This File Info panel floats over the Lightroom window and updates as you move from picture to picture. In Develop, it can display additional EXIF info that you can’t display in the built-in Info Overlay.

I’ve just released ListView 1.59 with a series of significant changes and improvements:

• Easier to change data displayed
  • Click the triangle in the column header
  • A new dialog box replaces the previous long drop down lists
• Display and output Develop fields
  • Slows down performance (there’s no batch access)
  • Freely mix Develop data with
  • Sort by Develop data
  • Save sorted items to a collection (the sort is in the “user order”)
• Display and output various other fields
  • Video
  • Folder paths
  • Pick flags
  • Edit count and time
• Completely new floating “File Info” panel (shown right)
  • Only available in Lightroom 4
  • Displays info about same 10 fields as List View
  • Floats, so you can move from file to file in grid view or the filmstrip
  • Display more EXIF info while you’re working in Develop
  • Put it on a second monitor
• Two additional panels for Metadata
  • A File Info panel including folders, file size
  • One bringing together copyright and other minimal data entry
• Save export data to location other than the desktop
  • It’s a preference in Plug-In Manager
• A lot more logging
  • So much more that it really slows things down
  • Switch it on when (if) you need it

What do you think? What else might it do?

If you are still having problems with Lightroom 4′s speed, see this list of things to try.

Also, run a File > Optimize Catalog and make sure you read Adobe’s standing advice on optimizing performance.

Earlier this year there was a bit of fuss when it was announced that LR4 wouldn’t support Windows XP, so I took a look at how this site’s visitors were split by operating system. It looked like of the half who were using Windows, 12% were on XP.

As you’d be crazy to visit this site for anything other than Lightroom, it seems a pretty good approximation for the kind of business data Adobe wouldn’t generally release – the split of users between the two platforms.

6 months on, I thought I’d take another look at how things are now, rather expecting the XP user base to have eroded and drifted equally onto Mac or to Windows 7. And the answer? Almost no change, which was quite a surprise in itself. It’s still close to a 50:50 split.

Not sure this works with every camera and on both Mac and PC, but see Importing Multiple Memory Cards Into Lightroom At The Same Time. For people shooting a lot of pictures and who has multiple card readers, this will be a big plus.

Former Apple guy Chuq Von Rospach writes an interesting article Aperture vs. Lightroom. It is, unfortunately, an easy call… :

… Apple may have been the initial innovator here, but they fumbled it, and Adobe has taken the ball and run with it. It’s the technology leader, and it’s where the innovation is. Aperture? After the initial release, it’s never regained any of its momentum, and releases have always trailed Lightroom in timing and technology. [JDB Not quite true, and Books, Slideshow and smart albums are still superior in Aperture]

My expectation is that it always will at this point. If Apple had a chance to take on Lightroom and become the market and thought leader in this technology segment again, it’s long passed. I think it’s pretty clear Apple’s made the decision not to try; to me, Aperture 3 was a “let’s keep our existing user base happy” upgrade, not a “let’s get back in the game” upgrade.  [JDB More like saying let's shoehorn in some stuff we already have] And the timing of upgrades (not aggressive) and the push Apple puts on for Aperture (basically, none), is a hint that it’s moved its priorities elsewhere.

I used to tell folks to evaluate both Aperture and Lightroom and choose the one they feel most comfortable with. Now, I tell folks to buy Lightroom. Aperture isn’t headed into “end of life” mode, but Apple has pretty clearly stuffed it into an eddy in a backwater somewhere, and it seems to be just kind of drifting. I don’t see any indication Apple’s going to change that.

Any why would they?

It might make sense if Aperture caused photographers to move to Mac or to buy more / new Apple kit, but that’s not really happening. Apple will ship lots of the new high res “retina” display laptops to photographers regardless of whether they use Aperture or Lightroom, and Aperture’s immediate support for those screens isn’t going to provide an advantage for very long (Adobe will soon support them too). Yesterday’s “big” news of Aperture having a “Unified Library” with iPhoto can equally be spun as Apple “merging” the two products and making Aperture merely a priced version of iPhoto. Of course, it won’t stop people reading the tea leaves from job ads and inferring Apple is still interested in the game, but just why would you invest, for example, in as-good-as-Lightroom lens correction when the only likely ROI might come through a few Aperture sales? You’ve got to ask where lies the financial incentive? But more importantly though – if Apple do simply tread water, where then is the incentive for Adobe to keep driving Lightroom forward?

Also see:

• Chuq’s follow up
• Apple’s Latest Announcements From A Professional Photographer’s Point-of-View
• How to move from Aperture to Lightroom

How do I update a Photoshop smart object with changes Lightroom has made to the raw file?

In Lightroom, go to the original raw file and make the adjustments. Then either:

1. Edit as Smart Object, sending a new file to PS with the raw edits. Open your existing TIF file  in PS, and drag this new file’s smart object layer into the TIF document and delete the old smart object layer. You can now discard the new file.
2. Ctrl S / Cmd S to save the edits back to the original raw file. Open your existing TIF file  in PS, right click the smart object layer, choose Replace, and point to the original raw file.

There’s little to choose between the two options. I prefer the first, but the second works too.

The Royal Navy passes a giant poster of Britain’s hereditary head of state (printed in black and white with a horrid colour cast)

If you have a Nikon D800 – possibly any recent Nikon DSLR – avoid using OLD VERSIONS OF Nikon Transfer to copy files from your flash cards.

UPDATE: Nikon confirm problem and recommend proper practice

I honestly don’t understand why a Lightroom user would ever use Nikon Transfer, but some do so. And what they’ve discovered is that it makes the D800 raw files unreadable – and not just in Adobe software.

See this thread about D800 corruption and this too. What’s more, it’s not a new problem and relates to standalone versions of Nikon Transfer – ie before it became part of View NX.

Without digging into more detail than I think it’s worth, it’s hard to tell what’s happening. For all I know, maybe Exiftools or some other utility can resolve the problem by deleting any metadata added by Nikon Transfer. I don’t know if that’s possible though.

While I am surprised LR/ACR are tripped up by whatever Nikon Transfer did to the files, the solution is very simple – don’t use crappy old Nikon software.

It’s time for Aperture user Scott Bourne’s biennial wobble Here’s Why I’m Seriously Considering A Permanent Switch To Adobe Lightroom. After saying how he prefers Lightroom’s raw conversion quality and its “much faster, speedier processing”, this seems the most interesting part:

Now if I knew Aperture 4.0 was around the corner and that Apple answered each of these new improvements with improvements of their own, I’d reconsider. But at this point I don’t know that and have no reason to expect it.
So if I can get my arms around the fact that I need to move almost 480,000 images and that I need to be able to master a new workflow involving referenced rather than managed files, I’m going to switch and if I do – I’m not going back – no matter what Apple does. Even if they do catch up because it will only be a matter of time before it’s deja vu all over again.
There have been a host of new bugs in Aperture (either introduced by OS or converter updates) that Apple has only recently addressed. They won’t communicate with their users and there’s no loyalty there. It takes loyalty to get loyalty so unless something happens in the next few days to change my mind, you can expect to hear me talking about a permanent change to Adobe Lightroom 4. I flirted with this once before when Aperture 3.0 launched because it was so buggy. But this time if I switch, I’m not coming back.

In other words, it’s all about communication – or its absence. With discrete purchases like  the latest iThingy, you can appreciate Apple maintaining tight secrecy around new products until they’re ready to unleash the hype. Maybe software is more of a continuing relationship where customers who earn their livelihoods from photography or who are professionals in their own fields expect the vendor to demonstrate long term commitment. Or it could also be that the existence of a genuine alternative makes customers particularly jumpy when you fail to keep them informed?

In any case, you know the saying about the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence? But just imagine if Adobe did put just a bit more effort into slideshow, books, smart collections and filtering, and matched Aperture’s few advantages. Would Apple then be any marginal revenue in continuing to invest in Aperture? It’s not as if Aperture sales drive sales of Macs. But let’s hope they don’t call it quits – we don’t want Adobe to relax, do we?

From Adobe’s official Lightroom Journal, Lightroom 4.1 Now Available. Whether or not you had problems with 4.0, I definitely recommend installing this release.

Lightroom 4.1 is now available as a final release on Adobe.com and through the update mechanism in Lightroom 4.  The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom. In addition, Lightroom 4.1 introduces the following new features:

• The ability to process HDR TIFF files.  (16, 24 or 32-bit TIFF files)  This can be useful if you have merged multiple exposures into a single 32-bit image using Photoshop’s HDR Pro.  Using the new basic panel controls can be a very effective and straightforward method of achieving an overall balance across the tonal range.
• Additional Color Fringing corrections to help address chromatic aberration.  Click here to learn more
• Save photobooks created in the Book Module as JPEG files
• Publishing photos to Adobe Revel is now accessible via a Publish plugin

  Continue reading…

Why are raw processors trying to be like the DAM/Library/Image managers?

The original question came in a discussion about CaptureOne and MediaPro, and the answer is essentially because Aperture and then Lightroom showed that integrated processing and management was what a lot of photographers want and need.

These apps didn’t emerge because Photoshop was too complex for photographers – Elements already existed – or because ACR/Bridge wasn’t working. The real problem we faced was volume, which really impacted once digital capture became the norm, and so these apps are about combining processing in bulk and managing your collections. Wanting to get into this market lay behind Microsoft’s purchase of iView MediaPro in 2006, when they outbid PhaseOne, and although they’ve lost a few years there is still plenty of potential in combining iView and C1. For my liking PhaseOne are a bit too wedded to keeping them separate, but it’s a line that appeals to some folk, and the key is going to be making the two apps communicate very smoothly. ACR+DNG+iView worked brilliantly for me, but required a bit of thought and one or two simple maintenance tasks. PhaseOne have bought what is fundamentally a very good product, with the advantage of supporting whatever file types the photographer chooses rather than setting an arbitrary line like “no video because no camera shoots it”, hm, or “no CMYK because you can’t do anything with it” – er, manage it with the rest of your work? But they’ve a lot to do, and they’re treading a fine line between wanting the C1-MediaPro to be seamless with mentioning the “integration” word.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always wanted LR to let me decide what files I want in Library, and have a mode to display embedded previews. you never know, one day….

There’s an interesting new feature in Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate 2 – the ability to adjust 32 bit HDR images in Lightroom.

I confess I’m not that big a fan of HDR and I don’t play with it often, but this picture is a good example of when I might use it. The component frames were taken last month in the Lake District near “our” village, Rosthwaite. These have been my favourite trees since I came across them early on a misty Christmas morning 5 years ago and on my recent visit, as you can see, there was a huge contrast range and the clouds were extraordinarily bright. It was an obvious HDR scene.

So I shot 5 frames at 1 stop intervals, beginning at – 3 1/3 stops. The camera is a Nikon D700 and I was shooting raw files. Back at the house, I did minimal preparation work in Lightroom – just dust spotting – and a couple of Library tasks:

• set the colour label to green
• stack them

I do these because there’s always a risk that during the culling phase of my workflow I’ll mistakenly decide that a frame is badly-exposed or badly-composed, so the green reminds me that it is intended to be part of an HDR or panorama.

But until today I didn’t do anything else with the pictures – I don’t want to have folk thinking I’m getting into HDR!

So, what’s the new Lightroom workflow?

1. Selecting all 5 frames in Library, I chose the menu command Edit In > Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop.
2. Over in Photoshop’s HDR Pro dialog, I then set it to 32 bit output
3. I placed the white point on the very brightest part of the clouds, and clicked OK
4. I didn’t do anything else in Photoshop except saving the file as a 32 bit TIF
5. Back in Lightroom, the 32 bit TIF was catalogued automatically and I adjusted it in Develop.

As well as overall and local white balance, I changed some Basic panel values (remember these are now tone-mapped) and produced the final picture below.

Another curious  detail is that once the 32 bit HDR file is back in Lightroom, you can use Library > Convert Photo to DNG to change the TIF to a DNG 1.4 which supports 32 bit floating data. Why you would do this is less clear to me, because you would lose the flexibility to process it as a 32-bit image in Photoshop (DNG means it would be sent to Photoshop as 16 bit). But for a long time I’ve done something similar with JPEGs from a point and shoot camera and from my iPad. Converting these files to DNG distinguishes them from derivative JPEGs which I might have generated for email, web etc. Packaging these HDR-merged files as DNGs would also mark them out as near-originals, and would permit Lightroom to update their embedded previews. Not sure.

But it does make me wonder. I did so little to this picture in Photoshop other than run the HDR Pro dialog, so how far are we away from doing the HDR process entirely within Lightroom….

I’ve now released version 1.57 of my List View plug-in. The main changes are:

• Thumbnails are now displayed in Lightroom 4
• Export to CSV format – better for anyone who uses the Numbers spreadsheet or for data exchange with databases
• Close to Sorted Collection button. One thing people like about the plug-in is sorting by almost any field, so this button saves the selected images into a new collection in their sort order – you just have to change the collection’s sort to User Order.
• Exported data can now include thumbnails.

The button to export the thumbnails is separate from the buttons to export the HTML text. This is because text export is very quick, while exporting thumbnails takes time. So you might export the thumbnails once, but then do more than once export of text, for example with different columns.

From the North Korean leadership school of modesty, here’s the first review I’ve seen of my Advanced Digital Black and White Photography. It’s from last week’s Amateur Photographer and is short and sweet – the book’s “readable and inspiring”.

Like the first edition, it is an end-to-end treatment of the subject from camera to print. In between it covers every known method of doing black and white in Photoshop, but most of all it tells you which ones are now best forgotten, and why.

The first edition was bang up to date when it was first published and so was the first book on B&W to feature Photoshop CS3′s B&W Adjustment Layer – as well as Lightroom and Aperture. That content is now updated, and there’s a lot more material on Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro.

It now seems to be available at Amazon UK and Amazon US, and translated versions will follow – including Korean.

Can I upload files from Lightroom by FTP?
Yes, the Lightroom SDK contains an FTP plug-in which works perfectly well. From the sample files, file the folder “ftp_upload.lrdevplugin” and put it somewhere on your system (I keep plug-ins in a folder on Dropbox so I can access them from various computers). Install the plug-in and then do an export. Choose FTP Upload in LR’s Export dialog box, and point to the FTP Server or create an FTP preset and select it.

This free plug-in does the job so well for most people that at least one unscrupulous preset site rebadged it and asked money for it! I just wish Adobe would simply add this plug-in to the standard Lightroom installation.

If you’re an InDesign user, you may have heard that version 5.5′s main changes were for publishing to the iPad. So you may be interested in Terry White’s latest Adobe Creative Suite podcast Lightroom to InDesign to iPad: Interactive Portfolios where he shows you how to take HTML exported from Lightroom’s Web and use it in an InDesign document which you then publish to the iPad. You can use any HTML gallery exported from Lightroom.

It’s pretty well the same route that I took when I wrote here about an app I’d been creating (the screenshots show some HTML animations which had been used in InDesign) and in other experiments or presentations since then. It’s perfectly doable, if you’ve got all the software, some InDesign skills and the time to figure it all out.

Q I just upgraded to Lightroom 4 and something happened with my flags in collections: they are gone! Where the xxxx are they?

A Well, they are not completely gone. But they are very hidden indeed.

As background, in Lightroom versions 1-3 the Pick and Reject flags were local to the folder or collection of pictures. So in one collection of pictures you could mark an image as a Pick, while in another collection it could be marked as a Reject. While many found this useful, many found it unnecessary and confusing – and I think it’s important to acknowledge both sides here.

So in Lightroom 4 Adobe made these flags global, but they did so without letting you save flag data out to XMP or do anything which might have made the change more palatable. Potential compatibility with other apps remains just pie in the sky.

Because of the change to global flags, you’ll find you only see any flags which you assigned to images in folders (or in smart collections). If you had assigned flags to images in dumb collections in Lightroom 3, at first when Lightroom 4 upgrades your catalogue it will look like the flags are gone and your selection work is lost. That’s not quite true though. When a catalogue is upgraded, there are extra menu items available in each upgraded collection.

“Select Old Contextual Flagged” and “Select Old Contextual Rejected” could benefit from their names being in Plain English – something like “Select the items I xxxxxxg flagged” – but they do at least allow you to images in collections which had been flagged and rejected in LR3 or earlier.

It’s important to add that this only happens if you let LR4 upgrade an LR3 catalogue – it does not apply if LR4 imports an LR3 catalogue via File > Import from Another Catalog. So if you want some access to your LR3 collection-specific flags, make sure you upgrade the catalogue.

Also see Lightroom 4 – global flags and local stacking, a suggestion for how to amend your workflow for the change to flags.

QIs a MacBook Air 13″ enough to use Lightroom?

AYes.

Lightroom 4 wouldn’t run on my Core Duo-based MacBookPro, and doing some demos for Blurb and the Focus on Imaging show were sufficient incentive to make me replace it. While it was a snap decision, I had been thinking about my options and asking around. I didn’t want the current MacBookPro as it’s more expensive and is scheduled for replacement this year, and I had been impressed by the Air’s portability and knew of people happily using it with Lightroom. So about a month ago I nipped into central London on the bus and picked one up in the Covent Garden store.

It’s the 13″ i5-based version and since then I’ve found it just fine for doing LR4 demos at Focus on Imaging and then for 3 weeks up in the Lake District where I was shooting and then reviewing maybe 150 raw pictures a day. The screen is smaller than I was accustomed to, but as a second / travel machine, it seems ideal.

I haven’t been 100% happy with the 128Gb hard drive’s size. It wasn’t the size, more that I really don’t like only having one copy of new pictures. So I think you need to accompany the Air with a portable drive and I just bought a Lacie Rugged 500Gb which seems to be the right combination of size and is powered by a standard USB connection cable. This drive solves the problem in the field, and also makes transferring pictures to the main computer much faster than wifi.

The other thing to consider is output to projectors. Just make sure that you get the USB to digital video adaptor(s) you need.

There’s a script on Adobe Labs to extract as JPEGs the thumbnails and previews that you see in Lightroom 4:

Sometimes, lost or deleted photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 still display a preview. This script allows you to extract and save those previews.

The script extracts previews for all the images that are selected at the time you run the script. It extracts poster frames for any video clips that are selected at the time. You can choose a location for these files. The previews are in JPEG format, and the name contains the size of the image, for example: _MG_0233-360×240.jpg.

QIf time was not a concern, and if your goal was to maximize image quality, what would be the best practice for moving images from LR3 to 4?

AYou do understand you don’t actually move images? You just open your catalogue in LR. Images processed in LR3 will still have LR3 adjustments and a little exclamation mark which you click if you want to update their adjustments to LR4′s “process version 2012″. But you can leave the existing images as they are in “process version 2010″. I would do this in general, leaving them as they are, and just update specific images – eg those which might benefit from better treatment of highlight recovery. Meanwhile, become familiar with the new adjustments by processing new images.