Here's an example from a bike outing I did yesterday to show what Lightroom can easily do and what it can't-- I caught a glimpse of the distant Mount Hood, OR through some trees across a big field and hike to the middle of the field where I took some shots. This mountain is about 50 miles away, so the photos came out very, very hazy! Lightroom did give me some very quick adjustments -- here is a photo shot at 200mm with my 70-200mm lens and after Lightroom tweaking it actually is something that doesn't feel painful to look at:
Now, just to show you how effective Raw processing can be -- I shot this using the "Expose To The Right" technique of upping the exposure to just the point where I had no "highlight blinkies" warnings in the camera so I would have good room to adjust both highlights and shadows, a major strength with Raw processing. Lightroom/ACR or another Raw processor has the ability to "tame" an image that may seem out of control, so here is my Before Lightroom image
!:
Believe it or not, the snow on that mountain is not actually blown -- in Lightroom I could lower the Exposure and no clipping showed up!
Now, granted, I did shoot a series at different exposures and I
could have chosen a shot with a lower exposure, but sometimes it is nice to have different choices, and an ETTR shot in Raw just gives you more choices
!
Anyway, that shows how much Lightroom
can do well and quickly, but there are a couple things to note:
First of all is the urban "clutter" in the foreground -- the red/orange sign, the lampost, the fence posts -- all get in the way of this becoming a nice fine arts print...well, Lightroom does have a rudimentary cloning tool but compared to those that Elements/Photoshop have, well, trying to clone those things out in LR would be a lot of work and probably end in frustration. I use LR for all my dust spot removal when needed (and some of my shots from yesterday on my old 5DC did need some) but if I was serious about this photo I'd go to Photoshop for sure.
And then, note that the mountain is still hazy and because of that it has a bit of a bluish tinge.
Now, again if I got serious about this photo I'd have to explore my options. One would be a Lightroom local adjustment brush set to both desaturate the Blues and up the Contrast, Sharpening and whatever would help. In fact I played with that a bit this morning, just for fun, but decided that 1) it would take more than just the single brush I was using to get the Contrast maxxed out and maybe not even then without some fine detail burning with a tiny brush on those darker spots on the mountain, and 2) I just didn't want to take the time on this shot
!
Elements has tools for this that are a bit more suited -- you can open adjustment layers with layer masks that you can pick and choose what to apply an adjustment to and those choices are visually "there" to check out and adjust as needed. That approach is what we have all "grown up" using. I have done some fairly effective stuff using Lightroom brushes but with Elements/Photoshop there are many tools to use that will help you fine-tune things that Lightroom lacks.
So, that's just a fun example of how if you have Elements and learn how to use it it will make you more effective in your work, alongside of the great power of processing your Raw files in Lightroom!
