General Archives

I can see clearly now

SQLite Database Browser is a browser utility for databases written in SQLite… such as Lightroom. Right now it's very basic, but it's a really easy way to open and examine Lightroom's tables, though I'd only use it if you're the sort of person who reads confirmation dialog boxes asking if you want to delete a …read more

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Lightroom Podcast 24 is definitely worth listening to. Three of the main guys behind Photoshop and Lightroom, Zelman Stern, Thomas Knoll and Mark Hamburg, discuss the development of Lightroom and ACR 4, and if you listen carefully you'll hear you a lot about what may well be in Lightroom version 1…. Find it at George …read more

Hung up

Inside Aperture blog contributor James Duncan Davidson writes on his own blog about Aperture vs Lightroom RAW Conversion: Does this mean that Aperture is off my system? Heck no. I'm not tossing 31,000+ images at Lightroom anytime soon. Aperture kicks Lightroom's butt at organization and management. And Aperture has done a great job with generating …read more

The Charge of the Light Brigade

So, the news is out about what iView is going to be called by “beauty makes us think better” Microsoft: Expression Media is a professional digital asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all of a creative professional?s digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation. Expression Media is due to be released in Spring …read more

Games people play

Maybe next week I’ll have a bit of time to try out Aperture, Apple’s Mac-limited raw processing and picture management program, but I enjoyed reading this thread Improving Aperture. Yes, it was me suggesting they make it run on PC, but wouldn’t that be an interesting response to Lightroom when it’s finally released?

I want to break free

Apple's Aperture may still be Mac-limited but with Lightroom looming Apple have decided to provide a 30 day trial. Now how hard was that? Anyway, now I've also got a Mac there's no excuse other than time pressure for trying it. Helpfully O'Reilly have launched an Inside Aperture blog with handy advice on spending another …read more

Wishin’ and hopin’

Michael Reichmann is brewing a storm in a teacup about Hasselblad's decision to make their latest body only take Hasselblad digital backs. It has sparked quite a fuss in the site's forum, and one poster ejaculates: It looks like they (Hasselblad) are simply trying to knock down the competition while locking in their customer base. …read more

The same old song

Lightroom beta 4 came out earlier this week - see Ian Lyons's notes. It has made great strides in what the raw converter can do, and features like Vibrance and Fill Light take the program well beyond Adobe Camera Raw. But if you're trying it, take a good hard look at what happens when you …read more

Don’t fence me in

OK, I am being mischievous by even suggesting Apple add to Aperture an “export to Lightroom” feature. And I wonder if anyone would ever find it worthwhile to map one metadata driven editor's XMP to another's sidecar format, or even one day use scripting to pass at least some data between Aperture and Lightroom. My …read more

Blinded by the Light

If you're into Lightroom, keep an eye on Sean McCormack's Lightroom blog.

Who are you?

I'm trying to come up with a name for programs like Lightroom, Aperture, LightZone and Capture NX that use instructions to process images. We've referred to programs like Photoshop as bitmap editors, but there's no agreed name for this new field. Peter Krogh has referred to the field “Metadata Imaging” and this seems snappy, but …read more

Purple haze

Added a group of photos to the History section. They are from a day I spent with American Civil War re-enactors back in October 2004. Some were already on the site, but I've given them all a new treatment using Lightroom. Apart from making them b&w and adding a purplish selenium tone, I also darkened …read more

Freedom

It's frustrating that the Lightroom beta only lets you work with one library, and that by default it's created in My Pictures. A quick workaround is to close Lightroom and cut and paste the library from My Pictures to wherever you want. Next time you open the program, it'll ask you where to find the …read more

All around the world

Isn't the Internet wonderful? Only a few minutes ago I posted about Marc's Rochkind's genius for revealing the Lightroom database structure. Add Christian Werner to the list - a minute after installing his SQLite ODBC driver I could examine the Lightroom tables in MS Access.

Visions of Angels

Marc Rochkind doesn't need his Wikipedia entry to show he's clearly a very smart guy. Not only is he developing ImageIngester, a sophisticated flash card downloader that backs up, verifies, adds metadata and logs the whole process, he's also figured out the Lightroom database structure: For your reading pleasure, here's the output of the SQLite3 …read more

Sorrow

O'Reilly's Lightroom Adventure sounds fun - as a two time Iceland visitor, I'm always very jealous of anyone going there. Then again, I don't really think photographers are pack animals - certainly I always scowl (at least inwardly) when another photographer invades my domain or nibbles at my prey. Maybe this explains the absence of …read more

Scary monsters

There's a time for photography and a time for drinking, and I'm glad to say I didn't take the camera to the Great British Beer Festival yesterday. Beardy's personal award goes to Timothy Taylor Best, a pint I'd never had before, and which narrowly pipped Archer's Golden into second place, ahead too of my long …read more

The Right Place

There's a limit to how much work you can do on an image in Lightroom, so right click a file and select Edit in Adobe Photoshop. Lightroom then applies any adjustments, adds a TIF file to the Library, and opens in it Photoshop. When your Photoshop work is done, the Library file is updated. A …read more

Mistreated

My Documents, My Pictures - I've always hated them. And the same ire is directed at programs that insist on saving stuff there, or to the user application folders. Tell me, how much important data gets stored in C:Documents and SettingsUserNameApplication Dataetc and how many users never back up that area and lose it when …read more

Feeling good

At last, Adobe have released Lightroom on Windows. First impressions are good in that it's very easy to select a group of raw files and apply global corrections and adjustments. But that's about it - it's a good raw processing tool with an easy workflow, but it's not much more. A lot of code optimisation …read more