@bobo Well, I’ve come full circle with editing, originally leaving LR for PL’s Prime and Optical corrections. Now, I found that, perhaps with increased competition, Adobe has sprung into action. The pendulum has has swing back. To mix metaphor’s, its always a game of leapfrog and now Adobe is in front. @zkarj I put a lot of effort into creating a watermark that works on black, white or coloured, so I have one watermark. It’s pixel perfect, too, which PL’s version definitely is not and was always required me to add another step to post. If you choose to alter opacity or position, instructions are here How to use the Watermark Editor to create copyright watermarks in Photoshop Lightroom Classic To do that on each shot, individually, you just export one at a time. As I say, that’s not necessary for me, though, but you could creat multiple presets for different shots?
I already do, but they are basic start points. If PL had smarter sizing, I would only need one for black, one for white, but I do have one for regular 3:2 or 16:9 shots and one for square, which use different sizes and offsets. Then I have the non-square one in black, also. (I rarely seem to need the black one for square photos.) If I created a preset for the number of variations I use, I’d have something like 2 dozen, and not being able to see them in-situ would make choosing which to use a problem.
That’s the power of putting watermark handling in the editor. For someone like yourself, they are just as easy to apply as in post. For someone like me, it makes it practical to tune the watermarks per shot. As I said, I want watermarks, not nameplates.
Here’s an example where I have tuned each of the two components differently. Sometimes I will alter the crop a little to provide for a good background to the watermarks, but on this occasion I didn’t want to. You can see the one on the left is at a much lower opacity than the one on the right. I could probably have actually gone dimmer still on the left, but the goal is essentially met. They are there and legible, but do not distract the eye from the subject.
I understand the scaling of watermarks is less than ideal in PL, but I tend not to notice it unless I’m pixel peeping. When viewed either on Flickr or in my photo library on my iPad, the pixellating is not obvious.
Understood @zkarj It obviously works best for you and I don’t know any other work arounds in LR. I’d only offer you one comment, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. My images are almost exclusively viewed on a screen. With 4K and soon 8K large screens, you don’t need to be a pixel peeper to see every flaw in an image. If that’s where my images end up, which is highly likely in presentations and rolling wall picture displays, I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of a fuzzy logo. I look at all my images now on a 4K screen to check.
My screen is 5K. When I view that image on Flickr on this screen, with a full height browser window (and sufficient width that the height is the constraining dimension), it displays at 1600 x 1066 points, or 3200 x 2132 pixels. At that size I have to really strain my eyes to see the issue. If I ask Flickr to maximise the image with the browser filling the screen, it jumps to 2010 x 1335 points, which is 10 megapixels — larger than my original — and yes I can certainly see an issue now, but not at a standard viewing distance.
One factor that influences the quality of the watermark is scale. Mine are generally at a scale of 5–7 but, in the viewer at least, I can set the graphic one to 100 and it remains perfectly smooth. That’s why I was annoyed at the output — I have given it plenty of pixels to work with!
The issue is very real, and I have complained about this before myself, as it shouldn’t happen. But on a day to day basis it isn’t enough of a problem for me to compromise on the ease of use. That said, I am not putting my images on giant screens that people stand very close to.
As I was reading your post I was thinking that is exactly what I do. But as I got to the last two paragraphs I realize I am doing things in a less sophisticated way. I import, keyword and cull in LRc. My intention is to process in PL5 but what actually happens is that I just start processing in LRc because I am impatient to see what the images look like after my initial pass. Then I will switch to PL5 at some point. And if it is an important image, I will probably try both and see what I like. Colors are often the major difference. I print from LRc. Because I consider PL5 to be my main processor, for the last 18 months I have not stayed up to date on LR’s updates. I barely know how to use the masking feature anymore. But I recently used the automated masking tool and it is amazingly good. So yes, trying to catch up to LRc is chasing a moving target!
May i remind you that using rawdng of dxo CA is applied and changing afterwards WB could provoke CA mislining.
A 16bit tiff is much more stable. (i did only some test with panasonic rw2 files and dxo to silkypix(which has a very fine coloredit.) so your experience maybe different.
Second i am not a lightroom user, yes i tried to adapt from Silkypix 5?7? To lr4 and got lost alot. What i am pointing to is adobes way is maybe that grown in to your workflow that it isn’t easy to change.
If you only want optical and denoising Pureraw is then a better option.
About whitepoint, yes your right lots of people complain about the dxo whiteslider. (most of them are LR users or ex LR users.) If hou have Filmpack you have advanged contrast.
Highlight selective tone and highlight contrast together gives you much better control on structure and highlights. And learn the benefit of controllines and points which have great options in skylines and other wavered objects. Choose a color and luminaction fine tune selection.
Other speeding up function is partial preset.
Thats’ like copy all selective past but then stored in your preset manager.
In bulk images you have often a group of adjustments who could be copy paste.
Create a baseline then create a preset and edit that preset as partial preset which avoid unwanted effects on other images.
Is that the “subject select” thing, or something else? Because I tried subject select with a pretty basic photo and it failed miserably.
Automatic masking, corrections etc. work in many cases. We also experience that, at times, automatic whatevers do fail. I consider that to be expectable.