly “softer” images (less sharpening, increased but not-too-much saturation), but hey my images are probably too soft for many.