CNET’s Lightroom 3 review includes some interesting comments from Tom Hogarty, Adobe’s product manager

The time was not yet ripe for Adobe to add face recognition into Lightroom, Hogarty said. “There’s a lot of interest in that area, especially as more consumer-grade applications such as Photoshop Elements have added facial recognition. I think the bar is higher for pro-level applications,” where misidentified faces are more of a problem and where integration with a photographer’s work flow must be handled more carefully. “It’s obviously of interest to photographers and of great utility, we just want to make sure it’s going to be a professional-grade solution.”

Geotagging is “a heavily requested feature,” he added. “Each (Lightroom development) cycle is fraught with difficult tradeoff decisions. Performance and image quality needed to come first in this cycle, especially given that (GPS support) is still not native functionality in cameras at this point in terms of collecting information.”

Yes, I know the post’s title is well over the top, but the Lightroom team isn’t as big as it should be, and the noise reduction and lens corrections are huge steps forward. And one way you can read Adobe’s strategy is that Lightroom 3’s improvements – such as better image quality, higher ISO performance, and above all lens corrections – hold great value to all segments of photographers, not just a few.

Had LR3 introduced geotagging, some of us would have been delighted- but I can think of one friend who only photographs in about a dozen, well known indoor locations and has absolutely no need for such a feature. Face recognition would be similar – of interest to some segments, but utterly useless for the wildlife snapper – and bewildering for my friend with his quarter of a million pictures in Lightroom. And you know, I’d have no hesitation in extending the same argument to soft proofing too.

One of the less obvious changes between the beta and Lightroom 3 is the inclusion of the “IPTC Extensions“,the extra metadata fields agreed last year (specification here – PDF). Great to see Adobe’s keeping up with publicly-agreed standards rather than doing what the competitor does and pretending they don’t exist!

Some of the fields could prove immediately useful, so for instance the Person Shown (which is where Aperture should have written some of its Faces data) can be used right away. You won’t need to pollute your keywords with the names of your nearest and dearest. However, the new panel does highlight a problem of the standard creating duplicate fields – in this case the British newsreader Katie Derham is a well known person, so her name would also belong as a keyword. In the case of the location fields, these will often be the same as the traditional IPTC locations. Given that it’ll take years for search engines and other programs to start using the Extensions, you may decide that putting much effort into them is overkill.

It may help if some of this duplicate data entry can be automated, and I’m on the verge of making my Search Replace Transfer plug-in available for purchase. The licensing code is finally integrated and it should be just a matter of days. Initially, the plug-in will not write to the IPTC Extension fields, but that shouldn’t take long to add. It’s a firm plan.

The trouble with prolonged public betas like Lightroom 3’s is that it’s harder to make a big splash when the time comes to announce the real thing. People become used to a big leap in image quality and take it for granted. They know they can now manage the videos their camera takes, and start asking why they can’t manage any file types they want. They know that when they go back to a folder, they’ll see all the images that should be there and start moaning about the bizarre ways they used to hide their images and forget they’re there. And even if the public beta doesn’t contain lens distortion correction – a feature as revolutionary in raw converters as dust spotting once was – they hear announcements that it’s on its way and have seen the elegance of the implementation in Photoshop. Is anyone going on about the point tone curve now? When it finally hits the shelves, there’s a bit of “apart from x, y, z… what have the Romans ever done for us?”

There are alternatives. You could always try to leave your customers in such dispiriting darkness that the next release’s real impact is to prevent any but the blindly-loyal from jumping ship. Another strategy is for a drunken developer to leave the new product in a bar, then call the local police to kick down doors in the middle of the night. By comparison, and in these tough times, isn’t a low key launch a touch more dignified?

I’m not a big user of stacking features in any software – it’s a good way to hide pictures and never see them again – and in Lightroom there’s a further reasons I avoid them: applying metadata.

If images are stacked and the stack in closed, when you add some metadata it only applies to the image that’s on the top of the stack. That’s both right and wrong – right in the sense that you might not want all the frames to share the same star rating, but wrong in that iterations of the same scene or subject should normally have identical descriptive metadata. The result is that to make sure they all have the same keywords, for instance, you have to expand the stack, select all the items, apply the metadata, then close the stack. If that’s the price, I’d rather not bother with stacking.

Lightroom 3 Beta introduces a nice little trick though. You know the little stacking badge at the top left of the stack thumbnail which reads 3 if there are 3 items in the stack? Well, if you double click this badge the stack expands  and all its component images are selected. Nice, huh?

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When I set up my Mac laptop, I remember they tried to get me to set up a .Mac account, what’s now called MobileMe. My first reaction – you’ve just taken my money and you’re trying to tie me up even more – certainly wasn’t meant as positively as Max Mosley might have uttered it, and my disinclination to lock myself into one company’s products and services has not grown any stronger with time – despite the laptop having been a good buy. So when an Aperture preference asks me to set up a MobileMe account, I’m immediately looking for the Cancel button. Not remotely interested.

Which is a long way of saying – I’ve not tried “Export to MobileMe Gallery” myself. But one Lightroom user I mentioned it to did try it and told me it was great, so it might interest you if you use Lightroom and are one of the millions (?) who do have MobileMe accounts. It’s by Vladimir Vinogradsky, one of the quieter or semi-detached members of the Lightroom plug-in developing community, and it apparently allows you to send images from Lightroom directly to MobileMe from your Mac – or Windows PC.

I’ve said before that I intend to introduce paid versions of my plug-ins, especially Search Replace Transfer which finds and replaces metadata text, and Open Directly which sends the selected files to other programs such as Nikon Capture NX. It’s just taken much longer than I’d hoped.

Rather than half-bake my own licensing mechanism, I’ll be using the Photographers Toolbox method which includes code written by Jeffrey Friedl. Unfortunately, Jeffrey’s far cleverer than me (he understands regex) and so my attempts to shoehorn his code into mine have only been successful in breaking my plug-ins. Rather like the reborn Buddhist golfer says, that’s almost certainly my fault and I take full responsibility, but I am about to have another real crack at figuring it all out.

As part of my own rehab process, I had been resisting the temptation (mixed with self-inflicted pain) of starting any new plug-ins until I have integrated the licensing code into those two plug-ins. I had hoped to force myself to sort things out before moving on. But I have just changed tack and instead I’m going to test the waters by adding licensing to the brand new, less complex plug-in which makes its first appearance here.

Syncomatic copies metadata between files whose names match, but which are of different file types. It’s one I’ve meant to write for a while, reproducing a tool that was handy in iView, but I finally got round to it after a client ran into some problems.

She had a large number of raw files in Lightroom and had then sent TIFs to her external retoucher. She then, before the TIFs came back, added a lot more metadata to the raw files and the challenge was to update the corresponding TIFs. That’s what Syncomatic does. Whenever there are matching pairs of files, it copies metadata from one file type to the other which you choose, so another usage example might be where you have pairs of raw and JPEG files and want their metadata to be synchronised.

While I hope there are clever features in the code, Syncomatic is more straightforward than my other plug-ins – if for no other reason than being created with more Lua experience in my locker. So this week I am going to get the licensing working with it, and other plug-ins should follow.

Incidentally, Syncomatic will be LR3 only.

Some of the thinking behind Lightroom 3's grain effect is revealed in this 2008 article by Eric Chan, one of the top guys in Adobe's Camera Raw team Ten Tips for Better Prints

The digital printing process requires resampling an image from its original resolution to a printer's own resolution. This resampling process can produce visible artifacts such as blocky edges and areas that appear unnaturally smooth and flat. These artifacts become more noticeable as the image is enlarged, especially with really big blowups. Adding noise breaks up these artifacts and provides the illusion of a more natural, detailed appearance, even though no real detail has been added.

In other words, don't just think of grain as a way to simulate HP5 or TMax. Speaking of which - and you know how much I love my presets - look out towards of next week for some b&w presets I'll be unleashing on an unsuspecting world. Code name Gekko.

After a spurt of premature announcements from dpReview (not their fault) and Adobe's own TV, there is indeed a Lightroom 3 Beta 2. See Tom Hogarty for the official announcement.

The product's appeal has been broadened by including support for tethering and for the management of video files. But for me the beef of this release is image quality, where the new demosaicing and luminance noise reduction really come together. In some ways that's a difficult strategy. After all, some demand shiny bells and whistles for their upgrade cash, don't they? Significantly better image quality is much less quantifiable, a percentage improvement, and a lot less tangible. Yet it should hold huge enormous appeal for photographers….

So I'd particularly urge you to take some high ISO images through the now-enabled luminance noise reduction. I've put some ISO 12500 images through it (a friend's Nikon D3s) and the days of needing the excellent NoiseWare must be numbered. Hogarty says:

Lightroom 3 beta 2 introduces a much more complete solution that includes an outstanding luminance noise reduction control and we're excited to hear your thoughts on the improvements. Open the metadata filter in the Library module to filter down to your high ISO shots and let us know if the combination of Luminance and Color noise reduction provide you with the quality you want. In general the new processing technology should really bring out the best in your raw files. The details and textures will be crisper and somewhat more naturally rendered. We are now applying minimal noise suppression in the new demosaic method compared to earlier versions like Lightroom 2.6.

The new luminance noise sliders are disabled if you are using Process Version 2003, the old Adobe Camera Raw treatment. To use them, you need to switch to Process Version 2010 - click the warning triangle. In my view, the improvement is so dependable that I am simply updating all photographs in my test catalogue. In fact, it's so dependable that I'm not really convinced users needed the option to retain the old settings - if that's a need, they could just keep LR2 installed and go back to their LR2 catalogue. But that's a small quibble.

I'll be posting some of my own thoughts on Aperture 3 soon, maybe tomorrow. But I just noticed David Riecks has some issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata and I recommend you read his article very carefully indeed:

Apple has made some significant changes to how Aperture handles metadata with this latest release. However, the ways in which this has been done should be of great concern to professional photographers that work with other programs, or hand off their metadata-rich files to others who need to be able to access the full range of that information.

You shouldn't be concerned if you use Aperture 3 on your own Mac, don't typically use embedded metadata, and don't share your images with others, or work with other programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Even if you do use metadata to describe your images, and only need to find them on your local computer, you should be fine.

You should be concerned if you use Aperture to write metadata to files you use with other programs, share with others or share on the Internet. For example if you do additional work in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then archive your images using other programs, you need to understand what is happening, or risk having some or all of your metadata disappear.

Good DAM practices aren't just about only ever using any one program, or placing all your trust in one company, even Apple.

Mark Wilson has just released a Lightroom plug-in Nature Data LR which, at first glance, is about adding to your Library a group of nature-related custom fields:

The fields provide a formal and structured approach to organising your images of natural subjects such as birds and mammals.
The plug-in adds a new metadata panel to the library module, a new dialog to manage the additonal data and an export action to add the data to keywords on exported images.
The plug-in also allows you to create dynamic collections of your photos based on families of species.

I wonder if there's a parallel with geotagging software. What I mean is that I usually can't be bothered to attach my GPS device to my camera, but I'm happy enough dragging the images onto a map when I get home. Equally, if I did get into shooting wildlife, I'd need some help recognising species, something like a dialog displaying whatever characteristics might distinguish a bit-titted wotsit from a striped wotsit, or a male from a female. Maybe that could be pulled from some online reference source, or each creature's record might have hyperlinks?

But wait, there's something else worth noticing:

Naturdata LR makes use of Phil Harvey's excellent ExifTool.

In other words, it's a plug-in with custom metadata and an export feature. This is the aspect of this plug-in that I find particularly intriguing. For one thing it's reassuring that someone other than Jeffrey Friedl has got Exiftool and Lightroom working together - and I hope it shames me into playing with this. But more interesting is what he's doing with it - taking his custom fields and writing them as keywords through the export dialog. As I've written before, just because a program provides hierarchical keywords, it doesn't mean you have to use them, even for something as hierarchical as species..

Terry White shows how to shoot tethered into Lightroom. It’s not perfect, not by a long means, but far from difficult. Wish I could think of a better pun though – conVince Cable?

If you’ve ever used iView or Extensis Portfolio, or many other non-Adobe programs, you will have learnt long ago that Photoshop’s Maximize Compatibility dialog box did exactly what it said on the tin – it maximised the PSD or TIF file’s compatibility with other programs.

Failing to choose this setting would save disc space at the cost of making other programs struggle to display the PSD or TIF file. Short term gain, long term pain?

Photoshop Product Manager Tom Hogarty explains that LR woud be more than doubled in size if it were to support these files

This is as true of Lightroom as it is of third party programs, and after all, Adobe engineers have far better things to do than cater for self-inflicted pain.

If you see the dialog box in Photoshop, go into Preferences and enable Maximize Compatibility.

For existing files, you could write an action which resaves files as TIFFs. Ideally save the action as a droplet – this  would make it very easy to process lots of files.

Over at Lightroom forums someone asked what people think are the 10 strongest points of Lightroom? While my initial reaction was a Keanesque “you've got eyes, haven't you, what do you think?”, it's actually not a bad question and nicely follows up my post from the other day. After all, for all the moaning about things I don't think are right, I do use Lightroom for positive reasons.

So in descending order, my ten favourites:

1. Adjusting and managing raw files in a single program - we easily forget how radical Aperture was….
2. Bringing together in one place pictures from multiple drives, whether they're online or offline
3. Auto Sync mode for adjusting multiple images simultaneously
4. Targeted adjustment tool for black and white, and for colour correction - elegant
5. Local adjustment brush and gradient tool - beautifully done
6. Smart Collections - could do much better though
7. How collections quietly store the last Print, Web or Slideshow settings applied to them
8. Print - though not Web, not Slideshow
9. Use of templates for saving frequently-used settings
10. Keyboard shortcuts

There's a apocryphal story that you can be waiting forever for a London bus, probably while it's raining, and just as you've given up and started walking home, two or three will turn up at once. Well at the end of a very enjoyable evening at Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society, someone asked me about Lightroom keywords and Alamy's requirements. It's a good question, somewhat off the beaten track, but I had come across the problem before. But then this morning my publisher forwarded an email asking exactly the same thing:

The problem I have is that when I assign keywords to my image files, Lightroom rearranges them from the priority order I put them in, to alphabetical order, which is useless. Alamy stock library wants the keywords in order of relevance otherwise images will not get noticed however good they are. ie. flower, yellow, daisy, chain. In alphabetical order your image would come up in a search for “chain daisy” which could be a very different image to a daisy flower - if you see what I mean!

I'd be pleased if anyone corrects me, but as far as I know there is no decent answer. Lightroom will write the keywords into the export file in alphabetical order, and there's no built-in way to change this. With a plug-in, I think it would be possible to use a custom field to record keywords in order of relevance, and then write them to the files upon export. Even then, it won't be as slick as other export plug-ins because I hear Alamy don't accept FTP, and I suspect that partly explains why no-one has come up with a solution. But you never know - one may turn up.

Update - thanks Nic for pointing out Jim Keir's Alamy plug-in.

It was interesting to read Scott Kelby’s 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users and I was surprised to see how many of his points would also be on my list. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are good, though 9 and 10 are very questionable. That article was actually inspired by recent Aperture refugee Scott Bourne’s post 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell Every New Lightroom User which was really more of a list of learning resources.

As I was preparing a “Lightroom not Photoshop” talk this evening for Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society, I thought a top 10 would be a useful exercise for me too. So…. hello, I’m Scott – well, actually John – and here are 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell A Slightly Less New Lightroom User:

1. 1. Until you know what you’re doing, use a single catalogue. And even then, think twice – remember that more than one catalogue means breaking up control of your picture collection. Three additional thoughts come out of this. Tens of thousands of pictures is not a lot in database terms. Secondly, optimise your catalogue regularly but remember Lightroom stresses the parts of your computer system that other programs don’t reach and something other than the number of pictures could be to blame for any slowdowns. Lastly, don’t worry about having all your eggs in one basket – that’s why you backup your catalogue and your images.
   2. Unless you really know what you’re doing, never use Explorer or Finder for moving or renaming files that are catalogued in Lightroom. Apart from affecting your image backup/recovery plan, moving files in Explorer or Finder is a bit like the local bookstore’s overnight cleaners getting high and spending their time moving books to different shelves. How would you, or Lightroom, know where anything is? Ignore this warning and you’ll be spending a lot of time telling Lightroom where you’ve moved your files. On the other hand, it will be a good learning experience.
   3. Put your effort into learning to use smart collections, not into building dumb collections or into the filter panel. This is why Scott K’s point 10 – that you can cut down on keywords if you use collections – is so weak. As well as keywords travelling with your files if you ever leave Lightroom, adding keywords means smart collections become an even more effective way to find and organise your pictures.
   4. Switch on Develop’s Auto Sync mode and leave it on. This makes every slider movement or other adjustment affect all the images you’ve selected and is the most efficient way to work. Efficiency isn’t for its own sake though – the less time it takes you to get the whole shoot up to scratch, the more time is left for making the winners really stand out. Don’t worry if you sometimes forget AutoSync is switched on and you’ve adjusted the wrong images – you soon learn from mistakes!
   5. Never pay a penny for a Develop preset.
      

      Never pay a penny for presets

      If you’ve collected more than a few presets, you’re relying on others’ judgement about their pictures, not on your own eyes and creative instincts. Photographers are hunters, not sheep.

   6. Use the targeted adjustment tool for colour adjustments or black and white conversion. Keep your eyes on what the picture looks like – not on the sliders.
   7. Learn a new keyboard shortcut every day. Keyboard shortcuts are the fast track to seeing Lightroom’s modules as simply “compulsory workspaces”.
   8. Whenever you drag a slider or click a button, try holding down the Alt/Option key. In many cases something useful will happen – you’ll see clipped colours in Develop, nest complex smart collections criteria, use the number pad with the Keyword sets….
   9. Think twice before you adopt a hierarchical keywording system. Keyword spellings, cases, and hierarchies can easily diverge on different computers, or your third party programs won’t understand the hierarchy and will return the images to Lightroom with flattened keywords. Keeping keywords and hierarchies in sync takes discipline which you may not have. Just because you can create hierarchies doesn’t mean you have to do so.
   10. Be consistent with your metadata. Keywords are terms that describe a picture, not aspects of your workflow. Ratings are for your long-term evaluation of a picture’s quality, flags for temporary pick/reject decisions, and labels for whatever makes sense to you at the time.

Maybe later this week I’ll wheel out the new LR3-friendly version of my Search, Replace and Transfer plug-in. There’s still a bit of testing to do though because I’ve had to find ways to work around LR3’s database access change – when your plug-in’s dialog box provides immediate feedback, you’ve a bit of a problem when the database returns values out-of-sync with it. It rather invalidates the term “dialogue”. I’ve also taken the opportunity to streamline some of the code, improve the layout, and add some new features. One is shown by this screenshot – instead of lengthy drop-down lists, separate dialog boxes make target fields easy to select. But it also shows another change – 16 custom fields.

I’ve never hidden my disappointment that custom fields are not available to users through Lightroom’s interface, as they are with Aperture, iView, Portfolio…. And I don’t think keywords are the right place for entering workflow or internal terms – only last week someone told me he had sent pictures to Alamy with “Getty” as a keyword. Correcting the omission of custom metadata is a much bigger task however than Adobe abolishing the obscenity “grayscale”. I never thought the Berlin Wall would fall either.

Plug-ins based on custom metadata are now trickling out, and it’s important that people are extremely cautious about their use. You’re taking quite a risk with your metadata.

This thought arose answering a forum question about whether one plug-in could access custom metadata entered through another plug-in. As far as I can tell, that’s not currently possible*. But it would be handy in many ordinary circumstances – eg to copy the caption or a date into a custom field.

*Update – it does work and it would have helped if I’d put the field name in quotes rather than treating it as a variable before getting on my hind legs:

getData = photo:getPropertyForPlugin(“uk.co.beardsworth.missing”, ‘jbMissing’ )

But my advice about extreme caution is more because I’m approaching from a DAM perspective and am more worried about the longer term viability of custom metadata. Let’s say I released a plug-in based around custom fields and users entered metadata which had some value to them – whether that’s just input time or business data like a client or agency account number. Now move on a few months, LR3 comes out, and the plug-in no longer works – I’ve disappeared, driven mad by SDK changes, or you’re unwilling to pay my extortionate plug-in upgrade fee. At worst, it’s a mafioso’s charter.

And what now happens to that valuable metadata of yours? The data is still safely in the database but is effectively lost. You can’t read it because the original plug-in’s unavailable, Adobe’s built-in “All” Plugin Metadata panel only shows data from enabled plug-ins, and it’s not even in the XMP either. You’re stuffed – unless you’re resourceful enough to reverse engineer chunks of the plug-in. Assuming that I encrypted my plug-in’s code, that means you’re going to have to dig around the SQL to figure out my plug-in’s ID and its field names. That’s one barrier in your way. Then you can create a plug-in to rescue your custom data. Easy eh? And you’ve got to hope to hell that my plug-in didn’t encrypt or obscure the values you entered.

For me what this shows is

1) You’re taking a big risk if you store valuable custom metadata via a Lightroom plug-in – if you wouldn’t be able to sort it out yourself, should you do it?
2) You should ensure any plug-in with custom metadata stores its field definitions in unencrypted files
3) The All Plug-in Metadata panel needs to show all plug-in metadata
4) The SDK should allow you to read (write?) custom metadata from other plug-ins
5) Custom fields should be mapped to XMP

When the LR3-Beta came out, one of my posts highlighted the less obvious aspect of the new Publish Service – the hard drive option – and I mentioned that I’ve already found it handy as a stepping stone between LR and InDesign.

There will be plenty of other uses too, and I’ve already seen a comment about using it to maintain a store of JPEGs for display on a TV. One possibility is for saving photos to the cloud – though you’ve got to wonder what upload speeds Mark Wilson’s getting.

My Lightroom plug-ins are intended for those who are more serious about DAM, so I didn't really expect people to be using them with the LR3-Beta. That important thought aside, I should have looked sooner, because some of them aren't working.

The reason is that the plug-ins rely on features which were first introduced in LR2's SDK, and I was wrong in my assumption that reliance on the latest SDK would future proof my code. To some extent, it does, but it turns out that Adobe have changed the means of accessing the database and moved it onto another thread. So when the plug-in needs data, the request now runs separately and unlike in LR2 doesn't give you the results immediately. In any case, a request that may have been perfectly good in LR2 produces an error in LR3-Beta. It means more significant rewriting than I'd expected. Aargh! But remember, it's only a beta and if you really do want to rely on it….

The clocks going back always make me grumpy, and the blog's been a bit boringly-Lightroom recently, so here's some cheerful news about Britain:

• We have wine labels in English dialects - by eck, this Shatto Burnley's reet tasty
• Students love their brands - proof that Exeter University is indeed full of Oxbridge rejects
• Someone found Bosworth's battlefield - miles from where they've been doing heritage walks for years
• Local council finds jobs for sheep - probably a pun-making scheme
• Restaurant critic kills baboon - yuck, if you won't eat it, don't kill it

My enthusiasm for LR3-Beta's new import dialog box is, as I responded here, best described as “complete indifference”, so see Richard Earney and Wade Heninger for opinions on the new experience.

One opportunity Adobe have lost (though it's not too late) is a semantic one - change its name from “import” to “register”. It's a small change, but as Laura Shoe says in When Words Fail Us it's an important one:

My Honda was made in Japan and imported into the U.S…. When this happened, it physically left Japan and entered the U.S…. Similarly, when we export Chrystlers to China (do we?), they physically leave the U.S. and enter China.

However, when you import images into Lightroom, you are not moving your images into Lightroom. This trips up so many users - it is not uncommon for newer users to import their images into LR, and then delete them from their hard drives - and then they wonder why they have question marks all over their folders and images. Users also often think that because they back up their LR catalog when prompted, and their images are in the catalog, that no further backup of their images is needed. Of course when their hard drive containing their images fails, they realize otherwise.

It's not cut and dried, because when you “import” off a flash card you are moving the files, but for a lot of users the word “register” might make them think - never a bad thing.