3-pm – nearly home from school. IR capture converted Fujifilm X-H1 with an 830nM Filter
In this Post
- Lightroom New Color Grading Tool
- New Scrubby Zoom Tool
- The new Box Zoom
- Performance Improvements
- Tethered View-view shooting for Canon
- Support for new cameras and lenses
- New control in naming upgraded catalogs
New Lightroom version 10 Tools
Here is my take on the latest Lightroom update (October 2020).
Lightroom New Color Grading Tool
I was quite happy with the old Split-toning tool to introduce two colours. Additionally, If and when I wanted to do a Tri-tone print (three added colours) I used the Red, Green and Blue Tone Curves in Lightroom. However, this technique required background knowledge and was a good way to easily ruin a picture for the uninitiated.
Therefore, I was interested to see the new Color Grading Tool as it can add tone to the shadows, mid-tones and highlights. The key to success is where each of the three-tone is placed on a scale of brightness. This feature is controlled by the Balance Slider.
This new offering does have the ability to select a band of tones to say with brightness in the range of 80-100% like using the Photoshop Color Range tool. By moving the Blending slider to the left no added tone is placed in the mid-tones.
I created a 5% step wedge in Photoshop to understand where the three added tones would be placed. Moreover, a step wedge was used so the findings would be measurable in terms of percentage brightness. Then, back in Lightroom, the three colours were added to the Tiff file. Nevertheless, this is subjective as the location of the red highlight tone will change if I alter the brightness globally or locally.
What the new Color Grading adjustment sliders do
Hue – Changes the colour
Saturation – adjusts the saturation or depth of colour
Luminance – varies the brightness of the added tone
Blending – defines the overlap of added tones in the highlights and shadows
Balance – controls where the added tone will be placed
- Values greater than 0 means more new tone in the highlights
- Values greater less than 0 means more new tone in the shadows
Tree starting to grow – warm tone in the highlights, cool tone in the shadows, Blending = 0 Balance = +12.
Here are a few comments about the other new controls
New Scrubby Zoom Tool
Hold down the Shift key and move the mouse left and right to zoom in and out. You may find this addition useful.
The new Box Zoom
Hold down the Control / Command key and draw around an area to be magnified to 100%. Click on the picture to return to the fit view. However, this a marginally quicker way than zooming to and from 100% magnification with the Spacebar.
Performance Improvements
With this update, I must admit not to recognising any performance improvements.
Tethered View shooting for Canon
I do not need to use or have the experience to comment on this.
Support for new cameras and lenses
I note Viltrox and pinhole lenses are still not supported!
New control in naming upgraded catalogs
When you launch Lightroom Classic 10 for the first time, you will get the Lightroom Classic Catalog Upgrade dialogue box to upgrade your existing catalogs. The upgraded catalog will be a new copy of your existing catalog. You can also control the name of your catalog in the dialogue box. However, by default, the catalog will be named as <currentCatalogName>-v10.
When I upgraded to the latest version, I did not take the opportunity to rename my catalog. But even so, from the Adobe text above it is not 100% clear about how and when catalog’s can be renamed. My uninformed guess is that if you want to rename a catalog it will be a copy of the existing one only. As a consequence, the last thing you want is to try to rename a catalog badly that the application does not then recognise and therefore your pictures have disappeared from Lightroom! Although should you so desire, you can create a new catalog from the File Menu.
If you have a reason to rename a catalog, for more information, check out Upgrade a catalog from an earlier version of Lightroom Classic.
Whether some of us, me included, will remember to use these new updates where appropriate is debatable as our practice has been stable for years or even decades.
