Lightroom, Mobile, Nexus

In which I re­port on us­ing the Nexus 5X in RAW mod­e, with the help of Adobe Light­room, and on work­flows for mo­bile pho­togs. With il­lus­tra­tions from Vancouver’s Light­house Park.

Back­grounder on RAW · (Skip to the next sec­tion if you know all this stuff.) A “RAW” pic­ture is sup­posed to be a bit-for-bit re­pro­duc­tion of ex­act­ly what the sen­sor in your cam­era saw. RAW pic­tures usu­al­ly take up lots of mem­o­ry, and do­ing a good job of pre­sent­ing them on your screen of­ten re­quires in­side knowl­edge of the quirks of the cam­era and its sen­sor. There are a bunch of dif­fer­ent RAW for­mat­s, but the in­dus­try seems to be con­verg­ing on DNG, which is pro­pri­etary but still rea­son­ably open and ap­par­ent­ly tech­ni­cal­ly sound.

The im­ages you see on your screen are most­ly not RAW, but JPEG or PNG for­mat, the re­sult of tak­ing the RAW bits and pro­duc­ing a com­pressed, color-corrected, stan­dard­ized for­mat that’s easy for soft­ware to dis­play.

Back in the day, dig­i­tal cam­eras pro­duced on­ly JPEGs; any­thing se­ri­ous, these days, al­so pro­duces RAW. Un­til very re­cent­ly, phone-cams were all-JPEG-all-the-time.

The rea­son pho­tog­ra­phers like to work with RAW pix is that they con­tain lots more in­for­ma­tion, so there’s a lot more scope for cor­rect­ing col­or or ex­po­sure prob­lem­s.

Fi­nal­ly, there is no good rea­son why the per­fect­ly good English word “raw” needs to be ren­dered as RAW, it just is. I was ar­gu­ing this on Twit­ter with David Heine­meier Hans­son and he sug­gest­ed that the caps made it look like an acronym so they’d feel com­fy in sen­tences with oth­er acronyms like JPG and GIF and so on.

Mo­bile RAW is a thing · Let me show you; here’s a shot to­ward Bowen Is­land, the way the bits came out of the cam­er­a; then, as tweaked via Adobe Light­room.

The biggest virtue of RAW is ex­act­ly this kind of thing: Pulling out bits of the pho­to that are over-exposed and under-exposed, be­fore they get com­pressed away in­to the JPEG. Here’s an­oth­er:

To be fair, the 5X’s im­ages don’t have the im­mense data-richness that the Fu­ji cameras’ do, with oceans of rich de­tail hid­ing in the shad­ows and glare, beg­ging to be pulled out. But I’m pret­ty sure that if I’d been in JPEG-only land, I would have just delet­ed both these pho­to­s.

Work­flow 1: RAW cap­ture · First, you have to con­vince your cam­era to take pix in RAW. The last cou­ple of re­leas­es of An­droid have in­clud­ed the API you need, and there are a bunch of cam­era apps on Google Play that sup­port this.

It turns out that one of them is a cam­era app that’s un­ob­tru­sive­ly em­bed­ded in the An­droid Light­room app. So that’s what I used here. It’s an OK cam­er­a; I wouldn’t say the er­gonomics are dra­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter than the one that comes with An­droid, but it does have a lit­tle but­ton with “RAW” writ­ten on it. It has nice tilt/lev­el ad­just­men­t. In these pic­tures I ba­si­cal­ly took all the de­fault­s.

Work­flow 2: Edit on the phone? · That Light­room app can ed­it pho­tos as well as take them. The idea is, you’ve tak­en a shot and you’re burn­ing up to In­sta­gram it, but some dork pho­to­bombed his self­ie stick in­to the top left cor­ner, so you need to tidy first.

That pic­ture came out quite OK; giv­en enough light, the 5X has an ap­petite for de­tail. I’ve to­tal­ly got out of the color-correction habit while shoot­ing Fu­ji be­cause the X-cams just get it right. The 5X pix of­ten need help; but Light­room is good at help­ing.

Since I on­ly do light edit­ing on the phone, I don’t have an in-depth opin­ion about the Light­room ed­i­tor vs the one Google ship­s. But Lightroom’s can han­dle RAW pho­to­s, which is what I most­ly plan to be tak­ing.

Work­flow  —  Networking stuff · Up un­til now, I’d set up DropBox to auto-upload pho­tos on WiFi, then I have a lit­tle script that copies them in­to a handy non-DropBox di­rec­to­ry for easy im­port to Light­room. Works just fine, if you don’t mind typ­ing a shell com­mand.

When I in­stalled the Lightroom-mobile ap­p, I no­ticed that it had an op­tion for adding pho­tos to Light­room, so I turned that on.

When I got back from the park, I wait­ed a few min­utes for the phone to up­load, then went look­ing for the pho­to­s. Took me the longest time to find them; the Light­room “Filmstrip” thingie across the bot­tom has a black tool­bar where you can se­lect fold­ers and things, and one of the things you can se­lect is “All Synced Photographs”. That’s them.

You can drag them from there to any oth­er fold­er, but then they’re still in “All Synced”. And if you ed­it them, then go back to the ver­sion on your phone, that ver­sion is edit­ed too. I guess that’s cool if you want to show off your pix on your phone. It al­so mean­s, I sup­pose, that they’re re­al­ly in Adobe’s “Creative Cloud”. Now I’m wor­ried, be­cause the Nexus 5X RAW files are 25M apiece  —  remember to turn that “Sync on­ly on WiFi” op­tion  —  and I ap­par­ent­ly I have a mere 20G of space there.

But wait  —  when I fol­low Adobe’s in­struc­tions, they seem to be telling me that I have ze­ro bytes in the cloud. So I’m kind of baf­fled.

Its still not ob­vi­ous to me whether I’m go­ing to be hap­pi­er with the Adobe or DropBox work­flows.

But like I said above, mo­bile RAW pic­tures are to­tal­ly a thing.

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