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.

A (mildly) Lightroom workflow for printing at costcos and getting superb color

Update: see edit at the end:

Update II (5/20/08): Lightroom 2.0 has made this workflow unnecessary. Check out my post on it.

I decided to detail my printing workflow I follow in Lightroom and Photoshop. This workflow will yield photographs up to 12"x18" (the largest most places print in 1-hour service - not a real limitation) with color and dynamic range rivaling and in some cases exceeding very expensive inkjets, but at a fraction of the cost. I use costcos for this purpose as they are fast, good, provide icc profiles and close to where I live, but I am sure other comparable labs will do fine too with a similar workflow. Labs that use Noritsus or Fuji Frontiers will all have very similar quality. My local costcos uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, which is somewhat thin for larger prints, but gives excellent color fidelity and deep dynamic range. The machines raster scan a laser at three colors over this paper to expose the paper which is then developed using conventional chemical processes. You're actually getting a real photograph from a digital file. The workflow I'll discuss is done in photoshop, but you could use any program that can convert images between icc profiles. For example preview.app from Apple. This sort of sequence is necessary because Lightroom will not export directly to arbitrary icc profiles. Hopefully that will be built in in a future version?¹

Preparation:
1. The first step is to download and install the icc profiles for your lab. Costcos makes them available on their photo upload pages, but they are actually done by dry creek. You can see if you can find your lab there. Download them and install them in a place where photoshop and other color managed apps can find them. On Macs that is simply ~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles or/Library/ColorSync/Profiles. On windows it is somewhere deep in the crypts of the OS. Check this page for instructions. Once installed, you should once every few months check if there is an updated profile.
2. Set up photoshop correctly. Many photoshop installations are setup incorrectly due to bad information floating around on the web. The way You should set it up is to respect embedded profiles and warn for profile mismatches. You get to the dialog in Edit:Color Settings. See below for a suggested setting:

Here I've disclosed the extra options, but they are usually correct. I'm just showing them for reference. The setting for the RGB working space is not that important. Setting it to ppRGB just makes photoshop throw up fewer warnings. When you get a color space mismatch warning when loading a file, always choose "preserve embedded profile." NEVER EVER choose "discard"

So only the top two options are meaningful. Now you have setup Photoshop correctly and it is time to describe the actual workflow:

Workflow:
1. Select the photos you want to print and crop them to the desired aspect ratios of your final prints. Typical print sizes are 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, 8x12, 12x18, etc, so your usual ratios are 2x3, 5x7 and 4x5.

2. Export your photos from Lightroom using the prophotoRGB profile (why ppRGB? check here) in a 16-bits Tiff or psd. At this point I use two different workflows depending on mood. I either scale in the output dialog of Lightroom, or in Photoshop. You should scale to your desired size at a resolution of 300 ppi approximately as this is the approximate resolution of the photomachines.



It s a good idea to create a preset for this.

3. Open one of the exported files in Photoshop.

4. If you did not yet scale to the final size, do it now using the Image->Image size dialog. Again, use 300 ppi for the resolution and type the size in inches or cm of your final print, making sure you have "resample images" checked. This will calculate the actual needed image dimensions in pixels for you and scale to that size. At this stage I use bicubic sampling for the resizing, but you could use whatever algorithm you prefer or perhaps a plugin such as Genuine Fractals.

5. Sharpen for final output. The machines have a resolution of 300 ppi approximately, but they are soft at that resolution which you should try to counteract to get the best prints. You can use many third party sharpeners for this purpose, but to keep this tutorial simple, I'll show you how to use the unsharp mask in Photoshop. Before I open this dialog, I usually zoom the image to 50%. The filter can be found in Filter->Sharpen. Zooming to 50% is a very old trick that allows you to judge the effect of the sharpening fairly well on screen. The settings below are fairly typical for me. An amount of about 150%, a radius between 0.5 and 1 and a threshold of 5 (to avoid sharpening noise).



This should look only slightly crunchy in the 50% preview in the big window. Experiment with this to see what works best.

6. Now comes the important step.² In the Edit menu, choose "convert to profile." In the dialog, choose the profile for your printing service:



7. Convert to 8-bit color (Image->Mode->8 Bits/Channel.

8. Save as a reasonably high quality jpeg:


Make sure you do not select the embed color profile option. The machines ignore the profile anyway and the profiles are usually around 1.5 MB, so to save you upload time, do not embed it. Give it a name that describes which profile you used and to which size you scaled it so that you can identify it later.

9. Repeat steps 3 to 8 for all your photos

10. Upload to your lab and print!

You can easily create a Photoshop droplet for all this if you basically always go to the same size. Also check out my older articles detailing how to use the print panel in Lightroom to do basically the same thing, but including logos and such. Here is the original article and here I explain how to add borders and such.

Notes:
¹ At this point I should note that you could do this all with just sRGB files. However, in my experience, the color reproduction is not as good as I like. Using custom profiles gets me exact color reproduction.
² At this point you could first softproof to correct for any out-of-gamut colors. I'll leave that for a later article.

UPDATE: Timothy Armes brought out a plugin for Lightroom that does all this without the need for Photoshop.