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Another Image Rescued by Lightroom 4

Here's another image from early 2011 which never quite grabbed me until I went back to the folder yesterday and applied some quick Lightroom 4 settings to it.  

I can't wait to bring more folders into Lightroom 4, but it's bogging down pretty badly on my new Windows laptop running Windows 8.  I may have to downgrade to Windows 7 or build a desktop with far more than the current 8GB RAM (unfortunately the laptop came maxed out in RAM and can't expand).

Edits: For something interesting, take a look at this time-lapse video capturing about an hour of the exact same sunset event from a different angle: https://vimeo.com/18626912 and stop it right when it first reaches 17 seconds.  There are actually 30 photos used to make every second of video so you'll probably stop on a different one, but I think I happened to find the same moment and splash… blue sky, orange sun and sunlight, blue sky light illuminating waves and white foam in the shade.  What I find really interesting is that like in the image above, the splash has a mixture of direct faint orange light from the last bit of the sun, and the blue light from the sky, and the result is a more pink-magenta shade of orange.

This is a fairly unique case where nearly all of the sun's evolving influence is shooting through the narrow cave.  A previous splash I caught just two photos earlier is much more orange.  It's amazing how lighting from all different directions can affect parts of an image, and for how short I time some of these effects can be!

Here's a quick "before vs. after" edit comparison as well:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2013/01/13/pfeiffer-beach-sunset/
Digital cameras are simply too primitive to produce reasonable results in difficult lighting situations… good thing we have post-processing software to restore realism!

Here’s a bigger copy, and print purchase option: http://jeffsullivan.smugmug.com/Landscapes/California-Coast/i-PLnNxFD/0/XL/_MG_3635-XL.jpg

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116 thoughts on “Another Image Rescued by Lightroom 4”

  15. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    Depends how many Chrome tabs one has open +Steve Johnson.  Believe me, 8GB can become completely insufficient in a hurry.  I have windows all over Chrome which hang up and give me "Shockwave flash has crashed" messages.

    I also filled my 1TB drive in a hurry, since I was trying to back up an external disk after Windows 7 killed its duplicate (an overheating processor can hang a Windows laptop and leave the disk drive in a corrupted state, and very frequently I cannot get an external disk to disconnect from Windows gracefully at all, so I have to sleep or hibernate it to disconnect the disk in a non-corrupted state.  The problem is, Windows apparently doesn't bother to check that when you re-boot you have the same disk attached; it simply writes the old folder directory over the folder directory on the new disk drive, rendering it completely useless!  I found all of this out the hard way (I have about 3 TB of folders across 2 external disk drives which I can 't afford to send off to a disk recovery service at the moment).

    Then Windows 8 lost 73GB of space when I deleted some of the folders and emptied the Trash Can and the space was never returned.  Ironically that sort of major bug was why I had to upgrade from my two prior Windows laptops… the 500GB disk on each had been reduced too far as several successive versions of Windows misplaced the space.

  20. Eugene Madatov
    Reply

    I would suggest downgrading to W7 and setup a true backup using Acronis TrueImage software or an equivalent. When windows refuses to disconnect  a drive something (Lightroom?) holds a handle to a file on the disk – try to close all apps. Also it depends on how you USB drive is configured for "Fast disconnect" or "Performance". When it's configured for performance Windows uses cached writes which means that even if it finished writes visually it still performs them at the background. So when you force it to sleep or hibernate it leaves the drive in corrupted state. You can however use Windows checkdisk to recover almost in every situation.

  22. Sola Veritate
    Reply

    I like the picture but I have this conflict in me concerning reality and edited pictures. Both are cool but I tend to lean towards reality unless the editing is the main feature of the photo.
    I guess I'm minimalist/traditionalist (or something).

  28. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    I agree +Sola Veritate.  So what to you seems edited or unreal in this image?

    The concept of white balance for example exists only in our brains… white illuminated by blue sky is actually blue, but our brains try to correct out the actual color and assign white to the brightest part of the scene we're in.  You can overcome your belief that white is white simply by paying attention and noticing.  I'm looking at snow outside right now, and and in the shade where it's lit only by the blue sky above (as the white foam in the foreground here is), it's clearly blue.  

    So one of the main questions a photographer must deal with is, do we edit to reality (white as blue in the shade), or do we edit to human perception, where most people would believe that blue is white, even when we can clearly see the actual color if we simply pay closer attention?

    It's actually even more complicated than that, since the way an eye exposes a scene is nothing at all like how our eyes measure a scene and our brains assemble the resulting perceived one.

  34. Tomasz Stypich
    Reply

    +Jeff Sullivan I have Win8 with Lightroom 4 and about 8000 photos. It is super fast and never bogs down, but the reason for this is that the drive that holds the operating system, Lightroom and Lightroom catalog is a very fast SSD drive. Photos themselves are on another, mechanical drive. So, to make long story short, I think that really fast SSD drive would help you out with performance issues.

  49. Gregory Chin
    Reply

    Too bad it cost so much money for these type of software which have the features required to turn images that you thought you lost to photos like these.  They should stop price gouging and maybe more people would get into photography.

  57. Gregory Chin
    Reply

    Only bad thing though about the way one would have to shoot to be able to save their photos is to shoot in raw.  Its the vast size of the image and takes up memory cards like air fills a room.  I need to carry around 3 or 4 memory cards for my camera when i'm on vacation or shooting many photos due to the file size.

  68. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    +Alan Ferrell Why won't doctors and dentists give me free services, and my local grocery store give me free food, and why won't the gas station give me free gas, and why can't I get my vehicle fixed and maintained for free?  These images cost me tens of thousands of dollars each year to take… giving photos away for free, contributing towards driving the value of a photo down to zero, would have prevented these images from ever being taken at all.

  75. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    +Gregory Chin Price is one of the things I really like about Lightroom… It started at $299 in the early versions, then dropped to $149, I bought it on sale for $99, but around the holidays it went on sale for $79.99 (search for one-day sales on MLK Day, a week from Monday).  I suspect what is happening is that Adobe is finding that their market is bigger the lower they drop it, so paradoxically their revenue goes up with each drop in price (like the music industry found when they started selling $0.99 MP3 downloads instead of whole CDs).  Compare Lightroom's common sale prices to $600 for Photoshop, and it's a steal.

    Often you can use Lightroom quite a bit before buying the license.  Not only can you download a 30 day free trial, but Adobe Labs often offers "Release Candidate" versions which are work for several months.  Of course then you might start to depend on it, get hooked and ultimately buy it, but at least you'll know the full value of it by then and you'll be getting something you're fully up to speed and productive on.

  79. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    I definitely buy bigger memory cards now +Gregory Chin.  I carry at least three 32GB cards and a couple of 16GB cards, and I can easily fill that space in a couple of days (especially if I shoot a timelapse sequence or two).  This photo was taken at Pfeiffer Beach.

  80. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    My last few Lightroom catalogs didn't start slowing down significantly until about 150,000 images.  I'm up to 109,000 on this one already +Paul Smith-Keitley since I'm shooting more timelapse.  I should start a new Lightroom catalog for the timelapses so the volume of their images doesn't bog down the rest.  
    I'll definitely get an SSD if I build a desktop +Tomasz Stypich and +Michael Cohen.  Then I'll have to figure out how to keep two copies of the Lightroom catalog in sync…

  81. Sola Veritate
    Reply

    +Jeff Sullivan yeah I agree. But I guess it's not so much a discussion about white balance and colour, those are as much about preference of viewing as taking a shot.

    I guess I think of a good picture as its composition & content more than its perfection.
    I'm a starting photographer with very little equipment and I think I intend to keep it this way to hone my skills.

    Some of the best photography I've seen came from the meekest of equipment.

  84. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    For something interesting +Sola Veritate, take a look at this time-lapse video capturing about an hour of the exact same sunset event from a different angle: https://vimeo.com/18626912 and stop it right when it first reaches 17 seconds.  There are actually 30 photos used to make every second of video so you'll probably stop on a different one, but I think I happened to find the same moment and splash… blue sky, orange sun and sunlight, blue light on the shared waves and white foam.  What I find really interesting is that like in the image above, the splash has a mixture of direct faint orange light from the last bit of the sun, and the blue light form the sky, and the result is a more pink-magenta shade of orange.  It's amazing how lighting from all different directions can affect parts of an image, and for how short i time some of these effects can be!  This is a fairly unique case where nearly all of the sun's evolving influence is shooting through the narrow cave.  A previous splash I caught just two photos earlier is much more orange.

    Welcome to photography, I hope you have lot of success with it.  If your camera will support it, capture your photos in RAW format.  You'll have much more ability to adjust them, now and for many years in the future, if you do that.  Keep in mind that a camera assumes that everything should look average out to middle gray, so don't accept "straight out of camera" results… try to tell the camera when to properly record the scene as lighter or darker, and use post-processing software to restore the camera's interpretation to what you recall from the moment (or whatever you want it to be in an artistic sense).

  94. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    With all due respect +tom kimsal, I disagree, the edited result is far more realistic than the straight out of camera result, as shown in this comparison: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2013/01/13/pfeiffer-beach-sunset/
    The time-lapse shows the same moment too, just as the last bit of the sun sinks below the horizon, about 17 seconds into the video.

    The original moment made my jaw drop (and I see a LOT of amazing sunsets).  If the result doesn't convey some healthy portion of that experience, the photographer has failed.

    Digital cameras may have their place, but under many lighting situations their output is just not real until it's adjusted.

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