LR - What's New in Lightroom 3

[What's New in ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 3 with Julieanne Kost] Hello and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost and in this tutorial, we're going to take a look at all of the new features and enhancements to Lightroom 3. Now, there's a lot to cover, so let's get started. What we found was that most photographers import their photos either directly from their card, or they copy their files from the card to the hard drive and add the files to Lightroom without moving them, so let's take a look at both scenarios and see how Lightroom 3 can help to expedite the process. I'll click Import so we can take a tour through the newly redesigned Import dialog box. You can see over here on the left-hand side is our source. Lightroom knows that there's a card reader attached, so it's automatically going to show me the contents of that card reader. However, I could also navigate and find another folder if I wanted to import from a different location, but for now, let's stick with the card. In the center area here, you can see the images in grid view. If I wanted to zoom in on an image, I simply double-click on it to take it to loupe view. Here, I can zoom in and pan around, check focus, and when I'm finished, I can either tap the G key to go back to grid view or click the icon in the lower left. If I only want to import a select number of images, I can quickly uncheck them all and then holding down the Command or Control key, select the images that I want to import and then click the checkbox in order to import the selected images. I can also sort by this checked state if I wanted to see all of the images that I had selected up at the top. For now, I want to bring in all of my images, so I'll check all and go back to sorting by capture time. Now, let's take a look at two improvements made to file renaming. You'll notice that in the template area, we have two new templates: a Shoot Name and a Sequence and a Shoot Name and Original File Number. Both of these allow me to enter in a custom shoot name; maybe something like Time Lapse, or if you're shooting for a client, you could enter the client's name. You can then enter in your start number or just simply have Lightroom start at 1. The second template has the same options for the shoot name, but it's going to keep the original file name in the image. So for example, with this image, it would get rid of the _mg_ but it would keep the 4864, and we can see an example of that right here. All right, let's choose our destination. Now, obviously, I can navigate down through my folder structure here and select a folder, but I can also use the shortcut if I go to commonly used areas or if I'm constantly going to the same paths, so I'll select that. Now, if I want to organize my images into a subfolder and choose to organize that by date, we can see that Lightroom can be very smart about this. Instead of choosing my 2009 folder, I'll just move up one folder, and then because these images were photographed in 2009, Lightroom is smart enough not to duplicate that 2009 folder but instead add a subfolder for me, so that's an excellent improvement. Now, if you just want to organize into one folder and you want to rename that folder, we can do that as well. So let's call it Time Lapse and I want to put this inside the Yellowstone folder so I'll select that, and Lightroom gives me this nice preview so that I can just double-check what it is I'm doing. All right, once we've got this set up, what I'm going to do is come down to the bottom and I'm going to save the current settings as a new preset so that next time, I don't have to redo all of this, and I'll call this one Import From Card. I'll click Create, and that has now become my import preset. Two more things to quickly note: first of all, in the lower left-hand side, I actually get a photo count as well as a file size for my import and you can see that I can eject my card after import. All right, let's go ahead and import these images. So that's the first way that many photographers import their files, but let's take a look at the second scenario. I'll go back into the Import dialog box, and this time, instead of importing from a card, I'm going to import or I'm going to add my images from my hard drive. So I need to go to my desktop, to my photographs, to 2009, and I'll select the West Palm Beach folder. Now, there are a lot of extraneous folders here that I really don't need to look at, so if I want to concentrate just on my photographs folder because that's where I often navigate, I can double-click on photographs and it will dock all the rest of those folders so that I don't have to look at them. Okay. We're back in West Palm Beach. This time, I simply want to add the photos without moving them or anything, and I really don't need to change any of the other options here except maybe some keywords. For example, I might want to type in Miami. Now, I'm going to save this as my second preset. This time, I'll call it Add Photos Inline. I'll click Create, and that has added it to my presets. Excellent. Now, one last thing to show you before I import these, and that's the compact view. In the lower left-hand corner, if I click on this little triangle pointing up, you can see that I shrink down my Import dialog box from the expanded view to compact view, but the great thing about this is that I can select from my different presets that I've created and if there are any variables in those presets, I can change them. So for example, next time I import, I can look at the compact view, choose my preset, and then change things like my keywords. Or if I was adding files from a card, I could change my destination. So the presets in this compact view I think will really help photographers expedite their workflow because you really can't make very many mistakes. All you need to do is go in and change the variables that you've already set up-- the ones that are important to you. All right, let's go ahead and import these other images from disk. Excellent, let's move over to the develop module and take a look at what's new. Now, I realize that I'm not working with the correct set of files, but new to the develop module is the ability to change your collections, so let's change to the work in progress. Now, that's one place that you can change your folders, but you can also select right here all of your different favorite sources as well as your recent sources, so don't forget that that's available at the top of the film strip. In Lightroom 3, we made such vast improvements to the way that we demosaic, the way that we sharpen and the way that we reduce noise in images that we actually came up with a new process version. Now, we don't update your legacy files automatically, so that they're still reproducible just like they were in Lightroom 2; however, all of the new files that you import will automatically be moved to the higher quality processing version. So if you're working with an image in Lightroom 3 that you have already processed in Lightroom 2, you'll notice an exclamation mark down in the lower right-hand corner. I can update this process version one of many ways. I could go to the Settings menu and say Update to Current Process, I could select it from the list here, I could even go down to Camera Calibration and choose from the list, but I think it's really easier if we simply click on the exclamation mark. However, before I do that, I want to show the difference between the older process version and the newer process version so let's go into the detail area. I'll also want to zoom in to 100 percent to make sure that we're looking at the image, especially these fine-detailed areas of the image. So I think it looks good using the older technology; however, when I increase my sharpening, we start to see that in these high-frequency areas that the image almost takes on like a painterly look using the older technology. So let's go ahead and update it. I'm going to review my changes via before and after, click Update, and let's hide the panel here so we get a little bit more area to view. Now, we can see the difference with the older technology here on the left and the newer technology on the right. You can see that we're holding information even when we increase that sharpening. So I'm hoping that this will actually hold up after this tutorial is resized down and also compressed, but if you can't see the difference, I would strongly encourage that you try this on your own files. All right, let's go back and view a single image and then move to the next image because I definitely want to show you the difference with noise reduction as well. I'll just move over here a little bit so that we can see some flat areas that have noise as well as some detail areas in the image. I want to update the process version. The easiest way to do this, I think, is to hold down the Option key if you want to bypass that dialog box. That would be the Alt key on Windows. And now, you can see in the detail panel that the color noise and the luminance noise has been split so we can reduce the color noise in the image while still maintaining the saturation, but without touching the luminance noise. If we need to decrease the noise in the luminance value, I'll use the slider. Now, if we go too far, obviously, the image is going to start looking really flat, so I'll just back off a little bit. And then, if you have a really, really noisy image, you can use the detail and the contrast sliders to also improve the image. The detail slider will help preserve details in your image. The contrast slider is going to help preserve contrast; however, if you are working with skin tones, you might watch out because a high-contrast value may make those skin tones appear a little bit blotchy. In something like this where you have a wall that has texture, I actually prefer the added contrast. All right, let's take a look at before and after. There's without the noise reduction and with the noise reduction. Again, without and with. So dramatic improvements not only to the sharpening but also noise reduction. One other thing just to mention: if you do add sharpening, that sharpening is now visible even if you do not view your image at 100 percent. I would still apply the sharpening and I would still apply the noise reduction viewing your image at 100 percent, but you can see the results when you zoom out. Excellent. Let's move to this next image. As you can see, this image was taken with a wide angle lens and it is a little bit distorted here. You can see the lines of this little cabin do not go straight across, so let's move down to the new Lens Correction panel. Now, everything I do here in the develop module is non-destructive and you can change your mind at any time and this is fantastic because this is going to allow me to correct any distortions from the lens non-destructively, right here in Lightroom. So you'll notice there's two areas: there's a profile area and a manual area. All I need to do is click to enable the lens profile corrections and because Lightroom understands all of the XF data in the file, it knows what camera make and which model you're using and it will apply the correct profile for you. Now, when we ship, we're going to be supporting several of the Cannon and Nikon and Sigma lenses, but if you're using a camera and lens combination that doesn't have a profile, we're also going to be offering the Adobe Lens Profile Creator Tool, which is going to be a free utility and you can download it from Adobe Labs. It'll have directions to print out some test charts, how to photograph them, and then how to load the files into the Lens Profile Creator Tool to automatically create your own profiles and you can even share those custom-made profiles with the community. So that should be incredibly useful for folks who are using maybe the less-common lens and camera combinations. Now, let's go ahead and select this next series of images. I'll select the first one in the film strip, hold down the Shift key and select the rest of them, and I'll show my panel on the left-hand side because I want to scroll up to my presets. Now, not only could I just come over here to lens corrections and enable the Lens Profile Correction individually, but I can turn on the new Autosync button right down here so that whatever I do to this one image will be applied to all of my selected images and in fact, I display the left-hand side to show you that I can save any of my Lens Profile Corrections as a preset and then just apply them with a single click and all of those selected images have now been corrected. Now, moving on to this next image here, this I'm going to use to show not only the ability to enable the Lens Profile Correction but also to modify it. So let's go ahead and turn that on, and you can see what it did is it removed that chromatic aberration. I'll turn it off again in case you missed that. See these misaligned pixels here? The green magenta? That's because this is photographed with a wide-angle lens and sometimes in really contrasty situations, you will see this misalignment of pixels either having this kind of red-cyan or a blue-yellow misalignment. So enabling the Lens Profile Correction will go ahead and correct that, but you see right down here, not only did it correct the distortion in the chromatic aberration, it also corrected the vignetting. But I actually kind of liked the vignetting that I got in camera, so we allow you to override any of the options here. So when I move the slider towards the left, I'm actually telling Lightroom to ignore the vignetting portion of my profile-- to remove that, but to leave the distortion and chromatic aberration. Of course, I could also move it the other way. This is kind of like a volume slider, so I could tell it to actually remove even more of the vignetting. But in this case, I liked the original vignetting; I liked the dark edges. All right, let's scoot over to Manual as well because I would like to also manually correct the perspective of this image. Now, this is not the distortion from the lens. That was taken care of with the profile, but I didn't photograph this straight on, so I need to use the manual correction to actually correct the perspective. The distortion has been taken care of by the profile, but I am going to come down and change the vertical distortion a little bit as well as the horizontal. Maybe just increase that a bit, and obviously, we can go back and forth until we get this image nice and straight and exactly the way that we want it. Now, as we're moving this, you can see that there are now some areas that are solid gray on the left and right-hand side of the image. I could take this image into Photoshop and use the new Content Aware Fill in CS5, maybe to correct those, or I can use the option to simply constrain my crop, in which case, Lightroom will crop into the image so that we don't see those blank gray areas. And if we scroll down, you can see that I can also add a little bit more vignetting here if I wanted to as well. Okay, moving to the next series of images here, I'll select them all on the film strip, and then, let's take a look at the tone curve because I don't want you to miss this. In the lower area, you can see that there's a new point curve, and if I click on this icon, I now have the same type of curve that probably many of you are used to if you're using Photoshop. So I can just click and add a point anywhere on the curve. I can add this nice S-curve to add contrast to my image and of course, because I have the Autosync button, all of the images that were selected have that new tone curve. Now, I'll turn off Autosync, move to the next image, and we'll take a look at the new Effects area. You can see I've got my post-crop vignetting like before, but now I have three different styles to choose from. As I move my amount down--and I'll go a little too far here--but you'll notice that when I use the Highlight Priority, I get a very dramatic change in my image and I get an increase in saturation, which is fantastic with some images. However, with an image like this where I really have kind of a neutral value here and I don't want that neutral value to become more saturated, I'm going to switch over to the Color Priority. It's much more subtle, but obviously, I can dial in the amount, but still, even when I add a heavier vignette, if I have the style set to Color Priority, I don't get that increase in saturation. Okay, let's move to this image. I just want to remind folks because I typically see people add a dark vignette, but you can also add a light vignette. So in this case, I'm going to kind of make it much more square and add a little bit of a feather here. Of course, I could make it hard-edged, but I like the feather addition. And then, I'm going to zoom in to show you the new ability to add grain. So even though we let you take away noise, we also allow you to add a more film-like looking grain, so let's increase the amount here, and we can see that grain. You can see how it's kind of a natural texture. We can increase the size of the grain if we want to, and also increase the roughness. Now, that's a bit too much, so let's back off on the roughness as well as the size. We'll zoom back out, and I think it gives us a really great look when used, say, in combination with a photograph like this that's got this cross-processed effect on it and these kind of funky edges from our post-crop vignette. Let's take a look at the localized correction tools because we've made a lot of improvements to the performance as well as added several enhancements. Now, the first thing that you'll probably notice is there's no longer a kind of basic and advanced mode; there's just the advanced mode. But for those of you who use the amount slider in the basic panel, you should know that that functionality is still here. What the amount slider did was basically if you had a combination, say, of exposure and brightness that you had changed in your image and you liked it, but you just thought the whole effect was a little bit too much, the amount slider let you proportionally remove that effect. So let me show you what I mean, because of course, you can still do it in Lightroom 3. You simply need to select the pin that has the adjustments-- in this case, I'll select this pin right here-- and you can see that when I position my cursor on top of the pin, not only do we get the overlay, but I also get the double-headed arrow. And if I simply click and drag to the left, if you watch the sliders, you can see that not only the brightness but also the saturation sliders are moving, so by just clicking and dragging on top of that pin, it's kind of like a scrubby slider--I'm changing multiple sliders, basically, the amount of multiple sliders in relationship to the change that I've made. So functionality is still there; it's just represented a little bit different now and I think it will eliminate confusion of having those two kind of modes. In addition, you'll notice that there are some new options in the toolbar, so we have the option to always show our edit pins or you can change it to Auto to select it or Never. I kind of like the Auto option, because now, they disappear from my image until I position my cursor inside this kind of preview area. So the pins will disappear when I'm outside, maybe making additional adjustments to say, sliders, and then they'll appear again when I position my cursor in that preview area. I also have the option to Slow Selected Mask Overlay, so if we click on that, we can see the mask that's overlaid. When I click on different pins, that mask will stay apparent until I turn it off. I can also use the keyboard shortcut O in order to turn that on and off. And if you're looking for those keyboard shortcuts, if we go here under the new Tools menu, you can see here's our Tool Overlay as well as our Adjustment Brush overlay in case wanted to change the color or we needed a refresher on what that keyboard shortcut was. In addition, you'll notice that if I hold down the Option or the Alt key Windows, the effect here will turn to reset, so that's a really nice way to quickly reset your tool. And you can see that if there's no color loaded in the color swatch area, there is now an X through it. All right, let's go ahead and move over to the Slideshow module where you can now go to the Playback area and select your soundtrack. Simply click Select Music and navigate to the song that you want to use and then, you can use the Fit to Music to have Lightroom automatically set the slide duration for your slides so that all of your slides will play once during that music. You can also choose to prepare your previews in advance and when you choose to export your video, you can see that we're using the popular H.264 movie format and we have presets here for many different devices. Excellent. Let's move over to the print module. As you can see, we have a new layout style called Custom Package. I can use the Cells area in order to add a cell to my layout. I can select from the drop-down menu or I can edit to create my own cells. I can also simply click on an image in the film strip and drag it into my image area. If I want to resize it, I can click on any of the anchor points to resize or position my cursor in the middle in order to reposition it. To add a photo to an existing cell, simply drag and drop it into that cell. You can see that it resized the cell because I have the Lock to Photo aspect ratio option turned on. If I uncheck that, then if the photo is at a different aspect ratio than the cell, I can hold down the Command or Control key and reposition the photo within the cell. If two images are overlapping each other, you can use the right mouse-click or the Control-click on Mac in order to change their stacking order. In this case, I would send this one forwards or to the front. Let's take a look at a template that I've already saved. Here's a multi-page template, and now, I can quickly add photos to fill this template by simply dragging and dropping them on top of the cells. You have to be a little careful; if I've got two cells that are overlapping, you just want to make sure that you drop your photo into the cell that's highlighted. And it's as easy as that to create a custom package. In addition, you might have noticed that the background of my image is black. There's two things to point out. First, under the Page area, we can now set a background color, and scrolling down further under the Print Job, you'll notice that I have this set to print to a JPG file. When you select JPG, you can then select your custom file dimensions so that you can eliminate any borders that might be necessary if you were printing to a printer. This way, I get a nice solid black background to my JPG file which I can then send off to my service bureau. Let's take a look really quickly at this 4 x 3 contact sheet that I've created. I'll select all of the files in my film strip here just so that you can see that when you add a black background as your page color, we will automatically reverse out your type so that it's white. In addition, this contact sheet template has an identity plate which I can now reposition using my arrow keys, so that's going to make it a little bit easier to align things. In the web module, you'll notice that you're now able to add a watermark. We can add the simple copyright watermark or we can go in and we can edit our watermarks. You can see that I've saved a text style watermark by just typing in Copyright 2010 Julieanne Kost and then selecting Save from the Preset area, but you can also add a graphical watermark by clicking on Graphic, navigating to your JPG or PNG file and then selecting it. I prefer the PNG because it allows for transparency. We can resize this either in the window or using the Size Proportional slider here. We could also tell it to simply fit within the image or fill the image. I prefer the proportional, and let's just make that a little bit larger. We can also add an inset if we wanted to and anchor it to a variety of different locations. As soon as we've got it set up, click Save, name the preset, hit Create, and the watermark is now applied to all of the images, and of course, this isn't just the web module. The watermarking is available in the slide show and the print module as well as upon export. But we also found that people are sharing images in many different ways. So let's return back to the library module for a moment because for most of us, publishing and sharing and handing off images to other people has become like a weekly-- if not daily--occurrence and we want to make sure that Lightroom makes publishing these images as well as keeping track of whether or not the most current version of an image has been published or updated as simple as it can be. So you'll notice there's a new panel header called Publish Services. Let's take a look at how I would set up the flickr publish services. I'll click Setup and then enter in a description for the service. In this case, I'll call it Photostream. You can see that I'm not logged in to my flickr account, so I'll click the Login button and then click Authorize. That will take me to this page and because I arrived at this page-- because I specifically asked Photoshop Lightroom to connect to my flickr account-- I can click the Next button. Then, I'll click to authorize it. When I return back to Lightroom, I'll click Done, and then you can see that I have now logged in as myself to my flickr account. I can set what I want to use as my image title, I can choose the File Name, the IPTC Title, or leave it blank. I could change the file naming but I actually want the file naming online to match the images on disk so that I know which images people are talking about. I can change my file settings if I wanted to improve the quality of each image a little bit. I could set this up to say, 90 or so. For image size, let's resize these images down to about 600 pixels. I'll add sharpening, a standard amount for the screen. I'll set my metadata to minimize the embedded metadata and I'll add my logo watermark. You can also see that there are some settings specific for flickr, such as privacy options. When I'm finished, I'll click Save, and I've now set up my publish service collection. I can now navigate to any folder and select images to publish. Let's choose these four, and then drag them into my photostream. When I select this, you can see I have new photos to publish. Publishing these are as easy as clicking the Publish button. As they're being published, you can see that Lightroom moves them down to the Published Photos area. Now that they've all been published, let's take a look at our photostream. We also have the ability to add a comment. Let me just ask, "What would this look like in black and white?" When I post the comment and I return back to Lightroom and I have the image selected, when we click on the refresh button here, and I can see the comment that's been posted on flickr. Let's go ahead and make a change to this image. I'll go to the Develop module, tap the V key to go to black and white, and then, grab my targeted adjustment tool and click and drag down on the sky to darken it. Now when we move back to the library module, you'll notice that I have a new area here for my modified photos to republish. To republish these, I'll simply click the Publish button. Now when I return to my photostream, you can see that my image has been modified. I can also set up any number of collections to my hard drive, making it really easy for me to keep track and manage images that I either send to friends or post on my blog or hand off to clients. And the great thing is we've built the Publish Collections functionality with the same extensibility to design for our export plug-ins and we're really working hard to support developers to create connections to many of the popular photo sharing sites. Excellent. Let's take a look at Tethered Capture. Now, before I move over to the develop module, I just want to take a look at the cameras that are currently being supported. All right. The reason that I'm going to the develop module is that there's features that I want to take advantage of. So I'll begin Tethered Capture just by going to File, Tether Capture, Start Tether Capture, We can name our session name. In this case, I'm just going to name it Demo and I can choose to segment my photo by shots. This is excellent if let's say, I was shooting maybe multiple bouquets of flowers or I have a client that was going to change outfits throughout the day. I can also change my file naming in order to incorporate that session name plus a sequence, so as I change my segments by shots, it'll automatically ask me for a new session name. I'll select to save my images in my 2010 folder, and then apply my metadata as well as any keywords. When I click OK, now I simply name my shot name and I'm ready to go. You can see that Lightroom automatically sees my camera. It sees all the settings on my camera, and all I need to do is click the button in order to trigger the shutter and take the photo. Okay, well, it's not too interesting of an image, but there's actually a reason that I did this. I know that the color balance in the room that I'm in right now is not set correctly so if I go to my basic panel and I use my white balance eyedropper, I can click on these neutral swatches to set the correct white balance for this room. Then, I can choose Same as Previous for my Develop settings so that when I remove the card and take another photograph, those settings--the correct white balance settings--will automatically be applied. Excellent. And that is all there is to Tethered Shooting. It's as simple as that. Now, for the last new feature that I want to show you, I'm going to return back to the library module and navigate to another folder. We can scroll down here, and you can see that some of these images are video clips. Now, we realize that many photographers are shooting video along side of their still images, and we wanted to make sure that you could manage those assets in Lightroom so we can see those thumbnails. You can see them larger in loupe view, we can see the duration of the clip, and if you click this icon, we will play that clip in your default viewer. Excellent. Well, that covers all of the new major features and enhancements in Lightroom 3. I'm Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me. [ADOBE TV Productions]