Author Archive

You either get it or you don’t

Barry Pearson writes about Seven years of writing about Digital Negative Format and other tales of  the life and advantages of the DNG format: When Adobe launched DNG on 27 September 2004, it was obvious to me that this was addressing a significant need. I knew from my career in helping to develop complicated multi-vendor computing systems that …read more

A minor contradiction

David Marx’s Professional-Grade Backup Plans is worth reading. My one point of minor difference is that people spend too much time thinking about their backups, making sure everything is backed up – but don’t spend time ensuring they know how to use their backup software’s restore features. Too often people only try to figure out …read more

How does Lightroom handle custom XMP?

There’s been no change to LR’s handling of custom XMP since version 1 – I’d characterise it as “preserving” custom XMP data. So LR does read the data from imported files and stores it in a database field. It never displays the information and it isn’t editable even through the SDK. But at least Lightroom …read more

Does History matter?

Does the order of steps in the History panel make any difference to the end result? The answer is an emphatic No. Lightroom edits do not build on one another – the current slider values in the right hand panel are all that matters. If you don’t quite believe this, save the edits back to …read more

What’s your workflow to Nik software?

What’s your workflow to Nik software? If you own Lightroom and Photoshop, Photoshop “smart objects” are the best way to use Nik apps. The workflow is easy. Do all your corrections in LR then select the image, right click and choose Edit In > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. Then in Photoshop select the …read more

“Edit in” or “Open as Smart Object” in Photoshop?

Unless you’ve a good reason, I would always choose Open as Smart Object. Good reasons might be you’re running out of hard drive space, or you have an earlier version of Photoshop than your version of Lightroom. OK, now why? I tend to assume there’s a fair chance you’ll want to fine tune the raw …read more

Will Lightroom ever get away from this modal hangup?

It might, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I know “modal” is a loaded word in Mac-land, but these are “modules” and more akin to the workspaces you see in Photoshop than they are to nasty unMaclike modality. They’re dedicated to tasks like adjusting or organising, and help you focus on the task in hand …read more

Doesn’t DNG mean my backups will be huge?

If you save metadata back to a DNG, doesn’t it mean that every time a change is made the whole large file needs to be backed up? Not really. It obviously makes no sense to keep backing up big DNG files after every change, but that’s a straw man argument against the format. Instead you …read more

How should I set up the Spot healing brush?

Activate the Spot Healing brush and then in the toolbar below the image choose “Auto”. This means that when the cursor is over the image, the circles will display. When you move the cursor out of the image area, they won’t.

Why isn’t history in the xmp metadata?

Lightroom’s Develop History panel is a log of all the work done on an image but it’s never written to xmp because: To hide it from prying eyes. If you send files to a client, the edit history can disclose your clever methods or your time-wasting incompetence to the client LR’s history data is of …read more

Why should I use keywords and not folders for organization?

QWhy should I use keywords and not folders for organization? AOne problem here is what you mean by “organize” – use the word “categorize” or “group” instead. Of course folders should be organized, in the sense of not being a mess, but it’s best think of folders purely in terms of ensuring the physical safekeeping …read more

Avoiding Lightroom’s backup?

Q: Can I avoid using Lightroom’s backup routine and have my backup software do it? A The answer is yes, you can, but…. If you rely on backup software and target your actual Lightroom catalogue you are taking some risk that the catalogue may be open when the scheduled backup kicks in. There’s a faint …read more

Limited locations for import, export, backup

There’s a funny bug in Lightroom on Windows when you try and select a folder or drive: When I try to export a selection of images from LR using Specific Folder (or choose folder later) the only available location that shows up in the hierarchy is my Desktop. No other folders/drives are visible. I had …read more

How do you copy adjustments from one image to others?

How do you copy adjustments from one image to others? There are three main methods: Select the image you’ve just corrected. PC: Ctrl Shift C / Mac: Cmd Shift C copies the settings Tick Check None Tick only the adjustments you want. Select other picture(s) and PC: Ctrl Shift V / Mac: Cmd Shift V. …read more

What are the delimiters for typing in hierarchical keywords?

How do you manually type in multiple keywords so they are added to an existing keyword hierarchy rather than being concatenated into a new and unwanted keyword?   Is it some sort of delimiter character? Use either the pipe “|” or the greater than “>” symbol, depending on which way round you want to type:  “|” …read more

Why not convert to B&W using the HSL panel?

Back in the days of Lightroom 1.1, the B&W panel had a big defect – it disabled the Luminance noise slider – so Martin Evening and I (among others) recommended using the HSL panel. This meant setting all the colours’ Saturation values to -100% and then dragging the Luminance sliders, white balance, and other colour …read more

What’s the best way to convert to B&W?

What is the best way to make pictures black and white? Go to the B&W panel in Develop’s right hand side and activate the targeted adjustment tool. That’s the little button at the top left of the B&W panel. It makes the cursor look like a pair of arrows which you can drag on the …read more

How do I move my images to a new hard drive?

How do I move my images to a new hard drive? In most cases, it’s actually quite simple: In your Lightroom catalogue, in the Folders panel’s header, click the + and choose Add Folder. You should see a dialog box headed “Choose or Create New Folder”. Navigate to the new drive and click the New …read more

How do I migrate from Extensis Portfolio to Lightroom?

While Extensis is good at exporting all metadata, importing data into Lightroom is liable to be the problem. Lightroom has no built-in tool to import text data, though there is a plug-in called LRTransporter, and I have ListView. Even with these plug-ins, you require a fair amount of skill and patience, and will have to …read more

My Lightroom catalogue is in a mess. Should I start from scratch?

No. Leave existing stuff as it is – sort it out later when you find such things easy – and add keywords to these images. New stuff, get it in a simple date based folder structure as described. Do include the date at the start of folder and filenames using a convention like YYYYMMDD. You …read more