Month: July 2020

Today’s Question: I only use a laptop with my [Lightroom Classic] catalog on the laptop and my photos stored on an external hard drive. When I travel it would seem like I could use the same catalog and store my travel photos on my laptop and then transfer the photos via Lightroom [Classic] to the external hard drive when I return home. Does this make sense?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, if your Lightroom Classic catalog is on the internal hard drive of the laptop you’re traveling with, you can simply import photos captured during your travels into that catalog. You can then move the photos to their permanent storage location once you return home.

More Detail: Quite some time ago I abandoned my desktop computer, opting to use a laptop as my only computer. This was an easy decision to make, since I am typically traveling more than six months out of the year. (This year, of course, has turned into an exception.)

When you have your Lightroom Classic catalog available while traveling, you can of course make full use of that catalog when you are away from home. That enables you to, for example, browse your entire catalog of photos, even if the external hard drive containing your photos has been left back at home.

While traveling with your Lightroom Classic catalog, you can of course import new photos into the catalog. If you don’t have your external hard drive with you, then you can simply copy the photos onto the internal hard drive of your laptop when importing those photos into Lightroom Classic.

When you return home, you can connect the external hard drive to your laptop so you can transfer the photos captured during your travels to their permanent storage location. You could, for example, drag the entire folder containing the photos from your travels to the external hard drive in the Folders section of the left panel in the Library module in Lightroom Classic.

Today’s Question: Can you explain, briefly, what LUTs are, a word I’ve been seeing lately. What can they do for still photographers beyond the garden-variety sliders in Photoshop, say, or the use of plug-ins? And do LUTs exist for black-and-white as well as color?

Tim’s Quick Answer: A “LUT” is a Lookup Table, which is used in several contexts to adjust the appearance of a display, or a photo or video. LUTs have become popular for providing what is similar to a preset for altering the appearance of a photo.

More Detail: For photographers, the earliest reference they might have heard to a “LUT” would have been in the context of color management. When calibrating and profiling a computer monitor display, the software will update the LUT on the graphics card, which in turn alters the behavior of the display. In other words, the LUT in this context determines how color and luminance data from the computer actually appears on the monitor display.

More recently, “LUT” has become something of a buzzword in the world of photo optimization. In video production LUTs have long been used as a tool for editing the appearance of video. For example, video is often captured with a very neutral appearance. A LUT can then be applied in post-processing to adjust the overall tonality and color appearance of the video. This is often referred to as “color grading”.

This concept has been adapted by many photographers to alter the appearance of their photos. The use of a LUT in this context is similar in concept to applying a preset to a photo, altering the appearance of photos in a uniform way, to achieve a particular look. This has led to the availability of LUTs to be used for this purpose, including options for both color and black and white interpretations of a photo.

In Photoshop, for example, you can apply a LUT to an image by going to the menu and choosing Image > Adjustments > Color Lookup. In the Color Lookup dialog, you can then select (or load) a LUT you would like to apply to the current image.