Author Archive

Another gallery – Swiss re-enactors

Added another SSP for Lightroom-generated gallery of photos of Swiss Medieval re-enactors. Some of the shots were outdoors but those which worked best were taken in Chillon castle's great hall at lunchtime. The wonderful directional light, low December sun bouncing in off the lake, had immediately had me thinking of the Dutch painters of the …read more

New gallery

Getting my Flash-based site up and running is taking me more time than I'd hoped. Now there's a surprise. Actually, that's not quite fair - within about 3 or 4 days I had written something decent, but I am being a bit ambitious and would like to integrate this site's text-based content into the new …read more

Lightroom and the Camera Raw Cache

Lightroom 1.3's exploitation of the Camera Raw Cache is very new and I haven't had time to experiment or reflect on it, so for now I'll just point to this thread Lightroom 1.3 creates CameraRaw Cache and quote a couple of posts from Thomas Knoll: It speeds reopening files in the develop module. It speeds …read more

The lost post – more about stack types

Now what were the points I made yesterday? Well, this is an HDR image showing the Castelrigg stone circle near Keswick, Cumbria. Preparing it made me check how many frames I shot in the Lake District were intended for multiframe applications, in particular for HDR and panorama. The answer - 20% - was surprisingly high …read more

A month of lakes

Got back from the Lake District last night. I was staying in the village of Rosthwaite where my brother and his wife have bought a holiday house and it’s great to report that this little country still has places with no internet, no mobile phone coverage, and almost no radio reception. So nothing else to …read more

One or many Lightroom catalogues

[Updated January 2011] Lightroom makes it easy to create and work with more than one catalogue, and it’s making some people think that’s how they should work. It’s an idea that I’ve seen touted in blog posts and user-to-user forums, and I’ve been asked about it on too many occasions to mention. Unfortunately it wasn’t …read more

GPS data, raw files, and Lightroom

In Lightroom Journal, Adobe developer Eric Scouten shows a Mac-limited application that accesses a GPS device's log file and writes the metadata to raw files. That's a coincidence. I've had a Garmin Foretrex 101 for a month or two and had previously failed to get it to talk to my D200 (method here and using …read more

DNG from Aperture

Although some developers of raw converters might have you think otherwise, the DNG format isn't just for Adobe. Photographer and Aperture user Micah Walters has written a DNG Export Plugin for Aperture which uses the Adobe DNG Converter's command line interface to generate DNGs from raw file. Right now it creates a bare DNG with …read more

Cross, don’t cross

Scripting is on David Miller’s Lightroom 2 wishlist: …Photoshop, Illustrator, and others support a variety of scripting languages: JavaScript (supported on both Mac and Windows), AppleScript (only on the Mac), and Visual Basic (only on Windows). However, Lightroom follows a different path; its interface & application logic is built using an embedded programming language called …read more

SlideShowPro for Lightroom

News that the excellent SlideShowPro Flash gallery is coming to Lightroom: With that, there will be two versions of the plugin - a “complete” version that ships with everything a new customer (without Flash or SlideShowPro) needs, and an “incomplete” version designed for existing users of SlideShowPro. For the “incomplete” version, you simply publish a …read more

Lightroom v Aperture

John Nack reports a comparison of Lightroom and Aperture pro market shares: InfoTrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America to determine which software they used for raw file processing. Here's what folks reported: 66.5% using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in 23.6% using Lightroom 5.5% using Aperture To be fair to Aperture, it might …read more

Lightroom forums

With the continuing changeover problems at Adobe's Lightroom forum, there's an alternative at Lightroom Forums, set up by Ian Farlow aka ifonline. Most of the usual suspects have already turned up!

A bridge too far?

Martin Evening shows a few ways to make Bridge a front end for Lightroom. This includes using the favourites feature in Bridge and Lightroom's watched folder, and as he concludes: You can use Bridge as a preview browser to inspect folders before proceeding to import them. This can easily save you lots of time since …read more

Taming Apache

Installed Skype last week and coincidentally noticed my desktop PC's Apache installation was broken just when I wanted to test a malfunction Lightroom Flash web site. But by the time I connected the two events (I should have just switched off Skype's Port 80 access), it was too late and I had completely screwed up …read more

Clean keywords

At Lightroom Journal, the LR developers blog, Eric Scouten advocates a superficially-attractive way of misusing the keywords to help manage workflow: Before I start actually applying those keywords, however, I also create the extra keyword to track my keywording progress. I like to organize these under another keyword category I call “worklists”. (This is just …read more

A Lightroom upres preset (updated)

The original post caused a bit of confusion because I didn't mention it affected dimensions like 8.5″which are not whole numbers. I've italicised my extra text. In London it's the rule that you wait ages for your bus, and just as the rain stops they come along in pairs, or threes, one after the other. …read more

Metadata field lists

A badge of any “professional” program is that it is highly customizable. In my book that includes things like scripting, and any database-driven app simply must let the user save queries – again that should be there from day one. Software developers like Adobe can never anticipate the range of users’ needs, so they should …read more

Data migration

In my former life I did a lot of data migration, moving finance and other business information between old and new systems. Moving metadata between cataloguing systems isn't very much different and I've moved quite a number of photographers' metadata into iView (now Expression Media) using an Excel application as a bridge (from there it's …read more

Lightroom camera defaults

Ian Lyons has written a tutorial on changing Lightroom's camera defaults: Whilst I briefly mentioned the new “Set Develop Settings” command in my review of Lightroom 1.1 I didn't think it was necessary to go into detail. Little did I realise that some two months after 1.1 was launched that many Lightroom users would still …read more

Lightroom and multiple frame techniques

One of the best things about Photoshop CS3 is the improvements in stitching, and Lightroom’s product manager Tom Hogarty is one of those who is shooting more panoramas. Asked in this interview what he’d most like to see in 2.0, he says: That’s a good question. Let me think about that for a minute. For …read more