Author Archive

Where’s the beef?

Ars Technica reports Expression Media ripped out of Microsoft Expression Studio: Expression Media, Microsoft's digital asset management software for cataloging photos, video and music, will continue to be available as a standalone product but will no longer ship with Expression Studio, effective with the upcoming Expression Studio 3 release. Microsoft will continue to market Expression …read more

DPi and an announcement

Last week's DPI show was fun. Only doing one platform session a day, it was a lot less arduous than the three daily sessions I did at Focus, and it meant I spent my time doing Q&A on Lightroom and Photoshop. Working one to one, or with small groups, you're able to establish their needs …read more

Zipping Lightroom backup files

While Lightroom's backup files are self-standing catalogues, and can be run without any further fuss, they do take up a lot of disc space - until you realise how much they shrink when zipped. I've always zipped them because of this space issue, but another reason requires me to break a little confidence…. A while …read more

SlideShowPro 1.96

SlideShowPro's latest update is a bit more significant than most - it introduces a “Ken Burns” pan and zoom effect - so I'm downloading it right now. A Lightroom version of this is here now.

Search and replace – the very first release

The term Release Candidate reminds me as much of Ronnie Biggs‘ impending release from jail, but here is a Release Candidate of BeardyReplace, my Lightroom 2.3 plug-in designed for changing text in Metadata Panel fields. It does three things: 1. Searches and replaces metadata text 2. Appends text to metadata fields 3. Transfers text between …read more

Blur with Clarity

Maybe I’m unable to appreciate the subtleties he’s trying to express, but I was somewhat underwhelmed with both of Alain Briot’s essays on in-camera blurred landscapes (part 1 and part 2). Such images “need to rely both on color, placement of elements and use of shapes and lines to be successful”, “the type of light …read more

Thoughts on learning Lua

No, I’m not going to write any tutorials, but Sean suggested writing some thoughts on learning Lua for Lightroom…. Getting this far with Lua has been a real struggle. I am not a trained programmer like Jeffrey Friedl. I know no C, C++, Cocoa etc, so I don’t know if Lua is easy for people …read more

Lightroom Plug-in #1 – PseudoRatings

Imagine you want Lightroom to print contact sheets with the rating under each thumbnail, but you want them to be shown as stars. This can be handy when you're sending the contacts sheets to someone and want to point out which images you consider to be the best. Perhaps unbelievably, Lightroom won't do it out …read more

The bleeding war book

So often it takes a fresh pair of eyes to notice something. As I wrote here, I'm designing my Blurb book in InDesign rather than following BookSmart's canned layouts, meaning the recommended workflow is InDesign > PDF > Photoshop > PNGs > BookSmart. While I could set up a Configurator app to automate saving multiple …read more

Punch the sky – updates

Just a couple of updates to yesterday's presets - 4 punch graduated filter and ultra clarity.

Punch the sky

Regular readers of my Lightroom rantings will no doubt be aware that I’m not a big enthusiast for Develop presets, and I use them so rarely that I probably wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there (along with Quick Develop, the Tone Curve, Snapshots, and the Filter Panel). But to be fair, presets are an …read more

A brand new DAM

It was no secret that it was on the way, but my friend Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book has now been listed on Amazon US and Amazon UK. The original book was immediately unusual in its cover not being emblazoned with “Photoshop CS2” or focussing on the image processing side of the pixel mountain. Peter …read more

Pandora’s box – or InDesign to Blurb

There’s never one way to do something, and whether it’s climbing a hill or putting together a book, it usually makes sense to have a good look around before setting out. Initially I’m going to do a test book with the minimum number of pages and trying out things like colour images (eek) or double …read more

Derrick Story podcast

Derrick Story's latest podcast is Adobe Engineer Pops the Hood on CS4: Meet Winston Hendrickson, Sr. Director, Engineering, Digital Media, for Adobe. During this chat in a conference room at Adobe headquarters, Winston and I talk about what's happening under the hood for Bridge, ACR, and Photoshop. He explains lots of goodies such as, the …read more

SSP Director 1.3

I'd been holding off upgrading SlideShowPro Director until I had enough time to do so properly, but I was itching to try the smart albums included in version 1.3. Here I've set my new photos section so it's now calculated automatically. I always find that any “latest photos” section soon becomes static, or involves some …read more

It’s damp Up (Pacific) North West

Before the credit crunch washed away O'Reilly's Inside Lightroom blog, its content had only just benefited from a new wave of writers including Seattle-based Laura Shoe. Her Digital Daily Dose is a not quite daily blog on digital photography with some well-written posts on Lightroom such as snapshots and virtual copies, and on on my …read more

Grayscale killer, qu’est que c’est

I know, I've said before that I'm too English or middle-aged to appreciate words like “awesome” or “wow”. And I wouldn't normally mention Matt Kloskowski's latest Lightroom tip as it isn't new to me - but I do appreciate the rant: So here's an easy one that I've been using a lot lately (because I …read more

Speak wisely

Anyway, getting back to the post I'd intended to write, for a while I've been intending to do a book of my English Civil War pictures and thought it would be interesting to blog about the project. I actually mentioned it 18 months ago when the idea was to go through Lulu, but I soon …read more

3000 roundabouts in Birmingham, Warwickshire

Really enjoyed Focus on Imaging. Presenting was nerve-wracking, of course, and I really felt out of practice, but the most fun was being on the stand answering all sorts of questions, most common being what's new in CS4, should I upgrade to CS4 or get Lightroom, how's Lightroom different from Photoshop, why won't CS3 read …read more

Bottom fishing

Speaking of being opinionated, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear I’m more of a BBC or PBS kind of web site viewer. It’s a big turn-off if a site seems too commercial or its language sounds too “Yoof TV” for my taste. So its title alone has always made me feel that Matt Kloskowsky’s Lightroom …read more