Lightroom Classic CC Update 7.5

Lightroom Classic CC Update 7.5 – August 22nd 2018

lightroom update 7.5

This morning I updated Lightroom Classic CC to the latest version 7.5.

And likewise I suggest you all do the same thing.

It’s not very often you hear or see me being very positive about Lightroom, but this latest iteration has me impressed for sure.

There has been the usual added camera support, together with some fangled update to the book module with some new Blurb templates – but that’s all inconsequential in my eyes and just so much froofroo.

No, the big improvement on all 3 of my machines here is one of SPEED.

And in particular, large catalogue load-speed.

I have one particular catalogue that sits on a raided pair of hard drives, and it contains just under 70,000 images.

This catalogue normally takes quite some time to open fully and it’s something of a torture-test for Lightroom.

But as of this mornings update not any more it would seem – the catalogue opened and all 69,865 previews were in place in under 10 seconds.

So would I recommend you install this latest update?

You betcha I would….always bearing in mind that Lightroom is notorious for varied performance on different individual systems – so I accept ZERO, NIL, NADA, нуль responsibility!

One negative thing that DID occur twice, but I couldn’t replicate in the video nor since – the infamous PANEL BLACKOUT.

They usually occur in the Develop module and your left and right panels just ‘black out’, and all you can see is your image.

If you do suffer a panel blackout though, don’t panic!

Just hit the G key to take you back to the Library Grid View then hit the D key to go back to the Develop module – you should get your panels back immediately.

I’ll keep you updated if I find any problems over the next few days and weeks, and if you have any problems just let me know.

Here’s the video on YouTube:

ETTR High Contrast Scene Processing.

ETTR High Contrast Scene Processing.

When faced with a high contrast scene like this most photographers would automatically resort to bracketing shots.

Sometimes you will be in a situation where shooting a bracketed sequence is difficult or impossible.

But a single image exposed to the right of the histogram – ETTR – where highlights are recorded at their maximum level of exposure can allow the camera sensor to capture far more detail in the darker areas than Lightroom will allow you to see at first glance.

Exposing to the right (of the in-camera histogram) correctly means that you expose the brightest scene highlights AS HIGHLIGHTS.

But it’s a balancing act between exposing them fully, and ‘blowing’ them.

Getting the ETTR exposure correct invariably means that the sensor receives MORE exposure across all tonal ranges, so you end up with more usefully recoverable shadow detail too.

In this video I show you a full Lightroom and Photoshop workflow to produce a noise-free image from a raw file exposed in just such a way.

Members of my Patreon site can download the all the workflow steps together with the raw file so that they can follow my processing, and perhaps come up with their own versions too!

My Membership site on Patreon

Lumenzia Plugin for Photoshop: https://getdpd.com/cart/hoplink/21529?referrer=c0vpzfhvq7ks8cw8c

Lumenzia + Comprehensive Training: https://getdpd.com/cart/hoplink/21529?referrer=c0vpzfhvq7ks8cw8c&p=165704

Just to keep you up to speed on my video channel, here’s my previous video from last week which illustrates how I do my dust-spot and blemish removal in Photoshop:

ETTR Processing in Lightroom

ETTR Processing in Lightroom

When we shoot ETTR (expose to the right) in bright, harsh light, Lightroom can sometimes get the wrong idea and make a real ‘hash’ of rendering the raw file.

Sometimes it can be so bad that the less experienced photographer can get the wrong impression of their raw file exposure – and in some extreme cases they may even ‘bin’ the image thinking it irretrievably over exposed.

I’ve just uploaded a video to my YouTube channel which shows you exactly what I’m talking about:

The image was shot by my client and patron Paul Smith when he visited the Mara back in October last year,  and it’s a superb demo image of just how badly Lightroom can demosaic a straight forward +1.6 Ev ETTR shot.

Importing the raw file directly into Lightroom gives us this:

ETTR

But importing the raw file directly into RawTherapee with no adjustments gives us this:

ETTR

Just look at the two histogram versions – Lightroom is doing some crazy stuff to the image ‘in the background’ as there are ZERO develop settings applied.

But if you watch the video you’ll see that it’s quite straight forward to regain all that apparent ‘blown detail’.

And here’s the important bit – we do so WITHOUT the use of the shadow or highlight recovery sliders.  Anyone who has purchased my sharpening videos HERE knows that those two sliders can VERY EASILY cause undesirable ‘pseudo-sharpening’ halos, and they should only be used with caution.

ETTR

The way I process this +1.6 stop ETTR exposure inside Lightroom has revealed all the superb mid tone detail and given us a really good image that we could take into Photoshop and improve with some precision localized adjustments.

So don’t let Lightroom control you – you need to control IT!

Thanks for reading and watching.

You can also view this post on the free section of my Patreon pages HERE

If you feel this article and video has been beneficial to you and would like to see more per week, then supporting my Patreon page for as little as $1 per month would be a massive help.  Thanks everyone!

 

Lightroom 7.4 Update June 2018

Lightroom 7.4 Update June 2018

We’ve just had a new update for Lightroom Classic CC which upgrades us to Lightroom  7.4

I’ve just made a short video about how we can make use of one of the updates main features to tidy up those Profiles in the profile browser of the Develop module.

You can see the video here:

My Thoughts:

Being able to manage the visibility of those profile groups in the develop module is a real bonus, because if nothing else, it frees up screen real-estate.

We still can’t stop the ‘hover preview’ of any profile – a LOT of people on the Adobe forums have found this very annoying over the last 2 months since the issue of v7.3

You CAN turn it off under the  Lightroom Preferences>Performance tab – but this is for presets only – it doesn’t turn the hover preview off for profiles.

Lightroom 7.4

We can also add color labels to folders, and search folders.  Some people might find this useful, especially those who work in one master catalogue, and some like me find this update ‘window dressing Fru-Fru’ – a new technical term there folks!

Lightroom 7.4 now supports HEVC and HEIF images and video from the latest Apple iOS systems and devices.

And the forth ‘improvement’ applies to Photomerge HDR and Pano where the end merge result can be stacked on top of the component images.  As I say in the video, this is possibly the answer to a question no one was asking – I’ve not seen a single request for this on any of the the Lightroom forums in the last 2 months.

So watch the video and explore the update on your own machine – you might be more impressed than I am!  But at least Adobe haven’t broken Lightroom 7.4 anymore than it was already, so let’s be thankful for small mercies ehh!

Color Temperature

Lightroom Color Temperature (or Colour Temperature if you spell correctly!)

“Andy – why the heck is Lightrooms temperature slider the wrong way around?”

That’s a question that I used to get asked quite a lot, and it’s started again since I mentioned it in passing a couple of posts ago.

The short answer is “IT ISN”T….it’s just you who doesn’t understand what it is and how it functions”.

But in order to give the definitive answer I feel the need to get back to basics though – so here goes.

The Spectrum Locus

Let’s get one thing straight from the start – LOCUS is just a posh word for PATH!

Visible light is just part of the electro-magnetic energy spectrum typically between 380nm (nanometers) and 700nm:

Color Temperature

In the first image below is what’s known as the Spectrum Locus – as defined by the CIE (Commission Internationale de l´Eclairage or International Commission on Illumination).

In a nutshell the locus represents the range of colors visible to the human eye – or I should say chromaticities:

Color Temperature

The blue numbers around the locus are simply the nanometer values from that same horizontal scale above. The reasoning behind the unit values of the x and y axis are complex and irrelevant to us in this post, otherwise it’ll go on for ages.

The human eye is a fickle thing.

It will always perceive, say, 255 green as being lighter than 255 red or 255 blue, and 255 blue as being the darkest of the three.  And the same applies to any value of the three primaries, as long as all three are the same.

Color Temperature

This stems from the fact that the human eye has around twice the response to green light as it does red or blue – crazy but true.  And that’s why your camera sensor – if it’s a Bayer type – has twice the number of green photosites on it as red or blue.

In rather over-simplified terms the CIE set a standard by which all colors in the visible spectrum could be expressed in terms of ‘chromaticity’ and ‘brightness’.

Brightness can be thought of as a grey ramp from black to white.

Any color space is a 3 dimensional shape with 3 axes x, y and z.

Z is the grey ramp from black to white, and the shape is then defined by the colour positions in terms of their chromaticity on the x and y axes, and their brightness on the z axis:

Color Temperature

But if we just take the chromaticity values of all the colours visible to the human eye we end up with the CIE1931 spectrum locus – a two dimensional plot if you like, of the ‘perceived’ color space of human vision.

Now here’s where the confusion begins for the majority of ‘uneducated photographers’ – and I mean that in the nicest possible way, it’s not a dig!

Below is the same spectrum locus with an addition:

Color Temperature

This additional TcK curve is called the Planckian Locus, or dark body locus.  Now please don’t give up here folks, after all you’ve got this far, but it’ll get worse before it gets better!

The Planckian Locus simply represents the color temperature in degrees Kelvin of the colour emitted by a ‘dark body’ – think lump of pure carbon – as it is heated.  Its color temperature begins to visibly rise as its thermal temperature rises.

Up to a certain thermal temperature it’ll stay visibly black, then it will begin to glow a deep red.  Warm it up some more and the red color temperature turns to orange, then yellow and finally it will be what we can call ‘white hot’.

So the Planckian Locus is the 2D chromaticity plot of the colours emitted by a dark body as it is heated.

Here’s point of confusion number 1: do NOT jump to the conclusion that this is in any way a greyscale. “Well it starts off BLACK and ends up WHITE” – I’ve come across dozens of folk who think that – as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing indeed!

What the Planckian Locus IS indicative of though is WHITE POINT.

Our commonly used colour management white points of D65, D55 and D50 all lie along the Planckian Locus, as do all the other CIE standard illumimant types of which there’s more than few.

The standard monitor calibration white point of D65 is actually 6500 Kelvin – it’s a standardized classification for ‘mean Noon Daylight’, and can be found on the Spectrum Locus/Plankckian Locus at 0.31271x, 0.32902y.

D55 or 5500 Kelvin is classed as Mid Morning/Mid Afternoon Daylight and can be found at 0.33242x, 0.34743y.

D50 or 5000 kelvin is classed as Horizon Light with co-ordinates of 0.34567x, 0.35850.

But we can also equate Planckian Locus values to our ‘picture taking’ in the form of white balance.

FACT: The HIGHER the color temperature the BLUER the light, and lower color temperatures shift from blue to yellow, then orange (studio type L photofloods 3200K), then more red (standard incandescent bulb 2400K) down to candle flame at around 1850K).  Sunset and sunrise are typically standardized at 1850K and LPS Sodium street lights can be as low as 1700K.

And a clear polar sky can be upwards of 27,000K – now there’s blue for you!

And here’s where we find confusion point number 2!

Take a look at this shot taken through a Lee Big Stopper:

Color Temperature

I’m an idle git and always have my camera set to a white balance of Cloudy B1, and here I’m shooting through a filter that notoriously adds a pretty severe bluish cast to an image anyway.

If you look at the TEMP and TINT sliders you will see Cloudy B1 is interpreted by Lightroom as 5550 Kelvin and a tint of +5 – that’s why the notation is ‘AS SHOT’.

Officially a Cloudy white balance is anywhere between 6000 Kelvin and 10,000 kelvin depending on your definition, and I’ve stuck extra blue in there with the Cloudy B1 setting, which will make the effective temperature go up even higher.

So either way, you can see that Lightrooms idea of 5550 Kelvin is somewhat ‘OFF’ to say the least, but it’s irrelevant at this juncture.

Where the real confusion sets in is shown in the image below:

Color Temperature

“Andy, now you’ve de-blued the shot why is the TEMP slider value saying 8387 Kelvin ? Surely it should be showing a value LOWER than 5550K – after all, tungsten is warm and 3200K”….

How right you are…..and wrong at the same time!

What Lightroom is saying is that I’ve added YELLOW to the tune of 8387-5550 or 2837.

FACT – the color temperature controls in Lightroom DO NOT work by adjusting the Planckian or black body temperature of light in our image.  They are used to COMPENSATE for the recorded Planckian/black body temperature.

If you load in image in the develop module of Lightroom and use any of the preset values, the value itself is ball park correct(ish).

The Daylight preset loads values of 5500K and +10. The Shade preset will jump to 7500K and +10, and Tungsten will drop to 2850K and +/-0.

But the Tungsten preset puts the TEMP slider in the BLUE part of the slider Blue/Yellow graduated scale, and the Shade preset puts the slider in the YELLOW side of the scale, thus leading millions of people into mistakenly thinking that 7500K is warmer/yellower than 2850K when it most definitely is NOT!

This kind of self-induced bad learning leaves people wide open to all sorts of misunderstandings when it comes to other aspects of color theory and color management.

My advice has always been the same, just ignore the numbers in Lightroom and do your adjustments subjectively – do what looks right!

But for heaven sake don’t try and build an understanding of color temperature based on the color balance control values in Lightroom – otherwise you get in one heck of a mess.

 

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