Cure for Lightroom blues

In the posting “Lightroom blues” I whined about LR’s poor JPG-export capabilities.  In a comment Carsten Fredsted proposed a solution, which has proved to be very convincing. First of all, you should install Mogrify. This is a program, which will convert from one picture file format to another, with a lot of user settings. However, … Read more

Lightroom blues

Try taking a look at the two pictures below. They look the same. But click on them to enlarge and see the difference:

Lightroom version

The original RAW-file was imported into Lightroom, cropped, converted to monochrome and exposure was adjusted. After that, the ways departed:

The version to the left was exported to JPG directly from Lightroom – without any sharpening applied (both “clarity” and “sharpening” set to zero). JPG quality was 100 – that is: no compression. The picture was downscaled from a width of a little more than 2000 pixels to 500 during export.

The version to the right was exported to Photoshop CS3 as a full size TIFF. In PS it has been downscaled to a width of 500 pixels and a suitable amount of “Smart sharpen” applied. Finally it was converted to JPG with “Save for web” with a quality setting of 70.

The funny thing is, that when you look at the version to the left, there is a distinct halo around the person in the picture.

Read more

Adobe Lightroom – not quite there yet, sadly

Lightroom is Adobes newest photo-handling software. It is based on at least two very good ideas: firstly, its meant to be a complete, integrated package for a digital workflow. It’s packing a RAW-converter, a picture-database, basic editing and several other functions into one program, with a very nice and functional user interface.

Read more