Dramatic Landscapes: Lightroom vs. LightZone

Drama

One the hardest images to make is the dramatic landscape. We have all been there. Great vista, Great sky. Big white clouds, or clouds in a glowering dark mass, or wispy fog…it is often the sky that makes the shot. Who wants an amazing vista with a clear blue sky…nothing to look at in the top half of the image?

Invariably exposing for the vista, for good color and detail in the land and foreground, produces a totally washed out sky, and exposing for the sky produces a dark, dense, landscape. Even when exposure values for sky and land are fairly balanced…as they may be on a bright sunny day with big puffy white clouds, you know you going to lose the detail in the cloud highlights.

Traditionally, photographers have used polarizing filters to darken skies and preserve cloud detail, or even resorted to graduated neutral density filters to hold the exposure in the sky. (Graduated neutral density filters have a top that blocks up to one half of the incoming light. The filter becomes more transparent from top to bottom. In theory such a filter will balance the exposure between sky and foreground.)

Some digital photographers now routinely take three or more images of every dramatic vista with clouds and combine them in sophisticated HDR software (High Dynamic Range), or HDR Photoshop plugins, to create an image that is closer to what the eye sees in those amazing views (and, unfortunately, imho, sometimes to create totally overblown images that the human eye would never see).

Most HDR work is done in RAW (special, camera specific, file formats that preserve all the data the sensor captures). Many image editing programs now read raw data and can work with raw files…and, without doubt, the best HDR work is done using raw. There is simply more data there to work with.

However, most P&S cameras, even the sophisticated bridge cameras with superzooms, do not record in raw. Most of us will be working with jpeg files which have already been processed in camera and compressed. A lot of data is crunched down, and what is recorded in your flash memory is actually a rendering of the senor data into a smaller color and data space. The data is not lost, as some argue, since every bit of it goes into the final rendering, but there is no way to get from the jpeg back to the original data.

As it happens, though, two of the newer editing programs that are designed primarily to work with raw images, also work very well to expand the dynamic range of jpegs of those dramatic landscapes.

Lightroom, or more properly, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, is a basically a work-flow/cataloging program with the full editing set from Adobe Camera Raw built in (and a bit more). It uses a combination of presets and sliders to adjust an amazing array of image parameters. Better yet, the controls are, at least for me, relatively intuitive. Want to recapture detail in overexposed clouds? Slide the recovery slider to the right. Want to bring up the brightness of only the dark toned, but reflective, areas of the image (grass, flowers, trees, faces, etc)? Slide the fill light slider to the right. Want to darken just the blue of the sky (and, as a side effect, remove a bit of image haze in the distance)? Go down the the Hue/Luminance/Saturation sliders, which are broken out into discrete color bands, chose luminance and slide the blue slider to the left. Could not be easier.

Using Lightroom has changed the way I capture images. I can now leave the camera on Program and wide area (or matrix) metering 90% of the time and just concentrate on composition. I know that the resulting images will be slightly blown out in the sky (overexposed) especially if the sky is dramatic…but I also know that a few moments work in Lightroom will restore the sky to all its drama (or a reasonable approximation), without loosing any detail or color in the foreground. I know that if the foreground is a bit too dark because I got a little too much sky in the frame, I can use a bit of fill light to restore color and detail. It is, to say the least, liberating.

(To be fair, the Sony DSC H50 I am using has a built in HDR routine (two different levels in fact) that attempts to preserve as much highlight and shadow detail as possible when crunching the data down to jpeg…so I a starting with files that still contain a bit more detail than your average jpeg might. Your camera may have a similar feature.)

When I was working with my tiny Linux laptop, I discovered LightZone (which is one of the few sophisticated modern editing programs available for Linux). LightZone takes a slightly different approach to image editing than Lightroom. LightZone is all about tone mapping. Tone mapping is the final step in HDR work…the process of taking your full range image and mapping it down to fit the much smaller tonal range of a printer or computer screen.

It has always been an essential part of image processing…and, indeed, of image making. No one understood it better than Ansel Adams (google the name). He invented the Zone system, which was an attempt to map the full dynamic range of human perception down into the limited dynamic range of, first, black and white film, and then, black and white print paper. His prints are evidence of how well he managed that trick.

LightZone takes the zone concept a step further and, working mainly through a series of preprogramed routines (tools) and preset combinations of tools (styles, looks, ect.), gives the image maker almost complete control of how the data from the file (raw or jpeg) is mapped for display.

I have raved about how well LightZone is able to manipulate a jpeg to bring out detail and restore dynamic range, and about how easy it is to use, in a previous article.

I have, recently, gone back to a windows machine for my photo editing (I actually bought the Windows version of my tiny laptop with a bit larger screen). I made the move largely because I wanted to be able to run Lightroom (and iTunes…but that is another story).

Because of its many features beyond image processing, Lightroom is my software of choice. It is where my images are cataloged, and I do 99% of my image processing right there. However, I still like what LightZone can do with the especially dramatic landscapes.

So…this is a set of images processed in both Lightroom and LightZone. You will see subtle differences. I am wondering what you all think. Which are the better images? Which do you like better? Which would like to have created yourself?

Any and all comments are welcome.

For the full set of LightZone Scotland images. For the full set of Scotland images.