"Organizing and Locating Your Images Using Adobe Lightroom" John Shaw e-book Help

About three weeks ago I purchased an e-book from John Shaw entitled"Organizing and Locating Your Images Using Adobe Lightroom".  This book is not about how to use light room, but how to organize and find your images with light room.  John Shaw's book has given me new ideas on how to organize my pictures in light room and I have utilized a number of his suggestions.  Like he says in his e-book not all of his suggestions will be easy and some will be tedious.  I agree, if you can't locate of image, it is of no use to you.  I have incorporated some of his workflow into my cataloging of images and yet have kept some of my old workflow that I understand from continuous use.  Over the last couple of weeks, I have been making changes to my cataloging workflow and just recently have gone back into older pictures and cleaned up my catalog by removing duplicates and making it easier to find what pictures that I know I have but because the way the catalog was set up,  I could not easily find them.  Now that has improved.  Reading the e-book you may not agree with everything, but there are many tricks that he shows you that will improve your workflow.  My feeling is, once you import pictures into Lightroom, you need to keyword them.  I have previously told you that I have taken my keywords and arrange them in a hierarchical fashion, which makes them easier to find and add to photographs.  With keywording you can find what you need when you are looking for them.

I still have a large number of photographs that are not keyworded, although they were once keyworded, due to the fact that I lost the keywords when I changed computers.

John Shaw gives you his basic set up and of course you can modify that due to your own needs.  The book is available for purchase at http://www.johnshawphoto.com/using-lightroom-2-and-photoshop-4/for $10, which is money well spent

High ISO Testing per John Shaw

John Shaw, a great nature photographer, just posted a blog.  Http://www.johnshawphoto.com/run-a-test/, about utilization of high ISO in a situation.  He said:  "It  depends on several factors.
1.    Every camera has different high ISO liabilities.  What does your camera do?
2.    How much noise is acceptable to you?
3.    What are you going to do with your images?  Downsizing a file removes noise, so you can get away with a lot if all you’re going to do with the image is posting it to the Web.  Making large prints, however, is another matter."

He then suggested to run a simple test, which is outlined in his blog, I decided to follow his advice and test out mine and my grandson's cameras which are at home at this time.  I set up on my porch two soda cans, plus the flower that I used to photograph the praying mantis.  I photographed the scene only utilizing the native ISO from each camera, I did not utilize the high and low settings.  I followed John Shaw's procedure.  I decided to take the highest ISO from each camera and see which software, and my eyes was the best at reducing noise.  I utilized noise reduction in Lightroom, with Topaz Denoise and NIK Dfine in Photoshop, so I could use layers.

Nikon D300s highest native ISO was 3200.  Nikon's D3s, D7100, and D800 highest native ISO was 6400.

Noise reduction in Lightroom was done manually by utilizing the slider and looking at the photograph on the computer screen.  Topaz Denoise I utilized a strong setting under Raw.  With NIK Dfine I utilize the auto setting.  This was so I can make the results as equal as I could.

My results: Nikon D3s     1: Denoise 2: Lightroom 3: Dfine

D3s ISO 6400 -  Original

 

D3s ISO 6400 - LR Noise Reduction

D3s ISO 6400 - Denoise

 

D3s ISO 6400 - Dfine

              

Nikon D300s  1: Denoise 2: Lightroom 3: Dfine

D300s ISO 3200 - Original

D300s ISO 3200 - LR Noise Reduction

    

D300s ISO 3200 - Denoise

   

D300s ISO 3200 -Dfine

        Nikon D7100  1: Denoise 2: Lightroom 3: Dfine

D7100 ISO 6400 - Original

D7100 ISO 6400 - LR Noise Reduction

D7100 ISO 6400 -Denoise

 

D7100 ISO 6400 -Dfine

            
  Nikon D800    1: Denoise 2: Lightroom 3: Dfine

D800 ISO 6400 - Original

D800 ISO 6400 - LR Noise Reduction

D800 ISO 6400 - Denoise

D800 ISO 6400 - Dfine

Interesting results, I am sure if I worked with Dfine the results may be different, but Topaz Denoise results were straight out of the box.

When I get a moment I am going to run even more tests that John Shaw suggests in blog.

Expose to the Right, a Test - from a blog by John Shaw

We are told only shoot in RAW that we should expose to the right (ETTR), so that we would capture the most information for the image.  John shore wrote an article on exposing to the right http://www.johnshawphoto.com/category/exposure/.  What the article discusses is how far to the right can we really go.  Should we stop when blinkies show up on the camera's LCD to avoid blowing out highlights.  John Shaw reminds us that what we are seeing on the LCD is really a JPEG thumbnail that the camera has produced.

What John Shaw suggest is to do a test to really determine what the correlation between when blinkies start and the actual clipped highlights in the RAW file.

I followed John Shaw's instructions and perform the test today and found out that I had one full stop of exposure available before the histogram In Camera Raw showed clipping.  In fact, I went to 1 2/3 stops of exposure, and I still could recover highlights in the picture.

Original image

Minor clipping at +1 stops of exposure

Clipping at 1 2/3 stops of exposure

 

 

 

Clipping recovered with the use of the highlight and exposure sliders in Camera RAW

 

 

 

 

 

I recommend to those of you who utilize and and shoot RAW to perform this test and understand what the latter to on your camera is in regards to exposing to the right.