Ask Tim Grey

Today’s Question: Is it possible to paint a color on an image in Lightroom Classic? I had an image with strange looking color streaks and wanted to use the color picker to select another color to paint over the streaks with and couldn’t figure out how.

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can paint a color into an image using the Brush option in Masking within Lightroom Classic, using the Color option among the targeted adjustment options.

More Detail: Among the various adjustments available with the Masking feature in Lightroom Classic is the Color option, which I find is often overlooked by photographers. With this adjustment you can add a color overlay to areas of an image defined by a mask.

To get started, you could add a new mask for the Brush option, so that you’re able to paint the intended adjustment into the image. If this includes the desire to add a color to specific areas of the photo, you can click on the color swatch rectangle to the right of the Color label at the bottom of the Color section of the targeted adjustment options. This will bring up the color picker, where you can select a color. You also select a color from the image itself by clicking within the gradient on the color picker, keeping the mouse button down, and dragging to the area of the image where you want to sample the color before releasing the mouse button.

You can then paint over the applicable area of the image to paint with the selected color. After painting, you can click the color swatch again to bring up the color picker so you can refine the color. You may also find it necessary to adjust the overall tonality or fine-tune other adjustments to get the area to blend in better with the surrounding image. But painting a color into specific areas of an image can most certainly be part of that process.

Today’s Question: I know there was some convoluted (to me) process for resetting preferences in Photoshop to resolve problems, which maybe explains why I can’t remember how to do it. Can you remind me?

Tim’s Quick Answer: You can actually reset Preferences in Photoshop very easily by clicking the “Reset Preferences On Quit” button the General tab of the Preferences dialog, then quit and re-launch.

More Detail: Resetting the Preferences in Photoshop can often resolve issues where the application is behaving in an unusual way. In short, when Photoshop seems to be behaving in an odd manner, resetting Preferences will often provide a solution.

The original process for resetting Preferences could certainly be described as being perhaps a bit convoluted. It involved holding the Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys on Windows or the Command+Option+Shift keys on Macintosh while launching Photoshop. This method still works, but thankfully there is also a simple option available in the Preferences dialog.

Start by bringing up the Preferences dialog by choosing Edit > Preferences > General from the menu on Windows or Photoshop > Settings > General on Macintosh. Below the other options on the General tab you’ll find the “Reset Preferences On Quit” button. Click the OK button inn the confirmation dialog, then close the Preferences window by clicking OK. Quit Photoshop, and when you launch the Preferences will have been reset.

Keep in mind that while resetting Preferences in Photoshop can resolve a variety of issues, doing so also means that all settings in Preferences and Color Settings will be reset to the default options. You’ll therefore want to review both in detail so you can adjust the settings as needed based on your personal preferences.

Today’s Question: Do you recommend splitting photos managed by Lightroom Classic between two external hard drives? Or is it preferable to purchase a larger external drive?

Tim’s Quick Answer: In general, I would prefer to have all photos stored on a single hard drive. However, due to practical limitations that isn’t always the best solution, leading me to split my photos between two hard drives.

More Detail: I prefer (and generally recommend) a workflow that is as streamlined as possible. That means using only a single catalog for Lightroom Classic, and ideally storing all photos on a single hard drive. However, a single hard drive isn’t always the best solution.

For example, I prefer to use portable bus-powered hard drives for my data storage, in large part for convenience when it comes to traveling with my drives. However, that also means that my storage capacity options are limited. Most bus-powered external hard drives max out at around 4TB of storage capacity, any my photos take up closer to 8TB. The 8TB hard drives that are available are generally either not bus-powered, don’t have a form factor that meets my needs, or are at a price point that makes them far less appealing.

As a result, I’ve opted to store my photos across two hard drives, even though I’d prefer them to all be on the same hard drive.

In Lightroom Classic, the only issue with having photos stored on two drives is that you’ll have two hard drives (and therefore two sets of folders) listed in the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module. All other features behave normally. For example, you can add photos to collections regardless of which hard drive the source images happen to be stored on.

So, if it isn’t practical to use a single large hard drive to store all the photos you’re managing with Lightroom Classic, you can most certainly use more than one hard drive for that storage. I just recommend coming up with some logical way to define which photos are on which hard drive, so it will be easier to know where to start looking for a particular folder of photos, for example.

Today’s Question: In Bridge, if a stack of images is collapsed and dragged to another folder, only the top image moves, and the others are left behind. If the stack is not collapsed both images get moved, but in both cases, the stacking information is lost. What am I missing?

Tim’s Quick Answer: If the stack is collapsed in Adobe Bridge, you need to be sure to select the full stack and not just the top image. If the stack is expanded, you need to make sure to select all photos in the stack in order to retain the stack.

More Detail: Admittedly, I consider Adobe Bridge to be a little finicky when it comes to the behavior of stacks. This can be especially challenging when it comes to a stack that is expanded rather than collapsed.

If a stack is expanded and you select some (but not all) the photos in the stack, if you drag-and-drop the images to a different folder only the selected photos will be moved, and they will no longer be in a stack. To retain the stack, you need to select exactly the images in the stack, not just a portion of them.

For a stack that is collapsed the behavior is a little easier to manage, but there is a “trick”. When you collapse a stack the frame around the thumbnail will have two frames that overlap, resembling two images stacked atop one another. If you click on the thumbnail, only the upper frame will be selected, which actually means only the top image in the stack is selected. If you drag-and-drop the image, only that top image will be moved, leaving the other images behind.

If you instead click the lower frame, which only appears on the right and bottom sides of the thumbnail, you’ll select the entire stack. This will be indicated by both frames having a colored highlight to indicate both frames are selected, meaning all images in the stack are selected. If you drag-and-drop with the full stack selected in this way, all images in the stack will be moved and the stack will be retained.

Today’s Question: When I export images from my iPhone to my computer, if I export them as Unmodified Originals they come onto my computer as HEIC files at 1.7 MB. If I export as JPEGs they are 3.2 MB files, and if I export them as TIFFs they are 36.6 MB files. My inclination would be to export as TIFF and get the largest amount of data but I’m not sure where the data came from??

Tim’s Quick Answer: The differences in file size relate primarily to how the information is stored, not how much information was captured. In this context I recommend transferring the original capture format as the best starting point.

More Detail: The HEIC and JPEG capture formats are similar in concept, though different in the underlying technology and who created them. Both, however, enable image data to be stored at smaller sizes based on image compression technology. You can think of HEIC as being something of a more modern version of a JPEG image, providing higher quality overall.

If you save an HEIC file as a JPEG image, you can select a Quality setting that will affect file size, but in most cases the JPEG image will be smaller than the HEIC image. However, because this is achieved through stronger lossy compression, image quality will suffer to some extent.

If you save the image as a TIFF file, the file size will grow exponentially. This is because very different compression is applied with TIFF image, and in some cases no compression is used at all. Among other things, this generally means that every single pixel is described with a TIFF image, while with HEIC and JPEG images the pixel data can be described more efficiently.

While TIFF files have the potential to maintain better image quality, this isn’t necessarily worth the additional file size at least as a starting point for an image being transferred between devices. If you later decide you want to make full use of Photoshop to optimize an image, for example, you can always save as a TIFF or PSD (Photoshop document) file to preserve special features such as layers and masks.

Today’s Question: I am into star trails and wondered if there was a way to remove objects (stars/star trails) based on their intensity as I would like to remove the less intense/less bright objects and control to what extent.

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you could define a mask based on brightness values to select the specific areas you wanted to affect, and then either perform cleanup or apply an adjustment to tone down or remove those areas.

More Detail: While this technique can work very well for star trail photography, the same concept could apply to a variety of situations where you can identify specific areas of an image based on their tonal value relative to the rest of the image.

In this example you could define a mask based on a luminance range, such as in Camera Raw (including the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop) or Lightroom Classic. Select the Luminance Range (under the Range option) for the mask. Then define a range that will include only the tonal values between the bright star trails and the dark night sky.

Once you’ve defined that mask, you could use adjustments to help hide the affected areas, such as by using a tonal adjustment (including possibly a Tone Curve adjustment) to darken the areas based on the mask. This would effectively hide (or greatly diminish) the areas of the image that were competing with the star trails a bit, by being darker than the trails but brighter than the night sky.

Note that if you preferred to use an image-cleanup tool to remove these areas, you could similarly create a mask based on tonal range (for Midtones) using the Color Range selection tool. That could then be used as the basis for a mask on an image cleanup layer to protect the rest of the image.

Today’s Question: Is there any downside to going back to photos I edited a long time ago [in Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw], and updating them to the current [process] version for the purpose of, for example, reducing noise and possibly making a few “tweaks”?

Tim’s Quick Answer: The only real risk of changing the process version for a photo that had previously edited is that doing so can alter the appearance of the photo, in some cases rather significantly.

More Detail: The process version in Lightroom or Camera Raw can be thought of as representing the version of the set of adjustments that are available. That not only includes new features that get added over time, but also changes in the algorithms that determine the specific behavior of individual adjustments.

For example, in the first process version the basic tone adjustments included Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. In the current process version (version 6) those have been updated to Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks.

If you had made a series of modifications to the tonal adjustment settings for an image using process version 1, and then updated that image to the latest process version, there could be a rather strong change in the appearance of the image. You could certainly then refine the adjustment settings based on the updated process version, but this adds a degree of work and in some cases it may be difficult to get the image back to the look you wanted.

To help manage this issue, when you want to update an image to a new process version I recommend first creating a virtual copy. Then, on the assumption you’re more likely going to want to retain the final image with the newer process version, I recommend leaving the virtual copy as a reference image that reflects the original adjustments, and then updating the adjustments for the original image including the update to the latest process version.

By creating a virtual copy for this purpose, you’ll be able to easily compare the previous and current versions of the image, and also revert to the earlier version of the image should that become necessary.

Today’s Question: I have two folders that have some of the same photos in Lightroom Classic. Is there an easy way to identify the duplicates so I can remove them from one of the files?

Tim’s Quick Answer: In my view the only real option that can be trusted for identifying duplicates is to browse the full group of photos at the same time, sort by capture time (and possibly filter the images), and then review the images to confirm which are duplicates. You can then compare the duplicate images to identify which should be kept and which should be discarded.

More Detail: Unfortunately, there isn’t a reliable and automatic method for removing duplicates in this context. There are a couple of plug-ins that purport to do this, but they only mark suspected duplicates and don’t have good algorithms for figuring out which of the duplicates is the better version to keep, for example.

Therefore, I would suggest browsing both folders and reviewing the images manually.

Start by selecting one folder in the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module and then hold the Command key on Macintosh or the Ctrl key on Windows while clicking on the other folder. In the grid view make sure the sort order is set to Capture Time. This will provide a great starting point for identifying duplicates, because duplicate images will be next to each other, assuming the capture time hadn’t ever been modified for the images being reviewed.

Of course, just because the thumbnail is the same doesn’t mean you can be certain that one of the apparent duplicates needs to be deleted. For example, you might have an original raw capture as well as a virtual copy or perhaps a TIFF or PSD file that was created via Photoshop. However, you can review the file types in this context to get a sense of whether there is a duplicate that should be deleted.

If you have true duplicates, such as two raw captures that are obviously the same image in different folders, the next step is to decide if one should be prioritized over the other. For example, you can review whether one or the other was optimized in the Develop module or had specific metadata updates such as star ratings or keywords. If there is one clear “winner”, the other image can be deleted. If there have been updates to both, you may want to apply metadata updates across the two images to get one of them updated with the most (and most recent) info.

Ultimately this process can be a bit time-consuming, but in my view it is important to be sure you’re deleting the right duplicate to avoid losing metadata updates or other important changes. In the future, hopefully there will be more powerful tools for reliably determining which images can truly be deleted as duplicates in Lightroom Classic without as much effort.

Today’s Question: I was checking my settings in Catalog Settings for Lightroom Classic, and noticed the “Import Number” and “Photos Imported” fields both show a value of one, even though I’ve imported many photos many times. Do these fields serve some sort of purpose, and if so why do the numbers never change?

Tim’s Quick Answer: The fields in question relate to the option of being able to rename photos to include a number based on how many times you’ve imported photos, as well as a number based on the total number of photos imported. The options in Catalog Settings allow you to change the current number for each field if needed.

More Detail: Lightroom Classic includes a variety of options for defining a template to rename photos. It is worth noting, especially in the context of today’s question, that there are different options for renaming based on whether you access the Filename Template Editor from the Library module or the Import dialog.

In the import dialog if you choose Edit from the Template popup in the File Renaming section of the right panel, the Filename Template Editor dialog that appears will include a Numbering section where you will find popups for “Import #” and “Image #”. For each you can select an option between one and five digits, to allow for leading zeros that will help ensure proper sort order when sorting by filename.

If you use the “Import #” token in a template for renaming photos, each time you import a batch of photos into Lightroom Classic the number will increment by one. That, in turn, means the value you see for “Import Number” in the Catalog Settings dialog will increment to reflect the updated number.

The same concept applies for the “Image #” token for renaming photos, except that this option relates to the total number of images imported that included the “Image #” token as part of the template for renaming. Therefore, when you use this token to rename images, the value for “Photos Imported” in the Catalog Settings dialog will increment based on the total number of photos you’ve imported while renaming with the “Image #” token.

Of course, if you don’t use the “Import #” or “Image #” tokens for renaming photos upon import, then the values shown in the Catalog Settings dialog will remain at zero. That is the reason you’re seeing both fields with a value of one, because that is of course the starting value, and you’ve not used either token that would cause those values to increment.

Today’s Question: My catalog is nearing capacity on my 4TB external drive, and I want to split it between two drives. Do I plug in the new (empty) drive, let Lightroom Classic discover it, then just drag and drop folders onto it? This frightens me a bit.

Tim’s Quick Answer: In this scenario I recommend first creating a new top-level folder on the new hard drive from within Lightroom Classic. At that point the new folder would be visible within Lightroom Classic, and you would be able to drag folders from the existing drive to the new folder on the new drive.

More Detail: The most important thing to keep in mind for this task is that all the work should be done within Lightroom Classic. If you attempt to move folders and photos from one drive to another outside Lightroom Classic, the folders and photos will appear as missing within your catalog, and you’ll have a bit of a mess on your hands.

I should also hasten to add that before performing any of this work I recommend updating your backup of all photos. Hopefully that goes without saying since I tend to write a lot about backing up photos!

After connecting the new hard drive to the computer, you can click the plus icon (+) to the right of the Folders heading and choose “Add Folder” from the popup menu. Navigate to the new hard drive, then click the “New Folder” button. Create a new top-level folder with a meaningful name, such as “Photos”. When you click the Choose button the new hard drive and the new folder will appear within the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module.

You can then drag-and-drop individual folders from the original hard drive to the new folder on the new hard drive. Note that it is possible to select multiple folders at a time from the old drive and drag them all at once to the new location. However, if you’re going to do so I recommend dragging in relatively small batches. Otherwise, if an error occurs it can be more challenging to get things back on track.

I also recommend creating some form of logic or strategy for choosing which folders and photos will be on the new drive versus the original drive. Doing so can make it easier to keep track of where specific photos belong and can therefore be found between the two drives. This can be especially helpful if you might tend to have just one of the two hard drive connected in certain situations. You could divide photos based on older versus newer images, higher versus lower priority, or some other criteria that makes sense for you.