Should I save as PSD or TIF?

TIF. There are no quality differences, and there’s almost nothing that a PSD can do that a TIF can’t do just as well, just obscure things like saving Duotone mode images (hat tip Victoria Bampton). In the long run it’s important to save your Photoshop work in a non-proprietary file format like TIF that’s much more likely to be readable in other programs, because over the years you will try or even switch to other programs.

Coincidentally, a good example of this need for long term thinking has just popped up. Capture One 7 has been released and is now a bit more like Lightroom with cataloguing features. But while you can import TIF files, you can’t bring in PSD’s. Maybe that will be rectified in 7.1 but I’ll bet the PSD’s will still need to have been saved with Maximise Compatibility switched on. Sure, you may not wish to switch to C1 right now, but over the long run we all change applications or sometimes we want to run more than one raw converter, so you always need to think ahead. It’s really my old analogy about good DAM being like a life of serial monogamy where you’re always prepared for the next move – you avoid so many complications with TIF.

Over the last week Adobe has said a couple of interesting things about the books module, one about a bug, one about plans for the future.

I happen to be one of the small number of people who has had first hand experience of a bug affecting Book – all the pages disappear, leaving only the default front cover and first page. This has happened on more than one occasion and I’ve lost hours of work, so I’ve been making an effort to watch out for it and have been making sure Adobe knew there was something amiss in this area. Usually with these things, a pattern will emerge from your own and others’ reports. But this is one bug that occurs very rarely and is proving difficult to reproduce. While it’s annoying, really annoying, it shouldn’t put you off using the book module, and Adobe added extra code in 4.2 to help diagnose and mitigate the problem.

Lightroom’s product manager Sharad Mangalick has posted an article Help with Disappearing Books in Lightroom 4. It’s well worth reading, just to be aware of the potential problem, but this is the key point:

The Lightroom team is currently researching and evaluating this bug to ensure that there are no other ways that it can be triggered. Our aim is to include a fix in a future update to Lightroom 4.

The second interesting snippet is that Adobe have changed their minds about how to enable custom page sizes. Some people have been wanting this since it would allow them to use vendors other than Blurb, and the original plan was to allow users to create PDF templates using something Illustrator and run them through a conversion process. The trouble was, while this would allow book vendors other than Blurb to create custom templates for their products, users would then depend on the vendor doing so – or have to learn to do it themselves. Maybe you know Illustrator, but I’d owned it for years without ever opening it. What’s more, I’m not sure people want to create templates – they want something just like Lightroom already does so well with Print’s custom package where you just drag and drop pictures into the layout. Fortunately Adobe recognize this, as senior development manager Julie Kmoch says here:

Sorry, but we’ve decided that the approach we were originally pursuing to create custom page layouts was not something we were comfortable releasing to the public. The scripts we’ve built have worked well enough for our internal use but needed a lot of work before they were usable without a lot of guidance. We think it’s more prudent for us to focus on enhancing the book module itself.

Good move, and even better to say so publicly.

Can I share Lightroom catalogues over Adobe’s Creative Cloud?

I’ve not subscribed to the Creative Cloud, so I may be exaggerating or misunderstanding what’s happening, but the problem sharing catalogues over the CC seems to be that it can only upload files, not folders. This doesn’t work too well when you want to share what you’ve done in Lightroom. Ideally you’d just select the images and use File > Export as Catalog, ticking the Include Previews box, and Lightroom would create a working copy of your catalogue. Share it on the CC and the other person would then be able to add keywords and metadata or make selections and be able to see you pictures without access to the originals – thanks to the catalogue’s previews. The trouble is, CC won’t upload the previews folder – it’s a folder.

The solution is easy – zip the folder created by File > Export as Catalog. Or use Dropbox.

I’d be interested to hear any experience of doing this. One issue is with unzipping. If a catalogue zipped on Mac is received on Windows you seem to need to go into File Properties’ Advanced tab where you should untick Encrypt Contents to Secure Data.

Imagine you are doing a large export. What’s faster, selecting all the images and hitting export – or breaking the export down into a few batches and exporting each batch individually? I was messing around with some code and thought I’d try a few alternatives. The results were pretty interesting.

My starting point was 267 Nikon D700 NEF files in 3 folders which I was exporting as DNGs with full size previews, then importing into the catalogue. On my main machine, an i7-920 Window 7 64 bit PC with 12Gb of RAM, this export and import took almost 11 and a half minutes. Not too bad, and while it’s running I can always do something else, but faster is better, right?

Using code to export one image at a time reduced the start-to-finish time to 60% of the straight Lightroom export. I then simulated the effect of exporting the three folders simultaneously and shaved more than 60% off the original time.

I’m sure others have been down this track before, and I’m not really surprised at the results, but this multi-folder export is something I do quite often and saving that much off the export time isn’t going to hurt, is it?

Update October 2014

I haven’t tested this since August 2012, but I am reliably informed it’s still true.

I’m a great fan of Lightroom’s Auto Sync feature which allows you to adjust multiple images simultaneously – it’s simply the most efficient way to work in Develop.

But I always add that if you do use Auto Sync you’ve also got to keep your head screwed on, because it’s equally easy to unintentionally apply an adjustment to lots of pictures. So I recommend:

• Leave Lightroom in Auto Sync mode all the time
• Keep the Film Strip visible so you can see how many images are selected
• Switch to normal mode when you need, do what you need to do, and then return to Auto Sync
• Don’t keep switching it on and off – it’s important to know you’re in Auto Sync mode
• If you find you simply can’t work this way, don’t use Auto Sync

Mistakes do happen though. Lightroom’s Undo feature often lets you recover from your error – at least if you notice the problem while Lightroom is still open – but things are tougher if you close the program. For example, imagine you had applied the same white balance to a variety of pictures in different lighting conditions, then re-opened Lightroom and noticed your error. The History panel lets you go back one History step, but it’s only applicable to one picture at a time. So you’d have to go through every picture. It could take some time.

There is a solution, but it is only for those with some technical skill, and all the credit for this belongs to the Moldovan photographer Dorin Nicolaescu-Musteață. I’ll also add that the method depends on writing directly to Lightroom’s SQL database, so it is an exception to my usual view that SQL hacks should be avoided at all costs. That said:

• you create a collection called “ReverseAutoSync” and add the problem images to it
• do this manually, maybe using a smart collection based on the Edit Time to find all pictures edited in a certain timeframe
• backup the catalogue – things could go wrong
• use a SQLLite utility to run the code shown below
• you may need to rebuild the previews (Library > Previews > Discard and then Render)

And yes, long ago I did ask for this to be a built-in feature….

UPDATE adobe_imagedevelopsettings
SET text =
(SELECT hs1.text
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs1
WHERE hs1.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs1.id_local =
(SELECT MAX (hs2.id_local)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs2
WHERE hs2.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs2.id_global <>
adobe_imagedevelopsettings.historysettingsid)),
historysettingsid =
(SELECT hs1.id_global
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs1
WHERE hs1.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs1.id_local =
(SELECT MAX (hs2.id_local)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep hs2
WHERE hs2.image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image
AND hs2.id_global <>
adobe_imagedevelopsettings.historysettingsid)),
digest = NULL
WHERE image IN (SELECT ci.image
FROM aglibrarycollectionimage ci, aglibrarycollection c
WHERE c.id_local = ci.collection AND NAME LIKE ‘ScrewAutoSync’)
AND (SELECT COUNT (*)
FROM adobe_libraryimagedevelophistorystep
WHERE image = adobe_imagedevelopsettings.image) > 1

On Blurb’s site, go to Your Blurb > Your Books

For a while Blurb’s site has let you convert books created with their BookSmart software into eBooks for the iPad. That wasn’t possible with books uploaded from Lightroom’s Book module, which used the PDF to Blurb method.

Well, this afternoon I had left Lightroom uploading a book of my re-enactment photos and  returned to it earlier this evening as I wanted to share it with some of the people depicted. It was then that I noticed that  books uploaded from Lightroom now have an interesting “Enhance for iPad” button. Hm, I wonder when they sneaked that one out!

To use it, upload the book from Lightroom as normal, log into Blurb’s site, and go to the Your Books section. You’ll see there’s a button for converting to eBook format –  Enhance for iPad.

It seems to take a short while – it says up to 30 minutes for a large book – but that may have been that the connection was slow or I just happened to log on at the wrong time. Or it may just be that the job is queued up for the server and crunching through a big PDF takes time. Anyway, just leave it to get on with the job.

And here is the book in iBooks on my iPad

Once I returned and logged onto Blurb on my iPad, it was easy enough to go to the book and and download it to iBooks. It seems about what you expect for iBooks, and fine for many uses. So I’d say whole process works pretty well.

Every so often interesting little features sneak out without any fanfare. This seems to be one of those “soft releases” and [update 18 July] from their tweets Blurb have only been thinking it would interest InDesign users. Well, it’s handy for Lightroom users too.

Even if Lightroom’s Book doesn’t itself allow direct publishing to iPad format (let alone access to Apple’s app store), this seems to be a viable route to selling hard copy and eBook versions simultaneously – and without much extra effort.

Published Folders can group related images and make it easier to find pictures when you’re in InDesign.

If you want to create a book in InDesign using raw files adjusted in Lightroom, the way I recommend it to use a Publish service to create and maintain a folder of TIFs which you then use for the InDesign project:

• In Publish Services, click the + to add a new service.
• Select the Hard Drive option.
• Choose a folder such as “my ID book 30x30cm images” (you won’t be able to change this folder so choose its location carefully).
• Choose 16 bit TIF as the file type.
• Set the size to match the dimensions required for the book. Yes, this means that if you want to use multiple sizes, you’ll need multiple hard drive services.
• Sharpening is up to you. I’d go for standard.
• Save the Publish Service – here I called mine “inDesign Project”
• Add the pictures you want. As well as raw files and other originals, include PSDs or TIFs if you want. This allows you to mix raw files which you were able to fully adjust in Lightroom and other pictures which needed a bit of Photoshop work.
• Put the pictures in collections or “Published Folders” if you want. Here for example I’ve created collections called “Section 1” and “Section 2”. When they are published these collections will become subfolders in Explorer or Finder, which can make life easier when adding pictures to the InDesign layout.
• Now press the Publish button – this creates the output folders and creates the TIFs.
  

  Instead of publishing each Published Folder separately, notice that you can select multiple Published Folders and publish them simultaneously by clicking the Publish button at the bottom of the panel.

At this point you have a folder of TIFs and it is these files you add to the InDesign book.

• Place the pictures in InDesign – you could pull them from the output folder using Mini Bridge (inside InDesign)
• Captions should be automatically added – see here, this video
• In InDesign pictures will be at actual size – if you resize them in InDesign some quality/sharpening impact?
• If you need to edit a picture, go back to LR, adjust, then to Publish and hit Republish, In InDesign, refresh the link in Links panel
• If you want to add another picture, go back to LR and add it to the Publish collection and hit Republish

So why is this method better than using an Export from Lightroom? One advantage is that it gathers everything into one place, in Lightroom and in your output folder. It’s ideal when you go back and forth between InDesign and Lightroom as it takes care of any republishing you may have to do – with Export it’s too easy to be inconsistent and export changed files with different filenames, for example. It works less well if your intended book design includes a variety of image sizes.

If you’re sending the book to Blurb, notice that there’s a new Blurb Plug-in for Adobe InDesign which automates the creation of the pages and the covers, and allows you to upload the book from within InDesign. See this video too.

Here’s an idea that I came across yesterday. What made it more interesting was that I very confidently expected it wouldn’t work!

You need to copy the public link for the index.html file

Well, yesterday I was bouncing ideas around for someone who needs an alternative to iDisk (as I understand it, Apple are withdrawing it, whatever it is!).

A couple of us had suggested Dropbox for sharing big files and attention then turned to a really, really simple way of sharing web galleries.

You can in fact share web galleries from your Dropbox folder. You just output a web gallery from Lightroom and save it in Dropbox’s Public folder. In Explorer / Finder you right click the gallery’s index.html file and “Copy public link”. You can then share that link with anyone.

If you’re attracted to Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service and use Lightroom, after months of “coming soon” it’s available now. Also see Adobe’s Lightroom and Creative Cloud FAQ.

Am I subscribing? No, at the time of writing (June 2012) I’m still thinking about it – and also still thinking about upgrading my CS5.5. If anything Adobe have pitched the pricing at such a level that it has left me sitting on the fence and unable to decide either way.

A few factors push me away from the idea and towards upgrading. In descending order of priority they are:

• I don’t like the idea of my files becoming uneditable if I ever stopped paying
• In principle I feel subscription models reduce the vendor’s incentive to innovate, whatever they promise. When unsubscribing means the loss of the ability to edit my files, haven’t you got me by the goolies? Sure you’re not going to get lazy? And of course, extend this to the monthly fee. Where’s the incentive to control your costs? Why not hike those fees once I’m trapped?
• Over the short term (18 months – 2 years) it looks like you’re better off upgrading – see Postscript below
• I don’t like a $1=£1 exchange rate – there should be worldwide pricing
• What’s the benefit to me of access to programs like Muse, Premiere Pro or After Effects which I wouldn’t ever use?
• While I have some of the Touch apps, I never actually use them

On the other hand, these are what’s tempting me:

• Can install on PC and Mac.  I may be odd and/or mad to have both a Mac laptop and my main Windows 7 machine, but I’ve always felt that Adobe’s restriction by operating system was as iniquitous as trying to stop you using a 2 machine licence on a Dell as well as an HP. So while it’s really a case of the subscription service eliminating an unnecessary annoyance, for me it’s a plus.
• I do use a number of Creative Suite apps and know I would take advantage of certain features in the CS6 software.
• I’ve some interest in Typekit and in the Digital Publishing Suite.
• While I like the idea of cloud storage and synchronisation, I’m happy enough with the free version of Dropbox, have already forgotten what Google’s cloud drive is called, and would sell my grandmother rather than waste any more time trying to make Apple’s iCloud, Photostream or otehr iFlavour-of-the-month do exactly what I want. Adobe’s cloud storage might be a better solution.
• Over the long term (10 years) it looks cost-neutral (it’s a much better deal for those who are buying new Creative Suite customers). Too long term.
• I might suddenly discover a use for Premiere Pro or After Effects

As you see there are some pretty solid pros and cons for me, and the decision is so marginal that I’m not sure which way I’ll jump. I don’t know of many people who have subscribed to the Creative Cloud, and those I know split into some whose choice seemed obvious and others who surprised me. What about you?

 Postscript

To upgrade CS5.5 Design Premium to CS6 would cost me £354.24. Assuming a 2 year cycle between releases, the Creative Cloud would be much more expensive at £890.64. So a difference of £540! Would I spend that much with Adobe on the other apps and the services which are bundled with the subscription? Somehow I doubt it. So why would you go to the Cloud if you have upgrade rights?

Post-Postscript

Eventually I decided to upgrade.

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 “Read more”…

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 appear because Photoshop was too complex for photographers – Elements already existed – or because ACR/Bridge wasn’t working. The real problem was that digital capture was quickly becoming the norm, and photographers were generating more and more pictures. So Aperture and Lightroom sought to provide a coherent workflow for processing shoots – as opposed to individual images – and managing fast-growing picture 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….