General Archives

Anyone using speech recognition with Lightroom?

Speech recognition seems to have been the coming technology since I don’t know when  – I seem to recall seeing DragonDictate in the late 90s – but it is one of those technologies that never seems to have arrived as a first-class way of entering information into a computer or getting it to do what …read more

Emailing from Lightroom

Here’s a quick summary of how to email files from Lightroom: The built-in way is to export files as JPEGs to your hard drive, then attach the to an email. Neat, eh? 1990s retro computing enthusiasts line right up! To email files directly from Lightroom, see Andréas Saudemon’s Mac-limited export plug-in Send By Mail Plug-in …read more

MediaPro1

Last year PhaseOne finally acquired – “liberated” may be a better word –  Expression Media from Microsoft and gave it back its old name, MediaPro. I say “finally” because they had tried to add the original iView MediaPro cataloguing program to their CaptureOne raw conversion products back in 2006, and also because in those five …read more

List View – new Lightroom plug-in

It’s been bubbling away for a while, and some people saw it late last year, but in the next few days I’ll be releasing a new plug-in – List View. It does exactly what the name suggests and provides a list view which some of us feel is sorely missed in Lightroom’s Library. After all, …read more

A perfect shot – in the foot?

No matter how much the Lightroom ethos is about designing a program for photographers from the ground up, there are still those atavistic folk who want to do things just as they suppose they’ve always done them. So every so often you’ll get people wanting Undo to be Alt-Ctrl-Z because it’s how Photoshop has always …read more

Blurb plug-in for Bookify

I’ll admit that I hadn’t even heard of Blurb’s Bookify and when I read their announcement of a Lightroom 3 to Bookify Plug-In I wasn’t particularly interested. Just another dumbed-down online service? Instead what I focussed on was the closing comment: … very soon, we’ll be bringing you more exciting ways to use Lightroom and …read more

Dropbox for catalogues, presets and preferences

One promising approach is to use Mac aliases or Windows symbolic links (a bit like shortcuts). So for example, you would keep the catalogue itself in a Dropbox folder, but use aliases or symbolic links to store the catalogue’s previews separately in a folder that doesn’t get synchronised. When you move to the other computer, your catalogue will be available as soon as Dropbox’s sync operation has completed, just having to rebuild its previews which are stored locally. As always, the originals could be on a network address.

Not the first time either

Although mainly a PC user, I also have a Mac laptop and do like its AppleScript and Automator scripting/automation features. I’ve little doubt that if I only used Mac I would quickly find various ways of saving myself time – maybe enough to outweigh the time spent on the learning curve. Yet I’ve always been …read more

Silver Efex Pro 2

I’ve never been one who photographs in colour and occasionally dabbles with black and white. It’s very much the other way round, and I often look at pictures I’ve left in colour and think they’re rather monochrome anyway. But I’ve never seen doing a lot of b&w work as a reason why I would want …read more

Complex File Renaming – using Search & Replace

Replacing text in filenames is a common need and for example Adobe Bridge’s renaming dialog box does it with its “string substitution” option. But this capability has never been available in Lightroom. I suspect it is as simple as Bridge’s “string substitution” only introduced during Lightroom’s early days and it was overlooked when batch rename was designed. And sadly, this omission has never been rectified, even 13 years after I started whining to Adobe about it….

Lightroom – finding all images shot at a certain time of the year

Recently I’ve seen a number of Lightroom users asking how they could find all images shot at a certain time of the year. Now, if you have your head screwed on you would have included seasons in your keywords. For instance, an image of snow might include “winter” in the keywords (unless you live at …read more

Pick flags in Lightroom

I was just helping out a newcomer to Lightroom with how to use the pick flags and the P U X shortcuts. As a reminder, I came up with this little panel end mark. Memorable enough? The file should go in the Panel End Marks folder which you can find by right clicking in the …read more

Google StreetView inside Lightroom

That’s exactly what you see here! It’s actually a Google maps gallery with images displayed as thumbnails on the map. They’re clickable and reveal larger images with captions, and you can also switch to StreetView inside Lightroom’s Web or in the browser . This is just a working proof of concept, but by the end …read more

And the point is….

See this interesting article by Michael Frye on Setting the White Point in Lightroom: A Comparison: Since I advocate using the Point Curve in Lightroom to set a white point and black point, I sometimes get asked about the difference between doing this with the point curve, and doing it with the Blacks and Exposure …read more

B&W from different angles

There’s an interesting comparison of doing black and white in Capture One 6, Silver Efex 1, and Lightroom 3 by Mike at The Intuitive Lens. It’s a two parter with Capture One vs Silver Efex and then both vs Lightroom. I’m not sure it proves much, if anything, other than one if one tries to …read more

Capture Time to Exif – released

Capture Time to Exif is essentially an in-Lightroom interface for Exiftool, Phil Harvey’s highly-respected “platform-independent Perl library plus command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files”. With Capture Time to Exif you can: Update the Date Time Original EXIF field of scanned images. Lightroom’s filter panel and smart …read more

Update on the 20 minute wow

I’ve been asked – a little mischievously – why in yesterday’s 20 minute wow I don’t say more about Slideshow, Web and Print. A single word each? That good then? Well, quite the contrary. I am not trying to pack every feature into a short presentation. The audience – existing Lightroom users and those questioning …read more

20 minute wow (as Orwell might have put it)

Someone, somewhere asked a good question about Lightroom. How would you wow a mixed group of existing users and other photographers when you’re allowed just 20 minutes? 20 minutes? At most? Without anyone asking you something? And let’s say we’re not dealing with thickos, but potential “power users”, or those who think they already are …read more

SiteMaker as a single gallery

Here’s another preview of my SiteMaker web gallery showing its huge flexibility. May I, as the saying goes, draw your attention to: Here it’s a single “contact sheet” gallery. SiteMaker can be either for a complete photo site or for a proofs gallery of a single set of images – or both All the thumbnails …read more

New Lightroom plug-in – CaptureTime to Exif

CaptureTime to Exif is my latest Lightroom 3 plug-in. Essentially it’s an in-Lightroom interface for Exiftool: Initially it was for Lightroom users whose catalogue contains scanned images and who wanted to make the scans’ Date Time Original EXIF field correspond to when the pictures were originally taken rather than when they were scanned. But people …read more