Enhanced details and what kind of images it helps with

The Heavens open

Adobe has added a cool new geeky feature in the latest release of Lightroom and ACR. These are Classic 8.2, CC 2.2, and ACR 11.2. The feature uses machine learning to analyze and learn from your raw file to eke out the last very bit of detail. For some cameras that have non-Bayer mosaic sensors such as Fuji's X-trans sensors, this is enormously impactful and improves almost every image. However for regular Bayer sensors, you will rarely see any improvement. I estimate that perhaps 1% of my images show any improvement and then you will only see it in humongous prints. The problems manifest in artifacts visible in the standard demosaic and are solved by the enhanced detail feature. For the fall color image below that shows definite improvement when looked at at 1:1, I have a 4 feet high print in my office where you will have a hard time seeing it. So this feature is really for the most extreme pixelpeepers out there. Nevertheless since I am a geek and appreciate the imaging science behind this, I thought I'd show you a few instances where you can expect improvement. These all have to do with the very specific characteristics of Bayer array sensors. A Bayer array sensor as is common in almost every DSLR and also cellphones and compact cameras, has its pixels laid in a way that you have twice as many green sensitive pixels as blue or red. It looks like the below where every square is a single pixel on the sensor and the color indicates different color filters in front of the pixel:

By Amada44 - Own work, Public Domain, Link

The job of a raw converter is to try and intelligently interpolate between the different pixels to generate a full color image. The existing algorithms for this are not always very smart and even Nikon's own raw converter can generate artifacts under certain circumstances. However Adobe has done something extraordinary and uses artificial intelligence to get around this problem. Also, the above figure immediately tells you that detail that only has blue or red will be prone to artifacts. This is precisely where you might find improvement from this feature. Below is a zoomed in view of an image I found in my library that had these exact issues. These are images from a Nikon D600 which is a 24 MP camera. Remember that yellow is really green and red combined. You should click or tap it to see it bigger:

You can clearly see that in the regular image as well as the image converted using Nikon's own software there are very ugly artifacts around the leaves. The enhanced detail algorithm is able to get around the problems caused by the Bayer mosaic sensor lack of detail in blue and red. To make it more obvious here is the two even more zoomed-in views:

Standard Demosaic


Enhanced Details:

Note that at the scale you are watching this, if you are on a typical desktop computer, it would correspond to a print that is 10 feet high. Again, I want to be clear that enhanced details only matters on ginormous prints. It does not matter for any reasonable size print and definitely not for online images.
Another type of feature where you might see improvement is sharp colored edges against blue skies. Again most visible around red objects. Here is an example from the temple of the sun picture I opened this post with that was taken in Cathedral Valley in Capitol Reef National park at sunrise. A beautiful and not too well known location. Again click/tap for bigger

You can clearly see on the diagonal feature that the old demosaic (right hand side) causes stair stepping artifacts while the enhanced details version (left) has a smooth edge. Again you will only see this in absolutely gigantic prints. What you see me do here is taking pixel peeping to the absolute extreme. Another thing to take into account is that the process of doing an enhanced details creates a new dng file that is about 4x the size of the original file. For the tiny enhancements you might find in a tiny subset of images, it is highly unlikely to be worth it to do this except if you find egregious problems like in the fall leaf image. Even then you would need to print at gigantic sizes.

To conclude this post here is the full version of the leaf image above. You can see that the detail that I used above is tiny. See if you can find where I took the sample.

Geometric

A mobile workflow with Lightroom?

Because of a recent trip to New York I decided to try whether I could work with a exclusively mobile workflow (i.e. no laptop) using just an iPad Pro and the sd card reader for lightning. I've read quite a bit about this and certainly Adobe plays up this workflow on their blog and with videos with well-known photographers singing its praises. I have certainly enjoyed the option to shoot dng files with my iPhone's built-in camera straight into Lightroom, and so to save a bit of weight and to see if this worked as well as advertised, I decided to try it for myself and only take an iPad and my cameras. To put the bottom-line up front, what I found is that this workflow shows some promise but is still very much a mixed bag. It works great if your needs are modest. It does not work when you are importing multiple days of images and when you have more than a few images. Part of the problem lies with Apple and part lies with Adobe. Let me explain my conclusions in a bit more detail.

The Brooklyn bridge at night. Shot using a handheld Nikon D600. Raw image file imported to Lightroom mobile using Apple's lightning sd card reader and edited using Lightroom mobile. The file automatically transferred to my desktop machine from where I edited the detail settings and uploaded it to my web service.

importing images

I use the excellent 9.7" iPad Pro that has the wider color gamut screen. This works great with Adobe Lightroom and it even color manages in Lightroom, Safari and other apps. This is quite nice. Also, the little Apple sd card reader works well but there are a few major problems to be aware off. First, you have to use Apple's Photos app to import your raw images from your camera's card. This is probably an Apple-imposed limitation but it causes some major issues. If like me, you have Photos set up to have your photo library mirrored through the cloud, it will immediately start uploading your raw files to Apple's cloud. Also, most people have limited space on their tablets so you do not want duplicate files in the end. So you have to as quick as you can go into Lightroom mobile and import the raw files from your camera roll. Then when it has imported them, go back to Photos and delete the raw files from there twice (first from the camera roll and then permanently delete them from the trash). The reason to do this of course is that you generally do not have very good internet connection when traveling like this and your tablet will be hogging your internet connection completely if you're not careful. However, this will cause a big problem the next time you import from the card as I explain below.

When you insert your card for the second time (say at the second day of your trip), you will be presented by something like the below:

There are two main problems here. The first is that it takes very long for the thumbnails to show and second that because we (forcibly!) deleted the raw files from the device's camera roll to save space and bandwidth, the device does not know which images were already imported. You basically have to remember and wait until the device finally gets around to the new images before you can select the images to import. This is a pain. You can avoid this by also deleting the files of the sd card, but this is a really bad idea as you will not have a backup of your images. Needless to say that is absolutely not what you want to do. The importing step into Lightroom is very easy however and fairly painless.

Conclusion: importing is not a good experience. This might be fixed if Apple opens up the sd card reader to third-party apps.

Editing images

Lightroom mobile works surprisingly well to edit images. Many things are supported such as gradient filters, and a fairly complete suite of editing tools. There are some major omissions though that turn out to be close to deal breakers for me. The first is that the camera profile defaults to "Adobe Standard" and you cannot change it (or even see the setting!) on the mobile side. This is problematic as the Adobe profile is not good for many cameras. I generally default to "Camera Standard" or to a profile I created from a passport color checker chart. You can't do this in Lightroom mobile. As a result, you're unlikely to get the color you would normally have on your desktop. The second major problem is that Lightroom will not show you the full resolution of the image and you can't change any of the detail settings directly. I could not easily reduce noise in high ISO images and could not optimize any sharpening. This felt very limiting to me. There are a few sharpening and noise reduction presets hidden in the presets submenu that do a bit of what you need, but clearly this needs a full set of settings. Thirdly, you can't stitch panoramas in LR/mobile. Oftentimes when I want to save weight, I will simply only carry a kit lens and shoot wider-angle views by simply moving the camera and stitching afterwards. This is not possible on just mobile. Last, but not least, the "upright" tools are not there. This means that for many of the shots I took in Manhattan and shooting many of the amazing buildings, I could not do any perspective corrections.

Last light reflected in the World Trade Center towers at the 9/11 memorial plaza. I highly recommend the 9/11 memorial museum at the site of the old WTC. A very powerful experience. I shot this using three shots using my Nikon 1 J4 camera at 10mm, imported into LR/mobile and did initial edits to it. When I got home, the images synced (after a looooong time - see below) to my desktop and I could stitch a panorama and do an upright correction to get the buildings vertical.

Conclusion: Editing works OK but is missing some essential features

Syncing images to the desktop

There is only one description for this: painfully slow even on very fast connections. It works for just a few pictures, but if you have more than a few such as the about 50-100 I had every day, it is not a good experience. It would be great if you could get home and have your images waiting for you. In practice, this will not happen. One major reason for this is that Lightroom mobile will not upload the images to Adobe's creative cloud while it is not in the foreground. This means that you have to stay in Lightroom and you have to keep your tablet awake. Also, it seems to use only a tiny fraction of the upload bandwidth and so expect it to take hours during which you can't do anything else with your tablet than Lightroom. To make matters worse, once your images have finally transferred over, your desktop machine does not have any clue that it has the images already in its library when you insert the memory card from your camera in your computer. This seems like a small problem but in fact, many people might take the approach to the above problems to only import a few files into LR/mobile and when you get home to import the rest from your card. This will ensure you end up with many duplicates! I do not understand why Lightroom Desktop does not recognize it already has the image files as it should screen on filename, capture date etc. All data that is exactly the same.

Conclusion: syncing your raw images to your desktop is not a very good experience.

Sharing images on social media

This is one thing that worked well. It is quite easy to just hit the share button in Lightroom and share directly to instagram (example), Facebook, twitter (example), etc. There are some issues with image quality however. The "small" 2048 pixel (how is that small?) has lots of jpeg compression artifacts. You also cannot easily add a watermark without going through another app on your iPad. There should be more options for image size and quality.

Conclusion: sharing your images on social media works well but can be improved.

Final thoughts

To sum up, A complete mobile workflow for people shooting raw files is not here yet. For now I recommend you take a ultralight laptop such as a MacBook Air or a Microsoft Surface and just run the desktop Lightroom on it. I am sure this is set to improve in the near future though. LR/mobile has rapidly improved over the last few months from a mere curiosity to something that at least comes close now and I am sure Adobe will keep improving the software. It is quite amazing that you can now edit raw images on a mobile platform fairly well I think. However, dealing with hundreds of raw files does not work well and has to be avoided for now.

Lightroom 2015.3 and 6.3 available

I know a lot of my readers use Lightroom. The last 2015.2/6.2 release has been quite the disaster with a messed up import screen and a lot of bugs introduced that slowed the program way down. I could not get the 2015.2 nor the 2015.2.1 version to work reliably on my main machine, a retina mac book pro, regardless of whether I turned off the graphics card acceleration (something most of heavy users of Lightroom should probably do) or whether I turned off the "add photos screen" so I had to revert to 2015.1.1 to get anything done. This morning Adobe released 2015.3 which promises to fix most of these issues. I will install later today and report on whether it now works right. Get it here.

Lightroom 5.7 fixes the color management bug

Adobe fixed the bug plugging up the shadows in the Develop module of Lightroom. Get the update here as fast as you can.

PDF with all Lightroom shortcuts

A dizzying array. It just keeps going and going. Nice to print out and keep as reference.

Fixed - bad scaling in ACR/Lightroom

Just an update on the problems with scaling in Lightroom that I hammered on for a while on my blog. See for example this post and this post. If you have CS4, install ACR 5.2 and you'll see that the scaling problem has been fixed. These improvements will carry over into LR 2.2 when it comes out later this month. Eric Chan from Adobe, who also had a lot to do with the superb new camera-matching profiles, apparently is in large part responsible for these improvements and he used many example images from me and many other people to test the updated algorithms. Great job. When LR 2.2 comes out, this will remove my number one problem with Lightroom. I'm as happy as a tornado in a trailer park, to use a strange Texas colloquialism.

Lightroom 1.2 and ACR 4.2

Adobe just released the Lightroom 1.2 and ACR 4.2 updates (use the adobe updater app in CS3). It includes support for the yummy Canon 40D and, for me at least, it solves the weird watercolor paint effect that some pictures took on in Lightroom 1.1. This is a must have update if you use either.

Lightroom interview

Just found a really interesting interview with Mark Hamburg - one of the developers behind Adobe's lightroom (via the lightroom blog). It is intriguing and offers quite some insight into the ideas behind the interface. I am hoping that the final version adopts some of the really good organization ideas from Aperture and vice versa (the print pane in Lightroom is really nice!) so that the whole field gets advanced. A little old-fashioned competition is a good thing I think.