But first, a very interesting development in the world of photography and digital imaging. Adobe announced today an early public beta release of Lightroom. Some might say it’s a reaction to Apple’s Aperture, but I feel that it’s a very natural progression of Adobe/Thomas Knoll’s Photoshop. With the release of Photoshop Creative Suite 1/Photoshop 8, something called Adobe Camera Raw came as a free mini application within PS, and once I wrapped my head around it, it was sufficiently blown. Lightroom is the latest front end for Adobe Camera RAW.
Many digital SLRs and a few consumer digital cameras are able to produce RAW images. Digital imaging devices (sometimes called “cameras”) are basically exposing their sensors to the world every time one presses the shutter. Commonly, when you review, share, and print these images, they are JPEG images. These jpgs are in a sense, just like Polaroids.
But the camera sensor is often able to capture a lot more detail than a JPEG can handle, but due to the fact that jpgs are inherently compressed, these images are a one shot deal. Editing and copying the image is only as good as that first jpg.
Now imagine if you could take a digital image and also develop the digital negatives too? These digital negatives are the originals from which to make any number of copies or prints.
That being said, for almost everyone, having a digital negative is about as useful as the negatives you get from Walgreens. Who even looks at them? But for some people, like me, the negative is as important as the ‘prints’ made from it.
Adobe Lightroom (and other RAW applications) allow you to control the development of this digital negative itself! Once I realised that I could actually control the exposure of the image and the colour temperature after you’ve taken the shot, I was hooked. You see, despite Photoshop’s amazing capabilities, it’s just like its name sake. A place to perform magic to the image once it’s been taken: cropping, rotating, lightening (dodging), darkening (burning), and classics like transferring George Bush’s face onto the body of a chimpanzee. Ultimately though, these tricks and edits are just making tweaks to an existing ‘Polaroid’; an image that’s already been processed in a particular flavour (like a JPG, TIFF, TGA, PNG, etc.) Lightroom, through Adobe Camera RAW, allows you to go back to control how George’s face looks, before you go an paste it onto his simian cousin.
For example, these two following shots were taken in a dimly lit bar, and my two models are bathed in lots of (yellow) incandescent light. When I shot it I didn’t worry about the white balance setting on my camera, but worried instead about the composition (since it was captured in RAW). Then, when I got home, I went through and produced ‘prints’ for flickr, and as if by magic controlled the colour temperature of the final image.
This image here is a comparison of the two techniques. The one on the left is the original, warm toned image, unprocessed with no adjustments (other than making the jpg itself). The one on the right has had exposure and colour temperature adjusted to produce a more natural skin colour. I don’t think I could have managed this as well with Photoshop’s colours controls alone.
If you want the most control from your digital images, shoot in RAW and get with the RAW program. It’s more work, but it’s worth it.
A good write up on this early beta Luminous Landscape is here. Go Adobe.
