Tell me why

Someone asked me: “If Lightroom doesn't use the embedded jpegs, why bother create them at all?” If you don't use other apps to examine your DNGs, I don't see much reason at all right now.

In fact the other day I saw a rather silly and unsubstantiated blog post (not worth linking) that alleged LR's release was a nail in DNG's coffin. The reasoning was loose - non destructive editor equals abandonment of DNG - but the conclusion was something I thought could be reasonably argued from LR not exploiting DNG. I suspect that's more due to Adobe's priority being to get the program released, and waiting for a new DNG specification to be agreed.

So I am continuing to build large previews because I hope Adobe will make use of the larger previews before too long (and because I still use iView). There are also longer term archival issues such as having a rendered preview of the data, which other applications would be able to read.

Gary Gilmour’s Eyes

StyleSheet Chooser PlusI've darkened the site's colours a little recently - not because of Lightroom, I should add, but because I've always been a Factory Records kind of miserablist. Anyway, I like them and they look right on my PC and Mac, but let me know if they don't work.

Because of a complaint (see the comments) I've just added an alternative CSS stylesheet - it's a lighter shade of grey text. The easiest way to choose it seems to be with the Firefox extension StyleSheet Chooser Plus.

The other extension icons are IETab, which switches the Firefox page into an IE6 window, and the invaluable Adblock which is essential for decrapifying so many web sites. I also like:

Some might say

Rick Walker I'm not a big one for canned recipes - what's that saying about giving a poor man a bowl or teaching him to fish - nor have I ever felt Nikon Capture's colours were objectively better than ACR's.

But it is a question I keep asking myself, just in case, so here's another Lightroom preset that uses the Develop settings Rick Walker describes in this Nikonians thread as his Nikon Capture Mode IIIa effect. If this colour rendition really works for you, then it's a simple task to apply it to all images upon import to Lightroom.

I really enjoyed the pictures at Rick Walker's site too.

The mad hatter rides again

Right now, Lightroom isn't the program for special effects. I've little doubt such things will come in due course, but right now there are a number of things that you can do - with a little bit of wine-crazed ingenuity.

This image was output directly from Lightroom using the same original as this but was produced by applying a preset that modified the Tone Curve.

But the curve's shape is not one you can do within Lightroom - it was created in ACR4 using its Point Curve and applied to a DNG file. This was imported into Lightroom, which read the curve, and I then saved a Develop preset with the effect. To my eyes it's some distance from the ideal solarization, but interesting nonetheless.

Here's John's solarization preset.

Bridge over troubled water

Co-ordinating Lightroom work on two computers isn't as easy as it could or will be. The need for portability is well understood, and I loved the beta's Binders concept, but it was right to sacrifice it for Folders, and no doubt there'll soon be a better way to move images and metadata between systems.

Dan Dill shows how you can currently synchronize Lightroom libraries on two Windows computers without simple copying of libraries and setting up identical drive structures. It relies on importing your images into Lightroom via Windows shortcuts:

The root of my image folder tree is D:Photos on an internal disk of a workstation, and Z:Photos on an external disk of a laptop. The Desktop shortcut on each machine is named Images, and it points to D:Photos on the workstation and to Z:Photos on the laptop. With this setup in place, when I import files into Lightroom (by reference), I navigate to them through the Desktop shortcut, as Desktop:Images…. For example, when I point Lightroom to the image folder

It would be interesting if Mac users could do the same with OSX aliases. Somehow I think the method might struggle to help those of us with a Mac laptop and PC desktop….

Word up

Chris ShepherdChris Shepherd has been busy getting a controlled vocabulary into both Lightroom and iView:

Now that I am trying Lightroom I thought I would try out if it is possible to use a controlled vocabulary when keywording images. David Riecks at Controlled Vocabulary has produced a controlled vocabulary keyword catalogue, which is a great basis for a structured keywording of files. It turns out its not too difficult to get the Control Vocabulary file into Lightroom, all it requires is a simple bit of Excel work to convert it. This is what you do….

I love tips that include Excel - it's still my favourite program. In fact once - maybe after a pint - I said I'd write a book on how to program Photoshop from it. No takers?

Don’t fence me in

Having both programs, I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of a Lightroom user comparing it with Aperture, and an Aperture user coming at it from the other direction, but that's exactly what Michael Clark on O'Reilly's Lightroom Blog and Micah Walter at O'Reilly's Aperture Blog are attempting (though Micah does seem to be writing mainly about Aperture). Already there are plenty of moments when I've thought “oh yes it does” at some comment about a feature's absence.

Coming at it from Lightroom too, I couldn't agree more with what Michael says on stacks :

Now in terms of Stacking, I was never one who stacked selects on my light table so this function seems a little strange to me but I know of a few Aperture users who swear by it. After playing with stacking in both Lightroom and Aperture, I have to say that it is much better done in Aperture because of the visual separation between stacks and the control you have as to how the stacks are made. Lightroom has similar controls to adjust and automatically form stacks but with the images all lined up right next to each other it isn't visually easy to delineate where one stack starts and another ends. For my workflow, I don't use Stacking so I'm not too worried about it. I tend to sequester my images by their star ranking and it works fine for me.

Functionally, stacks are identical in the two programs - it's simply the way they are represented visually in Aperture that makes the difference.

He's making two points, however, and and I agree with his second one every bit as much. This is regardless of who does it better - I've never really liked stacks either. Apart from the data not being portable between DAM systems, stacks have always seemed the best way to hide and lose track of that great shot that you notice later - sometimes many years later. You don't have to use them.

I fought the law

In What’s he building I wrote about how to use iView and the new Adobe Media Gallery. It wasn’t a tutorial, just something for those who can fumble their way around iView scripting, and I’ve now wrapped everything up together in a zip file which contains:

  • The AMG template (open source) which contains the Flash movie, related scripts, skeleton folders. Copy this folder to the desktop.
  • iView Convert Images settings – add these to the user’s Plug Ins Option Sets folder.
  • My Adobe_gallery_maker.vbs script. Run it in iView and point it to the Desktop folder so it will generate the images and populate the XML that powers the movie.

So why post this again? Well, partly I wanted to emphasize the point that you can use iView or other programs to drive the Adobe Media Gallery. But I also wanted to be able to say “I knew all that”? when I post this link to Bluefire Blog‘s description of how to customize Lightroom’s Flash gallery. OK – “I knew all that”? – but what’s really interesting about their posts is what they and others might do next – such as market alternative templates.

There’s good and bad in the way Adobe have implemented Lightroom’s web gallery module. I like the way a web browser component is built into Lightroom, so you see the gallery you’re generating within the application and see the effect of changes in real time. Now, this browser component could equally render output from token-based HTML-style templates, as used in various ways by Bridge CS2, iView, Portfolio, Breezebrowser, Aperture etc. Instead Lightroom’s template architecture relies on XML and especially on XSLT – and that’s at least another league of difficulty up from hacking HTML and CSS. It’s like Manchester United versus Chorley.

For a few years many photographers have been happily rolling their own HTML. Token-based web templates allow all options – tweaking their way up the DIY learning curve as and when time allows, a holiday distraction for your geeky nephew, or paying a web designer to ponce around for weeks on his or her Mac. Nothing at all against the Bluefire guys – posting those notes isn’t too venal, if at all – but are Lightroom’s Web templates going to force photographers into paying developers to create or modify templates? And is that what we really want?

With God on our side

Now Lightroom is released, there are lots of threads comparing it with its Mac-limited competitor Aperture. See Adobe's forum and this Apple thread where one wanker (you would have had to read the thread but Apple have now deleted it) shouts that Aperture is the one because

…most of all, it's not just the features. It's also the future. Apple are a much more innovative company. Much more! As a company, they've innovated more in the last six months than Adobe have in the last twelve years. If you take a look at Apple's other pro applications, such as Final Cut Pro, they're awesome. Adobe has nothing to touch them. And then realise that Aperture belongs to the same pro family of products.

A frail line of association indeed - makes about as much sense as 9-11 conspiracy theories, the Da Vinci Code, or anyone who thinks Chelsea would have won two titles without looted Russian oil money. It's also shortsighted - apparently Apple will shortly trump Adobe. But won't Adobe have anticipated that, and trump Apple, and won't Apple anticipate that Adobe will anticipate their anticipation, and…? Rumsfordian logic?

Outside (again)

A little but important update to my post on Lightroom's Auto Sync feature. Ctrl/Cmd clicking the Sync button switches you “permanently” into that mode, but there's more - holding down Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd changes the button's display and switches you temporarily into Auto Sync mode. So hold down Alt/Opt + Ctrl/Cmd and use the mouse to drag a slider - Lightroom applies the adjustment to all selected images.

Spooky


Full screen grab here
Sean McCormack's latest Lightroom video shows how to add a decorative border to a print. He's using the Print module's ability to overlay an image other than the identity plate.

I noticed the same feature when I was writing my Lightroom book, but didn't think of a decorative border. Instead I came up with a more prosaic application - adding a copyright symbol to contact sheets, using a transparent tif file for the symbol. You can see the full screen grab here.

Funny how people find completely different uses for things.

Common people

Part 2 of the interview with Lightroom's chief designer Mark Hamburg is at since1968.com. This one's mainly about the program's extensibility, and you'd expect me to find it particularly interesting:

Developers will have to write their extensions in Lua. At one point?and it probably complicates the app a little?there was probably some notion that we?d provide ways to let people write things in purely native code as well. But I think at this point you will have to write at least part of your logic in Lua for knitting into the rest of the system.

When people ask ?What do I do for Lightroom development?? I tell them ?Go out and learn Lua. Hack World of Warcraft until we?ve released an SDK.?

Any APIs we publish we?d like to commit to supporting long term. In getting a 1.0 out as we?re sorting through some of the feature set there?s a fair amount of churn on the APIs that we have. Putting out an SDK means we need to start freezing those a lot more, so that?s essentially the delaying factor. After version 1 we get to go through and sort through and say ?Yes we can commit to this. We can publish it and put it in the SDK.?

Yeah, I've already begun looking at Lua. But like the doddery old judge who asked who Springsteen was, what is “World of Warcraft”?

It's interesting that he doesn't mention scripting. Automation doesn't just mean developers. Real people will want to connect LR with other systems, for instance passing Edit Count data into a costing and billing system or sending data to a Word invoice template. So let's hope Adobe don't repeat Bridge's JS-only disaster - the big world outside Creative Suite needs LR to be scriptable in platform specific languages: VB and AS.

Turning Japanese

Maki Kawakita does some stunning combinations of Manga artwork and photography, superimposing models on comic illustrations. She is featured in George Jardine's latest Lightroom podcast, though she's not pressed to explain how she uses Lightroom to produce her work.

Be my number two

With Lightroom about to launch, it's no harm to see what's going on across at its Mac-limited competitor, Aperture. Automator actions and stock library plug ins give you a pretty good idea of the sort of things to expect once Lightroom gets its scripting and SDK released.

Other Aperture resources:

It’s too bad

Michael SladeI'll put Michael Slade's lovely series of black and whites of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in the Lightroom category as he uses its Flash web gallery feature to present the pictures. It's a nice idea to add a couple of text slides to the presentation - even if “it's shores”, “it's trance”, and “it's surrounds” are less clever. As least he's consistent, so there's hope (basic principles here).

Time for a Romanes eunt domus category? I'd make a good centurion.

Neat neat neat

Andrew Rodney describes Color management in Lightroom (pdf)

We didn?t see much in the way of color management in Photoshop until v. 5.0, nearly 8 years after its initial release, and it was still
rough around the edges. For a 1.0 product, Lightroom looks promising with respect to color management, but it?s a delicate balancing act.

I can live without LAB or CMYK support, but hope to see true soft proofing in a future version. The lack of multiple working spaces isn?t a serious limitation for me. In fact, if you only work with raw files, all you really have to do is set Lightroom to always export in 16-bit ProPhoto RGB. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to Lightroom, and how the product will evolve in response to wide user feedback.

This is one area where a dumbing down is exactly the right solution. I wonder if part of the problem is the language of “Relative Colorimetric”, “Perceptual rendering” and so on. No wonder people are killing themselves swallowing ink cartridges rather than grapple with this matrix of big words. Time to wheel out my favourite Orwell quote - “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.”

Via Lightroom News.

All the young dudes

With days left to go before Lightroom is released, Michael Tapes has a series of free videos (with a higher res DVD also available for $10.95). I got to know Michael virtually through the beta testing program and am not at al surprised that the style is professional and common sense - and I learned a few things too.

The streaming video is very impressive - somewhere I know Michael told me what he uses - and it almost makes me want to have a go at doing something similar myself in my Northern rasp. Hey, I could even inflict some background music on the photographic world - Joy Division, anyone?

It's going to be an expensive month too - today I ordered Aperture… as well.

Illumination

My Lightroom postings here are all freshly-crafted, but I've also got a book coming out and yesterday I finally saw the cover. I know I sound like a proud father, but it looks good, don't you think?

Complete control

Lightroom posts here will not be tutorials - you can get good short ones at places like Sean McCormack's and from these NAPP videos. In LR, the hows are far less difficult than understanding the whys.

Here I hope to convey principles - such as the best practice for Lightroom's “Collections”. These virtual folders are just like iView's Catalog Sets or Portfolio's Galleries, so there's even less reason for using your folder system to organize your pictures (message: use folders like packing pallets into a warehouse - purely for storage, backup, easy recovery). But a couple of things are less clear - when should you use Collections less often, and when you should use them more?

First, less - as a rule, do not use Collections when you should be using Keywords or Locations. This is partly to do with efficiency because a key DAM goal is to add as much description as you judge worthwhile, but it is also about the wide world outside Lightroom.

Collections, Keywords, and Locations are all hierarchical, and for instance you could easily put animal or bird species into a Collection, or use another Collection to categorize images by Country / County / Town / Place. Instead use Keyword synonyms, so assigning one keyword makes Lightroom add the other too, and input geographical metadata in the proper IPTC fields which the metadata browser can read. (As an aside, it won't be long before we figure out how to sync geographical metadata over to keywords) Secondly, Collections are a Lightroom feature that aren't yet understood by other programs, unlike keywords and locations. So think carefully before you build up a Collection - is a Collection really the best place for that descriptive metadata?

But do use Collections whenever you are creating virtual copies. While the video concentrates on creating versions of single images, that's not the point of Lightroom - and there's a nasty “gotcha” lying in wait.

Imagine you want to create b&w versions of an entire shoot, tens or even hundreds of pictures. Easy - it's just a right click to make the virtual copies. But what happens later when you want to select just the black and whites, or just the colour ones? You can sort by Edit Time, but there's no easy way - unless you use Collections….

Immediately after you create the virtual copies, Lightroom deselects the masters and selects the new versions (see screen grab below). So, before you do anything else, hit Ctrl/Cmd N and add them to a new Collection. In fact, I'd also do the same before you create the virtuals, so you can divide a shoot up into two or more Collections - also remember the Invert Selection menu command. I find the problem of selecting virtual copies so important that I've even worked out the SQL to write the Collections directly to the database, but that's another story.

So 3 points - force yourself to exploit Collections, don't use them for keywords and geographical metadata, and always use them when you're working with virtual copies.

See slight change of thinking.

Somewhere

The Library module is significantly improved in Lightroom v1.0, though it remains somewhat less coherent than Develop. The big change is the Folders panel replacing the old Shoots. While the name was clever, Shoots were a horrid confusion of virtual sets with physical folders that threatened to repeat one of Aperture 1.0’s worst mistakes, so the change is very welcome.

The new Folders panel lets you see where files are actually located in your folder system, files and folders where you want them without leaving Lightroom, rename or delete them, and run checks for files that Lightroom can no longer find because you’ve moved in Explorer (solution: once files are catalogued in Lightroom, only move them to new folders using Lightroom). Those capabilities are a big step forward from Shoots which let you move files only if they were stored in its managed folder tree but left you high and dry if you stored them where you wanted.

The panel isn’t perfect – you can’t yet right click a folder and simply tell Lightroom to import its contents (solution: re-import the folder and LR will reject anything that is already registered and import the rest), let alone set it to update automatically, or see its disc space usage.

One real silliness, a “gotcha” no less, is that Lightroom refuses to import two pictures which are in the same folder and have names that are identical but with different extensions. That may be OK if you shoot raw+jpeg and only want to import the raw file, but if you save psd, tif and jpeg derivatives in the same folder as your raw files, you’re going to have to change your bad habits (solution: if you must mix them, stick them in a subfolder).

DAM is about certainty and removing risk, and I’m always nervous of entrusting control of my pictures to any v1.0 product. Since iView works perfectly well in conjunction with Lightroom, there’s a fair chance that I won’t use the Folders panel much at all until any potential problems have been ironed out. Nevertheless it is very important progress in a design area where there had been real potential for disaster.

Welcome though the Folders panel is, DAM is also about not falling into the trap of using folders to analyse your files. That’s what metadata is there for – you have keywords and other metadata, plus the Metadata Browser panel. And you need to start making extensive use of Collections… the subject of my next post.