I take a lot of photos of events and programs at my church. Often flash is not appropriate. The low light in church brings problems of wide apertures and narrow depth of focus and slow shutter speeds can lead to blurred subjects. In addition, high ISO settings bring the risk of increased noise. The mixed lighting at church events also causes difficulties with white balance – which has not been helped by the new paint color schemes recently adopted by our decorating committee. My strategy for all these concerns is to shoot RAW and use Adobe Lightroom as my primary post-processing tool.
Lightroom imposes a logical work flow on my post processing. Equally important, modifications to the images are maintained as separate files. This keeps the original files from the camera intact. Lightroom imports my RAW files, quickly allows me to crop and straighten, provides a one-click white balance adjustment and has powerful exposure enhancement tools. It even permits red-eye removal and simple retouching. Even better, it works well with JPG files from Point & Shoot digital cameras and can often bring enhancements when those JPG settings were not the best. Lightroom is not a replacement for Photoshop but I am finding it quickly handles almost all the adjustments I need to make to the many 4 x 6 prints regularly displayed on our church notice board. Lightroom also has a legion of very clever supporters who have produced and distributed
excellent add-ons. Among these are user-friendly interfaces for web–based slide shows. Simpleviewer is one Flash viewer that is very user friendly and I’ve tried on our church web to document recent Christmas events. Others (check here) are HTML based and are equally easy to use. Best of all many of these add-ins are free.
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