Lightroom snapshots

What purpose the snapshot feature in lightroom? I asked myself that quite a lot as I was using virtual copies to make my image variations (such as mono and colour versions). I still don't fully know exactly why one might use snapshots rather than virtual copies other than what I've got below.

I'll start with what a snapshot is. It's a record of all the develop settings at any point you choose to record it - you could do this before experimenting with a really dramatic look or a really warm/cool look or a mono conversion and get straight back to where you started experimenting from. You can also do a few different mono conversions on an image. A very useful thing you can do with them is to do your initial crop (the first thing I do after culling the crap) and create your starting point snapshot. I know you can use the history panel and select the import if you want that state, but for wonky horizons (a common thing for me), I don't want that as my starting point. Now you've got your starting point snapshot (I call this "cropped"), what you can do is use it in your before/after comparisons - the "\" key. When you're making changes, especially subtle changes, doing the before/after comparisons can be very useful. Right, what does this waffle have to do with snapshots? You can right-click on the snapshot and select "Copy Snapshot Settings to Before". This means that instead of my wonky horizon in the before, I get the straight version to compare so only the changes in colour or contrast (or whatever) show. Now, that makes the before/after comparison tool useful for those of us who don't get the horizon straight all the time. It's also very useful if you shot an image knowing that you'd crop it into, for example, a square format. Again, make the crop first and snapshot it then use that for your before/after comparisons.

Anyway. Here's how I use snapshots when choosing to do these rather than making use of virtual copies.

• Import the images into LR
• Crop as required
• Snapshot, name "cropped"
• Make WB corections
• Make any basic exposure corrections
• Snapshot, name "exposure corrected"
• Either edit in another programme for retouching (if required) and export.
• If a customer buys a print/product, I make a new snapshot named "customer version" so that even if I lose track of the exported jpg's, I still know exactly what the image looked like when the customer bought it.

Hope this has helped in how to make use of the snapshot feature. I'm sure there are more uses, but for variations of an image which I want to keep (sometimes a mono image and a colour version), I tend to use virtual copies as I can see at a glance what I have in the catalogue.

Lightroom slowdown - purge the cache

What do you do when lightroom begins to slow down a little? I had this problem around the new year. I'd optimised the catalogue and was at the point of splitting the catalogue into sections; keep the landscape stuff separate from the portrait stuff from the family stuff. Then I came across the option to purge the cache in the preferences.

When I did that, the whole lightroom interface speeded up by quite a lot, so I can only think that others will have had the same issue and that means me making a post about it to show how I did it and hopefully help someone out.

Step by step guide:

Hit Ctrl-, (hold donw the control key and press the comma) or Cmd-, on mac to get the preferences dialogue box up. This can also be found on the edit menu on windows or the lightroom menu on mac.
Click the tab labelled "File Handling" 

Then click the button labelled "Purge Cache"

Once this is done, a quick re-start of lightroom should have you back up and running. Note that you will have to rebuild the previews of previous imports as this will get rid of them - the previews, that is, not the images in the import.

You may notice in that last screenshot that I have a large cache set rather than the paltry 1.0 GB which was the default. This ensures that I don't have too many issues with LR having to rebuild previews if I go back a couple of shoots. The default 1.0GB holds a lot of previews, but it soon fills up when you're using a 5DII.

Hope this helps someone out at some point :)

Finding just the images which have adjustments

A query elsewhere about how to find just the images the photographer had made adjustments to made me think about smart collections (again). What he wanted was to be able to find the images he'd altered in LR 3 and export just those to a new catalogue to import into LR4 which he had just purchased.

This is actually a simple thing to do if you use smart collections. (If you don't use smart collections, I suggest you make a start on them because they're very powerful.)

Anyway, to achieve this, scroll down to the collections panel in either library or develop module (you can't create them in slideshow, print or web modules) and click the plus symbol to the right of the word collections. From the menu which appears,

Select "Create Smart Collection"

Up pops the box in the next screenshot in which you need to click the condition dropdown (highlighted):

And select from the large menu:

The option "Has Adjustments". This will return you to the previous box. You now need to click on the rule dropdown:

And select "is true" if it isn't already selected by default (mine was)

And that's it. If you want to find every image which has an adjustment made to it in LR 3, use the power of smart collections.

HTH somebody.
Matt

P.S. I'll leave you with an image I made recently of which I'm rather proud :)

Lightroom auto advance

Still running lightroom 3 here even though LR 4 is now released and at a very attractive price too!

Anyway, the reason behind this post is that I recently had a problem with the computer which forced a reinstall of the OS and subsequently LR too. Not a problem as the catalogue was intact (although not most recently backed up - a situation to remedy) and just opened it with the fresh install of LR.

Nice clean fresh install of the OS and programmes means the computer has speeded up a tiny bit but one thing was bugging me about my time in LR; the auto-advance when I rated/picked/coloured an image. Now, I know that the auto-advance worked before and I was so used to it that I was completely thrown when it didn't work. Could I remember how to get it working? Not for a while until I knocked the caps-lock key and it started working. I hate having the caps-lock key on though, so I knew this wasn't what was doing it previously.

A search of various support fora told me multiple times that using caps-lock or holding the shift key while setting the flag or rating would do it, but that wasn't what I did before. Cue some searching of the preferences dialogue; to no avail, it isn't in there. More searching told me it's in the photo menu, but I couldn't find it and was scratching my head for a moment until a lightbulb lit. The menus are different in each module and I was in Develop and something like auto-advance is an organising feature, so that would logically be in the Library module. A quick switch to that and there it was in the photo menu: an option to auto-advance about three quarters of the way down.

If you're at all interested in the image in that screengrab, it's the Kincardine Bridge in Scotland. Shot from the banks of the Forth looking downriver.

Playing with lighting modifiers

Anyone who tells you that an umbrella or a softbox or a beauty dish (or any other particular modifier) are the only modifier you need is, quite frankly, talking out of their rear end. (That said, the modifier linked below is the one I take if I'm only taking one to any particular shoot)

I was playing with modifiers the other night just to see what lighting they would give me. This particular time, I had a McGillicuddy 36" multi-modifier configured as a vertical stripbox as my main/key light and a gridded flashgun as the hairlight.

This is the result of having the stripbox to one side at same height as the head and tilted down a tiny bit:

 

Contrast the above to the following image where a reflector umbrella was used (feathered heavily around) to light the face with no second light to highlight the hair:

Things to note are the shape of the catchlights in the eyes and the way the light falls off. 

I wouldn't be without the McGillicuddy modifier (I have 2 of them) now, but it's by no means the only one I own or use.

The conclusion is that no matter how portable/light/convenient a particular modifier is, if it isn't the right one to give you an effect for a particular image, it doesn't matter how portable or light or convenient it is.