Dive Photography: Lightroom, Developing Yr Wizardry at Photo Development - PUBLISHED by Asian Divers

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HOW IT WORKS

Lightroom 101

Developing Your Wizardry at Photo Development Sometimes all it takes is a little tweak to realise how good your underwater or topside photos can be.

Text and Photos: Lawrence Alex Wu

Once you’ve had a chance to sort through and rate your photos, colour and flag them, you’ll have to figure out if your images have great potential. In this installment, we will take you through the Develop module and reveal your photos as they acquire that “wow” factor.

The Develop module is where you will see your photos change before your eyes. Some of its features are considered software wizardry and some are from traditional film darkroom techniques.

Whatever it is, the magic of beautiful photos is now within your grasp at the flick of the mouse. So adjust to your heart’s content and fear not, as all the changes made in Lightroom never change your original files’ image data – all thanks to Adobe Lightroom’s groundbreaking non-destructive editing feature.

Not only can you reset the changes to any of your photos anytime you want, but any Lightroom change to your photos will only take up a few extra bytes (a fraction of a megabyte) on your computer for each photo. My workflow used to involve the original, a couple of duplicates and a photoshop file: with Lightroom, my average 50mb usage has been reduced to around 10mb per photo!

Fig. 1 - In the crop view, your photo is surrounded by crop borders and inside there may or may not be crop grid lines too (See TIPS).

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PHOTO CROPPING Cropping is an essential tool for correcting and finding new compositions. After all, framing your composition on the horizon is not the easiest while swaying on a boat or shooting underwater in surge or current. To crop a photo in either the Library or Develop module, select View > Crop > Crop in Develop. This will setup the image in the Develop module ready for cropping and minor rotating, with crop borders around the edge of your photo (Fig. 1).

The simplest crop method is to select the new crop area you want with a mouse click-and-hold from one corner of the desired crop area to the opposite corner and then releasing the mouse (Fig. 2). To move the image within the crop, click-and-hold the photo portion inside the crop borders. To accept a crop, double click within the crop borders or press the Enter key. To reset the crop, select Settings > Reset Crop at anytime – of course, there is the ever present Ctrl + z to undo.

To rotate your photo, move your cursor outside the crop borders and it will change to the rotate cursor, a slight curve with arrows on each end. Once you have this, you can click, hold-

Fig. 2 – Make a simple crop selection of the photo using the mouse.

Fig. 3 - Lightroom automatically resizes the horizontal and vertical borders of your photo when rotating in crop view.

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and-drag your mouse and watch the photo realign itself and its borders with your mouse movements (Fig. 3). If you need to rotate more than 90 degrees, then use the Photo > Rotate Left / Rotate Right function first.

To align horizons, hold down your Ctrl key and watch your cursor reappear over your photo as a ruler and crosshairs – yet another magic trick. Use this new cursor to click-and-hold on one side of a horizon, while moving your mouse to the opposite side of the horizon. Accurately align the cursor to the same horizontal level (Fig. 4) from where you first clicked and then release the mouse button and Voilà! Your photo now has a horizontal horizon line!

To crop from the sides, you can click-and-hold on any of the crop borders or corners of the photo and change accordingly. If you want the cropped aspect ratio maintained, then ensure that the Settings > Constrain Aspect Ratio is checked. My preference is to leave this unchecked and just hold the Shift key down to keep the aspect ratio. Similarly, if you hold the Alt key down while cropping, the crop will start from the centre of the cropped area.

Fig. 4 - For best results when using the align tool in the crop view, select the greatest distance possible between the two points.

Fig. 5 – Find the Basic panel on the right hand of Lightroom’s window.

DEVELOP’S RIGHT PANEL

The Basic panel (Fig. 5) on the right hand edge of the Lightroom’s Develop module is used to fine-tune all the light and colour characteristics that can make your photo pop. And although there is much science and theory about light and colour, do not forget that the most essential tool for your photos is your eye!

The simplest way to see what the Develop module can do is to experiment with the settings and watch your image change.

Starting from the top of the Basic panel and working down is usually a good approach but with more experience, you will know what areas you prefer to target first for different photos. To adjust a setting, drag its slider pointer along its scale. With each adjustment setting, a common practice is to gradually adjust the setting further than what looks good. Then select the settings that look best and finally tone it back by just a few increments.

Before starting with these light and colour adjustments, your computer screens should ideally be “colour calibrated” Although this is a topic beyond the scope of this article, it is widely written about on the Internet.

Stepping out of the tricks and wizardry for a brief moment and into some theory on the Basic panel’s settings (Fig. 5), turn the page for some suggested types of photos to try with each setting to see the adjustment results.

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HOW IT WORKS

Fig. 6 - Batch pasting adjustments settings from one photo to a group of other photos to save on tedious repetitive tasks.

Fig. 7 - The Before/After view makes comparing different changes and snapshots of a photo very simple.

Fig. 8 - In Before/After view, a top/ bottom split gives you close-up comparisons of the changes.

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Lightroom 101

Temp and Tint – Controls the colour cast, warmth or coolness of your photo, also known as your white balance. Consider bluish underwater photos as “cool” photos and sunset-lit shots of people “warm” photos. Try this on photos with too much of one colour – either too blue or too orange.

Exposure – Increases or decreases the exposure and affects mostly the bright to very bright parts of a photo. Try this on photos that are too bright or too dark.

Recovery – Brings back details to over-exposed parts of a photo.

Try this on land or underwater shots with the sun or a very bright light source in the background.

Fill Light – Adds some light and detail to your dark colours and shadowed areas. Try this on bright background shots where people in front are in the shadow.

Blacks – Darkens the dark areas without affecting the lighter areas. Its effect can be similar to adding contrast. Try this on washed out photos with pale and dull colours.

Brightness – Affects all areas except the very bright and very dark areas. Best used sparingly. Try this on night shots of friends using a flash in an indoor setting.

Contrast – Increases the difference between light and dark edges creating lines that are more distinct. Try this on detailed patterns such as close-ups of macro animals.

Clarity – Enhances details when increased, but softens when decreased. Increase with coral shots to enhance detail and decrease on mug shots of people for softer looking skin.

Vibrance – Intensifies light colours while protecting skin tones.

Very useful and more subtle than Saturation. Try this on portraits, washed-out blue skies and dull underwater scenery.

Saturation – Intensifies all the colours and is best used in conjunction with Vibrance albeit always sparingly. Try on colourful images or very dull-coloured photos.

Now suppose you have a group of photos all taken with similar lighting conditions. With one of these photos adjusted to your liking, it would make sense that photos in the same group would need similar adjustments. Lightroom achieves this in only a few clicks: with the adjusted photo selected in the Develop module, choose Settings > Copy Settings, then in the new Copy Settings window select the adjustments that you want to copy – usually, I click the Check All button then deselect some adjustments – then click the Copy button. Now select the group of photos that needs the same adjustments – easily done in Grid view by selecting photos and holding down the Shift or Ctrl keys – choose Photo > Develop Settings > Paste Settings (Fig. 6).

Remember though: having a book of spells doesn’t mean you need to use them all at once. Often, photos need only a slight tweak and sometimes none at all. Practice adjusting photos and you will develop an eye for what is needed.

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Fig. 9 – A set of different Grid Overlays to help you build composition when cropping.

DEVELOPING THROUGH TIME

TIPS

For assistance on the changes made, select View > Before / After > Left / Right (Fig. 7): these sets of comparison views in the Before / After menu help you see the differences your settings have made. It is a quick way to judge whether the changes you have applied improve your photo or not.

Next, let’s take a look at the time-recording History Panel.

Situated at the bottom of the left set of Develop panels, the History panel (Fig. 8) saves ALL incremental changes to your photos. So to view a photo’s historical steps in time, Right click on one of the steps under the History panel and select Copy History Step Setting to Before and presto, you can make comparisons with changes you’ve made to your image at any given time.

However, if a particular History step appeals strongly to you, then Right click on the History step and select Create Snapshot.

Snapshots are a great way to compare sets of changes that you might want to undo in the end. Each new snapshot created will appear in the Snapshots panel just above the History panel and you can also right click on a Snapshot and Copy Snapshot Settings to Before for comparison.

Now, suppose you want to keep two different sets of changes to the same photo. In other programmes, you would have had to duplicate the file and apply the separate changes, which would also double your memory cache. Lightroom however, has yet another trick up its sleeve. Select the photo that you want two copies of and choose Photo > Create Virtual Copy. With this new virtual copy, you can apply a series of crop settings and adjustments to your hearts’ content. And even with other instances of the same photo, the space saving Lightroom will only occupy a few bytes instead of taking up more megabytes on your hard drive!

• When cropping, a locked padlock icon above the Basic panel means that the crop aspect ratio is locked (Fig. 10).

• Use the Alt and Shift keys to constrain at any time in the cropping process and not just at the start of a crop.

• While in crop mode, select View > Crop Guide Overlay then one of overlay templates to assist you in your crop composition.

You can cycle through these templates by pressing the “o” key for common composition arrangements (Fig. 9) and Shift + “o” keys to orientate the non-symmetrical overlays.

• The Crop Reset button is different to the Develop module’s Reset button (Fig. 10), which resets ALL adjustment settings.

• Use the ‘\’ (backslash) key to toggle and compare Before and After views of the same photo in the same frame.

• There is no need to stop at only one virtual copy of a photo, create as many as you like.

• If you want to compare crops of an image, create a virtual copy, apply a different crop then in the Grid view with the two photos selected, select View > Survey to compare and Esc to cancel.

Lawrence Alex Wu is a freelance photographer and instructor based in Southeast Asia. Since 1996, he has dived into underwater photography with the digital camera revolution and has yet to come up for air. With over a dozen international underwater photographic awards since 2005, his underwater work has been shot with only digital compacts.

Fig. 10 - The crop panel only appears in the crop view and includes a locked padlock indicating that the aspect ratio is locked.

Number of dives to date: 3,000+

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