Author Archive

My not quite famous enough 5 – #4

I'm not that keen on Lightroom 2's new Filter Panel, as I said here. When I do use it, it's usually because I want to temporarily filter the visible items down by key such as rating or sometimes by masters or virtual copies - ie by one of the old Lightroom 1.4 filters. Display the …read more

Lightroom web galleries from the ground up

One reason why I still use iView rather than switching completely to Lightroom is because I prefer its HTML web gallery templates. iView takes about a third of Lightroom's time to output a big contact sheet style web gallery of say 100-300 pictures because it uses my DNG files' embedded previews, while Lightroom seems to …read more

Plug-ins (Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy)

It's easy to see real positives in Aperture's announcement of plug-in architecture. Taking advantage of existing third party tools can quickly flesh out its features, while positioning it at the centre of a viable “ecosystem”. Meanwhile third party developers can be working on fully-integrated solutions. On the other hand, it's a long way short of …read more

My not quite famous enough 5 – #3

The third feature in this little list is something which I won't swear is new, but which if it was there in version 1 is something I never noticed and can't get working now - autocomplete drop down lists. Previously Lightroom remembered whatever you'd entered in the Metadata panel, and would then autocomplete your entry …read more

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom – update

OK, I tried it out. After my little joke about Ahmedinejad and his centrifuges, I should say that this little toy didn't work 100% properly first time…. The Lightroom side of it worked perfectly, and the plug-in also created a new album (a grouping of pictures) on my server, but it didn't send the payload …read more

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom

While the existing SlideShowPro for Lightroom generates individual web galleries, when your site consists of multiple galleries you have to do some manual editing of xml files which (a) not everyone can do (b) is still manual work for those who can do it. It's much more efficient to power a site with an online …read more

My Hot 5 – #1

I've never used the word “cool” in the American sense. I remember hearing it as a teenager, but then 1976 and punk reached Bolton and swept away all such hippy Americanisms along with all the rock dinosaurs (for some reason it's always Rush who spring to mind) we'd previously admired as the height of musical …read more

5 new ways to while away the summer

A not altogether random selection of blogs: John Paul Caponigro now has a blog and mentions he has written 3 new artist's statements this summer alone (each a classic of its type). Interestingly, he has also used Blurb for a new book of photos and had a good experience. Interesting as I've been also looking …read more

Smart collections for controlling your workflow

When you have a library of many thousands of pictures, querying or searching is clearly a very important feature. And you’ve got to be able to save those search criteria – after all, each time you narrow down your catalogue to find certain pictures, it’s a fair bet that you may want to find the …read more

Choice cuts

A few other Lightroom links… Product manager Tom Hogarty writes about what’s really a plug-in and how so-called plug-ins (Aperture’s and others) are really external editors. Tom and marketing manager Frederick Johnson are interviewed about LR2 in this new O’Reilly podcast, and Adobe Camera Raw engineer Eric Chan writes about the Adobe profiles. The whole …read more

Stripping while exporting from Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl has released a set of Lightroom 2 export plug-ins including one feature which really caught my eye - his “Metadata Wrangler” which: allows you to strip selected metadata components from images as they are exported. You can use it, for example, to remove the embedded thumbnail and any Lightroom “develop” metadata, while retaining …read more

Five for Three

Somewhere in one of the “Lightroom 2 Is Out” articles I saw a list of 5 features someone would most like to see in Lightroom 3, and so got thinking about the next 5 steps I would want. In my view, Develop now needs incremental progress rather than a bunch of new features as big …read more

AutoSync, Gradient Presets, and wet haddock

Yes, I do throw up my hands in despair every time I read some Lightroom user saying he has hundreds of Develop Presets. It’s the same personality type who will trumpet the hundreds of Velvia-effect Photoshop actions he’s collected, who’ll leap for his wallet every time another newly-released plug-in promises black and white conversion just …read more

On target

Lightroom 2's out, and there are comprehensive lists of its new features at Lightroom Team Journal, by Victoria Bampton, and Ian Lyons. Here, like I did after Lightroom 1, I'm going to stay away from the detail of how features work and focus on the whys and what fors, and on best practice. I'm going …read more

New stuff

Just refreshed the site with a few new pictures - the new gallery is again all new stuff, as it should be, while the wedding gallery includes newer work as well as some old favourites. Both galleries are Flash-based and use the excellent SlideShowPro. I'm using the SSP for Lightroom web engine purely to generate …read more

A true story

I was going to reply to Sean's comments on filenaming conventions in this Lightroom forum thread: Nothing wrong with using yymmdd-camera sequence, lots of people do. I generally just use Custom Name_YYMMDD_3 dig Seq (or 4 for larger shoots) It's not a pedantic point either - I'll assume his “generally” using a filenaming convention was …read more

Result

Had a surprising couple of days. Imagine you go along to a trade show, and just wander up to see if you knew anyone on the Adobe stand - a gentle bit of networking, nothing more. You ask why they're showing Lightroom 1 rather than 2's public beta, but apparently they weren't even showing version …read more

What’s the buzz?

For years they've been saying web-based office applications like word processing and spreadsheets are not far from becoming mainstream. Since they own Flash, Adobe look in a pretty good position to make this reality and the bundling together in Acrobat.com looks like an interesting effort. You've got Buzzword, a Web-based word processor, ConnectNow conferencing for …read more

Print Lightroom ratings as stars

It's always been an irritant that while Lightroom makes it easy to print contact sheets, it can only print the rating as a numeral, not as stars. My own use of the DNG format means I go over to iView and can print adjusted thumbnails with starred ratings, but that's no use if you keep …read more

Aperture versus Lightroom

Ian Wood ( here too) has written an interesting and lengthy Aperture versus Lightroom 2 beta comparison. He admits “Obviously I'm pretty biased towards Aperture (contributing to an Aperture blog, writing Aperture-related software, top-rated poster on the Apple discussion forum, posting on pretty well every Aperture-related forum on the net etc.), but I like to …read more