A little demo of content-aware fill in Photoshop CS5: HOLY SHIT.

I had to take the excitement down a notch. Brilliant feature. If you're only going to spend a minute on the linked video, skip to the very last scene at the 4:00 mark.

Agreed. That might make me shell out the money for photoshop, finally.

(Been making do with cheaper alternatives until now)

I had to check that the date wasn't 1st April !

That certainly was incredible, though I don't think the work is quite done after that's applied. I don't understand why he didn't for a second remove the selection lines so we could get a really good look at the results. On that second image I suspect you'd have to do some work on the mountains on the right, as it appears to have created a sharp artificial peak.

But still, that was amazing.

This video and more good news about the latest Lightroom beta. Incredible. I'm still a little dissapointed we're not seeing much in the way of new features in Lightroom, but still hold hope they'll have a third beta or will add another surprise at launch time. This second beta adds tethered shooting and support for video file formats (for asset management only, not editing). Great new additions.

That Photoshop demo is sweet. Notice how it drags a bit on larger selections? I wouldn't be surprised if they were running that demo on some insanely fast box and it would be even worse on cheap laptops and such.

Now, my question is whether the next version of Lightroom support lens distortion correction. It's in Photoshop. Also notable, Lightroom 2 supports the Panasonic LX3. The LX3 has an amazingly wonderful wide-angle lens. The lens has serious barel distortion, but the LX3 corrects that before rendering its JPEGs. Lightroom's raw support for the LX3 also does this correction, as does Panasonic's proprietary raw software, yet lens correction, in general, isn't an advertised feature of Lightroom 3, much less Lightroom 2.

DxO and Bibble now offer lens correction. How about Lightroom?

I've been wanting CS5 for the new Premiere Pro and After Effects stuff for quite a while now. Then, once I saw the Mercury Playback Engine demo video showing real time editing of native 5D2 footage (and other native HD formats, including RED 4K), I really wanted it. Granted, that was with a Quadro FX4800, but still, that's not all that expensive compared to other systems.

Go to http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ and click on the "Sneak Peek at the New Adobe Mercury Playback Engine Technology" link to see what I mean.

That's exactly what I thought. Some of the stuff they did just boggles the mind!

Oh, and if you haven't used the latest Lightroom 3 Beta, I recommend getting it and playing around. Great improvements. Even simple things like just browsing catalogs are much faster. It feels more polished now.

Lightroom 2 and 3 have lens correction, but it's just chromatic aberration and vignetting. I agree they need barrel distortion correction and other expanded options there. I'm not sure what sort of corrections are done automatically, if any. Right now, the recommended way to go is to get PTLens.

Whilst straight away I can see how that feature will save me a good few hours editing time on the average wedding I think it is worth keeping in mind the type of images used and what the results actually looked like.

On the girl on the bench example I wouldn't be happy with the shadow under the bench, and this is just seeing it at really low res. I can't help but think on the last example the selection was kept to break up the fact that the fill would still be visible when it was taken away.

In CS5 and LR3 I was really hoping to see a closer integration between the 2. Fancy new features are great, but what will really save me time is workflow streamlining and speeding up the overall program. I am yet to try beta 2 but the first beta only lasted one afternoon before it got binned. I want to be able to pass a Lightroom DNG over to CS5 apply some edits and save, and have the results display in LR but keep it as a DNG based on the RAW file that I could continue to edit in LR if I need to. I spend a lot of time outputting and inputting between LR and PS, having access to PS tools in LR would be even better!!!

PS is a professional tool, I wish they would put more focus on how professionals use their product rather than building layers of complex tools on top that no one really uses that much. The last wedding I shot was over 1,900 shots with over 400 presented to the client. Now that is a hell of a workflow based on the current system I can tell you!

Cheers

Cris.

But this goes completely against the core principle of keeping your negative unedited. That's the foundation of Lightroom.



Photoshop isn't needed by every photographer and has tools that principally have nothing to do with photography nor editing photos at all. I'd like to see Lightroom's feature set expanded to be able to have some additional control over the photo editing process, but I don't want to see features lifted as-is from Photoshop. They're not necessarily appropriate. Though the one previewed in that video would be AMAZING as a nondestructive meta mod.



Photoshop is somewhat of a pig and really needs a lot of re-implementation. Much of its UI is the same as it was 20 years ago. I'm looking at you, filters and other misc. dialogs. But Photoshop is not a photography tool per se. It is a designer's tool and really always has been. Photographers picked it up because there was nothing else and Adobe took that opportunity to market it in that direction as well. But Lightroom can be used for many (dare I say most?) photographers without ever touching Photoshop proper. Certainly for wedding work where a quick workflow is important.

The feature I'm really looking for in Lightroom is the zone and selection abilities of Lightzone. Much nicer than traditional selection/spot.



Good thing it was a small shoot then. Your workflow would have really killed you on a large project.

Exactly, I'd rather development time spent on layers in DNGs for example. At the moment You have to output from LR as a TIFF, JPG etc... as if you take in the DNG the LR adjustments are lost. This is a big pain in the arse for me. This would be truly time saving.

I would say that 80-90% of my workflow is based on LightRoom, I use it a lot. The other 10-20% is Photoshop, and I maybe use 5% of it's features, mostly involving selections I never use layers or output PSDs as it would swamp my machine with bloated files very quickly. The time taken is disproportionate to the work required and it would have been nice to see a move towards solving this. So far this doesn't seem to be the case.

I recently started looking at how much time I spend on my pictures for clients. I didn't think it was too unreasonably to spend 5 minutes on each pictures workflow, but when you multiply that out by 400 it's over 33 hours of work! My current pricing is built on about 14-20 hours of post work, so I only get to spend 2-3 minutes on each shot! There are things I could do of course, offer less pictures and spend more time on the ones I present or stop using Photoshop all together and run the risk of the client not being happy etc...

Cheers

Cris.

Just curious, but what exactly are you doing in PS that LR can't do?

Mainly selections, adjusting the background independently of my subject. While the Lightroom tools can do this (kinda) results from PS are seamless when compared. Curves also has more control and somehow looks better. I also use the patch tool quite a bit, the clone tools within Lightroom are quite restrictive.

If Lightroom had better selection tools, patch and better curves I would be down to about 1% Photoshop.

Of course if I am doing a large print, or some published work like the cookbook I have been doing recently then I would spend more time on each image and Photoshop is much better for the detailed work like that.

Cheers

Cris.

Aha!



I do concur, and that's precisely the purpose of the feature I mentioned was so very excellent in Lightzone. I'm not sure they still have the same sample videos up, but their adjustments for this type of scenario were amazing every time I saw them.

With regards to the way you run your workflow, not being a professional photographer myself, but having a lot of Photoshop experience, I will suggest trying to front-load as much of the work as possible. That is, make whatever necessary adjustments to your shooting style and habits to reduce the amount of time needed in post.

Many wedding photographers shoot in JPG and don't do even a fraction of the post work you're talking about. At the very least you should be able to present a larger set of photos to your client and then do minor (manual) post on only the shots they select for printing.

Now if only we could get this as a non-destructive set of instructions in Lightroom. Could be very handy to "version" different instances of a photo without actually having to create additional files.

Looks like content aware fill will have some handy uses.

Heehee.

Ok, I haven't even watched this whole video yet, but I thought I'd post the link before I get back to it... Puppet Warp - pretty much what it sounds like. The ability to manipulate parts of an image, such as limbs on a puppet, while preserving linked "joints."