The Lightroom 4 beta was released just over a week ago. Are you getting used to the changes?
The new Develop controls undoubtedly take a little getting used to, particularly if you’ve used ACR or Lightroom for some years.
There are some great tutorials on the new Develop sliders, so we won’t reinvent the wheel here, but how about a quick summary to help you remember?
- Forget everything you know and treat it like a new program – it basically is.
- All of the sliders now work the same way – moving to the left darkens, moving to the right lightens.
- Try working from the top down in the Basic panel, even if you’ve always used another slider order. They’re in that order for a reason. You might go back and tweak slightly, but because the sliders are image-adaptive and some base their range on earlier sliders, you’ll find yourself bouncing all over the place if you insist on a different order.
- Whereas in the past you’d use Exposure to set the white point, now you use it to set the midtones, and don’t worry if that blows out highlights. That’s the hardest change to get used to, for me, at least!
- Once you’ve got the overall midtone brightness about right, tweak Contrast, again focusing on midtones. You’ll fix the highlights and shadows separately. Even if you never used to use Contrast on the old sliders, you’ll probably need it now.
- From that point, Highlights does upper tones, Shadows does lower tones. If you go too far (50+), it can start to get a tone mapped HDR type look, which is why you need to get Exposure slider right (or close) first. If you get that right, the others fall in nicely.
- Finally, the Whites and Blacks sliders affect the clipping point. In many cases you may not even need to touch those sliders.
That’s the basic overview. A few other odd tips that may come in handy…
- There isn’t a separate Recovery slider anymore, but you don’t need it as it’s automatically integrated into the Exposure slider, so it rolls off like film. It works much much better than it did before. If you want to do the opposite and clip the highlights, use the Whites slider.
- To get a Fill Light type effect, bump Exposure a bit and then pull down Highlights to compensate.
- In many cases, the nicest results come from fairly symmetrical Highlights and Shadows values. If one slider is wildly higher than the other, check to see whether you need to adjust Exposure.
- Clarity is also completely different. The halos are gone, but you’ll need much lower values than you used previously because the range of the slider is greater.
If you’d like more detail, I’ve included examples and diagrams in my Lightroom 4 book, which is available now.
If you haven’t seen the videos yet, here are my favorites:
Lynda.com free introduction by Chris Orwig
Adobe’s own introduction by Julianne Kost
And feel free to share your tips and tricks in the comments.
J Ruckser says
January 18, 2012 at 6:26 pmGreat tips. I can hardly wait for the final release and your new book.
John
Victoria Bampton says
January 18, 2012 at 6:43 pmThanks John!
Az Rehman says
January 18, 2012 at 7:38 pmVery helpful Victoria
Tourretired says
January 18, 2012 at 8:20 pmI’m getting addicted to LR4. I’m doing my undone photos from LR3 in 4 and loving it.
Mcat says
January 21, 2012 at 10:00 pmI’ve been using the new LR4 and love it so far, but accidentally deleted the Tone Curve from my Develop Module (don’t ask me!) I haven’t found any way to get it back. Do I need to re-install it?
Catherine
Victoria Bampton says
January 21, 2012 at 10:14 pmDon’t worry, you’ve just hidden it. Either right click on one of the panel headers until you see the context-sensitive menu, and reelect it, or do do from the View menu.
mcat says
January 21, 2012 at 10:28 pmYou’re right–there it was, hiding! Thanks a bunch. I’d read several sections in LR3-TMFAQ and couldn’t find the ans. Looking forward to the new book–I’ve got it in every form available and on both my laptop and desktop–am never without it!!
Victoria Bampton says
January 21, 2012 at 10:30 pmAh, it was hiding in the Workspace chapter! You’re always welcome to get in touch if you get stuck.
Craig says
January 25, 2012 at 1:56 amI’m amazed, Victoria, that both you and the LR software engineers seem to think that setting the camera calibration and the lens corrections are the last things to do in the workflow. For me, it’s much more logical to set them before going to the top of the sidebar.
Please explain why you think they should be done last.
Thanks,
Craig
Craig says
January 25, 2012 at 1:56 amI’m amazed, Victoria, that both you and the LR software engineers seem to think that setting the camera calibration and the lens corrections are the last things to do in the workflow. For me, it’s much more logical to set them before going to the top of the sidebar.
Please explain why you think they should be done last.
Thanks,
Craig
Craig says
January 25, 2012 at 1:56 amI’m amazed, Victoria, that both you and the LR software engineers seem to think that setting the camera calibration and the lens corrections are the last things to do in the workflow. For me, it’s much more logical to set them before going to the top of the sidebar.
Please explain why you think they should be done last.
Thanks,
Craig
Victoria Bampton says
January 25, 2012 at 7:07 amHi Craig, no I agree with you that the camera profile should be done first. When I said top to bottom, I just meant within the basic panel. Personally I think that the camera profile popup should be at the top, but Adobe’s view is that most people will pick their favourite and assign it automatically using defaults or presets. The lens corrections is a slightly different ball game. You could apply those at any stage – early in the workflow is useful if a significant amount of vignetting is darkening the photo, but on the other hand, there are performance implications of leaving that turned on while trying to make other adjustments, so many people benefit from turning it on later and tweaking their exposure afterwards if necessary.
Arne says
February 26, 2012 at 7:55 pmMany thanks Victoria, that was tremendously helpful when the beta came out. (Not least because I would likely have made the serious mistake of ignoring the contrast slider if it hadn’t been for this post).
But quite often I just don’t find your last point (giving the Whites a minor tweak last and often not needing to do so) to be true in practice: quite often the histogram will leave too much headroom at this point, whereas for many ‘normal’ pictures I will want a fully expanded histogram that makes use of the full range. (I find that PV2012 has a near-magical ability to guess my black-point, but much less so for the white-point.) So at that point I use the White-slider to change the clipping point so that the histogram fully extends to the right end (without clipping). But this will considerably brighten the image, therefore triggering a correction to exposure. But that correction will move the right end of the histogram some way back to the left again, triggering a further change to the Whites… so an iterative loop going back and forth between Whites and Exposure results that can go through quite a number of iterations before finally yielding both a fully extended histogram and the desired brightness. (And at that point the pictures then often need a correction with the Contrast slider, as using the whole range from 0-255 will of course increase the contrast.) In other words, I am experiencing exactly the kind of ‘bouncing’ that you talked about in your post. Given the objective of a histogram using the whole range, am I doing something wrong for this kind of pictures? Since in this scenario the resulting brightness is effectively determined by the combination of the Exposure and Whites adjustments, I have recently taken to doing that combo (rather than just Exposure) first, before going through the rest – is that wrong?
Victoria Bampton says
February 26, 2012 at 8:05 pmIt sounds like you’re not setting your Exposure slider high enough to start with Arne. Try setting the Exposure higher, and then using a minus Highlights figure to pull back any lost detail. You’re very welcome to email me some examples and we’ll look at them together.
Arne says
February 29, 2012 at 11:03 pmMany thanks, Victoria – that is a very kind reply and a very generous offer. I’ll try to pick out one or two example pictures next weekend. But you are definitely right in that my problem with this occurs with pictures that have either come out too bright at EV0 or with pictures that I deliberately exposed to the right, i.e. either way with pictures that receive a good dash of negative exposure in the first step.