- Lightroom Version Number
- Lightroom 3.2.1
- Operating System
- macOS 10.15 Catalina
- iOS
I am a professional videographer and sometimes photographer who has been hired as a side job by a hay exporting company to help them produce accurate photos and videos of the hay they sell to overseas purchasers. Typically the purchasers fly here locally and visit the farms and hay bale stacks and lots to inspect the product prior to purchasing. Due to Covid-19, no travel will be happening this year - so all product inspection will be by photo primarily with some video. Color and exposure/dynamic range must be near reference/real quality so as to not over-represent nor under-represent the quality and characteristic of the hay. Greens, yellows, and browns are hypercritical to determine the difference between a $2,000 lot of hay and a $20,000 lot of hay.
There will be 6-8 agents in the field visiting up to 15 lots each, taking approximately 10 photos of each lot. So 1200 photos perhaps each day. They are hay people and not techies, nor artists. This needs to be a solution for one year, and so they don't wish to invest heavily in photo gear nor are they interested in becoming pro photographers. They all have iPhones ranging from 8 to X. They will take the pictures, I will post-process them, and make them available the next day.
I figured a Lightroom subscription would allow them to take DNG photos which would take out the aesthetic processing of the apple camera app to get an untainted image which would upload to the cloud, and I would have one location in which to post-process them, then make available the next day through a storage server they own.
My questions:
1. Sanity check: is this the correct solution or should I be looking elsewhere?
2. I have a Xrite Colorchecker photo 2 on the way (my Colorchecker video passport doesn't seem to play well with Lightroom and Xrite color checker software). My current plan is to have each agent take a couple photos of the Colorchecker photo2 and I create a profile for each device to use as an export filter in Lightroom. This is based on this blog post: Accurate Colors from an iPhone Camera with ColorChecker Passport - X-Rite Photo Blog - Anybody have experience with this? Seem like it will work ok?
3. The biggie for me - direct sunlit hay photos tend to have highlights that make the hay appear to have more yellow/white characteristics than what is seen my the human eye which decreases the perceived value of the hay considerably. Would HDR photos in Lightroom tone down the highlights? Is there a way for me to process the photos without seeing the source hay to a proper exposure level?
Here's a couple jpgs exported from dng files as samples
Anything I'm missing? Any information I left out?
Thanks in advance for your time and any help you can offer a fellow lenser.
duke
There will be 6-8 agents in the field visiting up to 15 lots each, taking approximately 10 photos of each lot. So 1200 photos perhaps each day. They are hay people and not techies, nor artists. This needs to be a solution for one year, and so they don't wish to invest heavily in photo gear nor are they interested in becoming pro photographers. They all have iPhones ranging from 8 to X. They will take the pictures, I will post-process them, and make them available the next day.
I figured a Lightroom subscription would allow them to take DNG photos which would take out the aesthetic processing of the apple camera app to get an untainted image which would upload to the cloud, and I would have one location in which to post-process them, then make available the next day through a storage server they own.
My questions:
1. Sanity check: is this the correct solution or should I be looking elsewhere?
2. I have a Xrite Colorchecker photo 2 on the way (my Colorchecker video passport doesn't seem to play well with Lightroom and Xrite color checker software). My current plan is to have each agent take a couple photos of the Colorchecker photo2 and I create a profile for each device to use as an export filter in Lightroom. This is based on this blog post: Accurate Colors from an iPhone Camera with ColorChecker Passport - X-Rite Photo Blog - Anybody have experience with this? Seem like it will work ok?
3. The biggie for me - direct sunlit hay photos tend to have highlights that make the hay appear to have more yellow/white characteristics than what is seen my the human eye which decreases the perceived value of the hay considerably. Would HDR photos in Lightroom tone down the highlights? Is there a way for me to process the photos without seeing the source hay to a proper exposure level?
Here's a couple jpgs exported from dng files as samples
Anything I'm missing? Any information I left out?
Thanks in advance for your time and any help you can offer a fellow lenser.
duke