Develop Module Advancements in Lightroom 4

[♪ Music ♪] [What's New in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4] [Julieanne Kost] [Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist] Hi, and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost, and today we're going to be talking about the new features in Lightroom 4. Now, if you used previous versions of Lightroom, the first thing that's going to happen is Lightroom 4 is going to ask you to upgrade your previous catalogs. This catalog that we're looking at right now has already been upgraded, but let me just walk you through what will happen when you launch Lightroom and it finds a catalog from maybe Lightroom 3. What we'll do is I'll just say "Open Catalog," and I'll navigate to this catalog, which is a Lightroom 3 catalog. I'll click "Open," and Lightroom is going to ask me to relaunch because of course, Lightroom can only have 1 catalog open at a time. So I'll select "Relaunch," and then it's going to bring up another dialog box asking me to upgrade the catalog. You'll notice if you want to change the location or the name of the catalog we can do that, and then we would just click "Upgrade." Now, as it upgrades the catalog, I should just mention some of you have really large amounts of previews already generated by, say, Lightroom 3. And those are in your Previews file. Instead of duplicating all that data, what Lightroom is going to do is it's going to migrate your Lightroom 3 previews to Lightroom 4. You will still have that original Lightroom 3 catalog. It will convert that catalog to a new Lightroom 4 catalog, but it will migrate all of your preview files because some of those files are so large, and we don't need to duplicate all of those previews now that you're going to be using Lightroom 4. All right. Excellent. We can see that's a rather painless process. I'm actually going to switch back now to the catalog that I want to use by selecting "File" and then "Open Recent," and we'll go to my Lightroom 4 mini catalog. And again, I'll just relaunch that. Excellent, now let's talk about the new enhancements to the Develop module. I'll go ahead and select a collection here, and then we'll move over to the Develop module by either clicking on the Develop module up here, or we could just tap the D key. That would also take us to the Develop module. Now, the first thing that you'll probably notice, if you've worked with these same set of images in Lightroom 3 and you've made changes to them, then in Lightroom 4, we're going to give you a little warning here. This warning tells me that the process version that we're using in Lightroom 4 is significantly different from the process version in Lightroom 3, and in fact, this file is in that older process version. Let's scroll down here on the right-hand side through all of our panels, and we'll look at Camera Calibration. You'll notice here it says "Process Version 2010." I want to go ahead and update that to 2012, and I can do that in a variety of different ways. Obviously, I can come down here to the Camera Calibration like we're looking at right now, or you'll notice here underneath Settings I can go to Process and update it this way, but honestly, the easiest way to do this is simply click on the exclamation mark. It's going to bring up a dialog box asking you things like do you want to see the changes before and after next to each other? Do you want to update all your filmstrip photos? Or do you just want to update this image? I'll go ahead and click "Update," and you can see there was a slight change. Now, depending on how much processing you've done to your images in Lightroom 3 in, say, the panel, like the Basic panel, you can see much more dramatic changes then what we just saw right there. What I would suggest is when you're first starting, don't update your whole collection at one time. You'll probably want to go through and update each image individually. Or what you could do is you could create virtual copies of your images and then update all those virtual copies and see the difference that way. It's really up to you. All right, let's move to the next image. You can see this is also in the older process version, and to kind of expedite the process, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down the Option key and then click on the warning right there, and it will go ahead and update it without bringing up that dialog box. All right, let's take a look at the Basic panel because we've made a lot of changes here. For example, you will notice right here that all of our sliders now start at 0, so it's very, very easy to tell if you've made a change as well as revert back to the starting point. For example, if I do make a change to highlights here, and then I want to reset it, I would know to take the slider to 0. And probably the easier way would just be to double click on the slider itself, and that will reset it. The nice thing about having all these sliders set to 0 is that they all work the same way now, meaning that if I move any of these sliders to the right, we're going to see an increase in lightness, and if I move them to the left, we're going to see a decrease. You can see that with the highlights here. If I go to the shadows, we're going to increase the shadows or decrease the shadows. The same with whites, and same with blacks. It's really nice that all of these are very consistent, and of course, if you've made a lot of changes and you want to reset them all, you can double click on the name of the set of sliders, and it would reset them all back to their 0 point. All right, let's take a look at what these sliders mean. I'll just scoot up a little bit here so that we can see the interaction between the histogram and all of these new tone settings. Here we have exposure and contrast. We also have highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. If you want to know what area of the histogram any of these sliders are going to affect, all you need to do is position your cursor on top of that histogram, and look, it will highlight the corresponding slider, so I know over here on the left side of my histogram, you can see it says "blacks" right underneath, and the black slider is highlighted. As I scoot over, these are my shadows. This is my exposure area. Right here we've got Highlights, and to the far right we have Whites. I think that it's much cleaner and clearer now what area of the histogram or what tones in the image we're going to adjust. I know some of you are thinking, well, how do I correlate what we used to have to what we have now? And there really is no direct correlation. I mean, we improved the behavior of all of those sliders, so I don't want to say, well, what used to be Recovery is now Whites because the math behind it all is different. If it was the same, we would still be calling it Recovery. I guess the closest thing would be Whites, though, same with the closest area to what used to be Fill Light is now the Shadows slider. But you can see that when I go ahead and increase the Shadows, you'll notice that just that very narrow range is being affected in the image, so when I used to use Fill Light, the range was a lot greater, and so you would see the changes also being made in more of my mid-tone areas, and we wanted to kind of limit that a little bit more so that this really behaves much more like maybe adding a reflector or using a fill flash to your image. I really like the new, improved feature there with the Shadows slider. Okay, let's take a look at this next image here, and I need to do quite a few things here. We can see the histogram is a little bit too biased to the left. To me, the image is looking too dark, so the first thing I'll do is go ahead and scoot up the exposure. Then if I want to work with the highlight area, either making it lighter or darker, I can. I'm actually going to darken it down a little bit. I'm going to bring my shadows up a bit, and then if I need to, like if I had actually moved the exposure too far up and I was clipping, that's when I would use my whites to bring down those highlight areas. And then I could also use the Blacks slider here if I wanted to just make my blacks a little bit richer. Now, it's kind of a balancing act. If you do make your blacks a little bit richer, then you might want to go back up into the shadow areas if you want those lighter. Obviously, at this point, it becomes really more a matter of personal taste. But what I do want to point out is the Clarity slider here. In Lightroom 3, if you move the Clarity slider all the way over to the right, you started to see kind of artifacts or halos in your image, and in Lightroom 4, they've improved the math behind that slider, and you won't see those. Now, I still think that that's a little bit too dramatic, so I'm going to back off on that, and I might increase my exposure a little bit as well, but you should know that the Clarity slider now, I'm actually getting better results with a single image using the Clarity slider to kind of get that faux HDR look then I am using multiple exposures and putting it together if that's the kind of look you're after. Okay, let's go ahead and take a look at another new feature, and that's down here in the Tone Curve. Now, by default, what we're going to be looking at is the parametric curve here, and we actually want to switch that over to the point curve, and you would do that down here at the bottom by clicking in the lower right, and now we've got a curve that you can add your own points to, so much more similar to Photoshop. But what we didn't have in Lightroom 3 and what was added in Lightroom 4 is the ability to go in on a per channel basis. In previous versions of Lightroom, you could always use your Temperature and Tints slider to change colors. You could go into HSL and change colors. But really there was no way to change colors on a per channel basis, and now there is. This can be used for a variety of different reasons. For example, I might want to go to the blue channel here, and I just want to maybe lower this a little bit, and you can see that that's going to subtract some of the blue, and it's going to give me a warmer toned image. Here we can use this for color correction, but you can also use this as a more kind of creative way to change the colors in your image, and because you have so much control-- we have the entire curve, and we can point as many points on that curve as we want-- we can really go in and focus on a very narrow range. Like for example, I could just pull down the blues here, making kind of a yellow cast in my shadows if I put a secondary curve here. Or we could do the opposite. I could simply click and drag that point off. I could anchor down my mid tones and then just say-- I would like to add a little bit of warmth just in my highlight area if I wanted to make a more antique look. Or if I wanted to add a colder tone, we could move that blue up. And of course, I can do this not only for the blue channel but also for the green channel and the red channel, so you can really get a lot of artistic effects as well as really powerful color correction tools using the Tone Curve panel in Lightroom 4. Let's move down a little bit further, and I want to take a look at the Lens Correction Panel for a moment. And let's zoom in on this image. I want to make sure that we can see what I'm going to change here, so I'm going to change this. Instead of 1:1, let's go ahead and go to 2:1. And what I'm pointing out in this upper right-hand corner of my image is we've got some artifacting going on, and this is called chromatic aberration. Now, this usually occurs when you're photographing with a wide-angle lens, and you have a lot of contrast on the edges of your image. It's just due to the way that the light goes and hits the sensor. You can see that we've kind of got this magenta and green cast going on here. Well, it used to be that the chromatic aberration was removed using the profile for the lens. But you can see I have enabled my lens profile correction, but I haven't actually removed the chromatic aberration. We've separated that out because we're able to do that now much more efficiently on the fly, so you can just check that on. And I think we can see the difference. There's before. You see that kind of green/magenta halo, and when I say to remove it, it will go ahead and take that away. But that's not all. Let's also take a look at our selective adjustments. Now, I'm going to zoom back out here and move over to this image right here. We have 2 different ways to make selective adjustments in Lightroom. We have the graduated filter, and we have the adjustment brush. And if we select the graduated filter or the adjustment brush, it doesn't matter which one, you'll notice that all of the settings that we can load the brush or the graduated filter with are going to be the same for both tools. But what else is important to notice is look, we can now make selective adjustments that change the temperature and tint. This is a great way to paint in a correction if, say, you've got 1 image like we have right here that has very different lighting in it. Or maybe a better example would be if you were photographing something where there might be a spotlight on one person and ambient light on the rest of the people in the photograph. We can go and paint that in. I'm going to switch over to the adjustment brush. And we'll reset everything except for this temperature. I'm going to move it over to the right in order to warm this up, and of course, the great thing is this is totally non-destructive and re-editable, so even if I make a big change here, like 73, and I go in and paint--now before I start painting, let's just turn down the flow a little bit, maybe down to 50. What that does is it enables me to slowly paint in the adjustment and maybe paint it in multiple times in one area and not in another. Then I'll just use my left bracket key to get a little bit smaller of a brush. And we can paint down here, and you can see what's happening is I'm removing that blue cast from that area right there. I'm warming it up by the increased temperature. If we tap the Y key, we can see a little before and after, and you can see that now this is a lot warmer. And if I had gone too far, we could always back off on that. Or if I hadn't gone far enough, we could add more by just moving that slider, even after the fact. Now, I also need to make a few changes to this image on the Basic panel, so let's just scroll down a bit, and we'll go to Basic. And I want to bring down the whites of my image a little bit and see if that targets the right area. Now, it doesn't, so that tells me that this area right here is actually going to be the highlight area. Let's just bring that down a bit. Excellent, now I can see a lot of detail in this area. But I'm missing a lot of detail in my shadow area, so I can bring up the shadows, bringing that to the right, but I might also want to do this more selectively, in which case I will return back to my adjustment brush. I'm going to create a new adjustment. And I'll reset the Temperature slider, and I'm going to increase my Shadows here, and that way I can just paint a wee bit right here to just lighten these shadows. Now, as I lighten these shadows, one of the things that you'll notice because this shadow area is so dark, there's a lot of noise in that area. Let's go ahead and zoom in to 1:1. I'll tap the Y key again. And you can see where I've added that increase in shadows. I'm also getting an increase in noise. Now, I don't really want that, so what I can do is I can use the new Noise slider here. And again, moving it to the right will add more noise. Now, it actually adds more noise reduction. It might be a little confusing, but remember, these all add, and since this Noise slider is really noise reduction, moving it to the right will remove the noise. If I move it to the left, it's going to add the noise or take out the noise reduction, so I'll want to move that to the right so that now when I increase my shadow area, instead of getting a really noisy area, I can go ahead and reduce that at the same time. Let's go ahead and zoom back out. The last thing that this image might need is just a little bit of clarity, so let's go back to our Basic panel and bring up the clarity a little bit and maybe also a little bit of vibrance as well. Okay, one last thing that's really important in the Develop module, and that is when you're making presets. Let's say you had made some changes. Kind of the basic example would be maybe you take an image to gray scale, and then you add a sepia tone to it or something. If you've done that, you want to make sure that when you click on the + icon that you're cognitive of this process version. Now, we had this before. It was in Lightroom 3, but not a lot of people checked on the process version when they were saving their presets. But keep it in mind because if you have made a lot of changes, especially to the basic tone or something, and we make changes to that set of sliders in the future, maybe a future version of Lightroom, you might want to create presets that are specific to the settings that you have right now. Just keep that in mind. You don't have to do it, but you should be aware of it. All right, excellent. That wraps up this first in the series of what's new in Lightroom 4. My name is Julieanne Kost. Thank you so much for joining me. [♪ Music ♪]