Barry Pearson writes about Seven years of writing about Digital Negative Format and other tales of  the life and advantages of the DNG format:

When Adobe launched DNG on 27 September 2004, it was obvious to me that this was addressing a significant need. I knew from my career in helping to develop complicated multi-vendor computing systems that it is very important to structure a system into components linked by documented common interfaces.

I spent about 2 weeks examining the available documentation about DNG, including the specification, before concluding that it was a credible proposal. On 10 October 2004 I began to use DNG for all my raw images.

I had been reading and contributing to newsgroups for many years. Misleading and/or inaccurate statements about DNG began to be posted about 3 October 2004. (This has been a continuing trend all over the web).

I wasn’t that early an adopter, but almost. For me it was the release of Photoshop CS2 that made me switch to DNG, so that would make it April 2005, and high on my list were (and remain) a preference for embedded metadata over sidecars and for having an embedded preview. I still keep my raw files, somewhere, but isn’t it amazing that in 2012 a major camera company can release a professional camera without even offering as an option a publicly-documented raw file format?

Via the official Lightroom Journal

David Marx’s Professional-Grade Backup Plans is worth reading.

My one point of minor difference is that people spend too much time thinking about their backups, making sure everything is backed up – but don’t spend time ensuring they know how to use their backup software’s restore features.

Too often people only try to figure out how to restore data when they’ve just experienced a catastrophe. Do a dry run.

There’s been no change to LR’s handling of custom XMP since version 1 – I’d characterise it as “preserving” custom XMP data.

So LR does read the data from imported files and stores it in a database field. It never displays the information and it isn’t editable even through the SDK. But at least Lightroom doesn’t do any damage. When you save metadata back to the original files (sidecars or directly into the file) it does not overwrite any custom XMP it encounters, and it does write the custom XMP to any exported files.

It is possible to use a plug-in that calls an external library (exiftools) to read and write custom XMP. I have one working for myself, but I judged the area’s complexity and potential for damage to be so great that I’ve chosen not to develop it for wider use. I’d make far too many enemies!

Does the order of steps in the History panel make any difference to the end result?

The answer is an emphatic No. Lightroom edits do not build on one another – the current slider values in the right hand panel are all that matters.

If you don’t quite believe this, save the edits back to xmp and remove the image from the catalogue. Reimport it and there’ll be no History – but the image will look identical to before.

The History panel is more like a log of what you’ve done – an audit trail – and I’ve long thought Adobe could have used a different term, like “log”, to clearly distinguish it from Photoshop’s History feature, where the exact order of work does often matter.

Of course, it is not merely a log. One nice touch is when you’re in Before/After view (Y) you can drag history steps into the Before view.

What’s your workflow to Nik software?

If you own Lightroom and Photoshop, Photoshop “smart objects” are the best way to use Nik apps.

The workflow is easy. Do all your corrections in LR then select the image, right click and choose Edit In > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. Then in Photoshop select the smart object in the Layers Palette (F7), invoke Silver Efex, and afterwards save as a TIF.

Why is this?

• Send to Photoshop as a smart object avoids baking in the raw conversion adjustments
• Smart objects means the Silver Efex work remains editable as a smart filter
• TIF because non-proprietary and there’s nothing a PSD can do that a TIF can’t do just as well

Any downsides?

• File size is bigger – but why economize on space when extra drives are cheap?
• Cost – you need matching versions of Lightroom and Photoshop

Unless you’ve a good reason, I would always choose Open as Smart Object. Good reasons might be you’re running out of hard drive space, or you have an earlier version of Photoshop than your version of Lightroom.

OK, now why? I tend to assume there’s a fair chance you’ll want to fine tune the raw conversion at some stage in the future. For example, a new version of Camera Raw may have better noise reduction and you may want to rework the picture. Alternatively, you may have overlooked some dust spots and prefer to correct them at the raw level rather than with a retouching layer, or you might notice a lens aberration of some kind. Smart Objects let you do this.

Secondly smart objects allow you to adopt some very effective ways to work. For example, filters are applied as smart filters which unlike regular filters are non-destructive, so you can fine tune them long afterwards – so my workflow to Silver Efex is LR, Smart Object in Photoshop, then Silver Efex. Cropping or transform operations can be done non-destructively with smart objects too. If I do need to do some pixel level cloning, I’ll simply copy from the smart object layer into a regular pixel layer. So there’s no real downside.

It might, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I know “modal” is a loaded word in Mac-land, but these are “modules” and more akin to the workspaces you see in Photoshop than they are to nasty unMaclike modality. They’re dedicated to tasks like adjusting or organising, and help you focus on the task in hand rather than flipping between adjusting images and entering metadata. The key to getting over the modal hangup is to learn just a few keyboard shortcuts – E G D R Q W . There are lots more, but those combine important functions with moving between workspaces.

If you save metadata back to a DNG, doesn’t it mean that every time a change is made the whole large file needs to be backed up?

Not really. It obviously makes no sense to keep backing up big DNG files after every change, but that’s a straw man argument against the format. Instead you simply backup the DNGs upon their creation, and routinely backup your catalogue. If you were to hit a catastrophe, you can reconstruct the exact state of your work by restoring these virgin DNGs and your catalogue. Sidecars don’t contain all your Lightroom work.

Activate the Spot Healing brush and then in the toolbar below the image choose “Auto”. This means that when the cursor is over the image, the circles will display. When you move the cursor out of the image area, they won’t.

Lightroom’s Develop History panel is a log of all the work done on an image but it’s never written to xmp because:

• To hide it from prying eyes. If you send files to a client, the edit history can disclose your clever methods or your time-wasting incompetence to the client
• LR’s history data is of no use in any other existing application and xmp is as much about data interchange as it is about backup or moving work from A to B
• There’s also a desire not to bloat the sidecars with what is merely a log.

Had Adobe included history, there would have been loud demands to make it optional, perhaps on an individual image basis, and probably lots of other inconsistencies too. It’s really not worth the development effort.

QWhy should I use keywords and not folders for organization?
AOne problem here is what you mean by “organize” – use the word “categorize” or “group” instead.

Of course folders should be organized, in the sense of not being a mess, but it’s best think of folders purely in terms of ensuring the physical safekeeping of your pictures – best use of drive space, certainty of reliable backup, ease and certainty of restoring after a catastrophe.

Keywords and not folders should be used to categorize and group your pictures.

Q: Can I avoid using Lightroom’s backup routine and have my backup software do it?

A The answer is yes, you can, but….

• If you rely on backup software and target your actual Lightroom catalogue you are taking some risk that the catalogue may be open when the scheduled backup kicks in. There’s a faint chance and a long but obscure history of such backups being unusable.
• You also have to fiddle around with your backup software so it doesn’t include the potentially-huge but non-critical previews lrdata folders.
• Lightroom’s backup routine also includes a catalogue integrity check.

So it’s generally best to let Lightroom make its backups to another drive, and then point your backup software at this location.

There’s a funny bug in Lightroom on Windows when you try and select a folder or drive:

When I try to export a selection of images from LR using Specific Folder (or choose folder later) the only available location that shows up in the hierarchy is my Desktop. No other folders/drives are visible. I had this problem once before and managed to resolve it but don’t recall now what I did. I’ve tried shutting down LR and restarting. Rebooting the computer and restoring the default export presets. If I select Export as Catalogue, then my entire folder/drive hierarchy is visible. Using LR 3.5 on Win7 Pro 64.

It is usually triggered when a lot of files are on the Desktop, and you can try this. In the folder dialog, at the bottom you can type “D:” or whatever, and doing so once usually resolves the bug.

See this Adobe knowledge base article.

How do you copy adjustments from one image to others?

There are three main methods:

1. Select the image you’ve just corrected.
   1. PC: Ctrl Shift C / Mac: Cmd Shift C copies the settings
   2. Tick Check None
   3. Tick only the adjustments you want.
   4. Select other picture(s) and PC: Ctrl Shift V / Mac: Cmd Shift V.
2. In Library, grid (G). select the image you’ve just corrected and want to use to copy to the others. Add others to the selection (Shift click and/or Ctrl click) and notice how the first image’s frame is a lighter grey – it is the “most selected”. Now click the Sync Settings button (bottom right), select only those adjustments you want to copy, click Sync.
3. Auto Sync in Develop. Select 2 or more pictures. In Develop, click the Sync button’s switch so it shows Auto Sync. In this mode all adjustments you make will apply to all the images that are currently selected. Read that last sentence again. AutoSync’s both good and bad – good because it’s the fastest way to work, bad because you have to keep your head screwed on….

How do you manually type in multiple keywords so they are added to an existing keyword hierarchy rather than being concatenated into a new and unwanted keyword?   Is it some sort of delimiter character?

Use either the pipe “|” or the greater than “>” symbol, depending on which way round you want to type:

•  “|” would be in you want to enter GrandParent | Parent | Child
•  “>” would be in you want to enter Child > Parent > GrandParent

Back in the days of Lightroom 1.1, the B&W panel had a big defect – it disabled the Luminance noise slider – so Martin Evening and I (among others) recommended using the HSL panel. This meant setting all the colours’ Saturation values to -100% and then dragging the Luminance sliders, white balance, and other colour sliders.

This method was only ever a workaround to avoid noise – Adobe soon fixed the problem and made the HSL workaround obsolete. Yet people still use it, even recommend it.

Why you shouldn’t use it:

• Just because you’re using lots more sliders/panels doesn’t mean you’re actually doing something any better!

• It’s unhelpful in organising your work – Library records pictures treated with this HSL method as still being colour images, so you can’t use distinguish B&W from colour versions using either smart collections or the filter panel.

Nowadays the HSL method’s value in B&W is when you want to leave 1-2 colours in a mostly-B&W image.

What is the best way to make pictures black and white?

Go to the B&W panel in Develop’s right hand side and activate the targeted adjustment tool. That’s the little button at the top left of the B&W panel. It makes the cursor look like a pair of arrows which you can drag on the image itself. As you drag, LR moves the sliders for you.

Drag up and you lighten how that area appears in greyscale, downward darkens it. The important thing about this method is that it means you keep your eye on the picture’s changing appearance all the time you are adjusting it. That makes it much better than guessing which slider you should drag, and continually moving your eyes between the picture and the sliders. You inevitably produce a better black and white version, and faster too.

How do I move my images to a new hard drive?

In most cases, it’s actually quite simple:

Once you’ve added a new folder, the new drive shows up in Lightroom’s Folders panel

1. In your Lightroom catalogue, in the Folders panel’s header, click the + and choose Add Folder. You should see a dialog box headed “Choose or Create New Folder”.
2. Navigate to the new drive and click the New Folder button to add a new, empty folder. Select it and close the dialog box. The new folder and the new drive should now be shown in Lightroom’s Folders panel.
3. You can now simply drag folders from your existing hard drive and drop them onto the new drive.

Now, if I needed to move a large number of images – a complete migration from one drive to another – I might take extra steps. For instance, I would review my backup procedures and make sure that I could get back to where I am now if things did go wrong, put my images back where they were and restore the previous good version of the catalogue. I would also copy the folders via Explorer or Finder or using a file transfer utility that validates the migration, then right click the top level folders in Lightroom and choose Update Folder Location.

But in normal circumstances it’s a simple 1,2,3 exercise and all done in Lightroom without any of the voodoo methods that sometimes get recommended.

While Extensis is good at exporting all metadata, importing data into Lightroom is liable to be the problem. Lightroom has no built-in tool to import text data, though there is a plug-in called LRTransporter, and I have ListView.

Even with these plug-ins, you require a fair amount of skill and patience, and will have to deal with text file formats (encoding) and glitches caused by non-English characters. Also the metadata itself may have no corresponding place in Lightroom. For example, if you have a multiple value custom field in Extensis, what does that become in Lightroom? Lightroom doesn’t provide custom fields, so you’d be reliant on a plug-in, but even plug-in custom fields can’t have multiple value. So you’d probably want to make your Extensis multiple values into Lightroom keywords.

If you have JPEGs and TIFs, making Portfolio embed the metadata in the files may be the easiest approach for most folk. For custom fields, you might use Extensis’s excellent XMP mapping to point those fields to IPTC fields.

If you have raw files, PSDs, or other files where Extensis won’t embed metadata…. One route may be to make temporary JPEG and TIF copies of those files using Extensis – with the same metadata as the corresponding proprietary files (can’t remember if this can be done without scripting). Next you would import the real and the temporary files into Lightroom. You can then use my Syncomatic plug-in which copies metadata between files whose names match but whose extensions differ. So it would copy metadata from “1234_temp.tif” to “1234.psd” (it works on thousands of images at a time).

No. Leave existing stuff as it is – sort it out later when you find such things easy – and add keywords to these images.

New stuff, get it in a simple date based folder structure as described. Do include the date at the start of folder and filenames using a convention like YYYYMMDD. You won’t always be using LR and dates/text help, and this helps sort by shooting date and also helps ensure no originals ever have duplicate filenames. Also do include very broad “shoot” description – eg “Charlottetown”, but don’t waste time including in the file name anything that’s more image-specific like “Charlottetown bicycle”, “Charlottetown seals” etc. Instead put that time into keywords.