As the old saying goes, everything old is new again. In the world of photography, I’m all for this trend. The days of “the film look” are coming back in full force as photographers are making their digital images take on the look of film.

Before and after I added some subtle grain to my beautiful friends and wedding clients.

One of the best ways to do this is with grain. You see, film is organic. Film has a bit of roughness about it that gives it some personality. I’m all for the high ISO power of my modern digital cameras, but many photographers feel that we’ve lossed some of the grittiness that has made photography so powerful.

Enter the grain slider. You’ll find it in the Develop module, in the effects pane. With it, we can add back just a little bit of the film magic lost in the digital era. On the grain slider, there are three factors that we can change to add the grain: amount, size, and roughness.

You’ll find the grain option in the Develop module in the “effects” pane on the right side of Lightroom 4.

This is one of the many parts of Lightroom that you just have to play with to get a solid feel for. There are certain “visual effects” that are hard to describe. Here are the three factors that we can tweak with the grain option:

1. Amount – this is pretty straightforward – how much grain do you want to add to your photo?
2. Size – how big are the “pieces” of grain you’re looking to add? Grain can be very fine and small, or can be rather large in nature. One thing I have noticed is that
3. Roughness – this is the part that I probably can explain the best; in the film days, most films had some degree of grain, but each had its own personality. High ISO films like ISO 1600 had “rougher grain” than the ISO 400 counterpart. Pushing this slider toward the 100 end is a closer simulation of the rough grain of high ISO films.

One huge tip here: work at 100% zoom for most of these tweaks. If you don’t, you risk really overdoing it with the effect. Although I love adding a little grain to my photos, I would definitely caution you to work slowly with this effect. It’s fun to dive in and add more and more with the grain slider, but make sure and do it all in moderation.

Ever tried grain? What do you think of the results? Make sure and let me know what you think in the comments.

Lightroom has come so far from its early days. Each version has so much to add, and truly makes every upgrade worth the price. What’s the future for Lightroom? It’s hard to imagine, just because Lightroom 4 was so good, but here are four ideas I kick around on a daily basis.

True iPad Integration

Like this… only not so stretched. 🙂

There’s nothing I want more than the ability to work in Lightroom from my iPad on the go. How great would it be to kill time while on car rides culling your photos? Adobe has hinted that some type of integration is coming, but we’re yet to see it. Imagine how good our images would look on that new Retina screen, too. It doesn’t have to be a full edition of Lightroom – just enough to get work done away from the computer.

Let’s Get Spotty

One of the areas that Lightroom has grown the most in the last couple of editions is the ways that we can apply retouching options in small areas. These spot retouching options are one way

I would love to see Adobe bring the paintbrush over from Lightroom, and really beef up the ability fix things on a pixel level basis. This is really the only reason I still use Photoshop, and I want to completely break away from having to boot up Photoshop.

Network Support

Lightroom still doesn’t support opening catalogs on network drives. I’m not sure why.

Faster, Please

Adobe, I love you and most of your products. But I have to admit: you’re getting bad about bloat. Lightroom is probably the least bloated app, but I do think that LR4 is slower than LR3. I don’t have any data to show that, but it feels that way to me. Make sure you make Lightroom snappier and quicker than ever.

How about you?

What do you want to see in Lightroom 5? The comments are open for this – keep it friendly toward the fine people at Adobe. 😀

I have a confession everyone: I once hated Lightroom.

Actually, “avoided” is probably a much more appropriate term. It was installed on my hard drive for probably a full year before I started using it. It was just too complicated. At the same time, it also didn’t allow me to make the really precise adjustments that Photoshop was providing for me.

I had to face the facts. I was going to have to learn Lightroom. I was a busy wedding photographer with thousands of images to manage every weekend during wedding season, plus doing the editing for plenty of other photogs. I was slowing down in delivering images and that was hurting my business. Adobe Lightroom was the solution to this. With it, I cut my editing times to a fraction of the time and got everything back on track.

I had to face the facts. I was going to have to learn Lightroom.

Managing thousands of photos required me to learn to love Lightroom.

I’ve known so many users who have taken one look at Lightroom and ran away. Sure, the program has a lot of different parts. It’s a lot to learn at first. The key to learning to love Lightroom is to resist being overwhelmed. Learn the parts that you need to learn.

A lot of users and Lightroom users that I coach are missing the forest for the trees. The purpose of Lightroom is to solve your digital workflow issues. You don’t have to use every part of the entire program in order to tame your photo library.

Photos disorganized and out of whack? Master the library module. Need the absolute best editing tools? Venture into the Develop module. Want to put together web galleries for clients? Visit the web module.

Don’t let the selection of modules overwhelm you. Learn and utilize one at a time.

Another reason that people will avoid Lightroom is that they don’t feel like it can replace Photoshop. As we’ve learned, the Develop module plus its Adjustment panel is plenty powerful for most users.

You have to jump in and commit to using Lightroom, to building and managing a catalog and learning the ins and outs. The learning curve might be a bit steep at first, but it flattens out to just using Lightroom logic in no time. I wouldn’t advocate using it so strongly if I hadn’t seen so many users have their workflow transformed.

Are you a longtime Lightroom user? Was it love at first sight or did it take time? Make sure and let me know what’s holding you back if you’re not jumping in.