wolfe with an e's blog
Chapter 16: What the heck is Lightroom for iPad doing?
The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.
A big problem is that software gets updated, but the Internet doesn’t. There’s a lot of content out there about older versions of software that’s no longer correct and near impossible to weed through. And while the intent of Google AI is to eliminate this, at times it just makes it worse: Often there is no trusted source to go to.
Information about Lightroom for iPad is one such victim. How does it handle images imported from Photos or directly from your camera roll? Why is Lightroom auto-enhancing DNG files? And why do images look different than those imported to iPad Photos? After some experimentation, I think I have some actual answers.
- Conversion of RAW files will look different in Lightroom than in Photos. Each app has its own RAW converter. Which looks better? It comes down to preference. I find I like most conversions in Lightroom better: They have smoother grays. But images shot in lower-contrast scenes can look more snapping through Photos’ converter. For the most part this doesn’t matter since it’s expected that you’ll be editing either image anyway.
- Lightroom is likely not auto-enhancing images. It’s taking the data from the RAW file and converting it in Lightroom. So even if the file has been run through RAW converters and edited in Photos, Lightroom is going back to the original RAW data and converting the file with Lightroom’s converter. When you first open the image in Lightroom for iPad’s editor you’ll see the preview JPEG for a second and then see the converted image. The next time you open it, you’ll just see the converted image.
- JPEGS exported from RAW in Lightroom can look different. This is likely because the image in Lightroom has many more shades of gray than the 256 in a JPEG. So images converted to JPEG for social media may not look the same. And for that matter, RAW images sent from Lightroom directly to a social media may be using the original JPEG preview image or doing their own conversion to JPEG before posting.
I hope that clears up some of the confusion.
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Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom