Author: Tim Grey

Today’s Question: When I import images from my iPhone 12 Pro Max into Lightroom Classic, each image is accompanied by a 2-second video of itself. I wonder why that is happening and how to stop it. When I look at images on the phone, the videos are not there (or at least not obvious).

Tim’s Quick Answer: The photos with short accompanying videos are from the “Live Photo” feature on the iPhone. You can disable that within the Camera app on your iPhone for future captures.

More Detail: The iPhone Camera app includes a feature called Live Photo that is something of a cross between a photo and a video. It is like a 3-second video, but not exactly the same in terms of the number of frames and the quality of the frames beyond the primary capture.

Live Photo captures can’t be shared with the animation intact with all forms of sharing. However, if you swipe back and forth between Live Photo captures in the Photos app on your iPhone you’ll notice the movement of the subject of the photo briefly.

The animation effect of Live Photo captures can be used for various creative effects, including a looping playback and a long exposure effect. However, they aren’t easy to share with this type of effect intact outside the Apple Photos ecosystem.

Personally, I prefer to capture normal photos or video clips, not Live Photos. One of the reasons Live Photos tend to create confusion is that it is easy to accidentally enable the feature. You can turn it off (or on) by tapping the icon that has several concentric circles, almost looking like a target. The location will vary depending on your phone and operating system version, but you will likely see it at the top-right of the screen in the Camera app.

When you turn off the Live Photo feature there will be a slash through the icon for the Live Photo button. That will ensure you’re only capturing normal photos (or videos) rather than Live Photos. That, in turn, will mean that you no longer have an extra video file accompanying your still photo captures.

Note that you can filter your photos in Lightroom Classic to show only videos by clicking the “Videos” button associated with the Kind control on the Attributes tab of the Library Filter bar at the top of the grid view display in the Library module. That can make it easier to locate the videos that came along with your Live Photo captures. Just be sure that you’re only deleting videos from Live Photos, not videos you intentionally captured as videos.

Today’s Question: I do HDR [high dynamic range imaging] by the old method of collecting three exposures in Raw, then using Photoshop or Aurora HDR to combine them. However, I have a Canon D6 [https://bhpho.to/3JTaax7] that can do it in-camera, but then I have to use JPEG. From the standpoint of image quality, is it better to keep doing the HDR by the old method, or accept the loses of the in-camera method? I sometimes make enlargements up to 17×22”, but mostly the maximum is 13×19”.

Tim’s Quick Answer: I strongly recommend not using in-camera HDR unless you are using a camera that retains the original raw captures when you create an HDR image. With your camera I recommend continuing to capture bracketed exposures to assemble into an HDR result later.

More Detail: When you are photographing a scene with a great range of tonal values than your camera can record in a single photograph, you can capture bracketed exposures and assemble those into a final HDR image that retains maximum detail.

Some cameras provide an in-camera HDR option. This can be convenient, but it can also be problematic for a variety of reasons.

If your camera enables you to capture an in-camera HDR but also retain the bracketed raw captures used to assemble the HDR image, using this option can be helpful in terms of previewing the effect on the camera while still being able to maximize quality by assembling the bracketed raw captures into the final HDR image.

However, many cameras with in-camera HDR will not retain the original raw captures. If the camera doesn’t do a good job creating the HDR image, you don’t have a way to create your own HDR image later. In my experience, by the way, HDR software (such as Aurora HDR, https://timgrey.me/aurora) does a significantly better job assembling an HDR image that any camera I’ve ever tested.

For cameras that don’t retain the raw captures and that create a JPEG image for the HDR, the situation is even worse. A JPEG image will only feature a bit depth of 8-bits per channel, rather than the potential of 16-bits per channel for a TIFF image, for example. There is a very high likelihood that you will need to apply adjustments to the HDR capture, and often those adjustments will need to be quite strong. This can lead to a significant degradation in image quality for the JPEG HDR capture.

Therefore, I highly recommend using software after the capture to create your HDR images, capturing bracketed raw captures as the source of that HDR image. While this creates some additional work compared to being able to capture an HDR image in-camera, this approach will ensure much better HDR images. As a result, I most certainly would not call this an “old method”, as it is still the best method in my view.

Today’s Question: I have a question regarding the filters in Lightroom Classic. Although the filters appear to allow searching for text, it does not seem to search for text in the keyword field. To search in keywords, I have to do that under Keyword List. Is this correct or am I not searching correctly using filters?

Tim’s Quick Answer: You can indeed search specifically for keywords using the Text tab of the Library Filter bar in the grid view. Simply set the first popup on the Text tab to “Keywords” to get started with your search.

More Detail: Lightroom Classic provides a variety of options for searching for photos that contain specific keywords. You can, for example, click the right-pointing arrow that appears to the right of a keyword on the Keyword List on the right panel in the Library module when you hover your mouse over the keyword.

You can also use the Library Filter bar to search by keyword with a little more flexibility. In the Library module switch to the grid view display by pressing the letter “G” on the keyboard. If the Library Filter bar is not displayed above the grid view, press the backslash key (\) to reveal it. Then choose the Text tab.

On the Text tab click the first popup and choose “Keywords”. From the second popup you can choose how you want to search, such as “Contain All” if you want to search for photos that contain all the keywords that you type separated by commas. You could also use “Start With” or “End With” if you want to search based on a partial word, for example.

After selecting the preferred options from the two popups you can enter the keyword (or words) you want to search for. If you want to search based on multiple keywords simply separate each keyword with a comma.

Note, by the way, that for any photographers using the cloud-based version of Lightroom, the keyword search is not as discoverable as it is in Lightroom Classic. However, you can search specifically for keywords in the search field by preceding your keyword with “keyword:”, such as by entering “keyword: New York City”.

Today’s Question: I have many pictures in my Lightroom Classic catalog. It is nice to have access to them [in a single catalog], but every time I make a change I have a 2GB+ file to back up online, and I feel as if my catalog never gets backed up as I use Lightroom Classic almost daily. Thoughts on tradeoffs?

Tim’s Quick Answer: With most online backup providers there are measures in place to ensure that big files, such as your Lightroom Classic catalog, are managed in a way that ensures the files will indeed get backed up.

More Detail: I use and recommend Backblaze (https://timgrey.me/cloudbackup) for an online backup to supplement creating local backups of your photos and other important files. When it comes to large files, there are a few things that help ensure the files will indeed get backed up even if they are changed.

First, Backblaze uses versioning of large files that are being backed up, so they will only be updated once every 48 hours. Therefore, even if you update your Lightroom Classic catalog many times throughout the day, all of those changes don’t need to be backed up every time.

In addition, for files over 100MB in size Backblaze uses a workflow where the file is divided into smaller pieces, with each piece of the file uploaded individually. Depending on the specifics of how the file was updated, this can create a situation where only a small number of those pieces need to be uploaded to correctly assemble the full file. In other words, just because a large file is updated doesn’t mean Backblaze necessarily needs to re-upload the entire file.

It is worth considering, by the way, that while a 2GB file certainly counts as a very large file, it won’t necessarily require a tremendous amount of time to upload.

Many internet providers offer upload speeds of around 20 Mbps (megabits per second), with some offering much faster upload speeds. If you were able to make use of a full 20 Mbps upload speed, a 2GB file would only require about fifteen minutes to upload.

More realistically, in part because the online backup service will only receive data at a certain rate based on bandwidth limitations, you can probably expect upload speeds of around 5 Mbps. But even at that slower speed, the full 2GB catalog file would only take about one hour to upload.

You could certainly exclude files such as your Lightroom Classic catalog from the online backup, and then use a manual approach to periodically copy your catalog to a cloud-based storage provider. However, based on all the factors I’ve outlined above, I think it makes sense to include important large files in your online backup, including the Lightroom Classic catalog.

You can learn more about Backblaze online backup services here:

https://timgrey.me/cloudbackup

Today’s Question: I have a photo that is brighter on top than bottom. How would one fix that in Photoshop?

Tim’s Quick Answer: This type of correction calls for a targeted adjustment using an adjustment layer for the tonal adjustment (such as Levels or Curves) combined with a layer mask with a white-to-black gradient so that the adjustment itself will transition across the image.

More Detail: The concept involved with this type of correction is relatively simple, but the implementation can sometimes be tricky.

Basically, you want to apply an adjustment using an adjustment layer with a layer mask that is a gradient. You could start by adding an adjustment layer, such as using Levels in this case to apply a tonal adjustment. So, click on the Add Adjustment Layer button (the half-black and half-white circle icon) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Levels from the popup that appears.

I then recommend applying an exaggerated adjustment so you can easily see the effect in the image. With the Levels adjustment, for example, you can drag the middle slider directly below the histogram on the Properties panel left or right, depending on whether you need to lighten or darken a portion of the image, respectively.

Next, select the Gradient tool from the toolbar (or by pressing “G” on the keyboard). On the Options bar click the gradient popup that shows the gradient preview, and in the Basic section choose the first gradient, which is a foreground color to background color gradient. Press “D” on the keyboard to set the default colors of white and black.

To the right of the gradient popup on the options bar select the first of the set of five buttons, which define the overall shape of the gradient. This will establish a simple linear gradient. Make sure the Mode is set to Normal and the Opacity is at 100%.

Because the adjustment layer is active you can now click-and-drag across the image to define a gradient. You want black to be on the side of the image that doesn’t need to be adjusted, and white on the side that does need to be adjusted. So, with white as the foreground color and black as the background color you can drag from the side of the image that needs to be adjusted toward the side that doesn’t. The distance you drag determines the size of the transition for the gradient.

Once you have the gradient in place you can refine the adjustment setting on the Properties panel. The tricky part is getting a gradient with just the right shape (distance and direction) combined with just the right adjustment to get a nice smooth correction for the photo. How easy (or difficult) this is will depend on the nature of the photo itself.

Note that while I’ve used the Levels adjustment as an example here, you could also use a Curves adjustment layer. Curves would be helpful if you needed to apply a more sophisticated tonal adjustment beyond simply lightening or darkening one side of the photo.

Today’s Question: I noticed the announcement of a 25-megapixel micro four thirds sensor camera, the Panasonic Lumix GH6 (https://bhpho.to/3tpT6sT). Is that about the same image quality, plus or minus 4%, as my 24-megapixel Nikon full frame camera [such as the Nikon Z6 II, https://bhpho.to/36FJQYQ]? Smaller pixels I guess, but I’m not sure how or if that matters.

Tim’s Quick Answer: All other things being equal (which they of course aren’t) the smaller sensor would be expected to produce more noise and not offer as much dynamic range.

More Detail: There are myriad factors that ultimately determine image quality for a given sensor, so it is difficult to make an accurate comparison based exclusively on specifications. The best approach is to directly test different cameras under equal conditions to get a better sense of the relative quality of each sensor.

That said, there are some general properties that impact overall image quality. The size of the individual pixel elements is one of the more significant of these factors. Smaller pixel sites will generally translate into lower dynamic range and more noise. This is because the smaller pixel sites will generally not be able to gather as much light as a larger pixel site.

However, there are many other factors that impact image quality. Signal processing is a significant factor that will vary among different sensors, but the results are difficult to predict without hands-on testing. In addition, sensor manufacturers have made various efforts to improve the performance of their sensors even when they have smaller pixel sites, such as by using lenses to focus the light being captured at each pixel site.

Typically, a larger sensor of a given megapixel resolution would be expected to provide better image quality. Keep in mind, however, that most higher-end camera models offer generally good image quality, and so it is important to weigh other features such as autofocus performance, image stabilization, and other options that may be helpful to you when making a decision about a specific camera mode.