Author Archive
Managing panoramas
Here’s a quick tip for managing panorama frames. My own long-term practice has been to assign the green label to originals which are intended to be the component frames of panoramas, HDR, or other multi-frame techniques.I also stack them. I do this as soon as possible after importing the files from the card. The risk …read more
Solo Mode
What: Right click one of the section headers, such as “Publish Services” in Library’s left panel Tick “Solo Mode” You need to do this to each panel in each module What happens When you click on one section’s header, that section opens and the others close Why: It really cuts down on the scrolling up …read more
How to make Flash galleries show more than 500 pictures?
You need to modify the Flash template. This is at Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.x\Shared\webengines\default_flash.lrwebengine Mac: Applications\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom [version]\Shared\webengines\default_flash.lrwebengine Copy that lrwebengine to Windows: C:\Users[user]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\LightroomWeb Galleries Mac: [user]\Library\Application Support\Adobe\LightroomWeb Galleries Open the file galleryInfo.lrweb in a text editor. Notepad is fine on Windows, or TextEdit on Mac where you may need to right …read more
How do you enable Auto Sync in Library?
AutoSync mode in Library means that metadata changes apply to all the selected images, and is normally enabled by clicking a switch in the right panel (F8). But what if that switch isn’t visible? It took me a while to figure this out, but the switch is only visible when you are in Loupe view …read more
Why are colours different in Flash galleries
It’s because the Flash gallery’s SWF (the Flash file) isn’t colour managed. Flash does now support colour management. But the SWF would have to be ActionScript3 (the version in Lightroom is AS2) You also have to consider what the person viewing your site is using. Assuming the visitor isn’t using a Flash-hobbled device like an …read more
Anyone using speech recognition with Lightroom?
Speech recognition seems to have been the coming technology since I don’t know when – I seem to recall seeing DragonDictate in the late 90s – but it is one of those technologies that never seems to have arrived as a first-class way of entering information into a computer or getting it to do what …read more
Emailing from Lightroom
Here’s a quick summary of how to email files from Lightroom: The built-in way is to export files as JPEGs to your hard drive, then attach the to an email. Neat, eh? 1990s retro computing enthusiasts line right up! To email files directly from Lightroom, see Andréas Saudemon’s Mac-limited export plug-in Send By Mail Plug-in …read more
MediaPro1
Last year PhaseOne finally acquired – “liberated” may be a better word – Expression Media from Microsoft and gave it back its old name, MediaPro. I say “finally” because they had tried to add the original iView MediaPro cataloguing program to their CaptureOne raw conversion products back in 2006, and also because in those five …read more
List View – new Lightroom plug-in
It’s been bubbling away for a while, and some people saw it late last year, but in the next few days I’ll be releasing a new plug-in – List View. It does exactly what the name suggests and provides a list view which some of us feel is sorely missed in Lightroom’s Library. After all, …read more
A perfect shot – in the foot?
No matter how much the Lightroom ethos is about designing a program for photographers from the ground up, there are still those atavistic folk who want to do things just as they suppose they’ve always done them. So every so often you’ll get people wanting Undo to be Alt-Ctrl-Z because it’s how Photoshop has always …read more
Blurb plug-in for Bookify
I’ll admit that I hadn’t even heard of Blurb’s Bookify and when I read their announcement of a Lightroom 3 to Bookify Plug-In I wasn’t particularly interested. Just another dumbed-down online service? Instead what I focussed on was the closing comment: … very soon, we’ll be bringing you more exciting ways to use Lightroom and …read more
Dropbox for catalogues, presets and preferences
One promising approach is to use Mac aliases or Windows symbolic links (a bit like shortcuts). So for example, you would keep the catalogue itself in a Dropbox folder, but use aliases or symbolic links to store the catalogue’s previews separately in a folder that doesn’t get synchronised. When you move to the other computer, your catalogue will be available as soon as Dropbox’s sync operation has completed, just having to rebuild its previews which are stored locally. As always, the originals could be on a network address.
Not the first time either
Although mainly a PC user, I also have a Mac laptop and do like its AppleScript and Automator scripting/automation features. I’ve little doubt that if I only used Mac I would quickly find various ways of saving myself time – maybe enough to outweigh the time spent on the learning curve. Yet I’ve always been …read more
Silver Efex Pro 2
I’ve never been one who photographs in colour and occasionally dabbles with black and white. It’s very much the other way round, and I often look at pictures I’ve left in colour and think they’re rather monochrome anyway. But I’ve never seen doing a lot of b&w work as a reason why I would want …read more
Complex File Renaming – using Search & Replace
Replacing text in filenames is a common need and for example Adobe Bridge’s renaming dialog box does it with its “string substitution” option. But this capability has never been available in Lightroom. I suspect it is as simple as Bridge’s “string substitution” only introduced during Lightroom’s early days and it was overlooked when batch rename was designed. And sadly, this omission has never been rectified, even 13 years after I started whining to Adobe about it….
Lightroom – finding all images shot at a certain time of the year
Recently I’ve seen a number of Lightroom users asking how they could find all images shot at a certain time of the year. Now, if you have your head screwed on you would have included seasons in your keywords. For instance, an image of snow might include “winter” in the keywords (unless you live at …read more
Pick flags in Lightroom
I was just helping out a newcomer to Lightroom with how to use the pick flags and the P U X shortcuts. As a reminder, I came up with this little panel end mark. Memorable enough? The file should go in the Panel End Marks folder which you can find by right clicking in the …read more
Google StreetView inside Lightroom
That’s exactly what you see here! It’s actually a Google maps gallery with images displayed as thumbnails on the map. They’re clickable and reveal larger images with captions, and you can also switch to StreetView inside Lightroom’s Web or in the browser . This is just a working proof of concept, but by the end …read more
And the point is….
See this interesting article by Michael Frye on Setting the White Point in Lightroom: A Comparison: Since I advocate using the Point Curve in Lightroom to set a white point and black point, I sometimes get asked about the difference between doing this with the point curve, and doing it with the Blacks and Exposure …read more
B&W from different angles
There’s an interesting comparison of doing black and white in Capture One 6, Silver Efex 1, and Lightroom 3 by Mike at The Intuitive Lens. It’s a two parter with Capture One vs Silver Efex and then both vs Lightroom. I’m not sure it proves much, if anything, other than one if one tries to …read more