What's Wrong With Lightroom 2?

Since the release of Lightroom 2 I've been doing little else than playing with it. And I do mean playing—the review at imaging-resource.com has exactly the right title: "Turning Work Into Play." Developing raw files with Lightroom 2 is almost pure joy, and feels not one bit like work.

I've gotten many flattering requests for a tutorial on how I approach Lightroom 2 Develop Module work, usually accompanied by mention that my flickr photos have improved greatly in the short time since Lightroom 2's release. I take that latter bit to mean that I'm a better colorist than photographer, which is fine with me! I'm kind of sick that way—sometimes I feel that I shoot just so I'll have something new to play with in Lightroom!

But sadly my first post on Lightroom 2 after its release is about a problem with one of its vaunted new features. Lightroom 2 adds a post-crop vignette feature, acknowledging that many photographers (like, all of them) enjoy using the vignette-reduction functionality of Adobe Camera Raw to introduce additional vignetting. This effect is tied to the original framing of course, and can therefore break for extreme cropping cases, so Lightroom 2 adds the ability to dial in a vignette that is tied to the cropped framing. Awesome.

Except that in practice, the Lightroom designers have also chosen to render post-crop vignettes differently than the primary vignette control.

This image is heavily cropped in Lightroom 2. It also has exposure and contrast boosted quite a bit, enough that the sky behind the girl has become blown out. I'd like to use some vignetting to counteract this, and to give the shot more focus. What's so cool about Lightroom's primary vignette control is that it happens very early in the image processing pipeline. Reader's of The Guide will remember the importance of order-of-operations when designing color correction. Part of Lightroom's success is its well-considered internal order of operations, and vignetting is a great example of this.

Here's another (uncropped) shot in the same lighting, where Lightroom's vignette control has recovered lost detail in the sky and fence (that detail is there in the raw file because I exposed for it). This is the look I'd like for my close-up on the girl. So I reach for post-crop vignette, and here are the results:

Blech.

Clearly the post-crop vignette is being processed after all the other corrections, even after the recoverable detail in the highlights has been clipped. The effect is graphical rather than photographic, and is not something I would ever desire for my photos. Looks like I won't be using post-crop vignette.

Fortunately, Lightroom 2 has local adjustments. You saw me using them heavily in my Lightroom 2 Speed Session. Unlike post-crop vignette, the local adjustments are properly situated within the order of operations. So what I ultimately did for my shot was hand-paint a vignette using the exposure brush:

That's the look I want, but not the workflow I want. Part of the delight of Lightroom is that making your images look better is so easy that you wind up doing it a lot. Hand-painting vignettes is not fast or easy (the speed and interactive feedback of the local adjustments in Lightroom 2 is nothing to boast about, a fact that is easy to overlook given how exciting the local adjustments are). The rationale for the pipeline-placement of Post Crop Vignette only becomes clear when you push the slider in the "white" direction—in that case, the overlay effect makes a white vignette that looks quite a bit like something you'd make in a darkroom. But I never use white vignettes, so to me the Post Crop Vignette feature is broken in a way that highlights how easy it is to achieve visually poor results with a simple mistake in image processing order of operations.

What do you think? Have you tried Post Crop Vignette? Have you found cases where it does something you like? Are there times where this kind of look would be desirable?

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Panasonic is My Hero

Many years ago at one of the first RESfests in San Francisco, some Panasonic engineers approached me and the guys who would eventually become my Orphanage business partners. They had some prototype cameras that they wanted to show us, behind closed doors. We were presented with two plastic shells, one of which bore a strong resemblance to what we now know as the venerable DVX100, complete with the built-in faux matte box. They asked our opinions about many features, including the form factors, and of course we picked the one that eventually became the DVX100. As the session ended, the Japanese gentlemen asked us for one must-have feature that we hadn't discussed. We simultaniously said "24p." They smiled, and nodded, and thanked us.

It's easy to take for granted the enormous leap that Panasonic made by introducing a consumer camera that shot 24p. I still admire them for that bold move. Sure, someone would have done it eventually, but it's because of their courage that we now have so many excellent 24p choices, from the mature to the impulse-buy.

The only camera I own that I love more than my DVX100 is my Canon 5D. Although I frequently lug it around with me, there is only one camera that I am literally never without: my Panasonic Lumix LX2. The LX2 is a terrific little 16:9, 10 megapixel, raw-shooting camera marred by only one fatal flaw: piss-poor low-light performance. In fact, when I replaced my LX1 with the LX2, I lamented that Panasonic had increased the megapixel count, following what seemed like a relentless trend in consumer digicams; the more-is-more megapixel marketing barrage that packs so many pixels into tiny CCDs that each must fight for a tiny shred of light, resulting in noisy images with unnecessarily huge file sizes.

Lately I've been entertaining the idea of ditching the aging LX2. The Canon G9 and the new Ricoh GX200 were possibilities. I played with a GX200 last weekend, and it was sweet. Shoots raw as fast as my LX2 shoots JPEG, has a lens that is wide as hell, fast, and doesn't stick out too far beyond the camera body when retracted.

Despite the somewhat noisy 12 megapixel images, my finger was poised over the click-to-buy button.

Then Panasonic announced the LX3. From the press release:

At the heart of the LX3 is a key component that distinguishes it from all other compact cameras: a 1/1.63-inch 10.1-megapixel CCD. Boldly defying the trend to cram in the most pixels possible, Panasonic limited the LX3's large 1/1.63-inch CCD to 10.1 megapixels. This made it possible to make each pixel around 45% larger than those in ordinary 10-megapixel cameras. As a result, both sensitivity and saturation is around 40% higher than in ordinary models, giving the LX3 exquisite image quality with both excellent sensitivity and a wide dynamic range.

In other words, they kept the same resolution as the LX2, but made the chip bigger.

They made the chip bigger! (actually they totally did not, see update below)

Bigger chips mean so many good things. Big chips mean shallower depth-of-field at equivalent settings. Big chips mean big pixels, which means more light hits each photosite. More light means less gain, less noise per pixel. Less noise means more dynamic range. Bigger chips mean better pictures.

Bless you Panasonic. I hope you start a trend. Eventually people will realize that these crazy-high megapixel cameras are making their images look worse instead of better. I sincerely hope that low-light sensitivity and film-like dynamic range can somehow become as consumer lust-inducing as the megapixel number wrongly has.

For those of you looking for a true "digital rangefinder," or, like me, the digital replacement for your trusty old Yashica T4, you won't find it until the megapixel race reverses and becomes a race to the bottom of the Pixel Density charts. Pixel Density is a term coined by the lovely folks at dpreview.com, and it is such a better indicator of a camera's image creation pros and cons than pixel count that they have placed it right below megapixels in all their camera listings. The pixel density of the LX2 is 25 MP/cm² (megapixels per square centimeter). The pixel density of the 5D is 1.5 MP/cm². Less is so very much more.

The LX3 also sports a fast (f/2.0 at the wide end), wide zoom similar to the Ricoh's, and some other nifty things like an optional wide-angle adapter and hot shoe.

And then, as if that wasn't enough (which it is), I continued to read the specs and see that while the SD video mode on the LX3 shoots useful 848x480 video at 30 fps just like the LX2, its HD video mode (1280x720) has been bumped up from 15 to 24 fps.

24p.

24p HD video in your pocket.

Now don't get me wrong—I'm not suggesting that you're going to shoot the sequel to White Red Panic with the LX3. Video from P&S cameras is always ass. But it can be useful ass (if you saw my presentation at SF FCPUG you know this), and it always killed me that amidst the 30p shooting modes there was never a 25p mode for our PAL pals, or even, hey, I can dream can't I?, a 24p mode.

I'm sure some poor engineer at Panasonic Japan views the 24p HD mode as a huge failure. If only I'd tried a little harder, he's thinking, maybe it could have been 30p. I hope I still have a job in the morning.

Well you are my hero, guy-who-fell-just-short-of-30p. And in turn, Panasonic is once again my hero. While you may not be at the tippy top of the 24p prosumer video game that you created, you have once again ensured that I will never go anywhere without a Lumix at my side.

UPDATE: There's been a flurry of discussion about this camera and its sensor, and some helpful folks on Twitter pointed out this article that clarifies the "increase" in sensor size. Turns out the chip is barely bigger at all, and in fact the LX3 will actually use a smaller imaging area than the LX2 did when shooting in 16:9 mode. I'm still getting one of these things, but I sure won't be hyping its "enlarged" sensor anymore. Grumble.

Go Naked pt. 2

A month ago I called your attention to a teaser for a short film called White Red Panic by Ayz Waraich. The film is now complete, and viewable on Vimeo as well as on his site, dimeworth.com.

Don't you dare watch the video in this little window though. Go to the Vimeo page, download the full-res movie (requires logging in) and watch it full screen. I watched it projected at 1080p 90" wide played off a PS3.

And it looked damn good.

Ayz is my new "shut up and make movies" poster boy. He didn't fuss with 35mm adapters and carbon fiber matte boxes. Instead he tamed the toy (the in-spite-of-itself Canon HV20) and put some fine actors with a good, simple story into shots he knew he could make look great using a combination of well-considered camera settings and ample color correction.

Thankfully for all of us, Ayz has started to share some of his production methods on the Rebel Café, including these color correction before/afters.

Read the thread on the Rebel Café and get inspired—but don't make the mistake of thinking that you need to do exactly what Ayz did. The point is that he got off his ass and made a film at a scale he knew he could slam dunk, with the gear he had available.

See, I love Redrock adapters and follow focuses and jibs and anamorphic lenses. But I worry when I see young filmmakers thinking that they should not embark on a project without having all that stuff. Ayz estimates his budget at somehwere south of $1,000. Add the cost of a brand new HV30 to that and you still haven't come close to the cost of most fancy DV matte boxes. Think real hard about that the next time your gear lust overtakes you. I know I will.

Rock on Ayz. You deserve all the attention you're getting for this flick.