Lightroom: Localized Adjustments, Aperture and Viveza

In a way Lightroom 1.x has had "localized adjustments" since version 1. The DEVELOP module has always allowed for photo editing based on color range throughout the photograph. This way, one could target, say, green grass in the photo (but also all other things green) and adjust the hue (make it yellower or cooler), the saturation of that specific color range (more intense richer green, or one almost grey), and the luminance (make the grass brighter or darker).

The problem with this approach is that sometimes different (and non-adjacent) regions of a photograph have the same colors. Adjusting one instance of the color locally, without changing all the other occurrences of the color in the image was impossible. This is particularly visible in images that have lots of elements in similar color range. Take this photo of a few tulips - it shows very clearly the benefits of this new feature.

Originally (after initial develop adjustments), the photo has two darker purple tulips. I would like to make them brighter, and de-saturate them (make them more blue and less purple). With LR 1.4 this is possible, but will inevitably affect other parts of the image in a way that is not acceptable.

In other words, all colors similar to those present in the two dark purple tulips will change. The result will be something something like this (on the right). Normally, to fix that we would have to resort to Photoshop, mask the dark purple tulips, and use adjustment layers to change the specific areas. Of course, this requires a separate, costly piece of software, a much longer, more complex process, not to mention the learning curve. But LR 2 Beta makes this easy.

LR 2 Beta provides a brush which can be used to paint over the AREAS which you want to affect, to then apply to those areas only adjustments of exposure, brightness, clarity, saturation, and color tinting. To make "painting over" the image precise, the diameter of the brush, the size of the feathered brush edge, and brush's density can all be adjusted. In addition to "free-painting with a brush" (as you would with Photoshop's quick mask) LR's brushes can also "auto mask", which in Adobe parlance means automatically selecting adjacent areas of similar color, not separated by edges. It's sort of like the quick mask in Photoshop and the magic wand rolled into one: paint over an area, and if you turned on "automask," only the areas that have similar colors are selected. Once you select ("paint over") the areas you want to change, you can make precise refinements by adding or subtracting from the initially created selection with brushes of varying size, feathered edge and flow.

You can create several separate "masks" on one image (although it slows LR down), and make different adjustments to each selection. On the image below, I used two painted masks: one, labelled A is inactive (white origin point); the second, labelled B is active (black origin point); the parameters and adjustments for the currently selected mask (B) appear on the right in the develop panel (yellow rectangle); the coverage of the mask becomes visible as a whitish highlight as you hover over its origin point (I wish it was mote visible, and not only for a moment), here labelled as C; I added the red lines to clearly show the extent of the current mask / selection.

The image below shows the before and after view with the local adjustments turned on in the image on the right. I used one mask to lower the exposure on the very distracting, bright leaf in the lower center, and a few other leafage spots; then I darkened the left side of the background and warmed it up, by adding yellow "tint". All of it took a grand total of 2.5 minutes (OK -it actually took 15, but only because I was playing with it, AMAZED at what it can do, and how precise it can be; in normal, working conditions, it would take 2.5 mins.). No additional software needed. Very, very impressive. This feature alone will be worth the upgrade price to many users, as it will make many quick trips to Photoshop and back a thing of the past (in many cases).

 

HOW IT STACKS UP WITH APERTURE 2

Apple's Aperture (2) does not have a similar feature at all. Technically, localized adjustments are possible (they are performed via a plug-in, outside Aperture "proper"), but once you click on OK, they get permanently "baked into" the image, and cannot be edited after the current editing session is closed. In Lightroom, on the other hand, localized adjustments, like all other adjustments, are written as an editable list of instructions, and the original master image is never altered. The adjustments themselves may be edited and fine-tuned as much as needed, deleted later (with an animated puff of smoke and its whoosh! sound); and saved as a snapshot in the Develop module, or spun off from the master image as virtual copy at any time (CMD+').

HOW IT STACKS UP: U-POINT/VIVEZA

Lightroom's new feature must also be bad news for people at Nik Software, the creators of U-point technology implemented in Nik Software's own line of software (e.g., Viveza Photoshop plug-in, whose interface was very clearly inspired by Lightroom), and licensed by other developers (Nikon's Capture NX uses it).

At first sight, U-point is a much more elegant solution (image on the left, a screen shot from Viveza demo video on the company's website), and offers a wide range of local adjustment parameters. U-point (as implemented in Viveza) adjusts (on the image, beginning at the top with B): brightness (Lightroom: also), contrast (LR: also), saturation (LR: also), hue (LR: no), red, green, blue (LR: no), warm (LR: also as "TINT"), and point diameter (LR: also). On the other hand, LR includes exposure (Viveza: no), and clarity (Viveza: no), including the new, negative clarity values for decreased local contrast.

Lightroom's implementation of localized adjustments might seem (and probably is) less intuitive and less elegant than U-point, but LR has some advantages. Its adjustment brush has two modes, regular and automask. In automask mode it behaves very much like U-point does, but it can also work in "plain" masking mode, in which case it allows for blocking arbitrary areas of the image even if they include a variety of colors and edges (e.g., developing a landscape and its reflection in the water differently; Viveza might have a problem with that, although I haven't tried it). Lightroom allows to manually fine-tune the selections, and save two frequently used brush settings; Viveza relies on Photoshop CS3 to do that (it brings the adjusted image back into CS3 as a layer+mask).

Viveza is a beautifully designed and very elegantly implemented solution, but at $250 (in addition to CS3 which it needs to run on top of), Lightroom's new abilities will no doubt make many photographers think twice.

WISHING

I only have ONE major wish, and a few minor ones regarding the LR localized adjustments. One: currently the ACR in Photoshop CS3 cannot read the localized adjustments (except as a rendered / baked image), so potentially useful features such as "open as CS3 smart object" are not yet useable; I hope Adobe will provide ACR update able to handle that issue ALSO for CS3, not just for the future CS4.

 

Second (minor issue), I'd like the "painted over" areas to be more clearly visible; just showing them when you hover over the origin point makes refining selections difficult; third also to do with visibility, the origin points, on darker photos are also hard to notice / find. That's it. Speed would be something worth mentioning, but this is an early Beta, so hopefully this aspect of Lightroom will improve too.

The only downside of LR 2 Beta is that going back to 1.4 for actual editing of working photos is now much less fun, knowing what LR 2 will be able to do... :).