Image Retouching

 Image Retouching in Photoshop CC 2014

It’s very rare that we ever get a frame from our camera that doesn’t need retouching – that’s a FACT.

Imperfections in the frame can be both ‘behind the shutter’ and ‘in front of the lens’ – sensor dust and crud on the subject.  But you’ll take photographs where these imperfections are hard, if not impossible, to see under normal viewing.

But print that image BIG and those invisible faults will begin to be visually apparent; by which time it’s too bloomin’ late and they’ve cost you money; or worse still, a client.

The ‘visualise spots’ tool in Lightroom will show you a certain amount of ‘dust bunny’ type faults and errors, but the way Lightroom executes retouching repairs is not always ‘quite up to snuff’; and when it comes to dust, crap and other undesirables on the subject itself Lightroom will fail to recognise them in the first place.

Image retouching isn’t really all that difficult; but it can be an intensely tedious and time-consuming process.

To that end I’ve stuck these HD video lessons on my You Tube channel.

In these videos I illustrate how I deploy the Spot Healing brush, Healing Brush, Clone Tool, Patch Tool and Content Aware Fill command to carry out some basic image retouching on a shot of cutlery bright ware.

I demonstrate the addition of a ‘dust visibility’ curves adjustment layer – something that everyone should ‘get the hang’ of using – as a first step to effective image retouching.

When photographing glossy, high reflectivity subjects we need to remove the imperfections and smooth the surfaces of the subject without reducing the ‘glossiness’ and turning it matt!

Please note: a couple of these videos are in excess of 20 minutes duration and they will look better at full resolution HDV if you click the You Tube icon. Also, it takes a lot longer to do a job when you have to talk about at the same time!

I hope you get some idea as to how simple and straightforward my approach to image retouching is!

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Lightroom CC 2015 Crash Fix.

***Attention – if you are looking for help with the problems associated with Lightroom CC 2015/Lightroom 6 version 2.0 – October 2015 – then please go to this latest post page HERE and scroll down the page for the Temporary FIX.  This Lightrom crash fix/rollback method applies to both Mac & PC users***

Lightroom CC 2015 Crash & Performance Issues – (first release).

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There are a great many folk out there experiencing crash or freeze problems with the new Lightroom CC 2015.

The biggest problem, and the one that has effected me, is random crashing in the Develop Module, and a ‘jittery’ crop rotation tool.

If you have suffered from this then you will most likely have an ‘not too new’ nVidea GPU – or so it would appear.

Lightroom CC 2015 makes use of the graphics GPU acceleration on your computer, and this is ‘turned ON’ by default upon installation of the application.

But it seems that older nVidea chipsets are causing some quite considerable speed reduction problems, to the point where the application can run out of ram and basically crash.

Adobe are supposed to be creating a fix (according to the forums) but you can get around the problem really easily.

Open up Lightroom CC 2015 and go to your Lightroom preferences:

Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

On the preferences panel you’ll see a new tab called ‘Performance’

Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

You will see a checked ‘tick box’ for Use Graphics Processor – UNTICK IT, close the preferences panel and restart Lightroom CC 2015.

I’m on a mid-2009 Mac Pro running 10.10.3 Yosemite and a bog standard (for the day) nVidea Geforce GT120 512Mb graphics card.

Lightroom CC 2015 was slower than Lr5 on this machine, it would crash, the crop tool occasionally looked like it was a ‘motor neurone’ sufferer, and the heal/clone tool was harsh, pixelated and quite slow.

Turning OFF GPU acceleration has seemingly cured all my woes, and now it runs as smoothly as Lightroom 5 did but with the Photomerge options and other benefits of Lightroom CC 2015.

On that same performance tab there is a ‘system info’ button you can press that’ll give you the specifications of your machine and Lightroom installation:

Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

The word ‘Passed’ next to the Open GL support means nothing, and if you you click the ‘Learn More’ link on the performance tab of Lightroom preferences it’ll take you to THIS PAGE on the Adobe support website.

On that page you will see this:

Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

Now this explains A LOT!

Running a standard (sub 2K) 24″ monitor with sub 1Gb of VRAM, even with updated driver support for Open GL 3.3, means you are running at a resolution of 1920 pixels long edge and in effect you will not really benefit from Lightroom CC 2015 GPU acceleration in the first place.

I’m also running Lightroom CC 2015 on a mid 2011 27″ non-retina iMac with a horizontal resolution of 2560 pixels and an ATI Radion HD 6770M 512Mb graphics chipset.  This machine hasn’t crashed as such, but is certainly better run with the GPU acceleration turned OFF too.

Here is a very rough test you can do:

  1. Open a FULL RESOLUTION image in the Develop module.
  2. Pick up the Heal/Clone tool and set it to Heal with the opacity & feather controls to 100%
  3. Paint a random stroke on the image, and while painting, look carefully at the white edges of the stroke – are they smooth and feathered, or harsh and slightly granular?
  4. If they are the latter the go and turn OFF GPU acceleration and repeat the process – you will see the edges of the stroke look much better.
Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

Click to view LARGER

So, think of it this way; Adobe have put a facility into Lightroom 6/CC 2015 that makes use of very latest up to date computer graphics systems AND it’s ‘active’ by default.

If you run a new iMac 27″ Retina then you are running 5120 pixels on the long edge – that’s 5K graphics, and the new GPU acceleration will help you.

If your system fails to meet the operating criteria then having the acceleration active will cause you problems.  The severity of the problems you experience will be proportional to how ‘out of date’ your graphics are; so TURN IT OFF !

I can’t speak about installations of Lightroom CC 2015 under the Windows operating systems, but looking at the forums it seems that the same sort of problems exist for PC users.

A friend called this morning saying that the default installation ran smoothly and at warp-speed on his new retina macbook, but was noticeably slower than Lightroom 5 on his desktop PC – same problem, same fix.

Crash and slow-down problems with Lightroom CC 2015 are not OS problems – they are GPU VRAM/RAM problems, so don’t waste your time defraging hard drives and running system ‘junk checks’ if Lightroom 5 ran well.

 

Lightroom CC 2015 Launch Hang Problem?

Lightroom CC 2015, crash fix, speed fix, slow down fix, clone tool,heal tool,crop tool fix, Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,Creative Cloud,Photography Package,bug fix,Lightroom,Photoshop

If you are experiencing launch hang, splash screen hang or crashing of the application on launch then GO HERE where you’ll see the instructions in the image above.

Kyle Bailey kindly sent me a solution/fix for a windows crash fix if you literally can’t uncheck the graphics acceleration check box:

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Andrew, but I couldn’t untick the graphics processor box –Lightroom would crash when I tried. I just spent a couple hours with tech support and thought I’d share our solution:

Close LR first. Open device manager, double click on display adapters, right-click your graphics card (mine was AMD Radeon), choose install drivers, browse system, pick from list. Make NOTE of which is currently active, then change it to standard VGA. It may prompt you to reboot, but don’t do it.

This will make the screen look crazy, but don’t worry! Now, open LR, untick the graphics box, and close LR.

Finally, go back into device manager and change it back to the original driver and viola. Next time you start LR, the box will remain unticked.

Cheers for that Kyle.

 

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