Comparing Images From Adobe Lightroom 1.4

<<Before>>   << After>>

It’s like a tale of two cities.  One photo is dark and gloomy;  the other is bright and warm.  Thanks to Adobe Lightroom 1.4, Daddy can recover photos from earlier camera work.  In this case, we took the picture with our old Casio Exilim.  Actually, its not old as far as cameras go.  The Casio Exilim was only about 3 years old.  We had bought it just before Christmas at RadioShack.  Now its a feeble piece of equipment compared to our Nikon D200.

To clean up the photo, Daddy first imported the photo into Adobe Lightroom 1.4 on our desktop computer.  Using the import function, we imported all of the photos on the C drive. To our surprise, we initially loaded up 4500+ pictures into the library.  Amazing!

Next, the photo was selected from Lightroom’s All Photos library.  Clicking on the Develope module, we made multiple adjustments.   The first was to raise the exposure +0.67 of a stop to lighten things up.  The effect initially white washes everything to some extent. If nothing else, it helps Johnny’s skin from looking so ashen. 

To compensate for pushing up the exposure, the recovery setting was moved up 7 points.  Adjusting recovery under the develope settings keeps things from looking like a camera’s flash didn’t flood things out. 

Finally, the blacks were also raised up another 7 points.  Esentially it gave more contrast to the picture.  A simple trick that doesn’t require all of the crazy Adobe Photoshop learning curve to master, which is one of the main reasons of having Adobe Lightroom 1.4, and here is the proof!