Expanded Access: Organizing and modifying stills and video is easier with the right tools.

By Oliver Peters

Video editors and producers frequently deal with photos. This is especially true of documentaries, where much of the story consists of still images, requiring a large collection of possible shots to be organized and prepared for the edit. This task often involves color correction, painting out blemishes and scaling/cropping to match the video frame size.

Adobe Photoshop is usually the “go to” application for such tasks. While Photoshop is a great tool, it is oriented around design and isn’t ideal for managing and modifying a large catalogue of still photos. Adobe Lightroom 3, part of the Photoshop software family, is a better option to organize, manipulate and export still image collections. Among the new Lightroom 3 features is added support for video-enabled DSLRs. As with other Adobe applications, Lightroom 3 is 64-bit and supports both Mac and Windows.

If you are new to Lightroom, than the dark, tabbed interface might seem a bit foreign compared with Photoshop or After Effects. In fact, the layout is designed with a logical left-to-right flow — from file ingest to media output. The user interface is divided into five basic sections, accessed via tabs in the upper right. These are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.

Adobe Lightroom 3 is first and foremost an asset management tool for still images. You may use the application to manage the original images or organize them yourself at the finder level and import folders and files into the Library. There, you see your catalog of assets, which are displayed in several ways: grid, single image and others. Locations are tabbed down the left side of the main monitor, the selected image in the middle and its metadata on the right. If you have two displays, then the selected image will also be displayed full-screen on the left (secondary) monitor.

When you import folders or images into the Library, you have the option to Copy as DNG (Adobe’s standardized RAW format), Copy, Move or Add. Copy duplicates your images and leaves the originals alone. Move changes the file location of the originals. Add simply creates reference images in the Library that are linked to the master files in their original location.

Develop is where you adjust, correct or alter an image. Select a shot from the filmstrip below and it loads into the center pane of the main monitor at one of various proxy sizes. If you need to do a lot of “clean up”, then you’ll spend plenty of time here. The more corrections and effects you apply to large images, the more you see the advantage of 64-bit performance, especially as your Library grows. Develop works with high-res proxy files that link back to the master photos. Any alteration is non-destructive and only applied (“baked in”) to a new, exported version of the file. Adobe includes an advanced copy-and-paste routine to easily apply one image’s alterations onto other photos.

Develop already had a healthy set of tools to scale, crop, paint and color-correct images, but many of these underlying algorithms were updated in Lightroom 3. In fact, if you upgrade from an earlier version with an existing image library, the software asks whether you want to update any of the older image previews. Doing so will alter the appearance of some of your images – generally for the better. New features include lens correction for minor chromatic aberration errors and geometric distortion, improved noise reduction, film grain simulation and perspective correction.

The remaining modules are designed for output in a variety of target media types. Slideshow controls playback of a selected set of images on your desktop in a presentation format. A new Slideshow feature is the ability to add a music soundtrack and export the complete show as an MP4 movie file. Print controls layouts for printing. Web does the same for web collections, which can be previewed in a web browser. There’s an integrated Flickr uploader and additional services such as SmugMug and Facebook can be added through Adobe’s Lightroom Exchange website.

Adobe added support for DSLR video, but don’t view this as a replacement for an editor like Premiere Pro CS5. Lightroom 3 primarily acts as an organizing tool for these movie files. You can bring in DSLR video through the Library module and use it to copy, move, identify and export clips. A small thumbnail and/or a single, full-screen frame are displayed for quick identification of each file, but Lightroom 3 launches QuickTime Player to preview the movies. Unfortunately, you can’t color-correct or otherwise alter the video itself.

This current level of video support might be of interest to amateurs and photographers, but video professionals will likely gravitate to other tools. In fact, if you own Adobe Production Premium CS5, then Adobe Bridge was automatically installed. Bridge is designed for asset management, too, and video support is better integrated — including a built-in player. The good news is that both Bridge and Lightroom 3 let you add metadata and ratings to video clips, which become useful ways to organize footage.

The Lightroom 3 tools are some of the best for fixing still photos or giving a “look” to images. It’s an essential application for professional photographers, but the video producer is going to be most interested in how this makes life easier. That’s found in three areas: cropping, metadata and export. Develop includes a cropping tool, which can be restricted to certain ratios. If you want an image to fit neatly into the 16x9 of HD or 4x3 of SD, then set the constraints and the crop will maintain this ratio. The same tool also allows freeform rotation — handy if you need to level the horizon or correct for a badly angled tripod.

Photo organization is achieved through Smart Collections. Images can be tagged with additional metadata, such as key words and/or ratings. Any images with the appropriate tag will automatically be filtered and pop up in the appropriate Smart Collection folder. A producer culling 100 selected options from 1,000 possible images can easily tag the desired shots and automatically create a Smart Collection of the selects.

Once the images have been selected, simply export one or a range of images from the Library or Develop modules to use in your NLE. There’s an export dialogue to create or select presets for target export location, file format, size and color profile. You may also rename the exported file. Exporting a batch of JPEGs — resized to 1920x1080 and labeled by project name and sequential number — is a simple one-step process. When the images are exported, any color correction, stylistic effects and cropping will be applied to these new files, reducing the work required in the editing application. Once you get used to using a tool like Adobe Lightroom 3, you’ll be amazed how quickly you can organize and process a mountain of still images.

Adobe Lightroom 3

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