{"id":2560,"date":"2015-04-22T01:22:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T16:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2015-04-22\/2560"},"modified":"2015-04-22T01:22:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T16:22:00","slug":"my-thoughts-on-lightroom-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2015-04-22\/2560","title":{"rendered":"My Thoughts on Lightroom 6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<div class='img_right'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/i\/s\/Lr6IdentityPlate.png\" width=\"376\" height=\"94\"\nid=\"iLr6IdentityPlate\"\/><\/div>\n\n<p>Adobe has <a href='http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/lightroomjournal\/2015\/04\/spring-updates-to-cc-photography.html'>just released<\/a> <b><span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6<\/span><\/b>.<\/p>\n\n<p>There are plenty of places to find out about what's new, such\nas <a href='http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/richardcurtis\/?p=4374'>this post from Adobe<\/a> for an overview,\nor <a href='http:\/\/www.lightroomqueen.com\/whats-new-lightroom-cc-6-0\/'>Victoria Bampton's exhaustive \"What's New\" writeup<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>For my part, in this post, I'll just\ntalk about <span class='nobr'>a few<\/span> things <span class='nobr'>I think<\/span> are worth particular mention.<\/p>\n\n<p><b>UPDATE:<\/b> I guess I should mention right away that modern versions (from within the last couple of months) of\n<a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/'>my 45 plugins<\/a> should work fine on\n<span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6.<\/span> The major upgrade does cause registrations of my plugins to be lost, but that's easy enough to fix\n(<a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/register#major-upgrade'>see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n<style type=\"text\/css\">\n p.hdr { margin-top: 50px; font-weight: bold; font-size:120% }\n p.hd2 { margin-top: 30px; font-weight: bold; font-size:105% }\n<\/style>\n<p class='hdr'>You Don't Have to Subscribe<\/p>\n\n<p>Adobe is really pushing the subscription model these days (<span\nclass='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Creative Cloud<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span>), so\nmost of the marketing copy you'll see today references only <span\nclass='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Lightroom CC<span\nclass='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>. The stand-alone version, without\nintegration to their cloud\/mobile offerings, is still available <a\nhref='http:\/\/protogtech.com\/adobe-lightroom\/adobe-lightroom-6-perpetual-license\/'>if you dig<\/a>, but the <span class='nobr'><span\nclass='QO'>&#8220;<\/span><span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6<\/span><span\nclass='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span> branding is not being emphasized.<\/p>\n\n<p>Personally, I like to own (<span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>License<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span>) my copy of software, so I'm glad\nthat subscription is not the only choice. <span class='nobr'>But in looking<\/span> at the increased\nvalue of my Adobe stock since they started the move toward subscriptions, <span class='nobr'>I see the<\/span> writing on the wall that <span class='nobr'>I may<\/span> not have the choice forever. <span class='nobr'>But today<\/span> we still do.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class='hdr'>Requirement for an Adobe ID<\/p>\n\n<p>Adobe now flat-out requires an Adobe account to install <span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6.<\/span> This will\nundoubtedly lead to much bellyaching among <span class='nobr'>a vocal<\/span> minority for whom it is,\non principle, an evil thing... even though like for the rest of us it is\npractically-speaking little worse than <span class='nobr'>a one<\/span>-time 5-minute roadbump.<\/p>\n\n<p>My personal theory is that this new requirement is to help combat rampant piracy of Lightroom,\nwhich until now had little to curb it.<\/p>\n\n<p>A side note: most folks probably don't realize that long ago (circa\nLr3), <span class='nobr'>I made it<\/span> so that <a\nhref='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/'>my plugins<\/a> won't run\non <span class='nobr'>a pirated<\/span> copy of Lightroom, with folks who got caught having to\nvalidate their new, legal copy to my satisfaction before my plugins would\nrun on their computer again. <span class='nobr'>I suspect<\/span> that most folks who got caught this\nway simply decided to forego the use of my plugins rather than actually pay\nfor their own copy of Lightroom, yet still, many <i>many<\/i> (multiple\nthousands) folks did respond by buying <span class='nobr'>a copy<\/span> of Lightroom. <span class='nobr'>I know this<\/span>\nbecause <span class='nobr'>I handled<\/span> each validation by hand, and have set aside time several\ndays <span class='nobr'>a week<\/span> for the last few years to deal with them.<\/p>\n\n<p>As a user of Lightroom I want it to grow and thrive, so anything that thwarts pirates\nwithout too much burden on honest customers is fine with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class='hdr'>Raw Panorama Merge<\/p>\n\n<p>This might feel like only a mildly-convenient  addition in light of long having had the ability\nto merge panoramas in Photoshop or other tools, but you've got to realize that this is merging\nthe pre-develop <i>raw<\/i> data, creating <span class='nobr'>a single<\/span> <i>raw<\/i> file of the merged composition.<\/p>\n\n<p>It used to be that you had to develop each component photo to whatever\nfinal look you wanted, then do the merge and live with that one result. <span class='nobr'>But now you<\/span> merge prior to develop, and can then work with the result like any\nother raw file, with all the dynamic latitude and no-loss-of-quality\nwhite-balance adjustments that this implies.<\/p>\n\n<p>I don't have much experience with <span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6<\/span>'s panorama tool, but this\npanorama (from the top of <a\nhref='\/blog\/2015-04-17\/2556'>this blog post<\/a>) was\ncreated with Lightroom, from ten fairly bland shots taken by hand in the rain:<\/p>\n\n<div class='ic'><a href='\/blog\/2015-04-17\/2556'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/i\/JF4_074792-801_sm.jpg\" width=\"690\" height=\"192\"\nid=\"i074792_801\"\/>\n<br\/>merged from 10 separate, hand-held shots, in about as many seconds<\/a>\n<meta itemprop='about' content=\"merged from 10 separate, hand-held shots, in about as many seconds -- Takashima, Shiga, Japan -- Copyright 2015 Jeffrey Friedl, https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/\"\/><\/div>\n\n<p>I spent all of a few seconds\nto select them and invoke <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Photo &gt; Photo Merge &gt; Panorama<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> and let it do its thing. <span class='nobr'>The results<\/span> certainly exceed the effort that <span class='nobr'>I put<\/span> into it. \ud83d\ude00 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class='hdr'>GPU Acceleration<\/p>\n\n<p>This new option in the preferences has Lightroom use the processing\npower of your system's graphics chip to boost performance, mostly with\nrender speed in Develop.<\/p>\n\n<p>With my high-end Mid-2014 MacBook Pro, I've got mixed feelings about this option. <span class='nobr'>It indeed<\/span> does speed up responsiveness in Develop, sometimes remarkably, but other times it seems to\nadd <span class='nobr'>a jitter<\/span> to the display. <span class='nobr'>I haven't<\/span> pined down exactly what causes it, but <span class='nobr'>I seem<\/span> to notice\nthe problem most when using the dust-correction tool.<\/p>\n\n<p>Luckily the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Performance<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> tab in the Preferences dialog is sticky, so if\n<span class='nobr'>I want<\/span> to turn it on or off it's just <span class='nobr'>a tap<\/span> of Command-comma to bring up\nthe option, and <span class='nobr'>a click<\/span> to toggle the checkbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class='hdr'>Face-Detection and People Support<\/p>\n\n<p>Some people won't care about face detection, but <span class='nobr'>I find<\/span> it's useful,\nespecially after you get enough <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>critical mass<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> data. <span class='nobr'>My production<\/span> Lightroom catalog has 135,000 photos going back to 1986, many of them of\nfamily and friends, so there's value for me to be able to quickly identify\nall photos with such-and-such <span class='nobr'>a person<\/span> in them.<\/p>\n\n<p>It's quite a lot of work to accurately apply this retroactively to\n135,000 photos, so I've made only <span class='nobr'>a small<\/span> dent so far, but it's still useful.<\/p>\n\n<div class='ic tight'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/i\/lr\/Lr6-screenshot-faces.png\" width=\"690\" height=\"514\"\nid=\"iLr6_screenshot_faces\"\/>\n<br\/>from <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span><a class='pt' href='\/blog\/2015-01-25\/2517'>Exploring The Mountains of Northern Kyoto by Bicycle<\/a><span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span>\n<meta itemprop='about' content=\"from &amp;#8220; Exploring The Mountains of Northern Kyoto by Bicycle &amp;#8221;\"\/><\/div>\n\n<p>Of course, one doesn't need automatic face detection to associate people\nwith photos: many photographers already use keywords to do exactly that. <span class='nobr'>I'm just too<\/span> lazy to manually go through every photo to assign keywords\nthat way. Having the hard parts automated tipped the scale for me.<\/p>\n\n<p>It's not perfect, or even great, but this version seems to be <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>fairly\ngood<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span>, with some fairly restrictive design decisions that, how shall <span class='nobr'>I say,<\/span>\nleaves ample room for much improvement in future versions.<\/p>\n\n<div class='img_right' style='margin:0; padding:0; margin-right:1em; margin-left:3em'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/i\/lr\/Lr6-PeopleList.png\" width=\"250\" height=\"1347\"\nclass=\"raw\"\nid=\"iLr6_PeopleList\"\/><\/div>\n\n<p class='hd2'>Crunching Pixels<\/p>\n\n<p>There are several steps to the process. <span class='nobr'>The first<\/span> is that Lightroom's\nface-recognition engine must crunch on the pixels in the background to\ndetect face locations. This can take <span class='nobr'>a long<\/span> time... on the order of several\ndays to <span class='nobr'>a week<\/span> for <span class='nobr'>a catalog<\/span> like mine.<\/p>\n\n<p>The first thing I did was turn off the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Automatically detect faces in\nall photos<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> preference item (the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Metadata<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> tab of Catalog preferences) so\nthat <span class='nobr'>I can<\/span> control when Lightroom pegs the CPU looking for faces. <span class='nobr'>In this mode<\/span>, Lightroom looks for faces only when you've entered the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>People<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> view\n(the letter <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>O<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> keyboard shortcut) and works on only the selected source.<\/p>\n\n<p>For the initial check of my 130k photos, <span class='nobr'>I'd select<\/span> <span class='nobr'>a year<\/span> or two worth\nof photos, enter <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>People<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> view, and let it run overnight.<\/p>\n\n<p>You can assign names to faces (discussed below) while the\npixel-crunching of face detection is going on, but <span class='nobr'>I don't<\/span> recommend it,\nbecause as new faces are discovered, the Faces-Mode screen keeps updating...\nso trying to work with it can be confusing. I've always found it better\nto wait until the pixel-crunching face-discovery phase is over for <span class='nobr'>a set<\/span> of\nphotos before <span class='nobr'>I start<\/span> the name-assignment phase.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class='hd2'>Person Keywords<\/p>\n\n<p>In Lightroom, a <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Person<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> is represented by <span class='nobr'>a specially<\/span> marked keyword,\nand most times you'll want to choose the person's name as the text of the\nkeyword. In Lightroom's <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Keywording List<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span>, if you want families to\ngenerally sort together, you'll want to put the family name first. <span class='nobr'>I'd like to<\/span> put names like <span class='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Friedl, Jeffrey<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>, but <span class='nobr'>a comma<\/span>\nis not allowed in <span class='nobr'>a name,<\/span> so <span class='nobr'>I can't<\/span> do that.<\/p>\n\n<p>In the end I decided to put names like <span\nclass='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Friedl\/Jeffrey<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>. <span class='nobr'>It's a bit<\/span> ugly, but it seems to work\nwell enough for me. Also, <a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/people-support'>my People Support plugin<\/a>\nhas ways to automatically turn\n<span class='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Friedl\/Jeffrey<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>\ninto\n<span class='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Jeffrey Friedl<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>\non export.<\/p>\n\n<p>But some folks may well want to choose <span class='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>FRIEDL\nJeffrey<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span> or <span class='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Jeffrey Friedl<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span>. <span class='nobr'>I suggest<\/span> reading about <span class='nobr'>a variety<\/span> of approaches before investing <span class='nobr'>a lot<\/span> of time on\nentering names.<\/p>\n\n<p>Lightroom can let you pick a keyword to be the default parent of all new\nPeople keywords. <span class='nobr'>As you can<\/span> see at right, <span class='nobr'>I made a<\/span> keyword named <span\nclass='nobr'><span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>-PEOPLE-<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span><\/span> to hold all my People keywords (that's what\nthe asterisk next to it means, that it's the default parent). <span class='nobr'>I include<\/span> the\nleading dash in the name so that it sorts to the top of the keyword list;\nthe trailing dash is just for symmetry.<\/p>\n\n<p>Warning: newly-created <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>People<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> keywords are, by default, marked for inclusion in exported copies of an image. <span class='nobr'>If you prefer<\/span> to keep them private, you can exclude all <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>People<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> keywords via <span class='nobr'>a new<\/span> option in the Export\/Publish\ndialogs.<\/p>\n\n<p>Also, <a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/people-support'>my People Support plugin<\/a>\nallows you to easily see which People keywords are marked for export, and to toggle that state quickly.<\/p>\n\n<p class='hd2'>Assigning Names to Faces<\/p>\n\n<p>After faces are found within photos, the next step is to assign names to those faces.\nThere are <span class='nobr'>a lot<\/span> of ways to do this (accepting <span class='nobr'>a guess<\/span> offered by Lightroom,\ntyping in <span class='nobr'>a new<\/span> name, dragging thumbnails to named faces, etc.). <span class='nobr'>I'm sure many<\/span> other\nonline resources will go over this step better than <span class='nobr'>I could.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<p class='hd2'>Cleaning Up<\/p>\n\n<p>The automatic face-detection engine misses <span class='nobr'>a lot<\/span> of faces.... it simply fails to notice their existence.\nSo, if <span class='nobr'>I really<\/span> want to make sure that <span class='nobr'>I have<\/span> fully processed <span class='nobr'>a set<\/span> of photos, I'll go through them\none by one in Loupe view, with the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Draw Face Regions<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> option turned on (via clicking the person icon in the toolbar). <\/p>\n\n<p>In this mode, face rectangles that have been detected are shown, and if you see faces that have not been detected,\nyou can drag out boxes for them. <span class='nobr'>You can enter<\/span> the name of each face as you identify it, though it's often easier to leave\nthem unnamed until you've gone through all the photos, then return to whatever <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>Assigning Names to Faces<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> workflow you\nfind most productive.<\/p>\n\n<p>You can draw a face rectangle anywhere... it doesn't have to actually be <span class='nobr'>a face<\/span>:<\/p>\n\n<div class='ic tight'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/i\/lr\/Lr6-nonFace-Faces.png\" width=\"690\" height=\"514\"\nid=\"iLr6_nonFace_Faces\"\/><\/div>\n\n<p>It doesn't even have to be a person... you can use it to mark any object you like.<\/p>\n\n<p>Lightroom doesn't <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>learn<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> from the faces that you draw, so there's no\nharm to the <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>face knowledge base<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> if the region you identify is not clearly\n<span class='nobr'>a face.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<p class='hd2'>Plugin Support for Faces<\/p>\n\n<p>My <a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/people-support'>People Support plugin<\/a> has support for <span class='QO'>&#8220;<\/span>People<span class='QC'>&#8221;<\/span> keywords,\nand some enhanced functionality is enabled when used on <span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6.<\/span><\/p>\n\n<p>My <a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/data-explorer'>Data Explorer plugin<\/a> has extra search items when used in <span class='nobr'>Lightroom 6,<\/span>\nfor counting people tagged in photos in various ways.<\/p>\n\n<p>I wish I could have made <a href='\/blog\/lightroom-goodies\/picasa-face-import'>my Picasa Face-Recognition Import plugin<\/a>\nmigrate its data directly to Lr6's people support, but there's no easy way, sorry.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adobe has just released <b>Lightroom 6<\/b>.<\/p> <p>There are plenty of places to find out about what's new, such as this post from Adobe for an overview, or Victoria Bampton's exhaustive \"What's New\" writeup.<\/p> <p>For my part, in this post, I'll just talk about a few things I think are worth particular mention.<\/p> <p><b>UPDATE:<\/b> I guess I should mention right away that modern versions (from within the last couple of months) of my 45 plugins should work fine on Lightroom 6. The major upgrade does cause registrations of my plugins to be lost, but that's easy enough to fix (see here).<\/p> [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}