Author Archive
So you think Flash is safe?
Just as a lot of photographers think they have to go Mac, a lot think their web site has to be Flash-based because it stops people stealing their pictures. “Stops”, of course, has always been an exaggeration - someone could always do a screenshot or scavenge through the browser's cache folder. Flash only makes saving …read more
Lightroom’s library
Managing Photos in the Library Module of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 is an entire chapter from Martin Evening's Lightroom 2 book, introducing Library's features and how to use them.
Firefox and Lightroom
Here's a nice little touch for finding help on Lightroom matters with Firefox. Go to a topic in Adobe's Lightroom Community Help and up pops a little message asking if you want to add it to your search engines. Update - if you don't want all that corporate trade marking, you can edit the search …read more
The grass is always greener?
Rob Boyer's All Things Photography blog includes Aperture tips and has also ventured into the dangerous waters of direct Aperture versus Lightroom comparisons. While overall Rob's about as fair and balanced in advocating Aperture as I am in preferring Lightroom, some judgements fall in Lightroom's favour. For instance, see his comparison of Aperture and Lightroom …read more
Unplugged
Launching a Flash site has always been a background project – it’s not as if I’m unhappy with the current site – and it’s pretty easy to find a reason to keep it in the garage and keep tinkering away. Learning ActionScript3 was the latest reason for such delay, but I’ve convinced myself it was …read more
If you’re looking for reasons to use Bridge….
Let's say you have a bunch of raw files adjusted with Adobe Camera Raw, and you want to make a load of JPEGs. It's not a novel nor a difficult task - Lightroom's export function is designed for the job, or if you're using Bridge you might reach for the Image Processor which runs the …read more
Trojan horses
Not long ago I almost linked to Micah Walter's Inside Aperture article Seeing RED. He's now doing more video and is having problems managing the new file types: What would save my day would be Aperture. If only Aperture supported AVCHD (and many of the other tapeless formats) I could import my AVCHD card just …read more
A Lightroom podcast
A quick pointer to Image Doctors podcast for November 13th which is on Lightroom 2.0 and is essentially a 45 minute interview with Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's Product Manager. You can see one of the presenter's Yosemite pictures here - most aren't as artificial-looking as this one though.
ProShow and Lightroom
I've had ProShow Producer for a year and intended to use it to prepare a multimedia slide show of a wedding I recently shot at Cliveden. And just in the nick of time, there's now a ProShow Plug-in for Lightroom. It's another export plug-in - these things are beginning to pile up, aren't they? As …read more
CS4 File Info panels
One annoyance of Photoshop/Bridge CS4 is that it won't read any existing custom File Info panels. These let File Info display XMP metadata from other applications such as iView or Expression Media, and they were written in a text file format which was reasonably easy to create and edit. In CS4 though, the panels are …read more
Percentage shares
Tom Hogarty updates the what pros use for raw file conversion comparison. Both Lightroom and Aperture increase their share, Lightroom leaping 50% on 2007 and Aperture a respectable 36%. Among Mac users only, Aperture’s share is static though, indicating the overall increase is due to people shifting to the Mac. Of course, using one of …read more
Why iView, still?
I was asked recently for a few reasons why I still use Expression Media (I still call it iView) rather than depending entirely on Lightroom, so in descending order, here goes: By far the biggest reason is to manage in a single place all files related to photographic projects. For me, like very many photographers, …read more
Metadata from Lightroom to InDesign
I recently saw a wedding book some friends had created using Photobox. They wouldn’t claim to be computer-savvy, but they’d done a great job and were able to give copies to close family. It should be just that easy, shouldn’t it, and I am more than a little frustrated that Lightroom still doesn’t have a …read more
Strange (and missing) words
Over at the McCreate site (which first adorned the web as Aperture Professional Users Network, soon dropped the word “Professional”, and then dropped the rest) John Omvik does a lengthy comparison of Aperture 2.1 vs Lightroom 2.0 – Different Approaches to Local Image Corrections: So Which Method is Best? Both methods offer advantages and disadvantages …read more
A couple of Lightroom pointers
Lightroom 2 lets you send a panorama's component frames directly to Photoshop, but they're sent full size. Unless you really want a massive full size stitch, that slows down Photoshop's panorama processing. Instead, Martin Evening has done a video showing a method which gets round this. Initially Lightroom sends the files to Photoshop as layers …read more
Borrowdale Fell Run
Although Sunday’s annual Borrowdale Shepherd’s Meet had been cancelled, I knew the fell run was still happening. A book I’d been given last Christmas contained Patrick Ward‘s great wide-angle photo of the nearby Wasdale fell run, and I wanted to exploit the combination of the D700 and my 17-35mm f2.8 lens in a similar way. …read more
A rant about hierarchical keywords
It’s not specifically a Lightroom thing, and I say the same about Aperture and Expression Media 2. And I admit that I am a bit out on a limb here in holding these opinions….. But I find hierarchical keywords to be an utter pain, and simply not worth the effort. It doesn’t matter how much …read more
Mileage varies
Ben Long reviews Silver Efex Pro and correctly points out one of its best features The Black and White adjustment in Photoshop is very good because it allows you to make changes to specific color values in your image. The problem is that if you tell it to darken the blue tones in an image, …read more
Lightroom architecture
One of the Lightroom developers, Troy Gaul, has put online the slides from a presentation he did on Lightroom's architecture. It has odd nuggets of info - for me the mention of a possible IDE written in Lua was most interesting. So if you're writing scripts or web engines, there's the promise of a debugging …read more
Patrick Lavoie
I'm not really into navel-gazing descriptions of workflow, or into fashion photography, but here's a pointer to Patrick Lavoie's thorough description of Digital Photography Workflow: Fashion Photography: As a professional photo retoucher and digi-tech (digital assistant), my job is fairly simple yet stressful during a photo shoot. My job is to make sure everything is …read more