# Photographic Paper



## aeiou (Jun 22, 2012)

Hi there!

I am working for ages with Lightroom and I use it as my main tool for developing photos. Nevertheless I have a last insecurity, so I wanted to ask the following...

I`ve learned photography the old-fashioned analogue way with film, developing and printing in the darkroom. In analogue photography every paper you would use had a certain contrast and treated the colors in a certain way.

When one learns to use Lightroom then the usual way to develop the pictures is by adjusting all the sliders in the Basic Development Menu (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, etc...) individually photo by photo. When I am working on series of pictures - as I do right now where I have to process around 600 pictures - I always have the problem that I feel insecure about adjusting all the sliders photo by photo individually, because all the "Highlights / Shadows / Whites / Blacks - sliders" (from now: HSWB-sliders) change the general contrast of each photo.

Question: to simulate the quality of photographic paper and to achieve a certain degree of visual consistency in the final series of pictures I am working with a preset and all I do is adjusting the exposure and Color Temperature sliders (because this is basically what happens in the darkroom when printing on photographic paper: one adjusts the exposure time and the color, but not the contrast). When some parts of the individual pictures are too dark or too bright I do not correct this by using the HSWB-sliders (that are changing the complete picture) but by using the adjustment brush.

Is this the right way to do it?

What is your workflow when adjusting a huge amount of pictures to achieve the highest amount of visual consistency?

Cheers, Aeiou

PS: Hope this is a good question, as I`ve never ever looked into some kind of manual. I started Photoshop from version 3 (NOT CS3) and Lightroom from version 1 and I even gave courses, but this is a point of uncertainty for me...


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## aeiou (Jun 22, 2012)

PPS: Another way that I used to apply was to make a preset utilizing "auto tone" and curves that define the contrast and color-quality; but I found this way to deliver too inconsistent results. For one the auto-tone-function is one off the weakest functions in Lightroom (it completely fails when the subject is photographed in the shadow against the sun or if the subject is standing in front of a bright background, for example a window) and on the other side I could not achieve a visual consistency, so I`d have to re-adjust the HSWB-sliders individually photo-by-photo which is a very time-consuming process...


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 22, 2012)

Hi aeiou, welcome to the forum!  I do use all of the available sliders, but I also use the secondary window and locked loupe to keep a 'reference' photo on screen, and then skim back through them in Grid view once I've finished.  I've found any inconsistency usually stands out at that point.


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