pickyprick, following our PM about Lightroom here is a before / after of one of your, nice, shots.

All I did was select auto white balance (which I find sometime makes the images a bit harsh/life like. I prefer the slightly yellow colour)
I also put in some noise reduction. This helps remove some of the noise from a high ISO image plus also softens the image a bit.
It was then exported as a JPG.
edit - fixed access

[ Last edited by  mikeo90 at 4-2-2011 08:33 ]

eh. shouldn't the photos have some reading access attached to it? (since face is shown)

Which is before / after? I think the top one looks better

Top photo has more yellow in it.  I prefer it as well.

And no, I am not talking about the girl

Che'lu

The bottom photos is more true to life check out the colour of the sheets, which would be white.  
However the yellow tones do make the skin look better.

mike90, thanks. I could not be bothered going back to her thread to check the original 'color'. Please just tell me which was original and which was treated?

Is there a button for something like 'auto noise reduction' in LR? That would be cool haha. Setting parameters can be a headache.

Top one is the original.
There are plenty of ways to alter images, Lightroom is but one. Even Picassa will do colour correction and other fixes. Quite a good tool however I find a bit hard to separate images from daily life to onces that I do not want circulated.

I find that the Auto White Balance often makes hotel room photos look too blue, like the bottom photo here. Better result comes if you select any true white subject from the photo and use the White Balance Selector on it. For example the sheets on bed, a towel, or shirt. For lack of any of these in photo, I've sometimes had good success with the white in their eyeballs.


The free Google Picasa was a very easy and fun editor. But noticed later that it has one major fault, that is a built in feature: it will apply its own automatic color corrections, exposure and setting to all images, and you cannot stop it from doing this. So you might have shot a perfectly good portrait of a girl where her face is properly exposed, but for example if the background happens to be bright, Picasa will balance the settings which makes her face dark and grey. It is irritating if an editor makes these kinds of tweaks to your photos, and you can't switch it off. So Picasa is a very simple editor for snapshots, but for dslr photo processing you'll want to use something else like Lightroom (which is excellent).

Edit: More about Picasa and the auto-correction 'problem' from web explanations. That happens with RAW files, not with JPG. Picasa is not a 'real' RAW editor. It handles RAW by reading them up and immediately doing a default conversion to JPG on the fly, and shows that on the screen. While doing this RAW to JPG conversion, Picasa applies it's auto-corrections to make it's best guess at a photo it thinks it should look like. Which is not always what you had in mind when shooting. So if you shoot in RAW and want to see how the actual photo looks like that you took, and want to process it, you'll need to use a RAW editor and not Picasa. With a proper RAW editor like Lightroom you are working with the actual RAW file, and once you are done you export the photo as JPG. Picasa converts it to JPG in the beginning, and afterwards lets you do adjustments to that JPG.


There is one slider for noise reduction.

[ Last edited by  SkinnyForum at 5-2-2011 13:17 ]

Skinny thanks for your extra elabaoration from your understanding.

I just checked the link you provided on noise reduction. The noise reduction on that candle picture is awesome ...... to the extent that I think it looks suspicious. I have many grainy pictures not as bad as that candle picture, then all my pictures in the future will be cured just as that simple? Since you have LR, how would you rate the noise reduction capability? I am 100% impressed with that before and after candle picture haha.

mikeo, thanks for the clarification. I think ultimately it really boils down to personal taste which could change even on a day-to-day basis haha. I think the first one is ok (not because I took the picture) but then when I look at the second one, I find it's ok too. I am pretty ok with either one of them. But if you were a bedsheet wholeseller you should pick the second one even though like Skinny said, there is some blue in it. But otherewise picking the first one where the skin looks a tad more natural is not going to be a huge mistake either. It really depends on whether you are big on sheets or big on skin haha.

I think white balance is important but I would not say after applying auto white balance, the sheets look pure white either. But that's only an issue with 'auto'.

The point was I shot her in the evening and the room was not adequately bright, hence if you WERE in the room I suppose the sheets would not appear white to your eyes either at that very moment. Now we are trying to render something white because we think it was supposed to be white if the ambience was truely bright. But the truth was that the room wasn't bright at all, and any attempts at making the sheets white probably would push other things a little off balance.

On the other hand, if we knew the room was well lit but the sheets somehow turned out not white enough, I think this is the better opportunity to apply the white balance fix, 'auto' or not, that's a different issue.

mikeo I am sure you are just trying to show what auto white balance could do and you are not implying to apply it indiscrminantly on all the pics we take. Many thanks. I have never seen these effects before. Great stuff and fun. You have got me very interested in this software. Since you mentioned to me that Lightroom was about US$300, I think it's cheaper than building your own domestic darkroom haha.

Please tell me what else you use LR for apart from white balance fixes.

The noise reduction works, but nothing like that advertisement It does smooth out minor noise.


In addition with WG photos I mostly:

• Import photos to Lightroom
  
• Crop the image. The cropping tool is good, and allows for easy unlimited re-cropping on the fly.
  
• Adjust exposure/darkness based on histogram.
  
• Apply some noise reduction.
  
• Export to JPG for posting. Using pre-set width & height pixel resizing to 1100px width or 1200px height, and target up to 500 Kb file size. Which our forum software further compresses to around 60-80 Kb. End result photos still look pretty sharp.
  

PP, I'm sure you can tell Skinny and I are Lightroom converts.
In addition to what skinny mentioned i use lightroom to:
- ensure my day to day photos are very separate to punting photos (different light room catalouges)
- use it to punch colours and saturation (usually  not in punting photos) an example is pushing up greens in a landscape shot.
- organise my photos, exporting for different formats
- attaching geo-tagging data (gps location)
- you can also create virtual copies easily, eg a b&w version without changing the original.
- automated up loading to picassa or flickr
- and also waisting a lot of time playing

Thanks for the information Skinny. My feeling is that you are aiming at pretty high standard pictures ...... but who wouldn't if it's manageable, and probably fun too most important of all, isn't it? With your gear and adequate lighting in all cases (580 used in a hotel room), I think in most cases your photos won't be too way off optimal. There really should not be lots of room for adjustment in terms of "exposure/ darkness" before you might go overboard. And I suppose even budget cameras these days would not produce shots with colors or brightness that are too way off from optimal either. Nonetheless I think if you compare histograms of pictures taken with a well set dslr and those of a compact, I think it's more satisfying and fun to find out the histograms of pictures taken with a compact show potentially more room for adjustments before they become optimal. I could imagine the fun in the process of making adjustments.

But after you make your adjustments as per the original histograms (and I suppose this is as objective as it could get), do the adjusted pictures always look better?

Converts are a good term haha. I suppose it's an excellant software to push pictures to the highest possible viewing pleasure. I appreciate your listings of LR usages. How does gps get in here? Does your camera record gps information?

Skinny, I don't follow haha.


Faster than what?