When we teach students a lot of emphasis is put on getting it right in the camera. There should be little that needs to be done to a properly shot image. That said, there are very few photographs to would not benefit from a tiny bit of the manipulation I write about below.

I am 70 years old so when it comes to photography I have seen a lot over the years. When it came to image processing I had my own darkroom and manipulated images via burning and dodging and in some cases cropping. That is also where I draw the line with digital. I will only go as far digitally as I was able to do in a wet darkroom. The exception to that could be a white balance adjustment and sharpening because of the nature of digital images losing up sharpness because of anti aliasing filters in the front of sensors.

If there were “clouds” in the image you wrote about and they needed to be enhanced through a program like Nik Viveza 2, or Nik Silver efex pro 2 or both, I consider that the same as manipulating in a darkroom. But to add clouds or anything else for that matter is in my opinion not photography.

There is a very fine line. I have heard and I quote “but that is the way I saw it, but the camera gave me something different”. “So I altered the image the way I saw it.” So where does the line get crossed. For me, it is as I wrote above. It goes no further than what I could have done in a darkroom which consists of paper type, chemistry type, burning and dodging tools, film type that was used and chemistry used for that film. All of those things can be done to a certain degree in a program like Lightroom 4.4.

Even worse than adding clouds, which was wrong, are photo journalists today altering the meaning of a photograph adding or taking out people or things or changing the look of the location to make the image say things that were not real. Many photo journalists in the past few years have been caught with their pants down and taken to task because of their image additions or subtractions.

Elliot Stern

I can find out what is around the corner or over the next sand dune or even venture to one of the islands in the area if I choose. I just hope gas price continue to fall.

Our next Lightroom class is April 28 in Sterling, VA. Other dates will be announced shortly. However, the class will also be held in Charlottesville on Friday, November 9. This class is sponsored by the Chalottesville Camera Club and is currently open only to members of the Club. (Please contact Pat for more information and the registration URL or send me an e-mail at brian@blueridgeworkshops.com.)

As to your questions regarding Lightroom 4, I think it would be fine to load it on your computer. However, as noted in the post, update the application as soon as an update becomes available. (Given that Adobe has admitted to these issues-something software vendors are loath to do, I expect that we will see a update shortly.) After you install Lightroom 4, you will have two choices: (1) create a new catalog or (2) upgrade the Lightroom 3 catalog. What you do depends, I believe, on your workflow.

You indicated that this will be your “on the road” computer. As such, I suspect that this computer will not be the final resting place for your images. In other words, the plan appears to be that, when on the road, you will download and edit images on the laptop and then, when you return home, transfer them to a desktop computer. (This is my workflow as well.) If this is the case, I would recommend starting with a new catalog on the laptop. This will give you a clean starting point, uncluttered by previous images.

If, on the other hand, you already have Lightroom 3 and images that were processed in Lightroom 3 on the computer, I would recommend upgrading the Lightroom 3 catalog to Lightroom 4. You really don’t want to make using your images more difficult by having to go to two different programs to catalog and edit them. What you gain by starting with a clean catalog would be wiped out by the unnecessary complication of using two versions of the same program. Also, if you are using Lightroom 4 on the laptop, I would recommend using Lightroom 4 on the desktop. (You are allowed to install Lightroom on a desktop and laptop as long as only one copy will be used at a time.)

Despite the issues found by Adobe and as I noted in my first post about Lightroom 4, I still think it is a good upgrade. The tone adjustment tools are alone worth the upgrade and, being a nature photographer, I really like the map module.

I hope this helps.