Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

For the fourth iteration of Lightroom, Adobe has enhanced the processing capabilities and added features to aid photographers with handling modern photographic challenges, such as the integration of video. Although Lightroom is primarily a photographer’s tool, it is also indispensable for video producers and editors who have to deal with a large volume of photographs, such as when producing documentaries that are based on archival images. Lightroom is the ideal application to store, organize, adjust, crop and prepare stills for video editing. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom competes directly with Apple Aperture and each has its loyal proponents among photographers. Both are powerful tools and each new version tends to leapfrog that of the competitor. For now, Lightroom offers the more advanced video features and, of course, is a cross-platform application.

Photo features

Let’s first look at the improvements for photography. Image processing and color science have been changed in Lightroom 4. If you open existing photos that have been processed and catalogued in previous versions of Lightroom, you have the option of sticking with the old correction or update the file. Naturally, all changes are non-destructive, so your original photo is always unaltered. The biggest changes have been made in highlight/shadow recovery and noise reduction.

Highlight/shadow recovery is critical in digging out detail in bright skies and dark areas in an image. If you work with camera raw images, Lightroom uses the same raw processing engine as Photoshop. There’s also advanced black-and-white conversion. This lets you use eight color channels to control the tonal qualities of the black-and-white image. In other words, you have more control than merely desaturating the image. Finally, there are new selective brushes to control such options as white balance within areas of the picture.

With the increased use of smart phone cameras and online social media and photo services, like Flickr and Facebook, Lightroom 4 now lets you organize images based on location information embedded in the image metadata. This is aided by a new Map module accessible at the top of the interface. There is also enhanced sharing integration with some social media sites.

The big new selling point for photographers is photo book creation. This was a feature that previously had some Lightroom users jumping over to Aperture just to use, but no longer. Photo book creation lets photographers design coffee table book layouts, complete with proofing and ready to send to the printer. To enter the Book module, click the title button at the top (like Slideshow or Web) to access the book layout controls.

Plug-in integration

As a video editor, plug-ins are something I use a lot. A video plug-in is typically applied as a filter within the editing application, but photo plug-ins work differently. Lightroom sends your image to an external application launched from the Develop module’s Photo/Edit In pulldown menu command. This architecture has been available since version 1.0 and developers have steadily been creating photo-compatible versions of their tools. Adobe Photoshop, Magic Bullet Looks, Tiffen Dfx, DFT Film Stocks and DFT Photo Copy are all available as external “plug-ins”.

When you send a photo to an application like Magic Bullet Looks, Lightroom gives you the option to send a copy with or without the Lightroom correction “baked in” for further processing. When you are done, the external application returns you to Lightroom, where you then have two versions of the photo – the “before image” and the “after image” with the look added.

I like using Lightroom for processing photos, but I also find these plug-in options quite enticing. For example, adding selective focus filters, stylized effects, textures or painterly effects can be best achieved using an application like Photoshop or Tiffen Dfx. By starting and ending in Lightroom, you maintain the ability to organize these images in a central environment.

Video

Photographers have increasingly had to deal with video as part of their workflows, so photo organizing/processing applications have added video features. This includes Adobe Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom. First, in version 3 and now more so in Lightroom 4. Videos are accessed in the Library module, but you only have limited processing control. You can’t open video files in the Develop module for full color correction. Individual videos can be opened in a viewer by double-clicking the file in the browser. You can trim the in and out points of the clip and set a reference frame for the browser thumbnail.

The Library module does allow limited adjustments, as well as the application of custom and built-in presets. With video clips you can adjust white balance, exposure, contrast, black and white points and vibrance. A variety of video formats are supported, which on my Mac Pro included ProRes HQ and 4444 files from an ARRI ALEXA and RED files from both RED One M-X and EPIC cameras. Although the RED images are a raw format, Lightroom still only sees these as video, even when using an EPIC to shoot stills. If you do nothing to the RED files, then Lightroom applies the in-camera metadata settings created by the videographer. If you adjust the color metadata settings of the .R3D files using RED’s free REDCINE-X PRO application, then these updated settings will be recognized by Lightroom.

To test the custom presets, I exported a TIFF from an EPIC file out of REDCINE-X PRO using the flatter RedLogFilm gamma curve. This was imported into Lightroom as a photo, so I was able to bring it into the Develop module and make detailed image corrections. These parameters were then saved as a custom preset. Doing this enabled me to open my RED files in their native .R3D raw format (using the same RedLogFilm metadata setting) and apply the custom preset as a batch to all of the files. Although it’s possible to work with RED files inside Lightroom 4, frankly it’s a slow process. REDCINE-X PRO is the better tool if you are a RED photographer/videographer; however, there’s no reason you can’t use the two applications in conjunction with each other. This is especially true if you are using an EPIC camera for still photography, such as fashion shoots, since Lightroom 4 is far better as a tool for adjusting and organizing still images.

Another new video feature is the ability to export color corrected and trimmed video clips. Lightroom 4 offers three options: original, H.264 and DPX.  If you export as “original” then no color adjustments are applied and the existing clip is merely copied in its original size and length. DPX image sequences and H.264 files accept the color changes and are exported between the trimmed in and out point (if set). The maximum video output size is 1920×1080 for H.264 and DPX, but I was unsuccessful in exporting RED files as anything other than the original format. The ProRes files from the ALEXA, however, exported in all three variations and included the baked-in settings I’d used to offset the camera’s Log-C gamma profile.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 continues to improve as the best, cross-platform photography application. It sports a new, lower price ($149), plus will be available through the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service. The new processing features bump its power up a notch, but if you need to create photo books, then this upgrade is essential. If you are a video professional, then it’s not the most ideal tool for dealing with video, but obviously that’s merely a secondary feature, rather than the primary intent of the software. Nevertheless, photographers who want a limited ability to make color adjustments and to organize their video clips in a familiar environment will welcome the new video features.

Originally written for DV magazine / Creative Planet / NewBay Media, LLC

© 2012 Oliver Peters

Photo phun

I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to photography, though I still like to take my share of snapshots. Sometimes I’m lucky. As a holiday break I decided to play around with a hodge-podge of images – some from holiday times or winter locations and others not.

These were processed through Lightroom and Photoshop as well as the photo plug-in versions of Tiffen Dfx and Magic Bullet Looks. On some of these I was going for rich images, some for effects and others a pseudo painterly look. Although these were all still photos, the same looks and processes are applicable to video color grading and stylizing effects.

Click on any image to see an enlarged view and to scroll through a filmstrip view of all. After the New Year I’ll be back with more standard film and video fare.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Documentary Editing Tips

Of the many projects I work on, documentaries and documentary-style productions are my favorite. I find these often more entertaining and certainly more enlightening than many dramatic features and shows. It’s hard to beat reality. Documentaries present challenges for the editor, but in no other form does the editor play more of a role in shaping the final outcome. Many of them truly typify an editor’s function as the “writer” through shot selection and construction.

Structure and style

There are different ways you can build a documentary, but in the end, the objective is to end up with a film that tells an engaging story in such a way that the audience comprehends it. Structurally a documentary tends to take one of these forms:

–       Interview sound bites completely tell the story

–       The “voice of God” narrator guides you through

–       The “slice of life” story, where the viewer is a hidden observer

–       Re-enactments of events through acted scenes or readings, a la The Civil War or The Blues

–       The filmmaker as a first person guide, such as Werner Herzog

Sometimes, the best approach is a combination of all of these. You may set out to have the complete story told only through assembled sound bites, yet the story is never fully fleshed out. There, pieces of scripted narration will help clarify the story and bind disparate elements and thoughts together.

Story arc and character

The persons on screen are real, but to the audience they are no less characters in a film than a role performed by a dramatic actor. As an editor, the way you select sound bites and put them together – and the order in which these are presented throughout the film – establish not only a story arc, but also perceived heroes and villains in the minds of the audience. Viewers want a film with a logical start, building tension and ultimate resolution. Even when there is no happy ending, the editor should strive to build a story that leaves the audience with some answers or conclusion.

Remember to balance out your characters. In many interview-based stories, the same questions are posed to the various interviewees as the interviews are conducted. This is helpful to the editor, because you can balance out the different on-camera appearances by mixing up whose response you choose to use. That way, the same subject isn’t always to go-to person and you aren’t heavy with any single person. Sometimes it’s best to have one person start a thought or a statement and then conclude with another, assuming the two segments are complementary.

Objectivity

This is one of the myths taught in some film and journalism schools. The truth is that almost every documentary (and often many news stories) are approached from the point-of-view and biases of the writer, producer, director and editor. You can try to portray all sides fairly, but the choice of who is interviewed or which bites are selected reflects an often subconscious bias of the person making that decision. It can also appear lopsided simply based on which subjects decided to participate.

Sometimes the effects are subtle and harmless, as in reality TV shows, where the aim is to tell the most entertaining story. In the other extreme, it can become borderline propaganda for the agenda of the filmmaker. I’m not telling you what type of film to make – just to be aware of the inevitable. If there’s a subjective point-of-view, then don’t try to hide it. Rather, make it clearly a personal statement so the audience isn’t tricked into believing the filmmakers gave a fair shake to all sides.

The art of the interview

 If your documentary tale is built out of interview clips, then a lot of your time as an editor will go into organizing the material and playing with story structure. That is, editing and re-arranging sound bites in a way to tell a complete story without the need for a narrator. Often this requires that you assemble sound bites in a way that’s quite different from the way they were recorded in linear time.

Enter the “Frankenbite”. That’s a term editors apply to two types of sound bite construction: a) splicing together parts of two or more sound bite snippets to create a new, concise statement; or b) editing a word or phrase from another part of the interview to get the right inflection, such as making a statement sound like the end of a sentence, when in fact the original part was really in mid-thought.

Personally I have no problem with any of this, but draw the line at dishonesty. It’s very important to listen to the interviews in their entirety and make sure that the elements you are splicing together aren’t taken out of context. You don’t want to create the impression that what is being said is the exact opposite of what the speaker meant to say. The point of this slicing is to collapse time and get the point across succinctly without presenting a full and possibly rambling answer. Be true to the intent and you’ll be fine.

Typically such edits are covered by cutaway shots to hide the jump cut, though some director stylistically prefer to show the jump cut that such edits produce. This can give a certain interesting rhythm to the cut that might not otherwise be there. It also clearly tells the audience that an edit was made. It’s a stylistic approach, so pick a path and stick with it.

The beauty of the HDSLR revolution brought about by Canon is that it’s easier (and cheaper) than ever to field two-camera shoots. This is especially useful for documentary interviews. Often directors will set up two 5D or 7D cameras – one facing the subject and the other at an angle. This gives the editor two camera angles to cut with and it’s often possible to assemble edited sound bites using cuts between the two cameras at these edit points. This lets you splice together thoughts and still appear like a live switch in a TV show – totally seamless without an obvious jump cut. I’ve been able to build short shows this way working 100% from the interviews without a single cutaway shot and still have the end result appear to the audience as completely contiguous and coherent.

Mine the unrehearsed responses. Naturally that depends on the talent of the interviewer and how much her or she can get out of the interviewee. The best interviewers will warm up their subject first, go through the pro forma questions and then circle back for more genuine answers, once the interviewee is less nervous with the process. This is usually where you’ll get the better responses, so often the first half of the recording tends to be less useful. If the interviewer asks at the end, “Is there anything else you’d like to add?” – that’s where you frequently get the best answers, especially if the subject is someone who is interviewed a lot. Those folks are used to giving stock answers to all the standard questions. If their answers can be more freeform, then you’ll tend to get more unique and thoughtful points-of-view.

Organizing non-timecoded source material

 Archival footage frequently used in documentaries comes from a variety of sources, such as old home movies (on various film formats), VHS tapes and more. Before you ever start editing from these, they should be transferred with the best possible quality to a mastering format, such as Digital Betacam (for NTSC or PAL), HDCAM/HDCAM-SR (for HD) or high-quality QuickTime files (DNxHD, ProRes or uncompressed).

The point is to get these to a format, which can be organized and tracked through stages of the edit. This usually means some format that allows timecode, reel numbers or other file name coding to make it easy to find if the project takes years to complete. Remember that timecode and a 4-digit reel (or source) number lets you find any single frame within 10,000 hours of footage. To make this material easier to use during the offline editing stage of the project, you may elect to make low-cost/low-res copies for editing. For example, DVCAM if on tape or ProRes Proxy or DNxHD 36 for files. Doing so means that timecode and source/reel info MUST correspond perfectly between the low-res and hi-res versions.

Your still photo strategy

 Photography and artwork are the visual lifeblood of documentaries that lack supporting film or video content. Ken Burns has elevated the technique of camera moves on still images to an art form. Clearly he’s a filmmaker known to the general public as much for this effect branded by Apple after his name, as his award-winning films. Yet, the technique clearly predates him and has gone by many terms over the years. A company I once worked for frequently called it “pictography”. Regardless of origin – the use of stills requires two elements: organization and motion.

There are numerous photo and still image organizing and manipulation applications, including Adobe Lightroom, Bridge, Apple iPhoto and Aperture. Each of these provides a method to catalog, rate and sort the photos. You’ll need the application with a good manipulation toolset to properly crop, color correction and/or fix damaged images. Lightroom is my personal preference, but they all get the job done.

Moves on stills can be accomplished in several ways: animated moves in software, a computer-assisted, motion control camera stand or simply a human operator doing real cameras moves. Often the last method is the simplest, fastest and best looking. If that’s your choice, print large versions of the stills, put them on an easel and set up a video camera. Then record a variety of moves at different speeds, which will become source “video” for your edit session.

Another popular method is to separate components of the image into Photoshop layers. Then bring these into After Effects and design perspective moves in which the foreground elements move or grow at a different rate than the background layer. This method was popularized in The Kid Stays in the Picture. The trick to pulling this off successfully is that the Photoshop artist must fill in the background layer to replace the portion cut out for the foreground person or object. Otherwise you see a repeated section of the foreground image or possibly the cut-out area.

Edit system organization

 There are plenty of tools at your disposal, regardless of whether you prefer Avid, FCP 7, FCP X or something else. If this project takes several years with several editors and a potpourri of formats, then Media Composer is a good bet; however, Final Cut also has its share of fans among documentary editors. Make liberal use of subclips and markers to keep yourself straight. Tools like Boris Soundbite (formerly Get) and Avid ScriptSync and PhraseFind are essential to the editors who embrace them.

I tend to not use transcripts as the basis for my edits. Nevertheless, having an electronic and/or paper transcript of interviews available to you (with general timecode locations) makes it easy to find alternatives. That can be as simple as having a copy open in Word on the same computer and using the Find function. My point is that modern tools make it very easy to tackle a wealth of content without getting buried by the footage.

The value of the finishing process

 I feel that even more so than on dramatic features, documentaries benefit for high-quality finishing services. These range from simple online editing to format conversion to color grading. Since original sources often vary so widely in quality, it’s important to get the polish that a trained online/finishing editor and/or colorist can provide. Same for audio. Use the services of talented sound designers, editors and mixers to bring the mix up a notch. Nothing screams “bad”, like a substandard soundtrack, no matter how striking the images are.

Clearances

It is important for the editor is to keep track of the sources and usage for stock images and music. These aren’t free. Many documentary producers seem to feel they can “sweet-talk” the rights holder into donating content out of a sense of interest or altruism. That’s almost never successful. So understand the licensing issues and be wary of using images and music – even on a temporary basis – that you know will be hard to clear or too expensive to purchase.

Make sure that you have an adequate system for tracking and reporting the use of stock material, so that it can be properly bought and cleared when the film is being finished. During the rough cut, stock footage and images will usually be low-res versions with a “burn-in” or watermark. When the time comes to purchase the final high-res images, most companies require that you request the exact range of the material used based on timecode. That material will be provided as files or on tape, but there’s no guarantee that the timecode will match. Be prepared to eye-match each shot if that’s the case.

©2011 Oliver Peters

Cool Tools for Spring

Time to catch up on a few items that will improve your editing and make your daily tasks easier.

(Click on the images below for an enlarged view.)

DiscCatalogMaker

Editors are increasingly using inexpensive hard drives as a method of archiving. But how do you keep track of where your files are? As I started to look around, I realized I already owned a very functional utility, simply because I had Roxio’s Toast. One of the extra applications installed and in the folder is DiscCatalogMaker RE. It automatically catalogs all of the discs you’ve ever burned, but it can also be used to index hard drives. Simply start a new catalog and have it scan a target drive. This file can be saved and printed. It’s also searchable, so you can easily find files without mounting the drive. Once you add/delete/change files on the drive, just rescan it and re-save the updated file.

Red Giant Software Magic Bullet PhotoLooks

If you like Magic Bullet Looks and you do a lot of work with stills, then check out PhotoLooks. I touched on this in my Stocking Stuffers post, but it’s worth another mention. Like Looks for video applications, PhotoLooks runs in an external LooksBuilderPL application that is optimized for stills. PhotoLooks works as a plug-in for Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom and uses the same chain of tools as the video version. As you can see in this Alamo photo, it’s quite easy to create very stylized still photos in post.

Digital Film Tools PhotoCopy

At first glance, PhotoCopy might seem like it’s doing the same functions as Magic Bullet Looks, but that would be wrong. Like Looks, the plug-in launches a separate, customized interface, but that’s where the similarities end.  DFT PhotoCopy uses representative samples from movies, paintings, photographs, etc. to apply color correction and texture to your target photo or video clips.

These can work like color grading presets – or in the case of paintings – apply brush strokes and texture to the image. This isn’t just a simple overlay. PhotoCopy does an analysis of the target image, in order to intelligently apply the right effect or colors to the appropriate positions within the shot. These can be further adjusted by slider controls in the interface. PhotoCopy runs in Final Cut Pro, Media Composer, After Effects, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom; however, different licenses must be purchased for the motion and the still photo versions of the tool.

Nick Shaw ALEXA Look-Up Tables (LUTs)

As editors start to wrap their heads around post workflows for the ARRI ALEXA camera, the biggest issue seems to be the best method of converting the Log-C profile recorded by the camera into nice-looking Rec. 709 images for the client. Log-C images are viewable, but appear flat and washed out prior to grading. UK-based post consultant Nick Shaw has developed a set of FCP plug-ins designed to convert Log-C images into Rec. 709. They include a few extra features, like saturation boost and timecode/text burn-in fields. For now, these are considered to be “preview” quality, since the LUTs truncate the bit-depth to an 8-bit scale. The current paid version supports the camera’s 3.0 firmware.

Luca Visual FX

I’ve covered the Luca Visual FX tools a few times in my color grading posts. Their plug-ins are offered as part of the FxFactory product line. In addition to plug-ins, Luca Visual FX also offers a set of Film FX and Light Transitions. They have recently released the Film FX 2.0 package. Unlike the plug-ins, these tools are a set of QuickTime movie files using the Animation codec with an alpha channel. As such, they can be used with nearly any NLE or motion graphics application and aren’t dependent on a specific plug-in architecture. In the case of Final Cut or Media Composer, simply place a clip on an upper track and the rest is done. In the previous post, I covered some ways in which these can be used with different fills or by combining several clips for a custom effect. The Film FX 2.0 package adds more grunge to the options in Film FX 1.0 for new and dynamic effects.

Noise Industries FxFactory Manifesto

A better Final Cut Pro title tool and it’s free. What’s not to like? Noise Industries launched Manifesto – a lightweight, yet powerful title generator – as part of the FxFactory toolset. It installs as two generator plug-ins – one for static titles and another for rolls and crawls. Text composition is very easy and the plug-in draws on many of the built-in frameworks of Mac OSX, such as fonts, colors and spell-checking. You can also import existing RTF files and Manifesto will use the formatting of that file.

Focusrite Scarlett

Another tool I touched on in the Stocking Stuffers post was the Focusrite Scarlett software filters suite. This set of four audio plug-ins (EQ, compressor, gate, reverb) installs in VST/AU and RTAS formats. On a Mac, they’ll work in most DAWs, as well as Media Composer (5, 5.5) and Final Cut Pro (sliders only – no custom GUI). These filters are designed to look and sound like their classic hardware brethren. In general, they run best in Avid Pro Tools, Adobe Audition and Apple Soundtrack Pro and provide a reasonably-priced filter package for those who want to go beyond the healthy set of options already included with these applications. Focusrite also sells other software plug-in products, including Midnight, Forte, Guitar FX and more.

Noise Industries FxFactory Photo Montage

Noise Industries just introduced a great new tool for assembling photographic montage sequences, called simply Photo Montage. There are several of these on the market, but the Noise Industries version is easy to use and offers plenty of presets, as well as many ways to customize the style, moves, transitions and other attributes. Like most of their plug-ins, Photo Montage is GPU-accelerated and works in Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Motion and After Effects. It supports most common image formats including JPEG, PNG and PSD, so getting started is as easy as applying one of the generator effects, choosing the source image folder and applying a preset. From there, you can re-order the stills, alter the animation parameters and so on.

Digital Heaven Final Print 2.0

Many of Digital Heaven’s tools are designed around improving the editor’s efficiency and taking some of the drudgery out of non-editorial tasks. Often editors have to supply reports to clients, marker list print outs and more. A helpful application is Final Print, which has just been updated to version 2.0. You can start with XML files or directly load projects from FCP7. Final Print 2.0 will not only display various marker lists (which can be filtered by color), but also sequence lists complete with thumbnails and timecode. If you need to generate various reports out of Final Cut Pro – such as the director’s notes from marker text – Final Print 2 provides one of the best and most attractive ways to do that.

©2011 Oliver Peters

Adobe Lightroom for video editors

Video editors and producers frequently have to deal with photos. This is especially true of many documentaries where a large portion of the story consists of still images. No motion film or video was available to preserve that given event. This requires a large collection of possible shots to be organized and prepared for the edit. The latter task often involves color correction, painting out defects (tears, dirt, scratches, etc.) and scaling/cropping to match the video format of the NLE.

There are plenty of tools to do these tasks and more often than not Adobe Photoshop is used. I’ve written before about Apple Aperture as a solution for this, but recently I’ve been turning more to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Both Aperture and Lightroom are great tools to use. For me, there’s no clear winner is this debate, but you can find plenty of passionate posts around the web by photographers and photo enthusiasts who extol the pros and cons of each application. Regardless, both offer powerful tools for a video editor who has to deal with stills. Apple just released Aperture 3 and Adobe currently has Lightroom 3 in public beta. Although these add new features, the general requirements that I will discuss are fine in either app’s 2.0 version.

Comparison

Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture both work in the same general manner. You can view stills in a library or catalog, which is used as a form of asset management. You may choose to have the application handle all control of your stills and the locations where they are stored. Or, you may choose to do that organizing yourself at the finder level and then import these folders and files into the library. The application lets you work with high-res proxy files that link back to the unaltered original photos.

Changes made to these proxies are previewed by showing you a “live” update of the original at full resolution. Any alterations are only applied when a file is exported. This exported file is a copy with the adjustments “baked in”, so the original photo is always left unaltered. Obviously one key difference between the two applications is that Lightroom is a cross-platform solution, while Aperture is Mac-only. If you are on the Mac, then the choice of which to use is largely subjective for our purposes.

There are three things at the moment that appeal to me more in Lightroom than Aperture. First, I like that Adobe uses a terminology that’s consistent with the files and folders of the computer. I organize my images in folders on my hard drive. These can easily be imported into Lightroom as a folder and shown in a manner that maintains that order. Although Aperture allows essentially the same method, Apple prefers to hide the fact that you are looking at a folder on the hard drive, by organizing the photo folders according to “projects” and “albums”. Not a problem, but I just think that’s a way of dumbing things down, as well as, unnecessarily mixing metaphors for the user. The second and third items for me are that Lightroom feels like there is better dual monitor support for the way I like to work and it is already a 64-bit application.

Lightroom layout

The Lightroom user interface is divided into five basic sections, which can be accessed via tabs in the upper right. These are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. Library is where you see your catalog of assets. You can view the layout in several ways – grid, single image and others. Locations are on tabs down the left side, images in the middle and metadata on the right for the selected image. If you have two displays, then the selected image will be full-screen on the left monitor.

Develop is where you’d adjust, correct or alter the image. Pick an image from the filmstrip below and it loads into the center pane of the right monitor at one of the various, selectable proxy sizes. The same image is full-screen on the left monitor in either a “fit to screen” or a “1:1 pixel” display. The left portion of the right screen (your main working display), includes a navigator panel, presets and history. The image adjustment tools are on tabs down the right-hand side. I won’t go into any detail, since you can find plenty of in-depth tutorials around the web that discuss how these tools work. Suffice it to say that you have a powerful toolset for primary and secondary color-correction, stylistic effects, cropping, scaling and adjustment layer masking.

Slideshow offers you tools to control playback of a selected set of images on your desktop, complete with a presentation title. Print controls layouts for printing. Web does the same for displaying image collections on the web. Web choices include Flash, HTML gallery and Adobe Airtight display engines.

For the video producer

The toolset is great for fixing or giving a “look” to images, but the video producer is going to be most interested in how this makes life easier. That’s centered in three areas: cropping, metadata and export. Develop includes a cropping tool which can be restricted to certain ratios. If you want an image to fit neatly into the 16×9 of HD or 4×3 of SD, then set the constraints and the crop you draw will maintain this ratio. The same tool also allows freeform rotation – handy if you just need to move the image a few degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise to make the horizon level or correct for a badly angled tripod.

Photo organization is achieved through Smart Collections. Images can be tagged with addition metadata, such as key words and/or ratings. Smart Collection folders can be set up accordingly, so any images with the appropriate tag will automatically be filtered and pop up in the appropriate Smart Collection. A producer trying to cull 100 selected options from 1,000 possible images can easily tag the desired shots and automatically create a Smart Collection of the selects.

Once the images have been selected, then simply export one or more images for use in your NLE. Images can be exported from Library or Develop by right-clicking the image and choosing Export. Select a range of image to get more than one. This opens the export dialogue where you can select a preset or set new parameters for target export location, file format, size and color profile. You may also rename the exported file. So, exporting a batch of JPEGs – resized to 1920×1080 and labeled by project name and sequential number – is a simple one-step process. When the images are exported, any color correction, stylistic effects and cropping will be applied to the exported images.

©2010 Oliver Peters