Author Archive
Outside
Lightroom v1.0 is finally announced. At $200 or under ?150 I feel the price is about right and am also pleased the licence isn't limited to one brand of computer (Tom Hogarty here). Already people are posting v1 tutorials - see the wonderful Adjustment Painter - and I thought of doing one or two, but …read more
With a little help from my friends
There's an interview with Lightroom's chief designer Mark Hamburg at Since1968.com: The volume problem really hit home in the fall of 2003 when I did my first shoot of nearly 500 images in one day. The things we?d been experimenting with like light table simulations just fell apart in the face of that sort of …read more
What’s he building? (Update)
I'm not overwhelmed by Lightroom's web gallery generation module - behind the scenes it's overcomplicated to customize, for instance to add a shopping cart link. But I was a bit overrun with work when Adobe Media Gallery was published and have only just got to look at it: Photoshop Elements and Lightroom ship with a …read more
And the gods made love
The other day I posted about being able to examine the Lightroom database using the open source SQLite Database Browser. Well, according to Fazal Majid, Aperture uses the same underlying database…. Find the Aperture library, right click it and select “Show package contents”. The application data seems to be a folder structure with a large …read more
Always look on the bright side of life
There's a new Lightroom podcast at George Jardine's iDisk (look for “1127 Podcast - Phil Clevenger and Mark Hamburg”) which initially focusses on the programs interface design. A little on the bland side - you'd hardly base a design on anything other than a “content is king” mantra - but it's interesting enough as it …read more
I can see clearly now
SQLite Database Browser is a browser utility for databases written in SQLite… such as Lightroom. Right now it's very basic, but it's a really easy way to open and examine Lightroom's tables, though I'd only use it if you're the sort of person who reads confirmation dialog boxes asking if you want to delete a …read more
All Tomorrow’s Parties
Lightroom Podcast 24 is definitely worth listening to. Three of the main guys behind Photoshop and Lightroom, Zelman Stern, Thomas Knoll and Mark Hamburg, discuss the development of Lightroom and ACR 4, and if you listen carefully you'll hear you a lot about what may well be in Lightroom version 1…. Find it at George …read more
Hung up
Inside Aperture blog contributor James Duncan Davidson writes on his own blog about Aperture vs Lightroom RAW Conversion: Does this mean that Aperture is off my system? Heck no. I'm not tossing 31,000+ images at Lightroom anytime soon. Aperture kicks Lightroom's butt at organization and management. And Aperture has done a great job with generating …read more
The Charge of the Light Brigade
So, the news is out about what iView is going to be called by “beauty makes us think better” Microsoft: Expression Media is a professional digital asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all of a creative professional?s digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation. Expression Media is due to be released in Spring …read more
Games people play
Maybe next week I’ll have a bit of time to try out Aperture, Apple’s Mac-limited raw processing and picture management program, but I enjoyed reading this thread Improving Aperture. Yes, it was me suggesting they make it run on PC, but wouldn’t that be an interesting response to Lightroom when it’s finally released?
I want to break free
Apple's Aperture may still be Mac-limited but with Lightroom looming Apple have decided to provide a 30 day trial. Now how hard was that? Anyway, now I've also got a Mac there's no excuse other than time pressure for trying it. Helpfully O'Reilly have launched an Inside Aperture blog with handy advice on spending another …read more
Wishin’ and hopin’
Michael Reichmann is brewing a storm in a teacup about Hasselblad's decision to make their latest body only take Hasselblad digital backs. It has sparked quite a fuss in the site's forum, and one poster ejaculates: It looks like they (Hasselblad) are simply trying to knock down the competition while locking in their customer base. …read more
The same old song
Lightroom beta 4 came out earlier this week - see Ian Lyons's notes. It has made great strides in what the raw converter can do, and features like Vibrance and Fill Light take the program well beyond Adobe Camera Raw. But if you're trying it, take a good hard look at what happens when you …read more
Don’t fence me in
OK, I am being mischievous by even suggesting Apple add to Aperture an “export to Lightroom” feature. And I wonder if anyone would ever find it worthwhile to map one metadata driven editor's XMP to another's sidecar format, or even one day use scripting to pass at least some data between Aperture and Lightroom. My …read more
Blinded by the Light
If you're into Lightroom, keep an eye on Sean McCormack's Lightroom blog.
Who are you?
I'm trying to come up with a name for programs like Lightroom, Aperture, LightZone and Capture NX that use instructions to process images. We've referred to programs like Photoshop as bitmap editors, but there's no agreed name for this new field. Peter Krogh has referred to the field “Metadata Imaging” and this seems snappy, but …read more
Purple haze
Added a group of photos to the History section. They are from a day I spent with American Civil War re-enactors back in October 2004. Some were already on the site, but I've given them all a new treatment using Lightroom. Apart from making them b&w and adding a purplish selenium tone, I also darkened …read more
Freedom
It's frustrating that the Lightroom beta only lets you work with one library, and that by default it's created in My Pictures. A quick workaround is to close Lightroom and cut and paste the library from My Pictures to wherever you want. Next time you open the program, it'll ask you where to find the …read more
All around the world
Isn't the Internet wonderful? Only a few minutes ago I posted about Marc's Rochkind's genius for revealing the Lightroom database structure. Add Christian Werner to the list - a minute after installing his SQLite ODBC driver I could examine the Lightroom tables in MS Access.
Visions of Angels
Marc Rochkind doesn't need his Wikipedia entry to show he's clearly a very smart guy. Not only is he developing ImageIngester, a sophisticated flash card downloader that backs up, verifies, adds metadata and logs the whole process, he's also figured out the Lightroom database structure: For your reading pleasure, here's the output of the SQLite3 …read more