LR "equivalent" to Photoshop USM Local Contrast Enhancement???

I've been playing with LR 1.0 and I can't seem to find any sort of "equivalent" way of getting the results I get from the Unsharp Mask "Local Contrast Enhancement" effect. I've tried working with the curves, the exposure sliders, the contrast slider, etc., but nothing I do gives me the effect I get with a USM LCE effect, which I can achieve in Photoshop very quickly.
I fully realize that I'm simply "used to" a certain way of working, and that there are other options and methodologies for post processing in LR that I'm not yet accustomed to. With all the research that has gone into LR, there is obviously a way of processing that leads to a similar end result as what I'm used to, but so far, I just can't get results out of LR as good as what I'm used to with PS.
Can anyone give me any suggestions on this?
Thanks,
Larry

That isn't working for me. The closest control I can find to the LCE effect is the "Contrast" slider (which would of course make sense since it's "contrast"), but this is an approximation at best. For some shots, the end result is nothing like the effect I get with LCE.
Thanks,
Larry

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Aperture missing "Picture Package"equivalent to photoshop???

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PS: for reference, this is what the dialog looks like in CS2:

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IGQ wrote:
only sw I know is "Photoshop".
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I have used LR for the past year as my primary workflow tool and have grown to really appreciate the productivity it delivers. However, we all know there is room for improvement. So I thought I would take a little time to read through the feature requests in this forum, consider my own needs, and assemble a list of the key features that would really matter for my workflow.
A little background I primarily shoot sports often shooting 300-1000 frames per event. I use LR to select, correct, and crop my keepers then export them to my website for sale. I will spend more time fine tuning some the better images, build galleries and occasionally print. I really havent found a need for slideshow. I now have a little over 40k images in my primary catalog. I am at the point where I need more productivity processing the images, particularly for noise removal and color correction, and better tools for managing a larger volume of images.
I hope you find this useful.
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c) Previews with NR and sharpening applied
d) Improve auto-toning perhaps with configurable options like auto-levels in PS
e) Some kind of magic tool to help correct color when dealing with cycling vapor lights (I shoot a lot of indoor sports in caves) - maybe skin-tone driven. Am I dreaming?
f) Geometry correction tool in lens corrections
g) Gradient tool or similar for ND-like effect to help fix skies etc..
h) Green-eye removal tool
i) Improved spot removal/healing (make it work consistently when applied to the corner of an image)
j) Grain control to help emulate film look
k) Output sharpening in export USM or similar, ideally with some sort of preview feature to enable you to fine tune settings
l) Output sharpening in web galleries again, USM or similar with some sort of preview
m) Improved export plug-in architecture need a formal approach for combining/chaining plug-ins on export (piglets seem a tad limited and they are cumbersome to install and manage)
n) Lua needs to offer the ability to bind in external DLLs or similar libraries (command-line invocation is too crude and slow, and flashing windows consume focus making it impossible to use another tool while export is running)
o) Softproofing for print output
p) Faster performance when scrolling images in grid mode (Elements can do it, why cant LR?)
q) Better tools for backing-up/archiving sets of folders to offline storage
r) Archive to DVD / burn disc feature
s) Plug-in architecture for image processing components
t) Vignette effect tool that works with crops with the ability to set the center-point manually
u) Ability to move sets of folders in one operation

I think Travis has produced a well thought out list.
I agree with most of it, except that I would put somethiings
higher up the list.
(BTW: Thanks to the Adobe team for the antifringing improvements
they actually work and are great!)
I am a pretty intensive user of LightRoom. I only have 20K images
but the flow rate has increased and although I find LR to be very
efficient the limitations are starting to bug me. Hence I am always
hoping for an update that delivers some more functionality.
My List: (Shorter, but things left off do not mean I don't want them!)
1. Need a better starting point than just the raw with invisible camera calibration presets applied.
a. I want a lot more control over the auto application and set up of camera calibration presets. An ISO 100 image is handled way differently to an ISO 800 or 1200.
b. I want an auto toned, colored (something like "Perfectly Clear" used in BibblePro) as my start point. In otherwords I want a way more
intelligent start point then the current fairly crude and invisible
one. (Other auto engines include ColourScience, DXPro). However at
present I prefer the Perfectly Clear. Some of these do things like
move greens and blues to nicer hues, remove green (or other) color
casts, local contrast enhancement, face detection and de-redding
skin tones e.g. ColourScience) etc.
c. The option to plugin 3rd party stuff (in particular global
auto editors) and to set it an intelligent default start point.
(I know the start point won't be right for every image but it
will be for a enough to make it really valuable.)
2. The Sharpening (though improved) and Noise control needs to be
much better. At present the preview does not reflect sharpening
changes accurately.
(I have a v-large, high gamut monitor and sharpening and noise changes
are accurately reflected in BibblePro but not LightRoom).
2. More global image edits need to be available. For example- transformations (e.g perspective, lens distortion correction, ND
gradient exposure adjustments, Chanel mixer, etc).
3. Sometimes the LR controls are too coarse, I would like some way to
quickly (e.g. hit "minus" a few times) reduce the range of these some of the controls. Or maybe better choice of range for some controls
could be based on preset or on adjustable default settings, e.g.
right click brings up gain control on each slider say!?.
4. As a image manager it is a problem that LightRoom has a problem with some large images. LightRoom should simply handle the lot
no questions asked. In particular I have photoshop pano tiffs that
LR complains about. Also it would be great if I LR could process
my BibblePro files. (BiblePro uses ".bib" files in place of ".xml"
to do exactly the same thing as LR.)
5. Collections are way improved, but still need more control over
them. i.e. ability to sort on a number of criteria. Also joining,
dividing, evaluating images independently of ratings in underlying database/catalogue.
Anyway I hope the LightRoom Adobe team keep up the good work.

Selective SHARPEN (more powerful)

Hello,
I am a relatively new LR 2.1rc Mac user (from PS/ACR) and so far love the app! But my biggest hindrance are the limited selective sharpening tools available.
Say I have a photo slightly out of focus. In PS I can use SmartSharpen (or even USM), with a very wide range of radius / amount / etc. to almost always salvage the picture. Since it's fairly strong I always use a layer mask to limit its effects only to where it's needed. (eyes on a face, for example)
This weekend I tried this in LR but found it's not possible. The local adjustment brush has Sharpen 0-100, but it's not nearly strong enough AND has no options for me to tweak, like SmartSharpen in PS. It's a shame, because now my workflow must involve trips to PS for selective sharpening. (and I almost always sharpen selectively)
Capture sharpening (in the Detail tab) was getting close but it affects the whole picture, which I don't want. Output sharpening (screen or print on export) also doesn't address this issue. And honestly, I do most sharpening selectively (via layer masks) to avoid unnecessary build-up of noise, so both of these LR options are less useful to me. (the auto-mask in Detail is nice but I would fine-tune areas further in PS)
Just my humble opinion.
Thank you for your consideration!

Quick update:
Without radius control Clarity unfortunately didn't work well. I see it as a local contrast enhancer and didn't help sharpen the photo.
Multiple sharpen masks did allow me to strengthen it, but due to lack of radius control it ended up bringing out high-freq noise. A quick trip to SmartSharpen in PS gave much better results, mainly because I could fine tune the radius to what was necessary.
On a side note - the sharpening in the Detail tab (non-selective) was working quite nicely when I fine tuned the sliders. Bummer you can't mask it.
My conclusion: More flexibility here would be definitely appreciated. I will be forced to go to PS just for selective sharpening, prohibiting what otherwise could be a LR-dominated workflow.
One idea: combine multiple virtual copies with a mask? I made a VC and used the Detail tab to fix the sharpening, and then thought it would be great if I could combine the two (in LR, I know I can export 2 layers to PS and combine there) VCs with a mask.

PS CS3 Smart Sharpen very slow for LCE

PS CS3 Smart Sharpen is very slow to create a preview and then be applied to the image, at least when using a low amount and high radius, eg 20, 50, for local contrast enhancement (LCE). I'm now running Vista 64, but I think it happened even under XP 32.
Is this a common issue or is there some way of speeding things up with Smart Sharpen?
Cheers, John

A solution!
It turns out the problem in my case was in fact Suitcase. Previously, I'd tried turning it off, but that didn't fix the problem, so this time, I uninstalled it completely and the problem disappeared. I then began re-adding it (installed 15.0.1, upgraded it, etc.) and the problem resurfaced with the addition of the Photoshop-specific plugin. Deleting that plugin solved the problem. So it seems that "disabling" Suitcase by stopping the TypeCore doesn't seem to actually disable all of the tentacles it sticks into your system.
You can find the plugin here: Applications / Adobe Photoshop CS6 / Plug-ins / Automate / ExtensisFontManagementPSCS6.plugin
(After a restart, I also had to delete the font cache, as described here http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-photoshop-cs5.html but your mileage may vary.)
Alternately, if you don't want to delete the plugin, disabling it from within Photoshop seems to work as well. To do that, go to File > Automate > Extensis, click Preferences..., then deselect Enable Suitcase Fusion 4 Auto-Activation.
Fortunately, the plugin doesn't seem necessary at all to use the the core functionality of Suitcase (enabling and disabling fonts) in Photoshop. I didn't even know what these app-specific plugins did until researching this problem, and I still don't quite understand the point of them. I guess they allow you to let the apps for which they're installed do a little bit more of their own management (enable a font via Suitcase that isn't enabled system-wide), but that seems like more control than I need--if I'm enabling a font, I want all my software to be able to use it.
Anyway, the problem seems to be completely solved on my system now, though I just did all this, so more testing over the next few days is required. I'll post here if any issues crop up. I'm interested in hearing if this solves it for anyone else as well.

JPG images through HDR

Sorry if you know you can create a HDR image from a single jpg image
Thanks

Just search for "fake HDR". Usually includes a lot of shadow highlight adjustments in PS, and high pass local contrast enhancement.
Here's one:
http://www.deke.com/?q=content/faking-hdr-portrait

Mechanics behind exposure, blacks and other sliders

This might be a question for Camera Raw, too, but since I now mostly use LR, it goes here:
Is there any information about specific mechanics behind toning tools? I'd be happy to find somebody who can "translate" them into toning curve terms. For example, what curve manipulation performs similar to Exposure slider? Same question for Brightness and Contrast.

You cannot translate the exposure slider to a curve manipulation easily. What it does is simply transform the luminance data by multiplying with 2^exposure. So if you have a pixel with a luminance of 50% originally, and you set +2 stops of exposure compensation, you end up with 200% luminance, which will be clipped to 100%. In other words, this slider does exactly what would have happened if you would have set the exposure compensation in camera at the expense of some extra noise. If the gamma of the curve display would have been 2 (which it isn't, it is 2.2), you can sort of think of the exposure slider as taking a straight line from the origin and changing its slope by the brightness slider. + values will make the line intercept on the top axis (making highlights clip) and - values will intercept on the right axis (making original whites grey).
The blacks slider in a curve term moves the whole curve to the right and compresses the curve. You can visualize it by moving the left bottom intercept over the bottom (input luminance) axis. It changes the maximum input luminance that corresponds to black. Input luminances above it will give you a tone, below, they will just be black.
Contrast and brightness are basically what Victoria describes above, but Fill light and highlight recovery are impossible to translate to tone curve terms. They are local contrast enhancement tools that are more akin to HDR processing than to curve manipulation. You can get similar effects to fill light by boosting the shadow portions and to highlight recovery by lowering the highlight portion of the curve, but they are in a fundamentally different class.

Unwanted moire in the clouds due to curves????

Hi all. Im hoping someone can help me with this. I have been working on an image and adjusting the clouds to make them more dramatic using curves and brushing it back using a mask. I have noticed separation of the tones and a moire through the image (not there before the adjustment). Any ideas why this is happening??

"Peter, you are referring to RGB workflow and while my comments were regarding a cmyk workflow, I am interested in seeing a high res sample piece of an image done through that workflow because I see a couple of elements of the colour ones that interest me. I am looking at the step from rgb to cmyk. Can you post here or email a high res sample clipping of one of the colour pics showing some cloud and some sky?"
The original poster posted a screen shot of a layered RGB file. I never assumed what his output might have been, but my advice would be the same either way. If those were images I had drum scanned, then 8 bit would probably be fine, but they're from a Canon 40D with very low noise. That's the type of digital image prone to posterization, hence my advice.
I just looked at my web gallery closely again, and while I see more sharpening on this LCD screen than on my Artisan, there is no jpeg artifacting visible at 100 percent. I can send you a sample if you send me a private email.
As I prep files for all sorts of printing including a large variety of offset presses, I can say from experience that many of the iStock jpegs I have to improve, do in fact fall completely apart when converting to CMYK. All too often I have to replace or re-gradate skies that have become a posterized nightmare. This I usually do in 16 bit CMYK, as well as the all the gradations I'm completely rebuilding for a famous illustrator who delivers sRGB jpegs as his final product. They completely fall apart. Again, computer generated gradation. They have to be done in 16 bit or they WILL posterize on conversion. No freaking way around it. When I maintain a full 16 bit (well 14 for my Canon 1DsMKIII) all the way through to final CMYK, I still often have to add some noise or otherwise fix the cyan channel most often and then the magenta, but at least it's far less damage to deal with and MUCH easier to fix, taking far less time.
"Do you apply sharpening in your post-processing?"
I do no capture sharpening as is often advocated by certain pundits but of course, I do output sharpening, depending on where it's going, but always done as the last or near the last step before delivering the file. I do use HIRLAM sharpening often during the retouching process for local contrast enhancement. Sharpening for press output is the last step before converting to 8 bit, zipping the tiff and uploading to my server. Sharpening may be a single pass. It may be a double pass, particularly when a file has been rezzed up considerably, and it may be selectively sharpened as needed. All I know is that when I see the magazines printed with my ads, they jump off the page faster and harder than any of the other ads in the magazine. I also, whenever I can, get the printed copy and compare it with my original file to see if there was anything that might be improved upon.
Peter

Lightroom to Photoshop CC noise/sharpening workflow question

Most of my images I process 100% in Lightroom. HOWEVER, I do at times need to send and image from Lightroom over to Photoshop CC to finish. Then when finished in CC the image goes back to Lightroom 5 as a TIFF. My question is should I apply sharpening and noise reduction in LR5 prior to sending the image to CC? Or should I apply sharpening and noise reduction after the end of the round trip to CC and back when the image arrives back in LR5 as a TIFF. And yes I have tried a number of different ways. I have tried sending the same image from LR5 with sharpening and NR applied as I would if I were finished. I have sent the same image over to CC with just the default sharpen and noise settings AND I have zeroed out the settings. I sent all images to CC as 16bit TIFF. I tried those various ways and have gotten mixed results. So I was looking for someone with expertise as to what the best procedure is to take when using this workflow.

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I would generally go part way toward my final Detail settings in LR, then do what I have to do in PS, then do more in either PS or LR as appropriate.
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LR "equivalent" to Photoshop USM Local Contrast Enhancement???

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