Cleaning the Clutter: How to Get Your Lightroom Catalog in Tiptop Shape

Clean and organized. Some people are and some people are, well, less so. When it comes to Adobe Lightroom however, we all benefit from a clean, well-organized catalog. In fact, cleaning up Lightroom is one of the most common topics we’re asked about on our workshops and in our one-on-one Tutoring sessions.

In this post, I will share three tips on decluttering this very important part of our digital lives.

Tip 1: Use Reject Flags to Remove Unwanted Images

Get rid of those files you’ll never use and do it quickly with Reject flags. Lightroom has the capacity to keep track of thousands and thousands of images. In fact, I’ve not heard of an upper usable limit, but I have noticed that when my catalog neared 50,000 images it started to slow down a bit. Cleaning out the dead weight couldn’t hurt, right?

Here’s a method that will help you sail through your images and quickly mark them for deletion:

1. Open Lightroom and enter the Library Module.

2. From the menu choose Photo > Auto Advance (Auto Advance is engaged when there is a check mark next to it). You can also do this by engaging your Caps Lock key.

3. Find a folder that contains images you would like to cull. Click on the first image and then press your space bar to magnify the image to fill the screen (this puts you into Loupe view).

4. Now, if you want to keep this image, simply hit the right arrow on the keyboard to advance to the next image. To mark the image as rejected, you can go up to the Menu and choose Photo >  Set Flag > Rejected (Figure 1), or press X. This will set the flag on the image as rejected, and because you have Auto Advance enabled, Lightroom will automatically advance to the next image!

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Figure 1. Rejecting an image.

Once you are finished working through that folder, it’s time to actually delete the images:

1. Return to the Grid mode by pressing G.

2. The keyboard combination to Delete Rejected Photos on a Mac is Command + Delete, and on a PC is Control + Backspace. Click whichever is pertinent.

3. Lightroom will ask you to confirm (Figure 2). Click Delete from Disc to permanently delete the images from your computer as well to remove them from your Lightroom Catalog.

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Figure 2. Deleting flagged images from the catalog and disk.

Deleting images one at a time takes a lot of time. By using Reject flags and then the Delete Rejected Photos feature, you’ll save a ton of time, thus freeing up more time for you to sift through more images.

Further Tips

• You can do this whole process of adding Reject flags to the images while working in the Grid view as well.

• If you accidentally flag an image as rejected, simply click on the image again and press U to unflag it.

• Conversely, pressing P will flag an image as simply “flagged.” Many of us think of this as a Pick flag. This can be an additional marker on your image along with stars and color labels.

Tip 2: Optimize Your Catalog

Your Lightroom catalog is a database. Databases, like your teeth, need maintenance and occasional care. If uncared for, like your teeth, they will no longer perform the job we ask of them without being painful to use.

Begin by backing up your catalog on a regular basis. This could be once per week or once every two weeks or so. Remember this backs up only your Lightroom Catalog (the database of the location of your images and all the metadata and edits you’ve performed on them). This does not back up your actual photographs. To ensure your images are backed up, you must take the separate step of backing up the drive(s) where your images are stored.

Here are the steps to determine when your catalog will be automatically backed up:

1. From the menu on a Mac, choose Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings, or on a PC choose Edit > Catalog Settings.

2. Click on the General tab.

3. In the Backup section, choose your frequency preference in the dropdown menu (Figure 3). I choose “Every time Lightroom exits.” This setting gives me the option to back up or skip each time I close the program.

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Figure 3. Setting backup preferences.

When I quit Lightroom, I see the dialog in Figure 4, which tells me the backup preference that I set earlier. Then it’s time to make some additional choices. Notice that I check both boxes outlined in red. Test Integrity will ensure my catalog is healthy, and Optimize Catalog will keep my catalog lean. This way, by taking the time to back up my catalog, I’m simultaneously repairing it and making it run more efficiently.

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Figure 4. Backup options.

Further Tips

• Both the Test Integrity and the Optimize options are sticky, which means once you check the boxes they will still be checked every time you back up, until you uncheck them. (And vice versa.) So if you check the boxes today and then back up, next week when you go to back up again, the boxes will already be checked for you. Awesome, right?

• There is no need to have a zillion backups of your catalog. I recommend periodically going to the Backups folder and deleting older backups. I typically keep one or two. The Backups folder can be found by navigating to the General tab of Catalog Settings (directions above) and clicking the Show button (Figure 5). This will take you to the folder on your hard drive where your backups are stored. Enter the folder and delete any subfolders for older backups that you no longer want to keep.

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Figure 5. Navigating to the location of your backups.

Tip 3: Organize by Using Smart Collections

I know, I know, the topic of organizing your Lightroom catalog could easily fill a small book. (Or it could even fill a 5.5-hour video dedicated to the Library and Develop modules 😎). For now, I’d like to show you just one of the myriad tools you can use to ensure that your images are always easy to find. That tool is Smart Collections.

The more information you put into an image, the easier it is to find. For example, all imported image files already contain EXIF data from your camera that lists aperture, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, lens model, etc. This embedded information makes it easy to search for, say, all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400. You could further narrow the results by searching for all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400 using a focal length of 14mm.

That is incredibly powerful. But EXIF is only one part of an image’s metadata. The color labels, stars and flags we add to help us organize our catalogs are also metadata. Develop settings we apply—such as Exposure, White Balance and Dehaze—are also recorded as metadata. The keywords we apply to images? Metadata.

So we start off with searchable metadata in the form of EXIF data from our camera. But we can also apply metadata after the images have been imported.

Again: The more information (data) we apply to an image, the easier it is to find. How so? Smart collections.

Think of a smart collection as a really smart, saved search. In the above example we wanted to search for all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 set at ISO 6400 using a focal length of 14mm. Great. We could do that with Library Filter. But if you did this through a smart collection, Lightroom would immediately find those images and gather them up in one location for you to view at any time. It doesn’t move your images. It just creates another “location” to view the images that meet those criteria, no matter how many different folders the images live in.

The smart collection doesn’t stop there, though. It continually monitors your whole catalog and updates the collection whenever a new image meets those same criteria (Nikon Z 6, ISO 6400, 14mm focal length). You don’t need to anything. The next time you import an image you shot with a Z 6 at ISO 6400 and 14mm, that image will automatically appear in that smart collection.

Creating a Smart Collection

The Collections panel sits just below your Folders panel in Lightroom’s Library module (Figure 6).

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Figure 6. Creating a smart collection.

Here’s how to create a smart collection:

1. Click on the plus sign in the upper right corner of the Smart Collection panel to reveal the actions shown in Figure 7.

2. Choose Create Smart Collection. You will see the dialog that allows you to set the criteria the smart collection will search for (Figure 8).

3. Start at the top by giving your new smart collection a name. (Ignore the Inside a Collection Set option for now.)

4. Keep Match set to “all.”

5. The large area on the bottom of the dialog contains the rules you will set up for the smart collection. Notice that by default the first rule is sets Rating as “is greater than or equal to.” Clicking on one of the dots to the right sets the star rating it will search for. So if you click the fourth dot, this smart collection will collect all of the images in your Library that are marked 4 stars or above.

6. Click Create and you’ve just made your first smart collection!

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Figure 7. Collection panel actions.

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Figure 8. Creating a smart collection.

Putting Smart Collections to Practical Use

Now let’s make a smart collection that will help keep your catalog organized.

1. Click the plus sign to create a new smart collection.

2. Name this collection “Without Keywords.”

3. Click the arrows next to Rating and instead choose Other Metadata > Keywords (Figure 9).

4. Click the arrows next to “is greater or equal” and instead choose “are empty” (Figure 10).

5. Click create.

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Figure 9. Choosing a criterion for a smart collection.

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Figure 10. Refining the options for a criterion.

Now you have a smart collection that shows every image that needs to have keywords applied. Click on any image, apply a keyword, and that image will automatically disappear from the smart collection. Why? Because now that the image has a keyword, it no longer fits the criterion.

Creating this particular smart collection is a great way to begin organizing your entire Library, because it can be very difficult to find images that lack keywords!

Smart collections are extremely powerful. As you can see from the screenshot in Figure 9 above, there are an enormous amount of criteria you can use to build your smart collections. And you are not limited to just one choice. By clicking on the plus sign to the right of your first rule, you can continue to add additional rules. As long Match is set to “all,” an image would need to meet all of the criteria to show up in the smart collection. Figure 11 shows a screenshot of the smart collection we talked about earlier (Nikon Z 6, ISO 6400, 14mm focal length).

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Figure 11. A smart collection that collates all images shot with a Nikon Z 6 at ISO 6400 with a focal length of 14mm.

Spend some time thinking about how you want to find and organize your Library. Poke around in the choices for ideas for new collections. Before you know it you’ll be creating smart collections that will keep your Library perfectly organized!

Some Sample Smart Collections

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Make a collection of your favorite photos that are marked with 5 stars.

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Make a collection that shows all of your images that don’t have stars.

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How about one to show your favorite family photos?

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Or your favorite vacation photos?

Further Tips

• Organize your smart collections by creating collection sets. Think of these as folders to store your individual collections in.

• In the Collections panel, collections appear in alphanumeric order from top to bottom with the collection sets coming first. If you want to have something appear at the top, use a space or underscore before the title to force Lightroom to move it up there.

• You can edit a smart collection anytime by double-clicking on the gear icon that appears on your smart collection icon.

Wrapping Up

There you go, three tips to help you clean your Lightroom catalog! It might take some time and dedication to get this done, but the investment will pay off later when you’ll be running a lean, efficient database of images.

Do you have any of your own tips for how you like to clean up your Lightroom catalog? Share them in the comments below or on our Facebook page!

Want some help getting your Lightroom catalog organized? National Parks at Night offers one-on-one tutoring, so we can work with you remotely! See our Tutoring page for more information.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

How I Got the Shot: Ubehebe Crater at Death Valley National Park

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Ubehebe Crater, Death Valley National Park. Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. 11 stitched frames photographed at 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 2500.

The Location

Ubehebe Crater could be the most underrated natural feature in Death Valley National Park. Lots of folks know about Badwater Basin, where hexagonal formations rise from the salt flats; and Mesquite Flat Dunes, where sand rises and dips in patterns that lead toward desert-mountain backgrounds; and Racetrack Playa, where rocks appear to sail across the dried, cracked mud.

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Figure 1. Look out!

All those things are well-renowned, and they should be. But I’m continually bemused at how few people know about Ubehebe, a half-mile-wide, 600-foot-deep volcanic crater. Why? Because it’s amazing!

Standing at the edge (carefully, Figure 1) reveals a beautiful, mesmerizing landscape. Standing at the bottom is awe-inspiring, as you look up and marvel at the power of nature to blast such a massive amount of earth over an area of 6 square miles.

It’s also a fun place to hike, as immediately to the south sit a few more smaller craters. You can hike along the rims or to the bottoms and explore the wonders of geology and wilderness.

However, one thing that Ubehebe Crater is not? Easy to photograph. The main attraction is the main crater, and it’s a pretty massive subject.

The first time I photographed it, in 2017 (Figure 2), I used a Nikon 14-24mm lens at its widest zoom, which was OK, but I could barely fit the whole crater in the frame. Moreover, at that wide a focal length you really need foreground material to help create a sense of depth in the composition, and the crater rim offers very little of that.

In 2018 I got to try shooting the crater with the rectilinear Irix 11mm lens (Figure 3). That allowed me to get the whole crater into a 35mm frame, and some wild clouds helped add a special dynamic to the scene, but I still wasn’t thrilled with the photo. I visited again in 2019, and didn’t even bother shooting. I was completely out of ideas for how to make the scene work in a photograph.

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Figure 2. Nikon D3s with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 1/1250, f/8, ISO 400.

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Figure 3. Nikon D5 with an Irix 11mm f/4 lens. Three blended exposures of 1/640, 1/1250 and 1/2500, at f/8, ISO 100.

Another challenge to photographing the crater is that its sharp angle of decline prevents sunlight from fully illuminating the interior unless the sun is relatively high in the sky. So on a bright day, you need to choose between harsh light at midday or big shadows earlier or later. You might think that overcast conditions are the answer, but I’ve tried that too. Flat light wipes out all depth and diminishes the warm-toned hues on the eastern flank that are such a crucial part of the crater’s aesthetics.

Honestly, as much as I love Ubehebe Crater, by early 2019 I’d just about given up trying to make a photograph of it that I like.

The Aha Moment

Then in February 2020 I was back at Death Valley for National Parks at Night’s very first Alumni Excursion, a 5-night, 6-day photography jaunt through this amazing place. Toward the end of the workshop, we made a day and night trip to Racetrack Playa, and on the way we stopped at Ubehebe Crater.

I was leading this workshop with Lance Keimig and Matt Hill, and Matt had never been to the crater before. As most people do, he loved it. And he said, “On the way back tonight it’d be awesome to shoot a moonlit pano of this.”

Aha! That was the answer. I knew it right away. I had to get this image.

So, we scouted. Matt went off to explore his idea for the photograph, and I went off to explore mine. I hiked along the northern rim to find an angle where I could get a good vantage point over the crater with the snowy peaks of Hunter Mountain in the background. I made a quick auto-pano using my cell phone, just to make sure the composition would work the way I wanted (Figure 4). Then I checked PhotoPills to confirm a suspicion: That evening, I could shoot the full moon drifting through background of the scene. That was my shot. It was scouted and ready to be executed hours later, in the dark of the California desert.

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Figure 4. A daylight test pano from my scouted spot, using my Google Pixel 3a.

The Shoot

Unfortunately, the Racetrack is hard to leave, and we stayed late. By the time we returned to Ubehebe, the moon had drifted way out of the scene. But it was still high, and delicately sidelighting the crater, and that was beautiful.

The hour was late—well after midnight on what had been a long day at the end of an adventure-filled week—and I was exhausted. But I was also determined. I was getting this image.

With my eyes half closed, I carried my tripod, Nikon D5 and two lenses one-quarter mile to my spot. I set up, tested each lens, and decided the Nikon 14-24mm (zoomed all the way to 24mm) was my best option for creating the image I had in my mind.

The first key to shooting a pano is to level the entire setup. I own a Gitzo GSLVLS Leveling head, but unfortunately didn’t have it with me. So I needed to level manually. That required three steps:

1. leveling my tripod legs by using the bubble level on the top as a guide (Figure 5, left, bottom circle)

2. leveling my ball head by using its bubble level the same as above (Figure 5, left, top circle)

3. using the in-camera Virtual Horizon to ensure that all the leveling was correct by panning the setup left to right and back again and watching to see that the camera stayed level across the scene (Figure 5, right)

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Figure 5. Perfectly level in every way.

I fired off a couple of test photos to nail down an exposure. The NPF Rule told me I could shoot as long as 10 seconds before the stars began to trail. That was easy under moonlight, as I could achieve that shutter speed at ISO 640 with the lens wide open. However, I unconditionally trust the ISOs of the D5, so I pushed to ISO 2500, which allowed me to close the aperture to f/5.6 and really take advantage of the best sharpness levels of the lens.

I was finally ready to shoot. I started with the camera panned far to the left, way past where I needed it for the final composition, to give myself flexibility to crop in later. I shot the first frame. Using the engraved degree markings on the bottom of my Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head, I rotated the camera 15 degrees to the right, then shot again. (That’s really more overlap than I needed, but I always prefer to have more than less.) I repeated this nine times, until I was shooting far right of my composition, for a total of 11 frames.

The Post-Production

The only change I wanted to make before assembling the pano was to apply lens corrections. This is best practice when making panos (particularly at night), so that any natural vignetting of the lens is removed. Otherwise, the color and brightness of the sky can fluctuate across the final panorama.

In Lightroom, I selected all 11 images in Grid view (Figure 6), then clicked to the Develop module. At the bottom right, I toggled the switch next to the Sync button to enable Auto Sync (Figure 7). Then I opened the Lens Corrections panel, then checked the boxes to turn on Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections. Then I went back to the bottom right and turned off Auto Sync.

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Figure 6.

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Figure 7.

To start the stitch, with the 11 frames still selected, in the menu I chose Photo > Photo Merge > Merge to Panorama. In the resulting dialog (Figure 8), I selected Spherical for the Projection, because it created the look I had in mind more closely than Cylindrical. I choose not to use Boundary Warp, Fill Edges, Auto Crop or Auto Settings, because I prefer to perform those tasks manually and deliberately. I did, however, click on Create Stack, because I like my multi-frame images to be neatly organized in the Lightroom catalog.

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Figure 8.

I clicked Merge, and Lightroom did a great job stitching the 11 frames.

I switched to the Basic panel to apply some basic edits to Whites and Clarity, to make the overall image “pop” a little, then I manually made my crop to hone in on the elements I felt were most important to the composition (Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

I felt the sky and stars needed even more punch, so I used the Graduated Filter tool to create a mask over the top half of the frame. I wanted the changes to affect only the sky, and not the mountains, so I enabled Range Mask and chose Color. Using the Color Range Selector (the eyedropper) to sample the blue sky, then used the Amount slider to tweak the selection. When I was happy with my mask (Figure 10), I made minor adjustments to Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks, Texture, Clarity and Sharpness—all to add just a little extra “oomph” to the sky, to make it appear in the image how it looked to me in person.

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Figure 10.

Because the moon was off camera-right, the right side of the sky was noticeably brighter. To tone that down a bit, I created another mask in the same way as above, but instead of the top of the frame, I targeted the right (Figure 11). I then brought up Dehaze a bit to increase the local contrast of that portion of the frame, making it appear a little darker, and massaged the mask a bit to ensure a transition that looks natural.

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Figure 11.

Wrapping Up

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The final image. Ubehebe Crater, Death Valley National Park. Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm lens at 24mm. 11 stitched frames photographed at 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 2500.

That’s how I finally, after four tries, made an image of Ubehebe Crater that I’m happy with.

The 3-year process from first visit to final image reinforced three ideas:

1. Revisiting locations almost always leads to making better photographs.

2. Photographing at night almost always allows for a unique way of photographing a scene.

3. Creative breakthroughs can come from listening to what others think. I love teamwork and collaboration! (Thank you, Matt!)

Am I now done with Ubehebe? No way! On my hike back to the car that night, I thought of another idea, and I’m confident it will work. Stay tuned. Some night I’ll shoot that idea too.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Five Field Tips to Make Night Photography Go a Little Smoother

We’ve said night photography is fun. We’ve never said it’s easy.

We all encounter challenges that we need to overcome in order to get the shot. This is true even when working with other night photographers, but it’s especially true when we’re shooting alone.

Every photographer has their solutions to these little (or sometimes big) problems, which help us be more productive in the field at night. Below, each of the five National Parks at Night instructors offers one tip to work just a little smoother, a little better, a little more efficiently in the dark.

Lay Your Flashlight in Your Light Painting Spot

by Gabriel Biderman

When I first started light painting I was incredibly frustrated with the inconsistencies of my painting from shot to shot. The problem was that I would try a lighting strategy, then walk back to the camera to see how I did, then walk back out into the scene and try again—always from a slightly different spot! Why? Because it was dark and I couldn’t see exactly where I’d been standing before. That meant that the angle and distance would change as I went back and forth between my camera and my approximate painting location.

The first solution I came up with was marking my spot in the dirt or putting a rock there, so I’d know where I’d been standing. However, there aren’t rocks or etchable dirt at every location, and again, it was dark, so the mark could be hard to find.

Eventually I realized that there was another good marker that I always have with me: a flashlight. Now when I’m done testing some light painting, I place my flashlight on the ground at my feet, and my spot is easy to find again!

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When working on this image in Cape Hatteras National Seashore, I put my flashlight on the ground to mark the spot I was light painting from, so I could easily return after checking the image on the camera’s LCD. You can see the beam shining along the grass from where it was laying.

Of course, this works only if my spot is not in the frame, otherwise the camera will record the flashlight during the rest of the exposure. Also, if the exposure is still running, then I make sure to put the flashlight on the ground facing away from the scene, so as not to spill in more light than I want.

Now I can always find my exact place to repeat the lighting process after reviewing my image. This has been incredibly helpful when I am photographing alone and has helped me nail my light painting more quickly and more efficiently.

Set Up a Custom Menu

by Tim Cooper

As we all know, night photography can pose many challenges. For this reason it’s important to eliminate as many issues as we can so we can focus our efforts on the actual photography. One challenge to overcome is working with our camera in the dark. By being very familiar with our camera’s controls, we can easily make adjustments, focus and shoot without the constant need for turning on our flashlights or fumbling around while wasting otherwise productive time.

That’s easy enough (with practice) when we’re talking about buttons and dials—the controls that are on the camera body. But many features live deep in the camera’s menu system. Scouring the extensive menus for a particular function while in the field can be frustrating. It’s also avoidable.

I save a lot of time in the field by setting up a custom menu in my camera. Most modern cameras allow this, specifically so you can collect your most oft-used functions into one easily accessible place. In the following video, I’ll show you how to do just that!

Use a Low-Powered Light For Seeing

by Lance Keimig

If you’ve been on a workshop with me, you might have been gently chastised for using your 2 million-lumen flashlight to adjust your camera settings. Overly bright flashlights wipe out your hard-won night vision, making it difficult to visualize your surroundings without the light. And in a workshop environment, using a flashlight that’s brighter than necessary often causes unwanted light pollution in other people’s images.

Red lights cause similar but often more serious problems, because even at very low levels they bleed profusely into the shadow areas of everyone’s images. Red lights also diminish depth perception, making accidents much more likely on uneven ground, especially in red-rock environments.

To avoid all these issues, I use a flashlight in the field as little as possible (except for when light painting), and when I do, I use the dimmest in my arsenal. That way I can get a little extra light in extra-dark situations without ruining my night vision or other people’s photographs.

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Using a bright flashlight (left) just to check camera settings is overkill—it will ruin your night vision, not to mention the exposures of others who may be working around you. A lower-powered light (right) is a more subtle option that is less likely to cause unintended consequences.

My favorite for this purpose is the Coast G9, which Coast has been gifting to our domestic workshop attendees for the past couple of years. This small and relatively dim flashlight can be easily dimmed even further by removing the head and placing a couple of layers of tissue or toilet paper in front of the bulb. (If you want to get fancy and warm up the color temperature, add a piece of CTO or warming gel at the same time.)

This 2-minute hack will provide you with a light that will be just bright enough to navigate a dark path, to find that spare battery in your camera bag, or anything else that requires just a touch of illumination.

Protect Yourself and Your Bag With a Blanket

by Matt Hill

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The Matador Pocket Blanket.

One thing I’ve found I just couldn’t live without is something I didn’t even buy for myself. I didn’t know how much I needed it until after I received it as a gift! (Thanks, D&E!) I’m referring to the Matador Pocket Blanket.

Sometimes the ground is … well, dirty. And during a long exposure I might want to just stretch out and gaze lovingly at the stars. Or I might even want to—gasp!—put down my camera bag without getting it muddy or sandy. This super-thin blanket packs to 4-by-3 inches, so stowing it in my bag is easy, yet it unfolds to a surprising 63-by-44. I can use the hidden corner stakes to anchor it in place, and when it’s time to fold the blanket, a stitched line pattern reminds me of the perfect way to make it tiny once again.

I love this blanket so much that when I misplaced it, I bought another. And then I found the original. So now I have two. Which makes me twice as happy.

Use an LED to Find Your Tripod

by Chris Nicholson

A lot of night photography involves long exposures. And not just long exposures, but looooonnnnnnggggg exposures. Leaving the shutter open for an hour or more is not unusual. During those times, I often wander away from the camera, whether to explore, to return to a warm location, or even to shoot with a second setup somewhere else. The problem is that sometimes it’s hard to find that camera again in the dark.

Of course, I could probably locate the camera more often than not by just waving a high-powered flashlight around. But that would likely ruin my exposure (especially if I inadvertently shined the light directly into the lens), not to mention ruin the work of anyone I might be out shooting with.

The solution I use most often is to put a tiny light right on the tripod—something bright enough for me to see in the dark, but not bright enough to affect exposure. And to be safe, I point that light away from the scene.

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Even a tiny LED can be seen from pretty far away in the dark, making it easy to find a tripod that’s supporting a long exposure.

What kind of light? I use the flashing LED on my geotracker. It’s a piece of gear I always have with me on a shoot. It usually hangs off my belt loop or my backpack strap. But it also hangs nicely on the hook below my ball head.

Contrary to what a non-night person might assume, that LED is incredibly easy to see in dark conditions. In 2017 I was shooting at the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park. It was way too cold to stay out with the camera during a one-hour exposure, so we walked back to the Jeep—one mile away! Even from there, I could faintly discern that tiny LED flashing in perfect darkness across the flats. Found my camera right away.

Wrapping Up

There you have it—five tips for working just a little easier in the dark!

How about you? What are some hacks that you’ve found useful for making the night photography experience just a little simpler or a little more enjoyable? Feel free to share in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

How I Got the Shot: Time-Lapse at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory

One of my favorite experiences last year was the Eastern Sierra workshop we ran in California with Rocky Mountain School of Photography. What made this one so extraordinary is that it offered a variety of subjects and ways to interpret the night. Most of us were excited about the surreal “rockscapes” of the Alabama Hills or the ghost town train depot at Laws. But for me? I couldn’t wait to photograph the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) in Bishop.

The Location

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The Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 lens. 15 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

I’ve been to a few observatories, but to get a close-up look at these huge telescopes was a night photographer’s dream come true.

We had only one night scheduled at OVRO, and I had so many ideas I wanted to explore. Let’s just say I was stressfully excited! Two images I wanted to create were a time-lapse and a 2-hour-plus star trail shot of the telescopes. Unfortunately, as soon as I arrived I noticed that the cloud cover would prevent any long star trails from happening.

However, clouds can work very nicely in a time-lapse, as they are another moving element to capture as part of the scene. After all, time-lapses are all about movement.

Then I saw that the largest of the telescopes—a 40-meter beauty—was actively scanning the skies. Perfect. More movement!

The Shoot

I set up my Nikon Z 6 with a Z 24-70mm f/4 lens a couple of hundred yards away, so that I could include the sky patterns as well as the moving telescope.

However, in my excitement, I made a couple of critical errors with this first attempt. First, I defaulted to my typical vertical camera orientation, which worked for the single frame, but for time-lapse (or any video) you really want horizontal (unless you’re going to view it only on a phone).

Second, I was in a very “single frame” mindset instead of thinking about the many frames it takes to create a time-lapse. My exposures were 2 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 100. The 2 minutes was the issue. With time-lapses, you need a lot of single frames to make the “movie,” which means you generally want shorter (and therefore more) exposures. I didn’t do the time-lapse math prior to setting up my shot.

When creating a time-lapse, you need to work backward a bit. Before shooing, think about how long you want the video to be. For instance, if I wanted to make a 15-second time-lapse using a “normal” video playback of 30 frames per second, then I would have needed 450 frames. With 2-minute exposures, that would take 15 hours of shooting! Shorter exposures (say, from 10 to 30 seconds) are generally better, especially if you will be at a location for only a few hours.

Instead, I ended up with 91 vertical 2-minute images. I assembled them quickly in Photoshop and used a rate of 12.5 frames per second, which gave me a decent 7-second time-lapse that you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1. My first attempt.

I do like that the longer exposures worked well with the lesser frame rate to slow things down a bit—that really lets you see the motion of the telescope, clouds and car trails.

The Reshoot

As luck would have it, we had another opportunity to photograph at OVRO on this trip. Reshoots are amazing! Given this second chance, I wanted to learn from my mistakes and do a better job.

First, I had to figure out the best horizontal composition. The skies were clear and full of stars. Without the clouds moving through the scene, I composed for a closer look at the main actor, the 40-meter telescope.

Next, I needed to figure out a shorter exposure. The moon was out, so a shutter speed of 8 seconds was definitely attainable. It would take about 800 shots in 2 hours to capture the assets needed to create a 30-second time-lapse. If you need help figuring out the math for a time-lapse, our savvy friends at PhotoPills have a pill for that (Figure 2).

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Figure 2. PhotoPills has a calculator for seeing how many frames are needed to create time-lapses of different lengths.

My final exposure was 8 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 1600. I set my Z 6 to Bulb mode, and I set up my Vello Shutterboss II with a 1-second interval between shots. I let it rip for a little over 2 hours, which gave me 835 exposures to work with.

The Post-Production

My video editing skills are definitely basic—I’m really a still photographer, not a videographer. Fortunately in 2017 Adobe added a time-lapse feature to Photoshop, which is software that I’m very comfortable using.

Here’s what I did:

1. I exported my selects from Lightroom as JPGs, making sure my filenames were sequentially numbered—i.e., OVRO_1, OVRO_2, OVRO_3, etc. (There should be no breaks in the numbering.) Under Image Sizing, you want to check the Resize to Fit box and enter either 1920 pixels wide for an HD video or 3,840 pixels wide for 4K. I chose the latter.

2. In the Photoshop menu, I chose File > Open, which opens the dialog we use to get things started (Figure 3). I navigated to the folder of time-lapse JPGs and selected the first one. I checked the Image Sequence box, then pressed Open.

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Figure 3.

3. For a frame rate, 30 is considered best practice for digital video. However, you can choose a lower or higher frame rate to slow things down or speed things up. It’s easy to experiment and cook to taste. I chose 24 for this time-lapse.

4. The files were quickly put together as one video layer in Photoshop. I clicked on Window > Timeline to open the timeline bar in Photoshop (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

5. I pressed the space bar on my keyboard to watch the time-lapse play slowly. Typically only one play is required to buffer the video.

6. You can do basic editing like adding music, cross-fades, etc., but I didn’t add any visual bells and whistles, preferring to keep this time-lapse simple.

7. Exporting requires a few key steps. I selected File > Export > Render Video. The Render Video window (Figure 5) is pretty self-explanatory. Name your file, then choose where to save it. You can select a settings preset to suit your needs. The presets are helpful for automatically resizing your video to fit the various formats of YouTube, Vimeo, and Android and Apple Devices. I used Adobe Media Encoder.

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Figure 5.

That’s it. A quick and easy way for me to assemble a time-lapse.

As you can see with this second one, the improved frame rate created smoother and more realistic movements within the video.

Figure 6. The final time-lapse.

Wrapping Up

A dark-sky time-lapse is an amazing way to seize the night. I was thrilled with the experience and felt that the OVRO was a perfect subject to really show the passing of time and the search for life beyond the stars!

Like I mentioned before, I’m not a seasoned video guy, so I used Photoshop to tackle this, as it’s software that I’m already comfortable with. But there are other options out there. One in particular I’m excited to delve into is LR/Timelapse, partly because it eliminates some of the steps above by allowing you to go from Lightroom directly into the rendering software. Stayed tuned to our blog for more on that later this year.

Gabriel Biderman is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He is a Brooklyn-based fine art and travel photographer, and author of Night Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots (Peachpit, 2014). During the daytime hours you'll often find Gabe at one of many photo events around the world working for B&H Photo’s road marketing team. See his portfolio and workshop lineup at www.ruinism.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Five Ways That Lightroom’s New Update Eases the Processing of Night Photos

As has been true since the beginning of photography, field work is equally important as what comes after: post-production. Consequently, we always monitor the advancement of both in-field and on-desk tools, and this week there was some good news in the latter category.

On Tuesday, Adobe released an update to Lightroom that contained several interesting changes, including five that will make life easier for night photographers. So below we explore each new feature and setting, looking specifically at how it applies to working with night images.

(Note that these points pertain to Lightroom Classic, which is the version we use—and recommend using—for serious photo editing.)

1. Large-File Support

If you’re into blending exposures, stitching complex panoramas or stacking images—whether for stars, lighthouse beams, light painting or whatever else—then you’ve probably had to deal with the 2 GB size limitation for a PSD, Photoshop’s default file format (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Until now, Photoshop files over 2 GB posed a problem for Lightroom users.

If your image exceeded that limit, you were faced with five primary options, all of which had downsides:

1. Downsize the resolution (which meant throwing away pixels).

2. Flatten the layers (thereby limiting the ability to edit the image in the future).

3. Save as a TIFF (which has a 4 GB limit).

4. Save as a large-format PSB file (which Lightroom couldn’t see, edit or catalog).

5. Convert the layers to a Smart Object and save them as a new linked file, then save the whole thing as a TIFF (which is an inelegant, unintuitive process).

Now, with this update, these options are obsolete and the downsides are no longer obstacles. Lightroom now recognizes PSBs, allowing you to import, catalog and edit these files of theoretically unlimited size. (“Theoretically” because there are limitations, but ones that most photographers will never encounter—i.e., 65,000 pixels wide or tall, or 512 total megapixels.)

2. Simpler Visual Matching

Last winter Tim Cooper wrote a blog post titled “How to Make Your Lightroom Rendering Look Like Your Camera Preview.” One of the key points was ensuring that the profile you use in Lightroom’s Develop module matches the profile you use in your camera (i.e., the “Picture Controls” setting for Nikon, “Picture Styles” for Canon, “Picture Profile” for Sony, “Film Simulation” for Fuji, etc.)

For example, I always set my Nikon D5 (or any other Nikon camera I might be using) to “Standard,” so I want to use “Camera Standard” as my Lightroom profile. That used to be a manual step (or semi-manual, depending on how presets were used), but now Lightroom can do it for me by default.

To automate that process, select Edit > Preferences on a PC or Lightroom Classic > Preferences on a Mac, then select the Presets tab, and you’ll find the option at the top under Raw Defaults. Click on the Master drop down to reveal its options (Figure 2):

1. “Adobe Default,” which is the behavior you’re accustomed to—Lightroom just applying its own Adobe Color profile to the RAW conversion

2. “Camera Settings,” which uses the same profile/style you indicated in-camera

3. “Preset,” which uses any Adobe- or user-created Develop preset, which you select in the fly-out menu

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Figure 2. Lightroom’s new Raw Defaults let you specify which demosaicing profile is automatically applied when importing images.

For the purpose mentioned above, you want the second option, “Camera Settings” (and be sure to check “Use defaults specific to camera model” for the most precise results). You don’t even need to tell Lightroom which profile to use—it reads the camera setting from the metadata and chooses the appropriate profile for you.

Consistent Black and White Workflow

This feature also comes into play when shooting in black and white with a digital camera, which is an effective strategy for dealing with night scenes that contain too many variations of color temperatures to reign them all in to one exposure (e.g, LED and sodium vapor lights in the same scene)—or for if you just like to work in monochrome.

When using a digital camera to shoot black and white images, we always recommend changing your camera’s picture style to a monochrome setting. This provides an LCD preview in black and white, which helps you visualize how the final image will look more effectively than if you were looking at a color preview.

The problem with this strategy was that Lightroom would still import the RAW file as a color image. You would then need to remember which files you intended to be black-and-white photographs and then change the settings accordingly.

However, now with this new Raw Defaults management, if you set the preference to “Camera Settings,” then images you shoot with an in-camera monochrome picture style will appear as monochrome in Lightroom (Figure 3).

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Figure 3. By setting the new Raw Defaults option to “Camera Settings,” images shot in-camera as black and white will now automatically have the corresponding monochrome profile applied on import.

3. Overriding Manufacturer Adjustments

This isn’t new functionality so much as a new interface. It’s also really the second part of the previous feature, but we have a completely separate use for it, so it gets its own heading.

In that same Presets tab in Preferences, below the Master setting, you’ll find the option to apply a specific profile based on which camera you’re importing image files from. Most photographers who use this feature do so because they have specific adjustments they like to make to files from specific types of cameras—for instance, always applying a little extra Vibrance to images from an old backup digital body.

But there’s another, similar use: Overriding the built-in processing adjustments that some manufacturers apply to files from some cameras.

For example: We love the Nikon Z 6, but one challenge is that the files come packaged with baked-in noise reduction settings for Lightroom that we find to be way too aggressive. (Figure 4. You can read more about this in our blog post “The Z 6 is the Best Camera for Night Photography.”)

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Figure 4. The aggressive default noise reduction settings packaged in the metadata of Nikon Z 6 files..

The good news is that Lightroom now allows you to more easily take control of this on import, by indicating a specific profile or preset from the same Preferences tab (Figure 5). Simply select the camera model, then select from the same options listed above. Now that profile/preset will be applied to any imported files originating from that type of camera. (You can also apply this setting to specific cameras by serial number, if you need to. For the record, most photographers don’t need to.)

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Figure 5. By applying a custom preset in this new interface, we can fix perceived problems with baked-in adjustments from camera manufacturers.

So, using this feature, we can tell Lightroom not to use Nikon’s baked-in noise reduction settings for Z 6 files, but rather to apply a custom preset with the noise reduction approach we deem more appropriate. Gabe likes his Z 6 noise reduction set between 10 and 30 for luminance and color noise, so he could perhaps create a preset for 10 each, apply that to all Z 6 images on import, then tweak each of those settings manually in the Detail panel of the Develop module.

4. Camera Support

Nearly every Lightroom update includes support for new cameras and lenses, and this month’s is no different. One notable addition has us pretty excited.

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Figure 6. The Nikon D780.

A few weeks ago we got our hands on a brand new Nikon D780 so we could test it for night photography. (Thank you to B&H Photo! See our review in the coming weeks.) Lance was working with the camera before and during our workshop in Death Valley National Park, but he couldn’t open the files in Lightroom. That was a big obstacle to testing, not to mention that it was an unfortunate fact for any early adopter of the camera.

Now? No problem. The new version of Lightroom (as well as Camera Raw) will open D780 files. (For the record, other companies make cameras too, and Lightroom does support them. Also new to Lightroom are the Canon EOS-1Dx Mark III and the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III, among others.)

5. Auto Sync is Less Dangerous

The Auto Sync feature is very powerful, as it was the easiest way to sync adjustments to multiple photos—such as when applying Dehaze to a few dozen starry-sky images before stacking them. But Auto Sync is also dangerous, because it’s easy to create havoc with. Why? Because it was easy to leave on by accident, leaving you unaware that you could be applying a series of changes to dozens, hundreds or thousands of images—or even, as I did once, to the whole catalog. The danger of this was so palpable that I’ve always hesitated to teach the feature on workshops.

Now Adobe has mitigated the risk with three simple tweaks to Lightroom’s interface:

1. When you activateAuto Sync, the button now changes appearance to a bright light gray that’s easy to see at the bottom of the Develop module.

2. When you hover the pointer over the Auto Sync button, a tool tip warns what will happen if you click it.

3. When you make an auto-synced adjustment, Lightroom now advises that you did so with a message such as “Contrast updated for 190,817 images.” (That’s not a joke. See Figure 7.)

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Figure 7. Auto Sync can be dangerous, but powerful. New features mitigate the former.

The software also gives you the ability to disable these new warnings in Preferences. Don’t disable them. Ever.

Wrapping Up

There you have it—five ways to work easier when post-processing night photos, courtesy of Adobe.

Which of these features are you most happy to see implemented? And what features and improvements do you hope to see next? Tell us what you think in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.

Note: Do you want to learn more about post-processing? Sign up for the waitlist for our Post-Processing Intensive workshop in San Francisco, or check out our tutoring services!

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT