Ask Tim Grey

Today’s Question: Is there a way to create a preset in Lightroom Classic for changing a B&W negative into a positive image? I am scanning my negative film and thought there would be an easier method than using the sliders in the tone curve on each negative to turn it into a positive image.

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can create a preset that will streamline the process of converting a scanned negative to a positive image.

More Detail: It is worth noting that in most cases you can have the images inverted at the time of scanning. Scanning software will typically include an option to invert as part of the scanning process, and that often provides a more accurate positive image because it can take into account the fact that the original is a negative, not just an inverted source image.

The easiest way to invert a negative image in Lightroom Classic (or Camera Raw or Lightroom) is to use the Tone Curve using the point curve mode (not parametric mode). Drag the black endpoint at the bottom-left of the Tone Curve line to the top-left, and drag the white endpoint at the top-right of the Tone Curve line to the bottom-right.

You can also create a preset to make this even easier to apply to multiple images. Start by applying the desired adjustments to a sample image. You may want to include other adjustments, such as Clarity and Texture, for example.

When you’re ready to save a preset based on adjustments applied to a sample image, click the plus (+) icon to the right of the Presets heading on the left panel in the Develop module and choose Create Preset from the popup. In the New Develop Preset dialog enter a meaningful name for the preset in the Preset Name field, and choose which group you want to include the preset it from the Group popup.

Next, click the “Check None” button at the bottom-left of the dialog, then turn on the checkboxes for the adjustments you want to include in the preset, such as Point Curve, Clarity, and Texture. Click the Create button to save the preset, which you can then apply to multiple images at the time of import, to multiple selected photos in the Quick Develop section of the right panel in the Library module, or by selecting a preset for an image in the Develop module.

Today’s Question: How do I get rid of the floating toolbar showing “Select subject – Remove background” that now pops up [in Photoshop]?

Tim’s Quick Answer: The toolbar in question is the Contextual Task Bar, and you can hide it by clicking the “more” button (with the three dots) and choosing “Hide bar” from the popup menu.

More Detail: The Contextual Task Bar is a relatively new toolbar in Photoshop, which by default will float over an open image. The toolbar is context-sensitive, meaning the specific controls that appear on the toolbar depend on the type of image that is currently active or the task you’re performing.

While the Contextual Task Bar can certainly be helpful in terms of having quicker access to tasks you might perform with an image in Photoshop, it can also be a bit of a distraction. Fortunately, while you can’t dock the Contextual Task Bar to put it in a preferred location, it is possible to hide it altogether.

You can hide the Contextual Task Bar by clicking on the “more” button at the right side of the toolbar and choosing “Hide bar” from the popup menu. You can also go to the menu bar and choose Window > Contextual Task Bar to hide or reveal the toolbar at any time. Once you’ve hidden the Contextual Task Bar it will remain hidden until you re-enable it.

Today’s Question: I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard the photo composition advice for birds that one should always make sure that birds are looking left in a photo composition, because it’s more pleasing to the viewer’s eye (since we always start viewing photos from the left to the right. I’ve never heard this advice before, and it certainly is a photo ethics concern for me. Your thoughts?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I have not heard this advice before, though it relates to a portion of the rule of thirds. However, I feel photos generally look better with the subject (bird or otherwise) pointing to the right rather than left.

More Detail: One of the corollaries of the rule of thirds in photography relates to having space in front of the subject, meaning space on the side where the subject is looking or moving toward. You can obviously break the rule of thirds with excellent results, but the principles do provide a good general guide for composition.

For example, if a person or bird is looking to the right side of the frame, you should generally have more space on the right side of the frame than on the left side, which provides the subject with room to look. Similarly, if you photograph an airplane that is flying from left to right, you generally want to have more space on the right side of the airplane, so it has room to move.

Taking that a step further is the notion of whether you should favor having a subject such as a bird facing to the left rather than the right. I have found some folks online who have shared or supported this advice, and even, as noted in today’s question, people who recommend flipping a photo so that the subject will face left rather than right.

Flipping a photo can obviously introduce issues related to photo ethics, with the “right” answer depending in large part on the type of photography and how it is being presented. But keep in mind that in many cases the subject may not look right if the photo is flipped, such as in cases where features are not symmetrical on both sides of the face.

As noted above, in reviewing a large number of photos of varying subjects, I very much prefer to have a subject facing to the right rather than to the left. To my eye it looks more natural to have the subject facing to the right. When a subject is facing to the left the photo looks a little less natural to me, and in some cases has a bit of a sense of tension in the photo (similar to how having a person’s face near the edge of the frame as though they are looking beyond the frame can introduce tension).

I don’t feel that there is universal enough opinion (or awareness) of this issue to warrant going out of your way to have a subject face one direction or the other. And I would generally want to avoid flipping a photo for that purpose. But I’m sure there are many who would disagree with my view that pointing to the right is better, and perhaps even more who wouldn’t feel strongly about favoring either direction for the subject to face.

Today’s Question: I was reviewing your video course on long exposures [“Creative Blurs”, https://www.greylearning.com/courses/creative-blurs] and that got me wondering if those types of effects could be created with a smartphone.

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, it is possible to get photos with some degree of motion blur effect with a smartphone, but it is very difficult to control enough to get consistently good results.

More Detail: Smartphone cameras don’t enable us to control the exposure settings the same way you can with other cameras, and in many cases if you attempt to photograph a dark scene the smartphone will compensate such as by raising the ISO setting to compensate.

There are some apps that enable you to create long exposure effects with a smartphone. For example, the Lightroom mobile app includes options for adjusting exposure, including shutter speeds of up to one second. However, because you’re not able to adjust a lens aperture to reduce the amount of light, it can be difficult to get a long exposure except under dark conditions or by holding a neutral density filter in front of the lens.

There are other apps that enable you to capture long exposures more consistently, but most of these use a process of capturing a series of photos and blending them together, which doesn’t always result in a long exposure that looks like photos captured with the traditional photographic technique. These apps include Slow Shutter Cam and ProCam 8, for example.

In addition, the default Camera app for iPhone and iPad includes the ability to create a long exposure effect. This can be accomplished by capturing a photo in the Live Photo mode, and then browsing the photo and changing the “Live” popup to “Long Exposure”. This will take the multiple frames captured for the Live Photo and create a motion blur effect based on the variation of the frames.

Ultimately, while you can certainly achieve a long exposure effect with a smartphone, you’ll be able to get much better results using a proper camera instead.

Today’s Question: Thank you for your excellent course on Adobe Bridge. In watching the lessons, I notice that the Export and Workflow features seem to have a lot of overlap, as they both involve exporting copies of photos. Do you recommend one over the other?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I recommend the Export feature over the Workflow feature, in large part because the Export feature is more streamlined and has less potential for confusion.

More Detail: The Export and Workflow features in Adobe Bridge are both focused on enabling you to create derivative copies of photos quickly and easily. In both cases you can define and save the parameters for how you want photos processed for a particular purpose, and then process selected photos in batch. Both are similar to the Image Processor feature in Photoshop that has long been accessible from Bridge as well.

There are two key differences between the Export and Workflow features. First, with Export you define all the settings for processing images within a single dialog, while with the Workflow feature you use a workspace to define individual components of a workflow. This makes the former a little more streamlined in my view, and the latter potentially a bit more confusing and cumbersome.

The other difference is that with the Export feature you don’t have the option to rename as part of the option to export photos. With the Workflow feature you can include a step to rename the copies of the photos you’re creating. However, since the renaming is template-based, this can actually be a bit problematic. For example, there isn’t an easy way to include custom text for each set of photos you create with the Workflow feature. You would need to use a custom workflow each time you wanted a different file naming structure when processing photos.

Therefore, I recommend the Export feature over the Workflow feature. If you also want to rename the photos after processing them with the Export feature, you can simply use the Batch Rename command (Tools > Batch Rename) to rename the exported copies of photos with flexibility, including the ability to use custom text as a component of the filenames.

Today’s Question: This may be a silly or pedantic question, but it is something that always struck me as odd. Why do photographers refer to “post-processing”? Isn’t it just “processing”, as in applying adjustments?

Tim’s Quick Answer: The term “post-processing” is a reference to post-capture processing, meaning adjusting the image after the capture.

More Detail: This is actually a question I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, perhaps because I tend to use the term “post-processing” somewhat frequently, and it has struck some photographers as an odd term.

While most of the processing we do to our photos happens after the photo is taken, there is an element of processing in the camera based on the camera settings and capture techniques we use. I therefore think it is fair to refer to the adjustments we apply after the capture as post-capture processing. This term is often shortened to simply “post-processing”.

Of course, perhaps I’m just biased because I tend to use the term “post-processing”. To me it makes sense. But obviously at least a few photographers disagree and think there’s no need to put “post” in front of “processing”.

In any event, I appreciate the question and don’t think it was silly. It was a fun diversion from the more typical questions I tend to receive.

Today’s Question: This may be a silly bit of trivia, but is there a difference between JPEG (4 letters) and JPG (3 letters)? I see it both ways quite often, and I’ve never understood whether there was a difference and if there isn’t why there are two ways to describe the same type of image.

Tim’s Quick Answer: JPEG and JPG both refer to the exact same thing: an image in a standard file format created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

More Detail: The JPEG image format gets its name from the committee that shares its name, so technically the initialism for the file format should be JPEG, including the “E”, because that represents the full name of the committee.

The reason JPG (without the “E”) has become a common way to refer to the file format is that when the format was originally created in 1992, computer operating systems typically limited you to a filename in the “8.3” format, with an eight character base filename and a three character filename extension. Thus, the JPEG file format has long been referred to based on the original filename extension of JPG.

With newer operating systems supporting long filenames, including long filename extensions, we can now save files with a complete JPEG filename extension, without having to exclude the “E”. However, in many cases the format is still referred to as JPG, and many software applications still default to using a three-letter filename extension of JPG rather than using the four-character extension of JPEG.

Oh, and I don’t think it’s a silly question at all.

Today’s Question: I was wondering if there is any reason to keep all the past Lightroom Classic catalog files. I’ve never deleted any of my catalog files but if the most recent one has all prior history, then I wouldn’t need to keep them.

Tim’s Quick Answer: As long as the old catalogs are predecessors to your current catalog, you can most certainly delete those catalogs without losing any information. I do recommend, of course, that you make sure Lightroom Classic is behaving normally and that you have a backup of your current catalog before deleting the older catalogs.

More Detail: One of the common sources of confusion and frustration among the photographers I consult with is the presence of numerous catalogs alongside their current catalog. For example, photographers often don’t understand why they have multiple catalogs when they only ever created a single catalog the first time they started using Lightroom Classic.

The issue here is that with some of the major updates to Lightroom Classic the catalog format needs to be updated to support new features. When the catalog is updated, the existing catalog is left unmodified, with a new catalog being created as part of the upgrade process. With more recent updates the new catalog has text added to the filename to indicate the version number, such as “-v13” for the current version 13 of Lightroom Classic. With earlier versions the text “-2” would be appended, which led many photographers to end up with a catalog filename such as “Lightroom Classic Catalog-2-2-2.lrcat” after several updates over time.

As long as the older catalog copies are based on new catalog files being created with some of the major updates to Lightroom Classic, the older catalog files can be deleted. I recommend that instead of deleting the files right away, you move them into a “Backup” folder so you can recover them if needed. This will enable you to make sure you didn’t accidentally delete a file related to the current catalog, for example.

Note that you want to preserve the “helper” files for your catalog when moving or deleting older catalog files. For example, if you have a catalog called “Lightroom Classic Catalog-v13.lrcat”, the helper files will have either the exact same base filename with a different filename extension, or the same base filename with additional words. For example, the “Lightroom Classic Catalog-v13 Previews.lrdata” file contains the image previews associated with the photos being managed by the catalog. Be sure to retain those helper files when moving or deleting older catalog files.

And if you aren’t confident that the files were predecessors to your current catalog, but were instead other catalogs you created at some point, you will want to review those catalogs to make sure they don’t contain any photos that aren’t being managed by your current catalog.

The March 2024 issue of Pixology magazine is now available, featuring the following articles:

• Color Tint for Black and White: Learn how you can easily add a color tint featuring one or more colors to a black and white image.
• Slideshow Tips: Get tips for creating a great photo slideshow presentation.
• Workspaces in Bridge: See how you can customize the interface in Adobe Bridge, and save workspaces focused on specific tasks in your workflow.
• Bean Bag Supports: Learn about options for flexible camera support using a beanbag.
• Photo Story: Be Prepared: Read the story behind a photo that worked out well despite a complete lack of preparation.

Pixology magazine is included in the GreyLearning Ultimate Bundle, and is also available as a standalone subscription here:

https://www.greylearning.com/courses/pixology-magazine