Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Adobe Lightroom 4

In my previous post I mentioned that I have more or less settled on using Adobe Lightroom 4 for my photo management and editing needs. After getting a comment from someone about his trouble with image management software, I decided to write a blahg post just about why I decided to go with Lightroom.

Adobe
Some people love Adobe while some hate it. Regardless of your feelings for the company, you’ve got to agree, they have a lot of experience when it comes to making photo editing and management software. If you want to get serious with digital photo management and editing, they probably got it right. It turns out that a fair amount of professional photographers use Lightroom during their workflow. So, if this program is good enough for people that rely on it for their livelihood, it is probably good enough for me. :)
catalog
I talked about this a bit in my previous post already, but I will repeat it here. Lightroom lets me do most things the same way I did before it except for the parts I didn’t like. So, I get to keep my <year>/<event> directory structure that I like, but all the photos are indexed and searchable. The catalog stores all the metadata and lets me quickly see thumbnails of only the photos I want to see.
tagging
This is a very common feature of photo management software, but I am including it here since I did not have anything like it with my previous workflow. One can associate arbitrary text strings with a photo and then filter based on that.
geo-tagging
One special metadata field that Lightroom handles is the GPS location. It also lets you select photos based on location on a nice map (pulled from Google Maps).
captions
Every photo can have a title and a caption. I haven’t experimented with this feature all that much but it is rather self explanatory.
ratings
Lightroom offers several ways to “rate” photographs. There is a very straight forward 5-star scale (you can set zero to five stars) as well as each photo can have a “pick” flag or a “reject” flag. After I first import photos from a new event, I display all the thumbnails to get a quick glance at what I shot. Then I view every photo individually and mark every photo that is utterly useless (e.g., blur-y) as a “reject” and every photo that seems promising as “pick”. Then, I look at just the rejects and delete them completely. Now, I just have ok photos (un-flagged) and good photos (flagged as “pick”). I use the stars to rate post-processed photos from mediocre (1-star) to ones I am proud of (5 stars).
DNG
Lightroom supports a variety of image formats — JPGs, TIFFs, PSDs, even various camera raw formats. I used to occasionally shoot in raw (NEFs) but viewing and editing them was a pain. With Ligthroom, I can use them just like any other file format. They just work. Interestingly, I no longer store NEFs. Instead of importing them and storing them as is, I let Lightroom convert them to Wikipedia article: DNGs. I won’t go into NEF vs. DNG, but what tipped the scale in DNG’s favor in my case were sidecar files.
Wikipedia article: sidecars
I do not know what most photo management applications do, but Lightroom stores all the metadata changes in its (SQLite) database. Additionally, it lets you tell it to store all metadata changes along with the original images as well. For every NEF file, it creates a sidecar Wikipedia article: XMP file. That is, next to foo.nef it will create foo.xmp which contains all the metadata changes. JPGs store the metadata in the EXIF tags. DNGs also store the metadata internally. So, if you want raw files because of their quality, you can either use the camera manufacturer’s native raw format and have to keep the XMP files around, or convert them to DNG (which is lossless conversion by default) and then not worry about sidecars.
misc
There are many other cool features that Lightroom offers — from being able to quickly batch process hundreds of photos to being able to generate web galleries and upload them via sftp with a single click. The list of features is way too long, and I am certain that I haven’t found them all yet.

So there you have it. That is what I do with Lightroom. Other software packages had various deficiencies. As an added benefit, with Lightroom I get to use more open formats (DNG & XMP) than without it.

As a technical side-note, all my photos are on a ZFS dataset that I access via CIFS. Yes, compression is enabled (Wikipedia article: lzjb).

Post Processing + 2005 Memorial Day Airshow

As some of you know, I do enjoy running around with my camera. It really is a lot of fun wandering aimlessly around, taking a photo or a dozen of something that looks interesting or funny. Unfortunately, there is more to photography than just capturing photons. Once you have the “raw” images, you need to post-process them. Digital cameras make the photon capture part super-easy, however they don’t simplify post processing all that much. (Yes, I know, you no longer need to deal with darkrooms and chemical baths. My point is, the amount of improvement in photo taking is way greater than the amount of improvement in post processing.)

About two weeks ago, I decided to give Adobe Lightroom 4 a go. Up until then, I just had a super-simple organizational scheme: a directory for every year (2004, 2005, …, 2012) and inside each, a directory for each “event”. For example, the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium was in 2005/ols while the 2006 one was in 2006/ols. In each event directory, I just had a bunch of jpegs or NEFs. If I wanted to modify an image, I’d open it in Gimp or Photoshop, and save whatever variants I wanted to in a subdirectory called pp — which stands for post-processed. A very simple scheme, but it doesn’t scale. Over the years, I moved my photo collection from computer to computer, trying to keep a backup on an external disk whenever possible. Sadly, this resulted in my having a 130 GB directory with the per-year scheme and “temp” directories with various amounts of the same images, as well as some “I need to empty the CF card now, so I’ll just dump it somewhere temporarily” directories. I suspect that I have about 70–80 GB of unique content.

With this mess on my hands, I decided to try some photo management software. A while ago, I looked at digiKam and I was not impressed. Then about two weeks ago, I gave Picasa and Lightroom a try. Picasa didn’t quite do what I wanted it to do — keep a very similar workflow to what I have now (keep the per-year and per-event directories) but make it really easy to make powerful edits to the images non-destructively. That is, I want to keep the original as they are, but associate the edited images with the original. Lightroom hit the spot right on. At this point I am still using the 30-day trial, but I’m going to spring for the $150 full version.

Anyway, I’ll talk more about Lightroom at some later time. Today, I just want to share 25 photos from an air show I went to on Memorial Day in 2005. (Photos that have been “rotting” in my giant pile of photos until I imported them into Lightroom.) I generated a photo gallery with all 25. Below are the better ones.

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