Category Archives: technique

Lightroom Issues Update

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In quite a few previous posts, I have mentioned the troubles I have had with Lightroom recently.  This was all triggered by an update a while back and subsequent updates have not solved any issues.  The problems just continued and I was unable to get anything to address the sluggish behavior.  The program would respond better when I was working in the Develop module but it was very difficult in Library and when importing.

I recently had a bit more success.  I contacted someone who, while not working for Adobe, does have a business based around Lightroom and has good connections with the company.  I was able to send this individual a copy of my catalog.  They had a play with it and had similar issues with memory overuse so it wasn’t a hardware issue.  They were able to pass on the catalog to an Adobe engineer to investigate further.  I feared there was some corruption in the catalog and hoped they would find a solution.

It transpires that there is not any corruption.  Instead, it is in the nature of the catalogs that I have created that the problem lies.  A long time ago I posted about my approach to processing a shoot.  I would use a Collection Set for each shoot in which I would use smart collections to take shots with the right combination of keywords and dates.  They would split out rejects from non-rejects and put HDR, panorama shots and videos in separate smart collections.  This made processing the shoot more efficient.

As a result of this approach, I have, over the years, accumulated a large number of these collection sets with smart collections in them.  This is what is causing the trouble.  The program is getting bogged down with all of them.  This leaves two ways forward.  In the short term, I am going to go through these smart collections and turn them into simple collections.  Hopefully this will reduce the processing burden.  I don’t need the smart functionality any longer so I can just take the selected images and make simple collections out of them.

The longer term action is that Adobe is now aware of this issue.  Hopefully they can investigate a way to address this in a future update so that it isn’t constrained in the same way.  It happened suddenly so there was something in the coding that changed to cause the issue so maybe it can be similarly quickly fixed.  In the early days of Lightroom, it was limited in the number of images it could have before things got sluggish and that was resolved so hopefully this can be too.  We shall see.  If it is, you’re welcome!

 

A Further Trial in Focus Stacking

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In a previous post I wrote about a focus stacking effort I made with images of a model aircraft at a show.  I had been meaning to have another go at this and do so in a more controlled environment.  I then ended up buying myself a macro lens for use in my negative scanning efforts and immediately started playing with it to shoot things close up – it’s a macro lens for goodness sake!

As an f/2.8 lens, when shooting macro shots, the depth of field is really shallow.  This got me thinking about trying another focus stack.  A small Leatherman seemed as good a target as anything.  I set up with manual focus, put the camera on a tripod, went to manual exposure and then shot a sequence with small changes to the position of focus for each shot.  Then it was off to Photoshop.

Photoshop did a pretty good job really.  The distortion of the areas out of focus means that the area that the subject covers can vary quite dramatically as the focus shifts backwards and forwards.  The algorithm did well getting things masked and blended.  The only bit it struggled with was at the very top where the knurled edge seemed to confuse it a bit.  The top shot is the finished effort while two others are included to show how much things are out of focus in the individual shots.

Tokyo Station

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I briefly saw Tokyo Station last time I was in Japan.  This time I wanted to take a better look.  While the station has been significantly redeveloped over the years, the west frontage that looks towards the Imperial Palace has retained the brick structure designed and built over 100 years ago (although some rebuilding was necessary over the years).  I think it is an interesting looking building and an interesting contrast with the high-rise developments around it or even the old buildings that can still be found in the city.

I got there in mid-morning and my brain was obviously not firing on all cylinders.  The front was in shade with the sun quite high in the sky and I thought for some reason I had left it too late.  I ended up taking a bunch of pictures of the building, none of which I was terribly happy with given the shadow on the front and the bright overall conditions.  I did shoot some of the details around the hallways and overhangs which were fine.

It was only later when I returned from the Palace grounds that I realized which way the building was facing and that the sun had now come around to the front of the station, not retreated.  Consequently, things were a lot more brightly illuminated.  Let’s not kid ourselves.  Midday sun is not the greatest thing for shooting but, for getting snapshots for the trip, this was a significant improvement.  With such a wide and low structure, a panorama was obviously going to be tried!

Practice Panning to Make it Different at BFI

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I was killing some time at Boeing Field and the light was dropping fast.  There was a variety of traffic inbound but nothing that counted as terribly unusual and not, therefore, something I desperately cared about getting a good shot with.  As a result, I decided to play around with low shutter speeds to see how it changed the look of the shots at a familiar location, to see how the sharpness varied across the airframe and to see just how badly may panning skills have degraded.  Needless to say, the results were pretty mixed.  The worst of the lot will clearly never see the light of day but here you can see some of the shots that I was okay with.  The conclusion from the output is that I should go a bit lower in shutter speed to increase the sense of speed.

 

Blending to Remove Traffic

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During a previous visit to Vancouver, I experimented to blending images of the same scene to remove objects I didn’t want included.  When photographing the bridge at Deception Pass, I decided to have another go at this.  The bridge was very interesting but I found the traffic on the bridge to be a distraction.  Looking at some of the shots afterwards, it wasn’t as bad as I thought at the time but, even so, I decided to try processing the shots.

This was the same approach as before.  Load all of the images into Photoshop using the Statistics function and use Median to average things out and hopefully remove the items that I didn’t want to appear.  It seemed to work pretty well.  The top shot has the output while the one below is one of the input shots cropped in along with the final result to show what was removed.

My First Attempt at Focus Stacking

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I first read about focus stacking a long time ago and I have been meaning to try it for ages.  The premise is to take a series of shots with the focus set in different positions throughout the scene and then to use software to blend the images together to create on image with focus all the way through the shot.  This seemed like a simple thing to have a try with but I never got around to having a go.  Then I came across a situation that looked like it might be a good example to try.

I was visiting a model show at the Museum of Flight.  I was taking a few photos of some of the more expertly crafted models on display.  I was shooting with a longer lens and using a relatively small aperture to try and minimize the shallow depth of field that you get when shooting small objects close up.  I decided to shoot a model of a Fairey Gannet and the shallow depth of field triggered something in the deep recesses of my brain about focus stacking.  Of course, I had not planned for this so no tripod and just an effort to get focus on different parts of the model without moving the camera too much.

I took the shots and got on with my visit.  When I got home, I almost forgot about the stacking experiment but, fortunately, I did remember.  I exported the images to Photoshop as layers of the same shot.  Then, since they were hand held, I did an Auto-Align action to get them in place.  After that, Auto-Blend was selected.  It seemed to realize that they were a blend stack rather than a panorama – quite clever – and the software quickly did its thing.  Despite not taking too many shots and do it all hand held, the result came out pretty well.  The top shot is the finished product while the lower two show the extremes of the focus range for the original shots.  If I had managed a shot focused right on the back of the fin, the result may have been a bit better still.

Supermoon Rising

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The combination of the Super Moon, the blue moon and the lunar eclipse was something a lot of people were interested in.  Sadly, we were due to have a cloudy night so none of the excitement was going to be on show.  As the sun was setting at the beginning of the evening that this was all due to happen, I was walking out of the office at the same time the moon was rising.  At this point we still had a clear sky.  I hadn’t planned anything but I did have a camera to hand so grabbed a few shots for the hell of it.

I decided to try and bracket for an HDR shot.  The twilight meant there was something closer to an even exposure between the foreground and the background than you normally manage with a moon shot but it was still a wide range.  HDR gave a bit more to play with.  Then I headed home and the clouds rolled in.

Lightroom Keyword Approach Update

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I have been using Lightroom since the first version came out many moons ago.  For most of that time, I have been actively keywording my photos.  It is a bit time consuming, but it does provide for good searchability and it also is useful when providing images to stock agencies.  My initial keywording was a little light, but I have got a pretty good level of information in there now.  The only problem is that I have to try and remember all of the different words I use for given types.  I almost always forget something when doing this.

The solution to this is using a hierarchy system for the keywords.  Lightroom allow you to have these hierarchies in the keywords such that, if you add one word, a whole sequence of other words will automatically be added.  For example, if you want to add AH-64, it would also add Apache, military, helicopter, Boeing etc.  This does require you to set up all of the words properly of course.  I took a halfhearted go at this many years ago and it didn’t work out well.  Recently, I decided to have another go.

This time, I wanted to do things in a more organized way.  However, editing the words and the hierarchy structures in Lightroom seemed a bit slow going.  Then I realized you can export and import keywords.  I exported the words I currently have and it created a text file.  Where I had tried creating hierarchies before, these were shown as tabbed indents from the words above them.  Therefore, I figured I just had to create a text file in the same structure and then import it.

I spent a fair bit of time creating the file.  Setting up the structure I wanted required a bit of thought and I had to change things a few times as I realized certain groupings would work more efficiently.  I also changed a couple of times to have the one word that was likely to be used as I keyworded be the top of the hierarchy.  For example, I am going to add 787-8 reliably but not Dreamliner.  Therefore, if I have 787-8 at the top and Dreamliner below, it will get added without me thinking about it.  The same for F-22 versus Raptor.

By taking a couple of weeks to create the list, I got it pretty well laid out.  I remembered to add stuff as I went that I had initially forgotten so the final list was pretty comprehensive.  I will have still missed out on some stuff but it didn’t have to be everything.  All of the existing keywords are still going to be there, and I can add more stuff later if it seems valuable.  Finally, I imported the file to Lightroom and boom, all of the new structures were there.  Next time I add a bunch of stuff, we shall see whether it makes a significant different to the process.

One thing to note, if you have the keyword box set to Enter Keywords, this hierarchy approach doesn’t work. Much frustration ensued when I first found this. However, some good guidance was provided and by changing to Will Export, things work as intended. No idea why that is necessary but, now I know, things are okay. I am also going to progressively clean up the old keywords to get rid of the non-hierarchy ones to ease entry even further.

My Copy of Lightroom Got Sick

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After a previous update to Lightroom (6.12), it became almost unusable.  Importing would take forever and, once the images were in, it would grind to a halt.  Keywording and editing became a nightmare.  I was struggling to work out what was wrong.  A check on performance showed the processor wasn’t busy but the RAM was maxed out.  I couldn’t understand why.  The first thing I do when Lightroom behaves strangely is to delete the Preferences file.  This file can get corrupted and mess with the performance badly.  Just delete it and restart and things are often fixed.  That didn’t work in this case.  When the new version of Lightroom was released, I hoped this would fix everything but sadly not.  (Meanwhile Photoshop itself is working just fine on this system.)

I had a long session with the Adobe tech support people which got me nowhere.  After telling me this was normal, they realized it was not when our screen sharing crapped out as a result of the machine slowing to a virtual standstill.  They tried a bunch of simple stuff and got no further than I had on my own.  They suggested a second session would be needed and then promptly sent me an email telling me that the issue had been successfully resolved.  Not sure how they concluded that.  Meanwhile, I wondered whether there was an issue with my Windows installation so decided to do a completely clean install.  This had some slight benefits but basically the problem still remained.

I have done a bunch of scanning of similar issues and I found out a technique the support team can use to tweak performance.  There is a config.lua file that can be created in the presets folder to influence the system.  I have added this file and it has certainly made a few things work better.  It has also slowed some things down as well which isn’t ideal.  This was not a solution though.  All it did was make the program slightly more usable.

Another session with Adobe ensued.  This time we got into the permissions for some of the folders that contained the catalogs.  Lots of time to reset these to give greater authority.  I was told this is sometimes an issue with large catalog files.  Lots of time later, I found that nothing had really changed.  The whole thing would still get bogged down very quickly.

Then I read about Lightroom 7.2.  This was a new update that was supposed to address a lot of performance issues.  It was supposed to make better use of multi-core processors as well as larger RAM configs.  I had seen a sequence of updates not improve things – my issues were clearly not the normal performance problems although I had previously experienced some of them too – but I was hoping that, if they had changed the architecture of the software, maybe whatever was causing my machine to have problems might have been tweaked/replaced.  If not, I was seriously considering the need to buy a new system since this was so horribly inefficient.

I waited for the release date to come around when I knew the update was on its way.  Then I got an update to the iPad version and it said the new version of Camera Raw was included.  This must mean it was close.  A day later, the update dropped.  I downloaded it immediately and opened up.  Hurrah!!!  Everything run fast, the RAM levels were moderate and stable, everything was happening as it should.  My system lives!  Let’s hope this isn’t a false dawn.