The Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 has been released for download. I’ve been playing around with it for an hour or so, and my first impression is: no revolutionary changes, by a lot of minor improvements. Just to mention a few:

• More intuitive import function
• Publishing directly to Flickr – not with all the features of Jeffrey Friedl’s Export to Flickr plugin, but very well integrated into Lightroom itself
• Improved noise reduction
• New film-grain effect
• More flexible layout of prints
• Better performance in some areas, especially the adjustment brush

No revolutionary changes on the surface of Lightroom 3.
But lots of small improvements.

For a very enthusiastic video-presentation of every new feature, take a look at photoshopuser.com. But be prepared, that these guys seems to think that every little improvement is the greatest news since Niépce….

I have a bad habbit: learning about the present state of affairs around the world tends to make me grumpy. Friends sometimes tell me, that I have to look at things in a broader perspective.

Well, I might improve in the future. At least my new computer monitor is wide screen…

Lightroom, which has become the hub in my digital photo workflow, has a user interface which is clearly designed for widescreen. But apart from a wider aspect ratio – and a larger screen in general – I wanted a monitor with better colour reproduction.

After a lot of research on the net, I ended up with a Dell 2408WFP. Its a 24″ screen with an S-PVA panel. That means its capable of showing 8 bit colours, contrary to the 6 bit panels used in most cheaper monitors. Coupled with a better lighting of the panel, it makes the monitor capable of reproducing a colour gamut which is aproximately 50% larger than a standard monitor.

The first time I fired up my new monitor, I immediately noticed that the colours were much more intense and saturated than on my old monitor. Furthermore, there was a deeper black and more pure white. However, strong colours are not everything – they also have to be natural. As a starting point I chose to reduce the brightness level from 50 to 33 and the RGB levels from 100 to 90. Following that, I calibrated the monitor with my Huey Pro.

I am very pleased with the end result. Checking with a reference photo from DFA, the colour rendering seems close to perfect – at least for my eyes. In other words: a very recommandable monitor for photo editing. 

Media is ripe with stories about people who have found out, that photos they have put on the net has been sold, used in commercials or in other ways been misused behind their back. The culprits are not only sleazy types, but even companies such as Microsoft and Fox TV (Well, somebody might put them in the sleazy category too, but that’s another discussion).

The bad news is that the net has not just made it very easy to show of your own photos – it has made it just as easy for others to nick them. The good news is that copyright also exists in cyberspace. If you find out, that somebody has made illegal use of you photo or text, you can take legal action. That is if you haven’t given away your copyright already, of course…

And that is precisely what you have done, if you have set up a profile on Facebook. Because in the process of doing so, you accept a set of “Terms of use“, which includes the following:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to realize, that what this means is that you practically give Facebook the right to do whatever they want with your material, including selling it for profit to whomever they want.

Some Facebook users have defended the company, claiming that these terms are a practical and economical necessity. That’s bullocks. On Flickr, one of the largest photo-sharing sites of the Internet, users have full freedom to either claim complete copyright or allow their photos to be used by others under a Creative Commons license. That doesn’t prevent illegal use in itself. But it makes it possible for people, whose work has been misused, to take action.

If this works for Flickr, it could of course work for Facebook too. Hopefully, Facebook will someday realize that the concept of user-generated content doesn’t go well with the concept of disrespect for the users. Until that day, the best you can do as a Facebook user is probably just never to upload anything, which you wouldn’t be willing to throw away for free…

Sorry, but this post is not available in English

Some time ago I wrote, that Lightroom is a very nice program, but with some serious flaws that made me decide not to use. So now I’ve changed my mind, and decided to make Lightroom the hub of my digital workflow. How come?

Because Lightroom offers me 85% of what I need in one integrated package. First of all it’s a very capable photo-database with nice features for sorting, tagging, etc. Secondly it is an excellent RAW-converter. Furthermore it offers basic photo-editing, based on the idea of non-destructive editing. Finally it’s all wrapped up in a rather nice and functional user interface.

Apparently the developers at Adobe have done some serious case studies of the workflow of pro-photographers. The result is a program which – unlike Photoshop – is very “photocentric”.

How about the flaws then? Well of course they are still there. I hope that Adobe will include both the “save to web” as well as the “proof colors” that we know from Photoshop in the next version of Lightroom. And from some of the forums on the net, it seems like I’m not the only one with that hope…

Until this hope is fulfilled, there are basically two options when it comes to generate JPG’s for the web: Either learn to live with the limitations of Lightroom.  Or export to Photoshop and save as JPG from there. The last option is in fact made rather easy, since it is possible to make an export-preset in Lightroom that will scale your photo to preselected dimensions, save it as uncompressed JPG and automatically open it in Photoshop – all at one click. I like to see this as turning Photoshop into a save-to-web plug-in for Lightroom

Then there is the issue of speed. I’ve tweaked the preview options a bit – and then I decided to replace my aging AMD CPU with a never duo-core version. That helped. The time Lightroom takes to generate larger previews are still noticeable – but not more than I can live with it.

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. Secondly, it’s based on the idea of non-destructive editing: no matter the amount of tweaking and editing you perform, Lightroom will not change one single pixel in your original image. Instead, it saves all your work in either an accompanying text-file or simply in the database. This also means that re-editing and creation of different versions is easy and flexible.

Lightrooms interface takes a little time to get used to. But in fact it works well – and looks good.

However, the program is let down by three serious problems: first of all it is painfully slow when it comes to scrolling in the library. Rendering thumbnails takes forever. It could be my machine – even though other similar programs are running at much higher speed on the same machine. It could also be that I have simply not found out how to best set up Lightroom for maximum speed.

The second problem has to do with the way Lightroom handles colours. Internally, it always uses the prophoto RGB colour-space and all editing is in 16bit. Not before a photo is send to its final destination, this is changed. If, for example, you export to JPG, it will be changed to 8 bit sRGB. This is not in itself a bad idea. However, contrary to the “Proof” function in Photoshop, there is no way to preview the result. You just have to hope that your colours won’t change too much.

The third problem also has to do with JPG export. Unlike other Adobe products, there is no preview of the effects of the compression you apply. You can only chose an amount and cross your fingers. Furthermore, since the photo can be downscaled in size only during the conversion to JPG, you can only apply sharpening on the full size version of the photo. Again, you just have to hold your breath and hope it will look all right, even if the final photo is much smaller.

The end result is that exporting to JPG becomes a tiresome process of trial and error, if youinsist on the best possible quality.

This is so much more annoying, since most of these problems could be easily solved with features such as “Proof” and “Save to web” which are already part of Photoshop. If Adobe will include these features in a later version of Lightroom, it will probably become my first choice for most of my photo-handling – even if it requires a hardware update. But for now I’ve decided to skip it in favour of other solutions.