Home of the Soul Cowboy Music

Taken with an iPhone 3G and processed in Adobe’s new Lightroom 3

To snap or not to snap

We’ll agree right off the bat, photos made with an iPhone won’t ever qualify for anything above the snapshot moniker. But, firstly there’s nothing wrong with snapshots, and secondly, there’s no reason why an image you caught on the spur of the moment shouldn’t look as good as possible.

Photography is an eminently technical activity — and very quickly people lose sight of what makes a good photograph, to begin obsessing over pixel count and ISO sensitivity, to admire the perfect sound a reflex shutter makes, or to find themselves actually thinking a titanium body looks very sexy. I know, it’s true, I do it all the time. But let’s try and remember that photography is about the feeling a person gets from seeing a photo — it’s about the subject, and about light and composition. All things you can get from an iPhone snapshot.

I’ll tell you, I’m an amateur photographer, I’m not even getting paid for all this. But I love taking photos. I wasn’t sure I was going to like digital photography, but one day I bought a compact and plunged my hands into the digital darkroom.

Adobe’s Lightroom 3

A couple of days ago I downloaded the free Adobe Lighroom 3 trial and found out it has a nifty Lens Correction module, which includes a ready-made profile for the iPhone’s camera! Oh happiness! And it works pretty damn well. It straightens the corners of the photos so there’s less wide-angle distortion, plus it makes the iPhone’s weird color unevenness a little less apparent (images have too much green around the edges).

The color noise filter gets rid of your sensor’s color hesitations

Then there’s Lightroom 3’s rightfully advertised color noise filter. Color noise (a.k.a. Chroma noise) has been a big problem in JPEG photos from compact cameras, and it gets even worse with cellphone photos, because of their low pixel-count. If you take the magnifying glass to a color area that’s supposed to be uniform, you’ll see these ugly color specks I’m talking about, like the camera sensor didn’t know exactly which color to put there. This problem is especially visible in low-light areas.

The new Lightroom arrives with this great color noise filter that takes care of the sensor’s not knowing exactly which, and restores a beautiful uniformity to the color. What’s even best is that this filter doesn’t just blur the area; it preserves all the detail in the grain of the photograph. I finds it does a very nice job. Of course if you don’t want any grain you can do that too, with the noise reduction filter.

There are many other functions in Lightroom 3, like the sharpening, color balance, exposure controls and zone-specific contrast adjustments that can make your photos look much better. Maybe one day I’ll write some more about the digital darkroom, if you’re good.

There you go

So! You may not be prepared to pluck your wallet of 300 nice dollars just to get your snapshots to look right; that’s totally understandable. But if you’re a photo amateur with a good eye, you may at least want to give your hard drive a spin an try out Lightroom 3, and you’ll be able to make best-looking shots, snap or not.

Rico

PS: Btw, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has nothing to do with Photoshop, Adobe’s great image processing and retouching software. They’re both totally separate applications. Lightroom is also a great app but is meant for processing, tagging and exporting digital photographs.
Also note that Photoshop CS5 does have a similar color noise filter and lens correction module as Lightroom.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
US$ 299, upgrade US$ 99
Adobe’s Lightroom 3 page

Download the Lightroom 3 trial (all versions)
(Windows 160 Mb, Mac OS 80 Mb)