Lightroom and its hidden adjustments

[Bring on the clowns]

If anyone else sometimes struggles with what I'd describe as seeing pictures too obviously digital and shouty/over contrasty - probably to me more than most, as a luddite with so many years of using film - here is an excellent blog article on how Lightroom adds its own adjustments even at the import state to RAW files, and how to sort it. By the same guy who did an excellent Photoshop and Lightroom course I went on last year.

I now have this as one of my 2 default presets and it's really helped me get a happier starting point and less (random) tweaking needed in the subsequent development and pictures I'm now far happier with.

http://www.wildlifeinpixels.net/blog/lightroom-neu...

[LongQ]

You would love Capture One for that.

Just change the Curve for the ICC profile to "Linear" and you are all set to take control.

Well, that and a number of other ways to defeat the standards set by the majority of basic processors (people) and their view of what "looks good".

[steveatesh]

Must confess I preferred Capture One when I did the two trials and comparisons, it seems to give sharper images and I liked the ability to control colour at a very local level using layers.

Sadly it being almost twice the cost did it for me as a hobbyist so I ended up with LR.

[Bring on the clowns]

I did wonder about Capture One, especially with my hang ups with digital colour, but having already subscribed to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom it seemed a bit extravagant, again! Maybe one day. There is this legend(?) quoted by various pros, often Leica and Hasselblad/Imacon and Phase One users that the Danish do colour better than anyone else

Mostly I use Lightroom, with some further layers work in Photoshop and then variousTopaz add ons. I bought the whole Nik collection as well, but with the Topaz stuff find I never use it now. De-noise, for example is way better for me than the noise reduction tools in Lightroom - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRe2W-32N-_uStDUL...

[K12beano]

I'm generally happy living with Lightroom, but do appreciate why many don't like it - well probably detest it - when (like many things in the modern world) it just THINKS IT CAN DO BETTER

Understanding WHY it thinks it can do better is good! Thanks for the link1!

[Otispunkmeyer]

I get annoyed at this sometimes. Its easy enough to sorta go back to the flatter raw file, but yeah. You can see it do it as well, first time you click on an image it first pops up as you took it, then it gets altered.

I have to say though, I have just re-imported a load of photos into the latest LR and its done a decent job of automatically sorting out some of the horrible blue casts on some of them. So I am quite happy with it in that respect.

At the moment having great fun with the free Nik add-ons just released.