New York Photography Blog - Volume I

Am using Lightroom more and more. The most recent discovery is that with a little bit of planning, you can use one file size to do all your prints. This is what I’ve been testing today. Starting with say an 8 x 12 which has had all the tweaks done in Lightroom - then resizing it to larger and smaller sizes in the print area of LR and printing from there as the resolution goes up and down. Where the limits are. Whether artifacts are introduced? Can you imagine how much disk space I would save. I have separate files for the 5 x 7 print, the 8 x 10 print, the 11 x 14 print and the 16 x 20 print. These could all have been derived from the 16 x 20, not to mention that I would only have to make changes in one file.

You can’t do this if you are going to use a sharpening technique (photokit) that is based on a particular end print size - or you’ll introduce artifacts. So that’s the last point that I’m experimenting with, how good is the sharpening in the Lightroom print section. So far - so good.

I’ve also played with whether its a good idea to turn on noise reduction for high ASA in the 40D. So far, my feeling is not - that it takes away too much detail and I’m better off doing that in post processing.

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Only one criticism so far about Lightroom - but since I have a number of catalogs, one for negatives, and the rest are based on the year, it would be nice to have a central repository for sharing user created parameter sets. Currently, you can create presets for each of the modules — development, print etc. but they are stored at the catalog level. So for example, I have a print layout for a certain paper / paper size / whatever - and in order to use it in various catalogs, I need to manually copy it from catalog to catalog. But that’s about it. I’m still discovering more good things than bad things.