Image Processing Work Flow

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I was struck by how different the processing tools in Lightroom are from those of just a few years ago. This got me curious so I went back in my archive to 2017 and picked a photograph that I had process at that time only using Lightroom. I then, as you can see ran the same image through a 2024 version of Lightroom. As you can see with the added enhancements in Lightroom I can now create a better image in Lightroom with out having to resort to Photoshop.

The parameter I set for processing the 2024 version was to use only Lightroom’s basic adjustments, such as sky mask or auto-transform. Just for fun, I further processed the image in NIK, sticking to basic plug-in presets. In this process, I learned that a novice Lightroom user is likely to make significantly better photographs in Lightroom in 2024 than in 2017. I would also suggest that most expert photographs might also have the same outcome and better images.

The first image is out of the camera and processed using Lightroom in 2017.

This second image shows the image process using Lightroom 2024, which contains more tools than the older version. One key difference is the masking function that has been added to Lightroom, although in 2017, many tools that have since been added to Lightroom are also found in Photoshop.

The following image has been moved through several NIK applications and back into Lightroom.

A Second Image from the Same Day

Lightroom Adjustments

Then, it was processed in Photoshop layers with NIK Viveza

Then, adding a layer of Colour Efex Pro

Processing a Difficult Image

I was looking through my back archive of 2015 images and ran across the image below. I could see why I never bothered to process it; it was more of a scouting or sketching image than anything else. However, its lack of colour and tonal variation made me wonder what colours and dynamic range might lurk in the RAW file, even with this difficult image.

So, idle curiosity moved the image into Lightroom’s development module, and after some tweaking and masking, the following image was the result.

I then pushed the image through two of NIKs processing engines, Viveza and Colour Effects Pro, which resulted in the image below.

I also ran across an under-exposed image taken a little while later that day that I processed that day with the limited software options I had at that time.