- Upgrading from an Earlier Version of Lightroom? Read This First!
- Making Your RAW Photos Look More Like JPEGs
- Setting the White Balance
- Setting Your White Balance Live While Shooting Tethered
- Seeing Befores and Afters
- Applying Changes Made to One Photo to Other Photos
- How to Set Your Overall Exposure
- Adding Punch to Your Images Using Clarity
- Making Your Colors More Vibrant
- Using the Tone Curve to Add Contrast
- Adjusting Individual Colors Using HSL
- Adding Vignette Effects
- Getting That Trendy, Gritty High-Contrast Look
- Virtual CopiesThe No Risk Way to Experiment
- Editing a Bunch of Photos at Once Using Auto Sync
- Save Your Favorite Settings as One-Click Presets
- Using the Library Modules Quick Develop Panel
- Adding a Film Grain Look
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Adding a Film Grain Look
One complaint you hear from traditional film photographers is that digital images look “too clean.” That’s probably why plug-ins that add a film grain look have gotten so popular. The workaround we used to use was to jump over to Photoshop and use the Add Noise filter, which didn’t do a terribly bad job, but in Lightroom 3 there’s a now dedicated feature that brings more realistic film grain effects without having to leave Lightroom.
- Step One: The film grain effect is popular when processing B&W photos, so we’ll start by converting to black and white. In the Basic panel, click on Black & White at the top-right, then increase the Recovery amount to 100 (to bring back some sky), and the Clarity amount to +75. In the Tone Curve panel, choose Strong Contrast from the Point Curve pop-up menu
- Step Two: Now, go down to the Effects panel (to really see the grain, you’ll first want to zoom in to a 100% [1:1] view). The Grain Amount slider does what you’d imagine—the higher the amount, the more grain is added to your photo (go easy here—I don’t generally go over 40 as a maximum, and I usually try to stay between 15 and 30). Here I moved it over to 34.
- Step Three: The Size slider lets you choose how large the grain appears. I think it looks more realistic at fairly small size, but if
you’re working on super high-resolution images, you might want to bump it up a bit. The Roughness slider lets yw ou vary the
consistency of the grain. By default, the noise pattern looks pretty consistent, so the farther to the right you drag the
Roughness slider, the more it’s varied. But I gotta tell ya, when you increase it too much, it starts getting really contrasty
and kind of funky-looking, so I usually leave the Roughness amount at its default setting of 50.
Tip: Add More, If You’re Printing
Grain tends to disappear a bit when you make a print, so while the amount may look right onscreen, don’t be surprised if it’s barely visible in a print. So, if your final output is print, you might have to use a little more grain than you think you should.
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Lightroom Killer Tips > >
- Resetting the White Balance
To reset both the Temperature and Tint White Balance sliders to their original As Shot settings, just double-click directly on the letters WB in the Basic panel.
- Panel Trick for Impatient People
Have you noticed that when you expand or collapse a panel, it gently (and arguably slowly) animates this sequence (in other words, they don’t snap open—they “glide” open). If you’d like to skip the fancy gliding and have those panels snap open/closed the moment you click on them, just Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on them instead.
- Picking Zooms in the Detail Panel
If you Right-click inside the little preview window in the Detail panel, a little pop-up menu will appear where you can choose between two zoom ratios for the preview—1:1 or 2:1—which kick in when you click your cursor inside the Preview area.
- Hiding the Clipping Warning Triangles
If you don’t use the two little clipping warning triangles in the top corners of the histogram (or you want them turned off when you’re not using them), then just Right-click anywhere on the histogram itself and choose Show Clipping Indicators from the pop-up menu to turn it off, and they’ll be tucked out of sight. If you want them back, go back to that same pop-up menu, and choose Show Clipping Indicators again.
- Copy What You Last Copied
When you click the Copy button in the Develop module (at the bottom of the left side Panels area), it brings up a Copy Settings dialog asking which edits you want to copy. However, if you know you want to copy the same edits as you had previously (maybe you always copy everything), then you can skip having that Copy Settings dialog pop-up up completely by pressing-and-holding the Option (PC: Alt) key, then clicking the Copy button (it will change from Copy... to Copy).
- Make it Easier to Choose Camera Profiles
To make things easier when choosing your Camera Calibration panel profiles, try this: Set your DSLR to shoot RAW+JPEG Fine, so when you press the shutter button it takes two photos—one in RAW and one in JPEG. When you import these into Lightroom, you’ll have the RAW and JPEG photos side-by-side, making it easier to pick the profiles for your RAW photo that matches the JPEG your camera produces.
- Choosing What Will Be Your Before and After
By default, if you press the \ (back slash) key in the Develop module, it toggles you back and forth between the original untouched image (the Before view) and the photo as it looks now with your edits. However, what if you don’t want your Before photo to be the original? For example, let’s say you did some Basic panel edits on a portrait, and then you used the Adjustment Brush to do some portrait retouching. Maybe you’d like to see the Before photo showing the Basic panel edits after they were applied, but before you started retouching. To do that, go to the History panel (in the left side Panels area), and scroll down until you find the step right before you started using the Adjustment Brush. Right-click on that history state and choose Copy History Step Settings to Before. That now becomes your new Before photo when you press the \ key. I know—that’s totally cool.
- Making Your Current Settings the New Defaults for That Camera
When you open a photo, Lightroom applies a default set of corrections based on the photo’s file format and the make and model of the camera used to take the shot (it reads this from the built-in EXIF data). If you want to use your own custom settings (maybe you think it makes the shadows too black, or the highlights too bright), go ahead and get the settings the way you want them in Lightroom, then press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and the Reset button at the bottom of the right side Panels area changes into a Set Default button. Click on it and it brings up a dialog showing you the file format or the camera make and model of the current image. When you click Update to Current Settings, from now on, your current settings will be your new starting place for all images taken with that camera, or in that file format. To return to Adobe’s default settings for that camera, go back to that same dialog, but this time click on the Restore Adobe Default Settings button.
- Get Different Versions of Photos Without Making Virtual Copies
I briefly mentioned snapshots earlier in this chapter, but I want to give you another way to think of them. Think of them as another way to have one-click access to multiple versions of your photo. When you’re working in the Develop module and see a version of your photo you like, just press Command-N (PC: Ctrl-N) and how your photo looks at that moment is saved to your Snapshots panel (you just have to give it a name). So, that way, you could have a B&W version as a snapshot, one version as a duotone, one version in color, one with an effect, and see any of those in one click, without having to scroll through the History panel to try to figure out where each look is.
- Create White Balance Presets for JPEG and TIFF Images
I mentioned earlier that with JPEG or TIFF images the only White Balance pre set available to you is Auto. However, here’s a cool work around to get you more choices: Open a RAW image and only make one edit—choose the White Balance preset Daylight. Now, save just that change as a preset and name it White Balance Daylight. Then do that for each of the White Balance presets, and save them as presets. When you now open a JPEG or TIFF image, you’ll have these one-click White Balance presets you can use to get a similar look.
- One of My Most-Used Presets
The intentional vignette look is really hot right now, and it’s an ideal effect to save as a one-click preset. Just go to the Lens Corrections panel, click on Manual at the top, click-and-drag the Lens Vignetting Amount slider all the way to the left (to −100), then click-and-drag the Midpoint slider to the left to 10, and then go to the Presets panel and save that as a vignette pre set. Now you can just move your cursor over this preset and you’ll get an instant preview of how your image would look with a vignette applied up in the Navigator panel at the top of the left side Panels area.
- Updating Your Presets
If you start your editing by using a Develop module User Preset, and you like the new changes, you can update your preset by Right-clicking on the old preset and choosing Update with Current Settings from the pop-up menu.
- Fix Underexposed Photos Fast with Match Exposure
If you see a series of photos of the same subject, and some of these photos are underexposed, try this quick trick to fix those fast: Click on a properly exposed photo from that series, then while it’s selected, also select the underexposed photos, then go under the Settings menu and choose Match Total Exposures. It will evaluate the overall exposure from your “most-selected” photo (your properly exposed photo) and use that to fix the underexposed photos.
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