Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop Waveforms

[Bill Stephan]

Lightroom would be a good choice for someone migrating from Aperture. It has only the Photoshop tools that are important to photographers (color correction, healing brush, etc.) while omitting functions that photographers would rarely use. A histogram display always shows the state of the current image (available also in Photoshop).

Lightroom offers an easy-to-use library of lens correction profiles to remove the geometric distortion introduced by your lenses. Perspective correction function works either very well (usually) or not at all depending on the image. This function can save a lot of editing time.

If you need functions that are unavailable in Lightroom, there is a simple workflow to jump into Photoshop and then bring the image back into the Lightroom library.

Lightroom will handle almost all of your image editing needs, but it might also feel a bit overwhelming at first. You may want to obtain a book such as Scott Kelby’s Lightroom book, which breaks down the functions in easy-to digest sections.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Tanmay Chowdhary]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for that amazing advise, it is really helpful. I had one concern though in terms of using graphs for editing. I use a horrible monitor which is very deceptive to the eye and hence whenever I color correct for videos, I completely rely on luma waveforms etc. For photo color correction, the only tool I have in aperture is the histogram and I don’t find it very useful for getting my images to really pop. Most times, my edits look good to me on my monitor, but when I see it in a better monitor, it looks very washed out and the contrast and highlight ranges look highly limited. My primary motive of moving to lightroom or photoshop is to get a better idea of what exactly is happening to my images with every move of the brush or every addition/subtraction of a contrast point. Do you think, I will be able to get such waveform indications on lightroom?

regards

[Bill Stephan]

The number one concern if you do any color correction work, whether on photographs or on motion video, is to have a good quality, calibrated monitor to judge your work. That is key to having the results of your work display correctly on another device or on the Internet. Its doubly important if you want to print your photos. You simply cannot produce work that reproduces correctly using a flaky computer display.

The day I got Lightroom up and running on my Mac was he day I walked down the block to B&H Photo to buy monitor calibration hardware/software. (I got Color Munki.)

The histogram in Lightroom shows you the distribution of blacks, grays and whites. I think the histogram is very confusing for analyzing color. I wish someone would make a plug-in that displays a YRGB waveform. This would make it very easy to establish a good color balance for any image.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City