Digital BW, The Print

On Apr 4, 2012, at 11:07 AM, remononaz1 wrote:

> I read and appreciated your article on Lr4. I have been using Lr4 since the beta came out though I had not used Lr earlier so I am not familiar with Lr3. I have the production release of Lr4 now. 

Thanks, glad I could add some perspective.
> 
> I agree with your observations that you can really wring out the lights and darks with the 2012 process but I have observed two situations where things come apart:
> 
> - I shot a number of seascapes in very hazy lighting. When I went to convert these to black and white I needed to significantly decrease the blue luminance to gain contrast. If you push this too far, you get a grainy effect, especially in clouds, that looks like streaking rain. I suspect this is due to the lack of red and green in the images. The cure is to back off a bit, though at the loss of contrast. 

Thats always been an issue; blues and noise� not sure we'll ever see an end to that...
> 
> - I also observed situations, in similar but not so blue images as noted above, where I got very grainy noise in the darks area of clouds, even though I was shooting low ISO. This 'noise' disappered when I went to 100% viewing but showed up in a print. It seems almost to be more of a display issue than an immage issue. I'm not sure exactly what is happening. 

If it shows up in print, its more than a display issue. But if its not there at 100% its a pretty subtle artifact. Sometimes there is need of more smoothing on that channel, which doesn't tend to hold much info anyways. Used to have to do that to every single sky, back in the early days...
> 
> Overall, though, a great product. 

Agreed. There have always been smaller, or standalone, RAW converters claiming they were better. Now that is probably moot, and we can feel comfortable using Lightroom for cataloging, processing, even printing� well, not the kind of printing popular on this list perhaps, but general color printing.

C. David Tobie
Global Product Technology Manager


Datacolor
5 Princess Road
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA
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www.datacolor.com

Phone: 207.685.9248
Mobile: 207.312.0448
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Email:  cdtobie@...
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