Raw editing in Lightroom mobile

- Given their place in the market, Adobe was a little slow to get into the mobile thing. When the iPhone hit and then the iPad, and the proliferation of Android and tablets, Adobe, you know, the Photoshop people, should've been out there right away with some kind of Photoshop something, and they didn't really have any strong entries. That's all changed over the last 18 months or so. Adobe released Lightroom Mobile a while ago, and they've been slowly working it and getting it better and better, and it has become now, for me, a critical part of my mobile post production workflow.

Even better, it now supports Raw editing, which is huge if you want to go out in the field with a camera and a tablet and be able to work your actual real, Raw workflow without having to carry a computer around. As of the shooting of this video, Lightroom Mobile has hit the street, and I wanna talk very briefly about what you can do in terms of Raw editing here on an iPad or an iPhone. The same thing is gonna be true eventually in the Android versions of Lightroom Mobile. Those have not shipped as of the time of this shooting, but Adobe has been following up with identical feature sets.

So I have here my iPad, and it's got some images in Lightroom Mobile. These last four here at the bottom are actually Raw images, they're things that I got into the iPad. We'll talk in a minute about how I got them in there. If you look there in the upper left hand corner, you'll see this is image 36 of 38, and the file name, IMG_2661.CR2, so you Can shooters out there should recognize this as an actual, Raw file. As has always been the case in Lightroom Mobile, if I tap with two fingers on the image, I can turn on different pieces of data.

So I'm gonna get the histogram up here. This is using the same Raw converter that you find in Desktop Lightroom and regular camera Raw. This is not Raw conversion happening at the iOS level. I am running iOS 10, I'm sorry, iOS 9, which does not have Raw conversion built into the iOS. At the time of this shooting, iOS 10 public betas are out. Those do not have Raw converters in them either. Adobe has built the Raw converter into Lightroom, as well as all of the camera profiles, so I should get pretty much identical results here to what I would get working on my desktop computer.

This is an image that in older versions Camera Raw, I would have overexposed highlights. In this version, you can see from my histogram up there in the upper right hand corner that the highlights are not actually overblown. So I'm running the most modern, current version of Camera Raw, which is great. It's my favorite image editing software. As has been the case in Lightroom Mobile for a while, I hit the Edit button and I get all of my normal basic sliders that I would see in Lightroom when editing. So I'm gonna hit the Exposure slider here and pull my exposure down a little bit.

I'm gonna hit my blacks and get them into place. This has all the same type of editing that I would do on my desktop using the exact same tools, the exact same sliders. What I love about Lightroom and the latest Camera Raw is my ability to really control contrast in the lower quarter tones separately from contrast in the upper quarter tones. I get all those same controls here. It's just fantastic. Let me dial in a little bit of clarity. So of course, one of the things that is an advantage of shooting in Raw is that I get highlight recovery.

That's true in Lightroom Mobile. Another advantage is, of course, the ability to control white balance after shooting. So here's a gray card that I shot when I was in a particular location. Actually, I can show you the shot that I took was this. I knew that the light was a little weird, so I shot this shot of a gray card. I can go into Edit, hit my White Balance Tool, hit the selector, put the selector on top of the gray card, there's correct white balance. Now if I tap and hold on the image, I get Copy Settings, I say OK, I come to this image, tap and hold, paste settings, and copy that white balance from one to another, all non-destructive, and as should be the case with a white balance adjustment, I've got tremendous latitude for adjusting white balance, much more than I would if this was a JPEG image.

Of course, the white balance adjustment will still work on a JPEG image in Lightroom Mobile, but having it in Raw just gives me all that extra power because I'm doing it at the Raw level. This is working in a full, 16 bit color space, so I'm not losing any of the higher bit depth of my camera, as oppose to when I work with JPEG and everything gets crushed down to eight bit, so I get that advantage, also. Basically everything that I want from Raw editing is here in the iPad or iPhone, or Android device eventually, in Lightroom Mobile. This is great.

But how do I get Raw files into my tablet? That's the tricky bit here. Now it's not so tricky for Android users, because you've got an actual file system you can work with, the iPad doesn't unfortunately. So, I've been puzzling out how to do that, and I've come up with a solution that's working for me, but it's a bit of a drag, but it still works. These days, I'm mostly shooting with this Fuji X-T1, which has a WiFi capability. I can have the camera turn itself into a hot spot, and using a special app on my tablet or phone, I can transfer images from the camera directly into my device. So I was very excited to pull some Raw images over.

Unfortunately, the Fuji software will only let me transfer JPEGs. So I can do a conversion in camera from Raw to JPEG and transfer that JPEG over and edit it, and if I don't need highlight recovery, or white balance adjustment, or if I'm not gonna do a whole bunch of edits, and so one height bit depth, there's kind of nothing wrong with that, except that edits in Lightroom go via the cloud back to my computer at home, so when I get home, I just copy my images from my card onto my computer, and all of the edits for those images are already there.

So there's this great potential really cool workflow if I can just Raw images in here. Now, I can pull the JPEGs in here and edit them and have those edits go back home, but edits on a JPEG sometimes are a little bit different than they are in a Raw, so I would start to get nervous, and I wouldn't be able to sleep and that kind of thing 'cause I'd wonder if I need to redo the edits on my Raw file. So I'd really rather like to stay all Raw all the time. So transferring via WiFi isn't gonna work. I can of course transfer them to my computer and move them from my computer to here via any number of different mechanisms, but the point is I wanna travel just with my iPod so, I mean my iPad, so I don't have a computer with me.

I looked into an Eyefi card and found it to be very frustrating. In a lot of cases, I couldn't get the tablet to connect to the Eyefi card, at least not reliably enough to be useful, and I couldn't find that it was possible to transfer a Fuji Raw file using the Eyefi to here, so I took the Eyefi card back. An Eyefi card, for those of you who don't know, is a little SD card that has WiFi built into it, and so it's great if you're moving JPEGs around, and on some cameras if you want remote control and tethering and all that, that's very cool.

It's not working with my camera. So, I have gone to this. This is Apple's, it used to be called the Camera Connection Kit, now it's SD to Lightning Connector or something like that. You can see it's just an SD slot, so I can take the card out of my camera and stick it in here, and put it into my iPad. Again, you Android users are gonna have an easier time with this, 'cause you can simply copy files onto your device. So I'm afraid you're just gonna have to sit through this boring thing. You can scoff at us iOS people for having to jump through these hoops while you're watching.

I'm gonna plug this thing in, and when I do, it's going to immediately pop up the Photos app and it's going to be in this Import mode, and now we run into the next problem. It's very slow. Before I can do anything, it has to build all these thumbnails. So here's what I'm thinking about what I'm after here. I wanna travel light. I wanna travel with a camera and an iPad, and I'm going on a long trip. So I'm not ever going to delete anything from the card, because I don't have that much storage in the iPad and I want a backup.

So, every time I plug this in to download the day's images, I'm gonna have to sit and wait through this thumbnail building thing, which it's taking forever. This is a 32 gigabyte card. I'm not even through the first screen of images, and as you can see, this goes on for quite a while. Fortunately, I can start importing images before the thumbnails are done. The problem is I'm looking at blank thumbnails, so I don't know how many to import. So, this is where the Android people can start laughing at me, here is the workflow that I have come up with. Before I transfer, I come to the camera, and I count the number of images that I shot that day.

I plug the card in here, I scroll to the bottom of the list, and I count backwards that number of images, I tap them to select them, and I import those, and now I know I've got just the day's images. I keep them on the card. I have them in my iPad now. Tomorrow, I'll do the same thing. I'll count that day's images and import those and they'll come in. So it's kind of a dumb workflow, but it's the best one that I can come up with now, and it's actually not that big a hassle. It is working okay, and so I'm finding that this is a way that I can edit Raw here in my iPad.

Under iOS 10, the next version of the iPhone and iPad OS, I will have the ability to shoot Raw with my iPhone camera. The iPhone will give you, allegedly, I haven't seen this happening, but it will give you the ability to write a DNG file out rather than a JPEG, and those, in theory, will go straight into the Camera Roll, and Lightroom will be able to pull those in. So what's going on here is I'm not only getting Raw editing of my real camera's images, I'm gonna have Raw editing of my iPhone images.

I'm gonna have highlight recovery, white balance adjustment, and higher bit depth editing, all within my iPad, which I'm very excited about. So, that's something to look forward to in a future iOS. This is the start of the new mobile workflow that I have, the ability to edit Raw files. There's much more though that we're gonna look at in the future practicing photographer. I wanna show you how you can get all of this syncing automatically with your other devices and with your computer at home, so that you edit in one place and your edits go everywhere else, and your images come with you.

One last thing that I forgot to mention earlier, this device does now also work in the iPhone, which it did not before. The previous versions of the Camera Connection Kit were iPad only. This is now compatible with the iPhone, which means I actually could ditch the tablet and just travel with my iPhone and have full Raw editing capability. So Lightroom Mobile with this advance has really become, for me, a very powerful tool.