OUTPUT
It’s one thing to make sure your photos look good on screen. It’s quite another thing to ensure that your corrections are rendered faithfully in print, your photos display at the correct size, and your color is communicated to others who are incorporating your photos into a page layout or making prints at a digital photo lab.
Climber, Eldor ado Canyon State Par k, Color ado. Olympus E-3, 90–250mm lens, 1/250 second at f2.8, ISO 250
406
Whenever you share files with others, either casually or professionally, you must address a host of technical and aesthetic challenges to ensure that your vision is accurately represented. This chapter aims to demystify the practice of preparing images for print, slay misconceptions about image size and image resolution, and help ensure that you deliver photos in the correct file format every time. To do all this, we have to start at the very beginning with the most fundamental element in a digital photo—the pixel.
Where Do Pixels
Come From ?
Pixels are the building blocks of digital photos.
In much the same way bricks can be used to build a home, pixels are assembled in an elaborate mosaic to create digital photos.
When you press the shutter on your digital camera and light passes through the lens, you get pixels. Of course, this doesn’t all happen directly, and the engineering is rather complicated, so instead of ruining this magic moment that creates pixels, I’ll give you the quick and not-so-dirty version.
The surface of your camera’s sensor is made up of millions of tiny lenses, each covering a tiny opening roughly 1/8 the width of a human hair. Each opening and its corresponding lens is called a pixel site.
Electrons are gathered and counted in each pixel site, generating an electrical signal. This simple electric signal is sent by each of the pixel sites to the digital to analog converter
(DAC), where the individual light signals are analyzed and compared with signals from adjacent sites. This is where the magic happens. The DAC does all this measuring, calculating, and comparing and creates pixels, one for each pixel site. Together, all of these pixels blend to create a seamless, richly detailed, vibrant mosaic that is your digital photo. It could be a photo of the beaches of Barcelona or polar bears in the Arctic—the
process is exactly the same for each and every photo you take with your camera.
While you pause for a moment to catch your breath, I’ll take this opportunity to
tell you that pixels are the most valuable commodity you have as a digital photographer. They are the raw material you shape, sculpt, and hone to create your masterpiece, and as such, pixels deserve your respect. Preserving and caring for your pixels is of the utmost importance if your photos are to look their very best. Don’t laugh—there are lots of ways you can damage or even waste pixels, and a pixel is a terrible thing to waste.
The number of pixels you have to work with depends on your camera. The total number of pixels created with each and every photo depends on your camera’s megapixel rating. For example, each photo created by a 10-megapixel camera has 10 million pixels.
More Is Always Better, Right?
The old school of thought was to try and get a camera with the largest number of megapixels possible. This way of thinking is slowly
changing, and photographers are beginning to come to the conclusion that more isn’t necessarily better. You need enough pixels to ensure good quality in your largest sized
prints, but having too many pixels slows down your workflow and increases the difficulty in storing, managing, and backing your image library.
In my opinion, the sweet spot for digital SLR cameras is 10 to 12 megapixels. This provides more than enough information for 11 × 17 and 16 × 20 inch prints without taking up too much space on your hard drive.
To understand the relationship between a camera’s megapixels and your printing options, you must understand two fundamental concepts: image size and image resolution.
Image Size
The image size is the width and height of all pixels in an image. You know that a photo from a 10-megapixel camera has 10 million pixels. The exact dimensions of the photo will vary from camera to camera due to the camera’s aspect ratio. Some cameras are based on the 35mm film ratio of 3:2, while the Olympus cameras I use follow a medium- format image ratio of 4:3. A photo from a 10-megapixel Olympus camera has an image size of 3648 × 2736 pixels. I’ll use this as our
starting point, but your exact dimensions may differ.
Since pixels are just points of information without any physical size, you can’t determine
how large a print you can make from a
10-megapixel camera without an additional piece of information: the image resolution.
Before moving on, I want to reiterate one important point: When you press the shutter, you capture light and convert it to a finite number of pixels. While you can crop and resize images in Lightroom and Photoshop, you’ll get the best results when you compose carefully in-camera and crop minimally in your software.
Image Resolution
The image resolution determines how many pixels are packed into an inch or centimeter of paper when you make a print. Image resolution is listed in the number of pixels per
inch (ppi). Here, too, conventional logic holds that the more pixels you compress into an inch of paper, the more detail and sharpness you’ll see in your finished print. Image resolution also has a sweet spot, above which additional information yields diminishing returns and below which image quality suffers. Preparing your image correctly for printing can be
a little tricky, because each output device has a slightly different sweet spot for image resolution. For example, your inkjet printer
works best with an image resolution between 240 and 360 ppi, while the sweet spot for newspapers is around 200 ppi. Preparing images for web, video, or other screen-based output works a little different, so I’ll cover that later in this chapter.
407
408
Here is a list of the sweet spots for several common forms of printed output:
■ Inkjet printer 240–360 ppi
■ Digital minilab (commercial prints up to 8 × 12 inches) 240–300 ppi
■ Large format photo printer (commercial prints above 8 × 12 inches) 240–403 ppi or less, depending on the final print size and expected viewing distance
Tip You’ll often hear a generic recommendation to set your photos to 300 ppi for printing.
While this is a sensible guideline, it is not always the optimum resolution for all situations. Use 300 ppi when you don’t have a more definitive recommendation.
While the image size is fixed, the image resolution is elastic and can be adjusted easily for different forms of output without any loss of quality. However, you’ll often need to adjust both the image size and image resolution to create a photo of a specific size. How you do this will depend on whether you’re working in Lightroom or Photoshop. To make sure you have all your bases covered, I’ll demonstrate how to resize images in both applications.
Resizing Images in Lightroom
One of the advantages of Lightroom’s database system is that it simplifies the entire file management process, allowing you to eliminate many of the image resizing steps you have to perform in other applications. For example, let’s say you want to make a
5 × 7 inch print of your favorite photo. In Photoshop, you’d have to resize the photo manually to the correct print dimensions and image resolution. Otherwise, you’d get either a poor quality print or an incorrectly sized print. In Lightroom, all you have to do is select the print size you want, tell Lightroom what image resolution you want to use for printing, and Lightroom does the rest. This works for both camera raw files and layered Photoshop document (PSD) files stored in your Lightroom database.
The only resizing decisions you face in Lightroom occur when you use the Export module to export a processed version of your raw file or an additional version of a processed photo. You’ll use the Export module to
create a version of your photo for an e-mail
attachment, or when you want to make your 5 × 7 inch print at a photo lab instead of on your inkjet printer.
You can open the Export module one of four ways:
■ From the Library module, click the Export button on the bottom panel on the left side of the screen.
■ From the File menu, click Export in any of the five Lightroom modules.
■ control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) any image thumbnail in the Filmstrip to activate the context menu, and then click Export.
■ Use the keyboard shortcut cmd-shift-e (Mac) or ctrl-shift-e (Windows).
Each of these options will bring you to Lightroom’s Export module. At the end of this chapter, I’ll provide an in-depth How To about using the Export module; for now, I’ll concentrate on the image sizing options found in the module.
The Export dialog offers several Image Sizing options. Here you can adjust the resolution or image size of exported photos. This doesn’t change the resolution of the original photo in the library—it changes the resolution or size of the exported version only. Lightroom always works from the full- resolution file in the library, allowing you to make smaller sized copies for export.
Whenever you adjust the image size or resolution of your photos, you’re looking to accomplish one of two things:
■ Preserve the original image size of the photo, but change the image resolution. If you’re submitting a photo for professional repro- duction or printing, you’ll often need to give designers the full-resolution file, but you’ll adjust the image resolution for printing.
■ Change the image size and image resolution for a specific output condition. When you create an e-mail version of your photo
to send to a friend, or you create an appropriately sized print file for your
photo lab, you’ll specify both the image size and the resolution.
To export the full resolution file while changing the image resolution, uncheck the Resize to Fit checkbox and enter your desired resolution in the Resolution field. Here you can specify whether you’d prefer the image resolution to be in pixels per inch or pixels per centimeter.
409
410
Configure the remaining options in the Export dialog and export the high-resolution photo.
To change the image size and the image resolution, check the Resize to Fit checkbox and choose from the following options:
■ Width & Height Specify your image size in pixels, centimeters, or inches. Lightroom will resize the longer dimension of the photo according to the values entered in the input fields and resize the shorter dimension proportionally. This doesn’t take into account the rotation of the photo.
■ Dimensions Set your image size in pixels, centimeters, or inches. This works very similar to Width & Height with a little intelligence added. To resize both vertically and horizontally oriented images correctly using Width & Height, you need to set both Width and Height fields to the same dimension. (So, for example, for a series of 5 × 7 inch prints, you would set both the Width and Height fields to 7 inches to ensure that all images are resized correctly.) Using the Dimensions controls, you can specify the dimensions of your exported photo, and Lightroom will take care of the rest. Using Dimensions, you would specify 5 × 7 inches for all photos, and all photos would be resized to the correct dimensions.
This is a subtle, yet potentially problematic difference between the two options that can cause confusion. To be safe using either method, set your W and H to the same value so both vertically and horizontally oriented images will be resized consistently.
Resizing Images in Photoshop
Adjusting the image size and resolution of photos in Photoshop is more complicated than the adjustment process in Lightroom. In Photoshop, you’ll need to resize images for every type of output. Unlike in Lightroom, in Photoshop it is possible to damage your photo’s image quality.
Most of the time, you’ll adjust your image size using Photoshop’s Image Size dialog found under the Image menu (Image > Image Size).
Three main sections lie within the Image Size dialog: the Pixel Dimensions show the current dimensions of your photos in pixels, the Document Size section displays your current document or print size, and a series of checkboxes contain options for resizing images. By this point, these top two sections
should be fairly familiar, but the options at the bottom of the dialog can get you into trouble. For that reason, we’ll start at the bottom.
Scale Styles You will rarely need to use the Scale Styles checkbox. Keeping this checked ensures layer styles such as drop shadow
or a beveled edge will be resized with the document. Go ahead and leave this option checked.
Constrain Proportions Normally, when you resize a photo, you’ll want to keep the overall proportions of the photo the same; otherwise, the image will look stretched or squeezed. Leave the Constrain Proportions checkbox checked unless you want to distort the proportions of your image. (Even if you do want to distort it, there are better ways of achieving the effect than with this option— such as using the Warp tool.)
Resample Image The Resample Image option is like a sharp knife, a potentially dangerous tool you must use on a regular basis. Therefore, you want to make sure you use it correctly and with care.
When the Resample Image checkbox is checked, Photoshop allows you to add or
remove pixels from your photo. This is ideal when you need to resize an image for e-mail or for a smaller print. The danger comes from the fact that it adds or removes pixels from the original, working image. Therefore, if you take a 10-megapixel image, resize it to 1 megapixel to e-mail to a friend, and click Save, you’re
left with a 1-megapixel image. While you can undo this mistake or return to your original raw file, the best advice is this: If you check the Resample Image checkbox, when you save your photo, use Save As instead of Save. This will keep the full resolution of your original intact by creating a copy of the photo in the smaller size.
When the Resample Image checkbox is unchecked, you can change the image
resolution, but you cannot adjust the photo’s pixel dimensions. As you’ll notice, the Pixel Dimensions options at the top of the dialog cannot be adjusted.
Here’s a quick way to remember which option to use: When you need to change the document size, leave Resample Image checked.
411
412
If you need to change the resolution but you want to preserve the current size, uncheck Resample Image.
At the bottom of the dialog is a pull-down menu with five options: Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Bicubic, Bicubic Smoother, and Bicubic Sharper. The three Bicubic options are the only ones you need to know about. The other two are older methods of adjusting the image size and are used infrequently for digital photos.
With the first two options eliminated, your three choices for resizing images are as follows:
■ Bicubic This method is the most versatile of the three options and is effective for making images larger or smaller. This is the default option in Photoshop and my preferred option for making images smaller.
■ Bicubic Smoother This option is designed to give better results when enlarging, or upsampling, images. Several techniques can be used for creating large prints from small files, and I’ll discuss the merits of each in Chapter 18. I use
Bicubic Smoother for upsampling photos.
■ Bicubic Sharper As you may have deduced, Bicubic Sharper is designed to make images smaller, a process sometimes
called downsampling. Bicubic Sharper attempts to compensate for the softness caused by downsampling by adding a bit of image sharpening. This works okay for moderate changes in image size. With larger jumps—say, from a full-resolution image to an e-mail–sized photo—I find the sharpening to be too strong for my liking. I prefer instead to use Bicubic for downsampling, and then I can add image sharpening as needed before saving a copy of the file.
Changing the Image Resolution in Photoshop
With Resample Image unchecked, you can enter a new image resolution in the Resolution field and the Width & Height will adjust automatically to the new print dimensions.
Once you’ve set the resolution, click OK to close the Image Size dialog box.
Changing the Image Size in Photoshop
To change the size of your photos, make sure the Resample Image checkbox is checked, and then adjust any of the image attributes—Height, Width, Resolution, or
pixel dimensions. Click OK to apply your size changes and exit the dialog.
Tip Use the image preview to validate your corrections. I always watch for changes in the size of my image in the document window after clicking OK in the Image Size dialog. If I’ve downsampled my photo, the preview should get smaller as well. This helps me catch any mistakes I may have made when adjusting the image size or resolution.
If your photo’s dimensions don’t quite match your intended print size, you’ll need to correct this by resizing your image and then cropping the photo to match the proportions of the print. Enter the dimension of the
short edge of the photo in the appropriate Document Size field, and then crop the long dimension after exiting the dialog.
Recommendations
Given the choice, I prefer to perform my resizing in Lightroom instead of Photoshop. Not only is the process simpler, but I never have to worry about accidentally changing the size of the original. It is also far easier to select a group of images in Lightroom and resize them through the Export module than it is to create a resizing action in Photoshop.
Recommended Image Sizes
Now that you have achieved the technical skills necessary to resize your images, use the following guidelines to help you prepare
photos for a variety of different output types.
For most print images, you’re safe using the default print resolution of 300 ppi, particularly when preparing images for commercial reproduction (you’ll be looked
at askance when you deliver files at anything other than 300 ppi). This is a good rule of thumb when printing at a photo lab. Unless the lab specifies a different resolution, 300 ppi is a good starting point.
For inkjet printing, many photographers prefer to set their image resolution at a
fraction of the print resolution. For 2880 dpi printers, this means setting your image
resolution at 240, 360, or 480 ppi. Most, but not all, photographers think 480 ppi is overkill and use either 240 or 360. I’d suggest running a few tests with your printer and paper combination to see what works best for your fine art prints.
Web
When images are displayed on a web page or incorporated into a multimedia presentation, your resolution is irrelevant; all that counts is the image size. Because graphics are displayed online at their absolute size, pixel for pixel, you’re best served by specifying image dimensions in pixels instead of inches or centimeters.
For an e-mail attachment, I recommend setting the long dimension of your photos somewhere between 600 and 800 pixels, which displays nicely in most e-mail applications.
Selecting the appropriate dimensions for a website can be trickier since there is no standard size for pictures on a site. Most web pages are designed to use either 800 × 600 or 1024 × 768 pixel images, but photos used on the site are often considerably smaller. As an example, Flickr resizes images posted to the site to the following sizes:
■ 75 × 75 pixels
■ 100 pixels (long side)
■ 240 pixels
■ 500 pixels
■ 1024 pixels for large display
413
414
Check out www.flickr.com/help/ photos/#18 for more information.
This gives you a ballpark set of image sizes for use on a website. The smallest is a thumbnail-sized image, the middle sizes could accompany an article, and the two larger sizes are to be used when a photo is the dominant (or only) element on a page.
Video and Multimedia
Like preparing images for a web page, sizing images for video or multimedia production depends on how the image will be used. Here, too, image resolution is ignored in favor of the absolute image size. Further complicating the issue is the fact that digital video often uses non-square pixels, requiring a special
compensation to ensure that the photo appears correct in video.
You can also base your image sizing on the pixel dimensions for common video formats. Consider adding 200 to 300 pixels in either dimension, as video producers often like to pan through a photo and need the extra pixels to ensure that your photo looks good at full size in the video.
Ultimately, you’ll be best served by asking the producer what size photos he or she would like to receive for the project.
Color Modes /Color Spa c e s and Color Management
Understanding the image size and image resolution helps you assess how large a print you can make from a given photo and allows
you to reduce the image size for posting to a website. These two attributes of your photos, however, don’t tell you anything about the color and tone of your photos. To glean the most basic information about a photo’s color and tone, you have to dig a little deeper into the technical attributes of your digital photos.
Understanding color is important, because on some occasions, technical issues relating to color require you to troubleshoot problems or convert colors for use with a particular output method, such as inkjet printing or displaying photos online. For these reasons, it is essential that you have at least
a basic understanding of color modes, color spaces, and color management.
Color Modes
Every single picture taken with your digital camera is captured in the RGB color mode. That is to say, every pixel in your picture contains red, green, and blue values, which when combined create all the color, tone, and detail in your photos.
The RGB color mode is not the only one used in digital imaging. Grayscale and CMYK color modes are also commonly used at different points of a digital photography workflow. In this section, I’ll examine the
three commonly used color modes to help you get a handle on how color is represented in Lightroom and Photoshop.
In the “Color Management” section, I’ll demonstrate the best methods for converting photos to other color modes.
Grayscale Mode
As the name implies, the Grayscale mode contains only tonal, not color, information. Grayscale images were once commonly used when scanning black and white film or when creating black and white images from digital photos, because the file size for grayscale images is significantly smaller than that for color images. As the speed of computers has improved and hard drive storage space has expanded, this has become less of an issue.
Grayscale images contain only one channel, the Gray channel, used for storing your photo’s tonal information. The lightness value for each pixel is listed as a percentage of total black. A deep shadow pixel will have a Grayscale value of 80 percent or higher. A
bright highlight will have a Grayscale value of 10 or less.
In all likelihood, you will need to work with grayscale images only if you are preparing images for use in a print newsletter, newspaper, or magazine.
Lightroom does not allow you to import grayscale images into a Lightroom library, nor does it allow you to export photos in the Grayscale color mode. To work with grayscale images, you will need to work in Photoshop.
Fully saturated values of red, green, and blue create white and are thus called additive colors. As a photographer accustomed to working with light, you will work almost exclusively in RGB mode unless you are preparing images for reproduction on a commercial printing press.
RGB (Red, Green, Blue) Mode
Since RGB (red, green, blue) is the native color mode for your digital photos, it is worth highlighting a few important points about the RGB color mode.
Equal values of RGB correspond to a neutral shade of gray.
0, 0, 0 128, 128, 128 255, 255, 255
48, 48, 48 185, 185, 185
The greater the difference between the primary colors, the more saturated the individual color.
200, 180, 180 240, 180, 180
RGB values affect not only color, but tone as well. Low RGB values equate to darker tones, and higher RGB values equate to brighter tones.
415
416
15,12,40 75, 85,130 150, 210, 240
Increasing the amount of any of the three primary colors makes the color more saturated and the tone brighter.
150,128,128 220,128,128
When working in the Develop module in Lightroom, you can hover your cursor over any pixel in the image and the pixel values will display immediately below the histogram. Lightroom displays RGB values as percentages (0–100), with 0 percent being fully desaturated and 100 percent being fully
saturated. Therefore, a pixel value of 100, 0, 0 is a fully saturated red color with no green or blue color.
In the real world, colors are rarely that saturated. Even this bright red jersey contains some green and blue.
Photoshop uses the older convention of displaying RGB values on a scale of 0 to 255, with 0 being fully desaturated and 255 being fully saturated. Photoshop displays RGB values in the Info palette (Window > Info).
Personally, I find the percentage system more intuitive and easier for new photographers to learn, but either system
works for assessing color casts by comparing the pixel values between red, green, and blue. Equal values will always indicate a neutral shade of gray, while unequal values can indicate a color cast. For example, in a
wedding photo, as a test you can often look at the RGB values on the groom’s white collar. If blue is higher than either red or green, you’ll likely need to remove a blue color cast.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta,Yellow, and Black) Mode
While the RGB color mode is used for light- based devices, the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) color mode is used exclusively for printing. RGB and CMYK can be thought of as opposites. Increasing values of red, green, or blue in an RGB photo lightens the photo
(additive color). Increasing values of cyan, magenta, yellow, or black darkens a photo by adding more ink to the page (subtractive color).
In contrast to your monitor, which transmits light, ink on paper absorbs light. Fully saturated values of cyan, magenta, and yellow equal black. In the real world, the pigments we use to create cyan, magenta, and yellow inks aren’t perfect, so we add black (K) to the mix to get truer, richer blacks on an inkjet printer or printing press. If you look at the ink cartridges in your inkjet printer, you will find the base colors of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are used to print all of the colors of your digital photo. This leads to an obvious conclusion that during the printing process, your RGB photos will, at some point, need to be converted to CMYK for printing.
417
Additive Subtr active
418
While this is true, even if you frequently create prints from their digital files, you will rarely find the need to work in CMYK color mode. The RGB to CMYK conversion takes place within the printer software, often called the print driver, allowing photographers to continue to work exclusively in RGB.
Lightroom does not allow you to import CMYK images into a Lightroom library, nor does it allow you to export photos in the Grayscale color mode. To work with CMYK images, you will need to work in Photoshop.
Color Profiles
The color mode provides general information about a photograph and its intended purpose, but it isn’t precise enough to give you the
exact color of a pixel. For this, you need a color profile, often called an ICC profile. (ICC stands for International Color Consortium.) ICC serves an important role as part of a broader system of color management to help you preserve the appearance of your photo as it is converted to, or accessed by, different devices such as monitors or printers.
Most ICC color profiles are created by displaying a series of colored patches on screen or printing a test target containing dozens,
if not hundreds or thousands, of colored patches, and then measuring them with either a colorimeter (screen) or spectrophotometer (screen or print). The measured color values are compared to the actual color values stored within the color management software,
and a lookup table is created by the color management software to offset the differences between the expected and actual color reproduction. This lookup table, based on specifications set by the ICC, is a color profile and can be used in a wide variety of imaging applications. Most often, the ICC profile is embedded in a photograph and travels with the photo as it is copied from computer to computer or from device to device.
For a practical example, let’s look at the RGB values 200, 15, 18. Since the red value is much higher than that of either green or blue, we can determine that this pixel is red, but
we are unable to assess exactly what shade of red it is. If we look at this RGB combination in three different color profiles, we get three clearly different results.
Adobe RGB 1998 Apple RGB Epson 2880 Pr inter with Premium Luster Photo
Paper
When a photograph has a color profile, it becomes easy to convert between different color profiles for printing or more accurate
reproduction on the Web. Converting between two profiles changes the RGB values of each pixel to preserve the color appearance when used in this new color space.
Ultimately, the color profile acts as a secret decoder ring to help Photoshop or Lightroom determine what the RGB values contained in your pictures should actually look like. When color profiles are embedded within digital photos,
■ you can make accurate color and tone adjustments more confidently;
■ your pictures don’t change color when you move between computers or share photos with others;
■ printmaking becomes easier and more predictable.
Color spaces are one essential component in a broader color management system. In the next section, I’ll look at how color management fits into a digital photography workflow.
Color Management
Color management in a digital photography workflow brings consistency to your color and tone corrections and predictability to your printing. The keystone for a digital photography workflow, a calibrated monitor, and proper use of ICC profiles allows you to trust with confidence what you see on the monitor and in print.
Unfortunately, color management comes with its own vocabulary to describe the features, functions, and options of a color managed workflow. Following is a list of the most commonly used terms to bring you up to speed:
■ Color gamut The colors reproducible by a particular device or color space. The color gamut is determined by the physical properties of the device—for example, how cyan is the cyan ink—and is calculated as part of the ICC profile.
■ Display profile An ICC profile describing the color reproduction characteristics of a display such as an LCD or LED display. The display profile is stored at the operating system, allowing it to be used and accessed by any color management–aware application.
■ Editing space In an RGB workflow, the color space is used as the primary color space for tone and color corrections. RGB editing spaces do not represent the color behavior of a physical device, making them ideal as an intermediate space between input and output for conducting tone and color corrections. In Photoshop, editing spaces are selected in the Color Settings dialog as working spaces.
Think of editing spaces as a specific class of color spaces designed specifically for image editing and corrections. While all editing spaces are also color spaces, not all color spaces can be considered editing spaces. Editing spaces need to
be mathematically generated and well-
419
420
behaved, meaning equal values of red, green, and blue always equal a shade of gray. This is not necessarily the case with other classifications of profiles, as they describe the color response of specific devices.
How Does Color Management Work in a Digital Photography Workflow?
To achieve consistent color throughout the input, editing, and printing stages of a digital workflow, an ICC profile embedded in the image tells the software programs what the colors in the image should look like. As the image file moves from one device to another (such as from scanner to computer), the color numbers are converted from one color space to another to preserve as accurately as possible the color appearance of the file. Here’s an example of a common workflow:
Step 1 RGB information is captured by the digital camera or scanner. Camera raw photos have an ICC profile applied
during processing. (See the sidebar “Color Management in Raw Files.”) Scanner software allows the use of ICC profiles
to describe the scanner’s color behavior. After the initial scan, photos are converted from the scanner profile to a common editing space.
Step 2 During the editing process, the information is converted from the editing space to the monitor profile on the fly, ensuring that the image displayed on your monitor is as accurate as possible. This process is referred to as display compensation.
Step 3 After the necessary adjustments are made to the file, the color values in the file are translated to the printer’s color space and the information is sent to the printer.
Commonly Used Editing Spaces
If you spend any time on the popular digital photography forums or chat rooms, you’ll find that photographers have strong opinions about which color space is best. In truth, there is no “best” color space, but some color spaces are preferred for specific uses. RGB editing spaces, in particular, have to strike a delicate balance. They should have a larger
color gamut than the anticipated output methods to ensure that you’re maximizing reproduction quality. However, the downside with larger color spaces is they have a tendency to show banding in areas of smooth transitions if great care isn’t used when you’re making adjustments.
Allow me to take a moment to introduce you to some of the commonly used color spaces. Along the way, I’ll point out each color space’s pros and cons.
Adobe RGB 1998 The Adobe RGB 1998 color space is the most popular color space for digital photography. It is large enough to
exceed the color gamut of most inkjet printers, save for a few highly saturated cyan blues,
but it isn’t large enough to cause significant problems with banding in smooth areas.
Adobe RGB 1998 has emerged as the default RGB workspace for commercial print- based workflows. It is also a fine choice for landscape, portrait, and travel photographers, particularly those who perform their own inkjet printing.
If you’re shooting JPEG on-camera, you’ll want to select Adobe RGB 1998 as your preferred color space on the back of your camera to give you the best information from your JPEG files.
sRGB Originally designed to represent the “average computer monitor,” standard RGB (sRGB) has gotten a bad reputation in recent years. sRGB is the ideal color space for many wedding and portrait photographers, as most
online print-fulfillment services prefer to receive sRGB files for printing. Wedding and portrait photographers aren’t sacrificing much by using this smaller color space, since the most important colors for their work—skin tones— are not very saturated and fall well within sRGB’s color gamut. Since it was designed to mimic an average monitor, sRGB is also ideal for web, video, or interactive projects.
A gr aph compar ing the color gamuts of Adobe RGB 1998 (wirefr ame) against sRGB (solid).
The far ther from the center axis, the more highly satur ated the color.
ProPhoto RGB When compared to Adobe RGB 1998 and sRGB, the color gamut of ProPhoto RGB is huge. While ProPhoto has advantages for photographers, particularly from an archival perspective, it also has significant drawbacks. First, since ProPhoto is so large, you must work with high-bit files (discussed later in the section “What Is Bit Depth?”) to avoid introducing banding and uneven steps in smooth transitions. Second,
421
422
even though ProPhoto can retain detail in heavily saturated colors, the monitor you’re working on can’t display them since it likely has a color gamut similar to sRGB. This means you are doing your corrections blind and cannot preview, or even print, many of the colors you’re manipulating.
I see ProPhoto as an expert color space. There are specific reasons for using such a large color space; however, they are very specialized and require a high degree of technical Photoshop skill to use effectively. For the rest of us, the negatives associated with ProPhoto RGB outweigh the benefits.
A gr aph compar ing the color gamuts of Pro Photo RGB (wirefr ame) against sRGB (solid).
The far ther from the center axis, the more highly satur ated the color.
The Moral: Don’t Sweat It
Some photographers get themselves all worked up over which profile to use for their editing space. My suggestion is to choose the one
that best matches your current output types.
For wedding and portrait photographers, or those photographers who display their work primarily online, that is sRGB. For landscape, travel, and fine-art photographers, the best choice is Adobe RGB 1998, since that will give you the best results in print, both from desktop inkjet printers and from commercial printing presses.
The biggest reason you don’t need to agonize over the selection of your editing space is that you’re shooting in camera raw and performing most of your corrections on the raw file. Since this unprocessed file doesn’t have a color space applied to it, you can always go back to the raw file and reprocess it into a larger color space if the situation warrants it.
Most likely, as technology improves, you’ll want to go back to the raw file and re-export
it using the latest camera raw processing. With every new version of the software, the tools and the conversions improve, so you can go back and rediscover your old photos all over again.
Color Management in Lightroom
Lightroom takes a unique approach to color management, hard-wiring the color
management policies within the library, while offering full color management controls over exporting, printing, and interfacing with Photoshop. This makes color management in Lightroom both easy to use and very effective. Here’s how it works.
Your Lightroom libraries are always color managed using Lightroom’s own internal color management policies. There are no options for you to choose, buttons to click,
or checkboxes to check. You don’t need to know anything about color management in Lightroom to make it work. This is a marked improvement over many applications, where color management is turned off or restricted until it’s manually activated by the user.
Because Lightroom is designed for maximizing the image quality of camera raw files, the program uses a variation of the
ProPhoto RGB color space for generating high- resolution previews of raw files and generating thumbnails. The use of a wide-gamut color space such as ProPhoto RGB is advantageous at this stage, because Lightroom has access to all the raw information in your photos to ensure that your gradients and transitions are smooth and that no colors are unnecessarily clipped during the editing process.
For processed images such as JPEGs and TIFFs that you’ve brought into your Lightroom library, Lightroom uses the color
profile embedded in your images or defaults to sRGB if no profile is embedded.
Tip Because the default color spaces differ between Lightroom and Photoshop, you may notice a discrepancy in the RGB numbers displayed in the Info panels of each application. Normally, this does not affect the appearance of colors, only their RGB values.
When exporting photos for use in other applications, Lightroom allows you to select your preferred RGB editing space in the Export module.
During the export process, Lightroom will convert the unprocessed pixel values in your raw files to processed RGB values based on the color profile selected in the Export dialog. As with image resizing, this conversion applies only to the duplicate copy of the file created during export, not to the original photo in the library.
Lightroom also provides control over the color management policies for delivering photos to Photoshop and other external imaging applications. In Lightroom’s Preferences dialog (Lightroom > Preferences on Mac or Edit > Preferences in Windows), click the External Editing tab to adjust Lightroom’s external editing policies.
423
424
Recall from the beginning of Chapter 15, when I had you change your default Color Space from ProPhoto RGB and bit depth from 16 bits/component to use the Adobe RGB 1998 color space and a bit depth of 8 bits/ component. I’ll discuss bit depth and why I suggested you make these changes in the next section.
I suggest you leave the following current settings in Lightroom:
■ File Format: PSD
■ Color Space: AdobeRGB (1998)
■ Bit Depth: 8 bits/component
■ Resolution: 300
These are sound defaults for the workflow outlined in this book. If you decide to work with a different set of color management
or image processing parameters, feel free to change the settings in this dialog to better suit your workflow.
When generating web galleries, Lightroom converts your photos to the sRGB color space, which is better suited for display on the Web.
When printing photos, Lightroom allows you to take full control over the conversion
of your photos from the editing space used in Lightroom to your printer’s output profile. I’ll cover this process in full detail in Chapter 18.
That rounds out our tour of Lightroom’s color management capabilities. Since Photoshop takes a slightly different approach, let’s look at Photoshop’s color management options.
Color Management in Photoshop
Unlike Lightroom, Photoshop makes all the color management options in the application available to the user. While this gives advanced users more control, beginners are sometimes overwhelmed by the color management decisions they are forced to make. We’ll start by looking at Photoshop’s Color Settings, the default color management settings.
Color Settings
Photoshop’s Color Settings (Edit > Color Settings) store the default color management policies for displaying and converting colors in your Photoshop documents. In a digital photography workflow like the one described in this book, the Color Settings will have minimal impact on the efficiency of the
workflow, since most of the color management decisions are made in the raw processor. In our case, that will be Lightroom’s settings selected for editing photos in Photoshop.
A few items are worth pointing out in Photoshop’s Color Settings dialog.
The Working Spaces are the default ICC profile Photoshop uses when you create a new document or open a photo that does not have an embedded ICC profile. When this occurs, Photoshop displays the photo using the Working Spaces profile.
The Color Management Policies are used to specify what Photoshop should do when it encounters a photo containing an embedded ICC profile that differs from what is specified in the Working Spaces settings. By default, all
425
three policies are set to Preserve Embedded Profiles. This is a safe setting and similar to the one used within Lightroom. The three checkboxes at the bottom of the window are used to indicate whether or not you’d like Photoshop to notify you when it encounters photos containing an embedded profile that differs from your Working Spaces settings. By default, all three are unchecked, but we’ll change that in the next step.
Configuring Photoshop’s Color Settings
For a smooth workflow between Lightroom and Photoshop, synchronize Photoshop’s Color Settings with Lightroom’s color management. Change the Settings file used from North America General Purpose 2 to North America Prepress 2. This changes your Working Spaces RGB setting from sRGB to Adobe RGB (1998) and activates the Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles checkboxes.
With these new settings, you may receive a warning dialog when opening your older pictures. There are, in fact, two possible warnings you could receive, neither of which is cause for alarm. Let’s look at the two dialogs to learn what they are trying to tell you.
The Profile Mismatch Dialog
When photos contain an embedded profile different from the one specified in the Color
426
Settings, Photoshop gives you a head’s up to highlight the difference and asks you what you’d like to do. This indication, called the Embedded Profile Mismatch warning, is not serious. It simply means the photo you’re opening has an embedded profile that’s different from the one in your Working Spaces settings.
The Embedded Profile Mismatch dialog box offers you three options:
■
Use the embedded profile This is the preferred option. There’s nothing wrong with opening and working with photos in other color spaces. If you are compelled to convert the photo to your Working Space you’re better served by opening the photos as is for now, and then using the Convert to Profile dialog to perform the conversion.
■ Convert document’s colors to the working space Selecting this option probably won’t cause significant harm to your photos, but it’s better to perform your color corrections manually using the Convert to Profile dialog
because you’ll have a preview of what effect the conversion will have on your photo. With this option, you are performing the conversion blindly.
■ Discard the embedded profile Selecting this option will increase your color management problems. Avoid it at all costs.
Converting Between Profiles
At several different stages in your workflow, your photo will undergo a conversion from one color space to another. For example, when you print an image, you’ll convert it from an editing space, such as Adobe RGB 1998, to the output space used for your printer. During the conversion process, the color values are adjusted to maintain an accurate appearance of your photo.
You’ll usually perform your color conversions in the print dialog boxes of either Photoshop or Lightroom, or in Lightroom’s Export module. Should you need to perform a color conversion in Photoshop, you’ll want to use the Convert to Profile command (Edit > Convert to Profile).
The Convert to Profile dialog allows you to convert between any two ICC-based color profiles. Free of the limitations imposed in Lightroom, Photoshop allows you to convert between RGB profiles or from RGB to a specific CMYK or grayscale profile. This is essential if you’re ever asked to deliver photos in the CMYK mode for reproduction on a commercial printing press.
Within the Convert to Profile dialog, you’ll see headings for Source Space, Destina- tion Space, and Conversion Options. The Source Space is a listing of the ICC profile currently embedded in your photo. The Destination Space is the profile to which you’ll be converting. In this case, I’ve selected U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, a commonly used profile for commercial printing.
Because there are colors in the Adobe RGB 1998 color space, such as highly saturated reds and greens, that cannot be reproduced accurately on a printing press because they are out of the press’s reproducible gamut, I have to use my rendering intent, in
the Conversion Options, to specify how I’d like these out-of-gamut colors to be handled.
Although four rendering intents are available here, two options are the most appropriate for photography: Relative Colorimetric and Perceptual.
The Relative Colorimetric rendering intent converts in-gamut colors as accurately as possible from the source and the destination profiles, and it then converts out-of-gamut colors to the closest possible match in the destination profile. The net effect of using
Relative Colorimetric is a high degree of color accuracy for
in-gamut colors at the expense of out-of-gamut colors. This
is the preferred rendering intent for most photographs, including black and white images.
The Perceptual rendering intent scales the color gamut between the source and destination to preserve the
color relationships among out-of-gamut colors. Unfortunately, this sacrifices color accuracy among in-gamut colors, making it less desirable for photographers. Use the Perceptual rendering intent only when the
427
428
detail in saturated colors (such as vivid flowers) is more important than overall color accuracy.
The Use Black Point Compensation checkbox is used to scale the black point, or darkest black, in the source profile to the black point of the destination profile. This preserves shadow detail during conversions and should be left checked.
The Use Dither checkbox preserves the smoothness in areas of
continuous tone or subtle transitions. This, too, should be checked for your color conversions.
Whenever you’re performing a color conversion, it is worthwhile to toggle the Preview checkbox to look for any colors or tones that will shift during the conversion. If a color shift occurs, you can try a different rendering intent to see if it improves the conversion.
Once you’re satisfied with the conversion, click OK.
Note For most RGB to RGB conversions, you will not see a significant change in color or tone. When converting from RGB to CMYK, however, you will often see dramatic shifts in tone or color. To improve the results of your RGB to CMYK conversion, you’ll want to use the Soft Proof feature, discussed in Chapter 18, to preview the effects of the conversion and perform adjustments to minimize the visual effects of going from RGB to CMYK.
When creating web galleries through Photoshop or Adobe Bridge, or preparing images for the Web using the Save For Web feature, Photoshop converts images to the sRGB color space.
The final color management option you need to be aware of when working with Photoshop is the Embed Color Profile checkbox in Photoshop’s Save As dialog.
When saving images in Photoshop, you’ll want to be sure the Embed Color Profile checkbox is checked. Otherwise, your photos will not have an embedded color profile and will not display correctly the next time you open them in Photoshop, prompting the Assign Profile routine. Do yourself a favor and visually check to be sure you’re embedding an ICC profile with your image whenever you’re saving your photos.
Bit Depth
During our discussion of color management, the topic of bit depth came up a couple of times in our decision to work with Adobe RGB 1998 over ProPhoto RGB and in our Lightroom preferences. While the topic of bit depth isn’t necessarily a difficult one, it is a technical subject, and for some reason it has attracted some heated discussion in online forums. In this section, I’ll help you wade through the complexity to get a handle on bit depth and how it impacts your workflow.
What Is Bit Depth?
Every pixel in your photo is stored with a combination of mathematical values. For the most part, the math involved in digital photography is hidden, but every once in a while, digital photography’s mathematical roots break the surface. Bit depth is one of
those mathematical concepts arising at critical junctions in the workflow.
Without getting too deep into computer programming, I’ll describe the bit depth as the amount of information used to describe a given pixel mathematically. Generally speaking, the higher the number of bits, the
more discrete colors are available for programs such as Photoshop to help differentiate all the hues and shades of the world.
The majority of the digital photos you’ve worked with to date use 8 bits of information per channel to describe the colors and tones in your photos. An 8-bit per channel (bpc) image has 256 possible colors per channel. This is the
reason Photoshop’s Info panel displays RGB values of 0 to 255. The 8-bpc RGB images are sometimes called 24-bit images (8 bps × 3 channels = 24 bits) in scanning parlance.
Images with a higher bit depth define the same range of colors as an 8-bpc image, but with higher mathematical precision, often 12, 16, or even 32 bpc. Instead of having only 256 possible color values per channel, a 16-bpc image has approximately 4096 color values per channel.
It is important to underscore that higher bit images don’t give you whiter whites or deeper shadows. Instead, they slice the range between black and white into finer increments. It is not uncommon for the digital to analog converter (DAC) on your camera to use 10 or 12 bpc for recording the analog light signals as digital values.
These extra bits become important the more work we do in correcting a photo.
While performing image corrections, we routinely lose information to rounding errors. Normally, this does not pose a problem,
but cumulatively, if we are not careful with our corrections or we have to rescue an underexposed image, these rounding errors can become visible in our photo as abrupt transitions between tonal values. These unnatural transitions are called posterization.
Since high-bit images have so much extra information, they rarely show banding or posterization. The downside in working with higher bit depth images is file size.
Photoshop treats all higher bit depth images
429
430
17_BitDepth_1: This gr adient transitions smoothly between two shades of gr ay.
17_BitDepth_2: This transition has
been heavily edited and shows signs of poster ization where the gr adient jumps abr uptly from one tone to another.
as 16 bpc, causing photos to require twice as much RAM to process and hard drive space to store as 8-bpc images. As you begin to add layers and masks to your images, this difference taxes your computer’s ability to
perform image corrections quickly and quickly fills your hard drives. For these reasons, I recommend performing all your adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which uses
a high bit depth for all corrections on raw files and exports files in 8 bpc—except in special circumstances, where 16 bpc will give you superior image quality. These special circumstances are as follows:
■ You need to upsample an image to make an exceptionally large print. Upsampling in 16 bpc will give you smoother transitions and cleaner detail at large sizes.
■ You need to rescue shadow detail from an underexposed photo. Digital capture
inherently uses less information to store shadow detail. If you need to salvage an image from the shadow detail, you’ll have less noise in your photo if you use 16 bpc.
■ You’re performing a radical color-to–black and white conversion. You’ll usually want to perform your black and white conversions on the raw file, but if you are significantly changing colors—such as making a middle gray sky black for dramatic effect—you’ll want to work in 16 bpc.
■ The post-production work required on a photo is so time consuming you want to do it only once. If you’re creating a
complicated composite from 50 images, or you’re spending the better part of a week retouching a photo, your time is best served by working in 16 bpc. With most of your photos, if you revisit them in 5 or 10 years to make prints, you’ll want to return to the original raw file and start over, since your skill and the processing tools available will be vastly improved, giving you a better print. If you have a significant time investment now, and you know you won’t be returning to the raw file, find a fast computer, load it up with RAM, and work in 16 bits.
Outside of these circumstances, I’m hard- pressed to find occasion where a 16-bit image offers a visually superior photo. I strongly encourage you to perform a series of tests and see for yourself.
Tip On those occasions for which you want to work with a high–bit depth file in Photoshop, use a Smart Object. Smart Objects will always perform corrections on the unprocessed
raw data, usually 10 or 12 bit, which is equal to, and sometimes superior to, working on a processed, 16-bit image.
Working with High–Bit Depth Photos in Lightroom and Photoshop
Lightroom will automatically adjust its corrections to work with high-bit images when they are available, so you don’t need to adjust any settings. If you infrequently need to work on high-bit images in Photoshop, consider using Smart Objects. If you want to work exclusively with 16-bit images, you’ll need
to change your External Editing preferences (Lightroom > Preferences on Mac or Edit > Preferences in Windows).
Under the External Editing preference, change the Bit Depth pull-down menu from 8 Bits/Channel to 16 Bits/Channel. Lightroom will now export only 16-bpc images into Photoshop or other image editing applications.
Photoshop will work with images in 8, 16, or 32 bpc. The bit depth of an image is controlled using the Image menu (Image > Mode).
Generally, you’ll need to use this feature only when you’re reducing the bit depth of high-bit images in preparation for the Web or delivery to others. Since high-bit files
are not widely supported in other imaging applications and cannot be used on the Web, you’ll need to convert your 16-bpc images to the standard 8 bpc.
To convert from a high bit depth to a normal bit depth, do this:
Step 1 Save a copy of your layered file in the PSD format, preserving your layers.
Step 2 Flatten the layers in your file (Layer > Flatten). This applies the changes in your adjustment layers to the original pixels. It is advantageous to perform this
before converting to 8 bpc to take advantage of the extra bit depth in each pixel.
Step 3 Click the Image menu, then click
Mode, and then 8 Bits/Channel.
Step 4 Although it is possible to increase the bit depth of an already processed image from 8 to 16 bpc, you don’t gain any benefits, since your pixels have already been converted to 8 bpc when they are exported from your raw processor.
431
432
File Types
One of the final steps necessary to ensure your digital photo can be read, printed, or displayed by other applications is to save your photo in
a file format appropriate for its intended use. The four most common digital photography file formats are JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and DNG. In the following section, I’ll offer recommendations of when to use each format and help you avoid some file format pitfalls.
■ JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) Fast, nimble, and read by almost every imaging program on the planet, JPEGs are a good choice when you want images to take up the least amount of space or move very quickly through an image processing workflow. JPEGs make images small by compressing or “averaging” data into smaller bites, such as “these 9 pixels of sky have roughly the same values.” This results in a small file but can also result in a loss of subtle image detail. Opening and resaving a JPEG with a different compression setting compresses (averages) the photo a second time, which is a bit like making a copy of a cassette tape, and then making a copy
of the copy, and so on. Each subsequent generation loses quality compared to the original. JPEGs can’t store layers and do not support 16-bit data. JPEGs are adept for the Internet and for quick processing or e-mailing, but they aren’t appropriate for image archiving or intermediate processing.
■ TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) A versatile format for printing, TIFF files can be read in almost any imaging or page layout application. Unlike JPEG, TIFF doesn’t average or lose data when it is saved, making it an ideal format for archiving. TIFF is also the format your service bureau or minilab will request. TIFF can store layers and it works with
16-bit data. Beware of sending layered or high-bit TIFFs to designers or digital labs, as they can cause problems. TIFF is an excellent format for long-term archiving because they can be read by many different imaging programs, and TIFF offers zip compression, a lossless form
of image compression used to save hard drive space. If you’re ever asked to provide a high-resolution photo for publication, consider saving your flattened photo in the TIFF format.
■ PSD (Photoshop Document) This is the native file format for Photoshop documents. As you would expect,
just about everything you can do in Photoshop, you can save in a PSD. Layers, yup; 16-bit data, yup; type layers, shape layers, and alpha channels, yup, yup, and yup. PSD has traditionally been the archive format of choice for most photographers, as it ensures that
all layered Photoshop file characteristics will be retained. For a long time, photographers used PSD to indicate whether the file was a layered master file or TIFF for a flattened print-ready file.
With TIFF now able to store layered and high-bit files, this distinction has become less cut and dried. For the sake of simplicity, I still recommend using
PSD to denote layered master files. But if you decide you’d rather use TIFF, by all means, go for it.
■ DNG (Digital Negative Format) As discussed earlier, the Digital Negative Format aims to unify the multitude
of camera raw formats into an open source, nonproprietary raw-file format. Photoshop allows you to convert your camera’s raw files to the DNG raw-file format and to edit and adjust DNG files as you would any other raw file. Some photographers are more comfortable archiving their raw files in the DNG format because it is an open standard instead of a proprietary, closed system. If you’re ever asked to deliver a raw file,
convert your raw file to a DNG file prior to delivery. With proprietary raw formats, it is too easy from the XMP sidecar file to become separated from the original raw pixel data. The DNG file format wraps
all this information together in an easily transportable package, making it an ideal option for delivering or transferring raw files. You can save DNG files only from Lightroom or from within Photoshop’s ACR plug-in.
The file format you select will have a direct impact on the file size and the amount of space required to store your photo on your hard drive. JPEG files require the least space since they are a compressed file format.
However, this compression can degrade image quality. The TIFF format offers two types of compression, LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) and zip, both of which bypass the compression problems and subsequent quality loss found with the JPEG format.
PSD and uncompressed TIFF files take up the most disk space but allow you to store your layers, masks, and Smart Objects for future editing. As a rule of thumb, I always save my master images, complete with all
my corrections, as a layered PSD. Print- ready photos, often resized and sharpened, are saved as flattened TIFF files. Web-ready photos are saved in the JPEG format. This system incorporates the strength of each file format and provides an easy means for me to differentiate among multiple copies of the same file. When I look in my file system, I
may have three images with the same filename saved in different file formats. I know the JPEG is safe to e-mail, the TIFF is ready for printing, and the PSD is ideal if I want to make additional changes to my photo.
433
434
Building these types of routines into your workflow helps you work faster and eliminates mistakes. In most cases, you will need to archive only an original raw file and a layered PSD for each image. Saving additional copies of each photo takes up more space on your hard drive and has the potential to slow down your workflow by forcing you to sort through several different images to find the one you need. Whenever possible, keep your workflow simple and versatile.
Saving Photos in Photoshop
Saving photos in Photoshop is similar to saving documents in any other application. Photoshop gives you both Save and Save As options for saving photos. Save applies your changes to the current document, overwriting the previous version on your hard drive. Save As creates a new copy of your photo. Using Save As, you can select a file format that’s different from the one you originally used to save your photo.
Tip If you do not see the JPEG option in your Format list, your document likely contains 16 bpc. Click Cancel in the Save As dialog, change the bit depth to 8 bpc, and try saving again.
When using Save As, select the destination for your new file just as you would any other document. Under the Format heading in the Save As dialog, select the file type in which you’d like to save the new document.
If, after selecting your desired file format, a warning icon appears, this is an indication that not all file attributes of your current file can be stored in your desired format. This is likely caused by saving a layered file in the JPEG format, which does not support layers. Go ahead and use the Save As command to create your flattened JPEG file, and then use the Save command to save any changes you’ve made to your layered document. Be sure the Embed Color Profile checkbox is checked, and then click Save.
435
H OW T O : U SING L IGHTROOM ’ S E XPOR T M ODULE
Now that you’re up to speed on the technical ins and outs of digital photography, from image size to bit depth, it’s time to put your skills to practice exporting images from your Lightroom library. Lightroom’s Export module is the quickest, most efficient means of creating TIFFs and JPEGs from your camera raw or layered master images. This How To will help you take full advantage of Lightroom’s Export module.
Begin the export process by launching the Export module using one of three methods:
■ Click the File menu and then click Export.
■ Click the Export button in the lower-left corner of the Library module.
■ control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) an image in the Filmstrip and choose Export.
I’ll cover other export-related options in the File menu at the end of this How To.
Step 1
In the Export module, you can either export photos to your hard drive or burn the exported photos directly
to a CD or DVD. Specify which export option you
prefer by clicking the pop-up menu at the upper-right corner of the dialog.
Step 2
Immediately below the export pop-up is the Export
Location panel, where you can specify whether you’d like the exported images saved to a new folder or to the
same folder as the original photo. I recommend saving to a specific folder to avoid creating duplicate versions of your primary photos, cluttering your Lightroom library.
Step 3
From the Export To pull-down menu, select Specific
Folder. Then click Choose to navigate to the location on your hard drive where you’d like the exported photos
saved. Click Choose to select the folder and return to the Export dialog.
Step 4
Leave the Put in Subfolder and Add to This Catalog
checkboxes unchecked, and from the Existing Files pull- down menu choose Ask what to do.
436
Step 5
In the File Naming panel, set the Template pull-down to Filename to use the existing filename. Otherwise,
choose from any of the existing file naming templates to
create a new filename for the exported photos. Step 8
The Output Sharpening panel complements the creative sharpening you’ve added during the image correction
process by adding a second pass of sharpening based on your image size and output method. Use the Sharpen
For pull-down menu to specify whether sharpening
Step 6
The File Settings panel is used to select the file for-
mat for the exported images. Choose from JPEG, PSD, TIFF, DNG, and Original. When Original is selected, the original, unadjusted file will be exported. Often, you will
lose any adjustments, keywords, or ratings applied to the image within Lightroom.
Depending on the file format chosen, you will see additional export options, including bit depth (TIFF and PSD), Quality Settings (JPEG), and Conversion Options
(DNG). For processed images, you will also be prompted to select your output color space.
routines should be based on Screen Display, Matte, or Glossy Paper. Further tailor your results with the Low, Standard, or High Amount setting.
Step 9
The Metadata panel allows you to reduce the amount of metadata included in your photos during export.
Some professionals like to remove camera and exposure information before sending photos to clients. That isn’t much of a worry for our workflow; I suggest leaving the Metadata fields unchecked and setting the Post-Process- ing panel’s After Export option to Do Nothing.
Step 7
The Image Sizing panel, discussed earlier in this chapter, allows you to resize images during the export process.
Using the Width & Height resizing option, enter the long dimension for both portrait and landscape oriented pho- tos and select your image resolution.
At this point, your photo is ready to export. If your export settings are unique, and you’re unlikely to need them again, go ahead and click Export to create your new file. If, on the other hand, you regularly export files of this size and file format, create a preset to save yourself time
in the future. Creating export presets allows you to bypass the Export module entirely by storing your commonly used export settings for easy access.
To create an export preset, first make your selections in each of the Export panels. Your preset will remember these selections exactly, so be sure you have each of the settings configured correctly. Here are a few tips:
■ Select a destination that won’t change or be moved. For example, exporting photos to your Desktop, Documents, or Pictures folder will be more effective than exporting to a custom folder that you might discard at a later date.
■ Go easy on the sharpening. Selecting a lighter sharpening setting will help ensure that your photos aren’t oversharpened during export.
■ Give your preset a useful name. Be sure you can decipher what the export does, solely by the preset name.
Once you’ve configured your export settings, click Add in the lower-left corner of the Export module. Then, in the New Preset dialog, give your Preset a descriptive name and click Create.
Your export preset will now appear in the User Presets list on the left side of the Export module. Use this preset in the future by clicking the preset name to recall your export settings.
437
At this point, go ahead and export your photos if you haven’t already done so. This will return you to the Lightroom library. Within the library are a few additional ways to leverage your settings in the export
preset without having to go through and reconfigure your settings in the Export module:
■ Under the File menu, clicking Export as Previous will export your photos using the most recent settings in the Export dialog.
■ You can export photos using your Export presets by selecting the preset in one of three places:
■ From the File menu Click Export with Preset.
■ From the context menu control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) an image and click Export, and then click the export preset.