Getting to Grips with Lightroom

[John R Smith]

Good Morning one and all.

Here is a selection of the latest results from my perambulations around Cornwall with my ‘Blad 500 and the CFV-39 back.  The CFV is firing on all cylinders once more, after a little trip to Denmark and back under warranty, and I am gradually getting to grips with the transition from film to digital. Jeff, Mark and John will be pleased to hear that I have now become an evangelical Lightroom convert, and that all these shots have been 100% edited in LR 2.6 from raw file to finished print. In fact, I am now a totally reformed character, and I haven’t even thought about the Lab color method for many weeks.

These were all shot with the 80mm Planar, handheld, and at ISO 200. The conversion to B/W was done using the LR grayscale tools, with my own presets which emulate the response of some classic mono film stocks. This seems to work quite well for me, and comparing these to my previous film scans they seem to have a very similar “feel”. So the church shot is “FP4”, and the boat is on “HP5”. But this is not carved in stone, and sometimes I will create a different profile for a particular picture. LR seems to do pretty much everything I need to do for this kind of work, I’ve just got to get better at using it. The only time I need to make a trip out to PS is for perspective correction (the usual problem with church towers) and for a cloning retouch sometimes (overhead wires and stuff).

Of course, there is always some element of dissatisfaction. Now I need a faster, more powerful PC . . .

John

[Jack Varney]

Very nice, I enjoyed your images, John. Good to have the camera back I'll bet. Maybe you could enlarge a bit on your LR technique for B&W.

[John R Smith]

Thanks, Jack. It was very good to have the CFV home again after five weeks. When you have just spent that much money on something it's a pretty dismal experience to realise that your wonderful new toy is defective. I will give an outline at some point on my B/W conversion within LR, but at this point in time I an very much in the early stages of constructing a method (or workflow, if you like). So this is evolving quite rapidly. All I would say at the moment is that working from colour RAWs is a lot different to working with scanned B/W film, as I was doing. Another thing I would mention is that the factory presets for B/W which come with LR do not fit at all with my vision of a good print, so I started from scratch.

John

[john beardsworth]

Another thing I would mention is that the factory presets for B/W which come with LR do not fit at all with my vision of a good print, so I started from scratch.

Agreed - the built in b&w presets are a bit lacklustre. I prefer to have "red filter" "green filter" rather than pretending to mimic a particular film stock's responsiveness.

Hopefully you're using the "targeted adjustment tool" too - it's much more creative than focusing on presets.

John

[Alan Goldhammer]

I enjoyed the images as well and look forward to a more detailed explanation of your workflow.

Alan

[RogerW]

Very nice mono conversions.  I particularly enjoyed the texture of the wooden boat and also the church interior.

Oh, and I do envy your equipment!

[John R Smith]

Alan and Roger

Thank you for your interest and and kind remarks. I wasn't fishing for compliments, and the pix were just meant to show folks how I have been getting on with LR, but if someone actually liked them then that kind of makes my day. It looks as if LR3 is going to solve having to do my perspective correction in PS as well, so that's another upgrade to pay for. Ho hum.

I'm not trying to set myself up as some sort of B/W conversion guru either (now I'm feeling nervous about my workflow) as there are others here far more experienced than I am. But I do have quite definite (fixed? or possibly fossilised?) ideas about how I want my prints to look, I suppose. The debate I am having with myself basically revolves around two alternative but complementary paradigms. Starting with the real world, which is (mostly) experienced in colour, the aim of a B/W print is to end up with a monochromatic version of it in two-dimensional form. With film or digital B/W, we can manipulate the image in two specific ways. First, in terms of the spectral values of the image (by making different parts of the colour spectrum lighter or darker) which we do using coloured filters with film, or by manipulation of the underlying colour values in a digital editor. Second, by manipulating the luminance values of the image - in a darkroom with exposure and paper grades, in a digital editor with EV, brightness, contrast and so forth. The question then arises, for a given editing task should one use one or other, or both, and if both in what order, what proportion, and to what final purpose?

This is stuff I think about as I drive to work in the mornings. Maybe I need to get out more  

John

PS Roger, the church porch interior is at Kea near Truro, and is a wonderful Arts and Crafts wooden framed edifice with hand-made glass from 1897, designed by G H Fellowes-Prynne. This is the fourth church for the parish of St Kea. The medieval church was abandoned in the early 1800s, and only the tower still stands. The little Mission Church in photo 3 was built in the churchyard in 1863. A Georgian parish church which had been built about a mile to the west in 1804 was found to be so poorly constructed it had to be pulled down in the early 1890s, and Fellowes-Prynne's fine new building is the one we can visit today. Hmmm. This is what happens when I do get out more.

[RogerW]

Thanks for the thoughts and for the information about the photo locations.

At the moment, I'm preparing a lecture on digital monochrome - not just conversion techniques but also about "seeing in B & W" so I guess I think about this stuff as I wander too!