Having just got Lightroom 4 I was looking for easy files to Geotag by dragging them to the new Map Module. I had forgotten I had taken these at Severn Beach in 2008.
Taken with a 35mm lens at f8 focusing on the foreground the background is still nicely soft. The sense depth in the picture is increased by the dynamic diagonal leading lines to the factory chimneys in the background. The picture was taken on a 400D at 100 ISO unfortunately this was not at all noise free. To combat this I balanced noise removal with adding of Lightroom Grain.
I have included the original unprocessed raw file (left) to demonstrate my starting files are no any different to anybody elses. Raw files from any camera are always less constrasty than Jpegs. A raw file is like an undeveloped film it can be processed in any number of different ways. A Jpeg file is processed and compressed in the camera. The black and white picture posted here was entirely processed in Lr4 without Photoshop or Silver Efex Pro 2 as trial to see what it could achieve.
Lr4 in the Develop Module is a completely different and more controllable animal to Lr3. It’s so unfortunate that it is so slow and clunky.
A big hello to all the new followers of my little blog, why not leave a comment?
(c) Andy Beel FRPS 2012
Andy Beel FRPS 
This is a really cool photo
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Hi Thank you you are so kind. Andy
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Those steps glisten with contrast, almost. A tremendous example of processing, Andy.
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Hi Andy thanks. Yes the highlights in the steps do glisten they should be around 96% brightness. Andy
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What a difference from start to finish. I really like the end product. Nice job, Andy!
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Hi Danita thanks for the comment. I think it helps to show where I started occassionally and not just the end result. Hopefully it shows what can be done with ordinary lighting conditions. Often less contrast at the taking stage is best. Andy
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Great Andy, but RAW files are more versatilie than JPEG´s don´t you think?
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Hi Adrian “A raw file is like an undeveloped film, it can be processed in any number of different ways”. A raw file is therefore vastly more versatile than a Jpeg file. Thanks for asking the question. Andy
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Hi Andy, goodness, I didn’t realise you could do that with software. My word. Lovely work Sir. Clearly I don’t know enough yet …
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Hi Jack Thanks for appreciation all artists fed on the oxygen of praise. Lr4 is certainly much more controllable than Lr3 in terms of bending and pushing tones to where I want them. Regards Andy
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Thanks for sharing the before and after shots again Andy. Its always strangely comforting to know that the starting image is not dissimilar to what I capture. Your post processing work is outstanding and something to aspire too. I’ve used Aperture for all my post work but have been considering Lightroom over the past few months. Speed is important to me so it’s nice to hear snippets of your experience with LR4. I’m hoping that Apple is working madley on a significant update to Aperture.
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Hi Distan I downloaded the 723mb of Lr4.1 today perhaps its my perception but I did not feel it was always catching up with mouse. Thanks for the appreciation. Regards Andy
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I find LR4 a huge improvement over LR3, especially for tonal control in the basic module of Develop. I haven’t found it slow though I do have a pretty well spec’d PC. If appropriate, perhaps you might be in line for an increase in RAM, which has become much cheaper. 18 months ago, my new PC had 12GB RAM which cost $A450 = £280. I’d always suspected problems with that memory but couldn’t isolate the problem and I replaced it about a month ago when I realised I could get 24GB for $A200 or £125.
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Hi Murray thanks for your comments here here to the improvements.I expect you have just downloaded Lr4.1 to me it was not quite slow frustrating? Regards Andy
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Hi Andy.
I’ve downloaded LR4.1 and haven’t noticed any problems with slowness. In fact it seems to have cured the one place I noticed that LR4 had been a bit slow in taking a second or two to switch between Library and Develop.
The difference could be in the spec of our PCs (I have 3.5GHz i7 CPU, 24GB RAM, RAID-5 for data drives, SSD for C Drive, two video cards) but then I don’t recall LR4 Beta being slow on my laptop in Japan.
It could be in LR preferences and settings: I have my camera raw cache on my SSD C drive, maximum size 1GB (probably just the LR default in both cases); I have [Automatically write changes to XMP] turned off; I also have standard preview size = 2048 pixels, preview quality = high and automatically discard 1:1 previews = never.
I hope something there might be useful,
Regards, Murray
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HI Murray Thanks for the comments. MY PC currently has 8Gb of RAM so if the speed of Lr4 remains a problem I might increase it to 16Gb. Thanks Andy
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Tis a cool shot, like what you did with it. Reminds me I need to try and use that module a bit more.
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Hi Aaron thanks for the kind comments. Its a case of keeping on keeping on until you get the result you are after. Andy
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