General Archives

SiteMaker for Lightroom

SiteMaker is the name of a new and very-soon-to-be-unleashed web gallery for Lightroom 3 which aims to create a complete web site within Lightroom. The front page is designed so you can highlight three key groups of images – for example “Latest work”, “Landscape portfolio”, “Black and white portraits”. So the top part of the …read more

With kind permission

With kind permission, a letter of thanks: Dear Mr Beardsworth I write to advice that I shall be lodging a formal complaint with Adobe about Lightroom [gurus] in general and you in particular.  You are all a load of shysters.  With mal-intent you insert stealth bombs into Lightroom that no user could possibly detect, simply …read more

OpenDirectly released

I’ve just (finally) released Open Directly, my plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 that opens images directly in another program. The other program may be another raw converter, or it can be any program the user chooses. In either case, the plug-in simply sends the original file and invokes the other program. Read more here

Keywording

A particularly well-rounded set of thoughts on keywording in Lightroom from Chuq Von Rospach here: An important point  — when you design a structure like this, how well it’ll work for you depends on where your hassle factor hits. Are you more annoyed by looking through long lists of things? If so, design a hierarchy …read more

Sweet spot

Not sure who is behind Totally Sweet Photos but he (maybe Tom) or she describes a A Hyper-Organized, Smart Collection-based Lightroom Workflow: This seems like an incredibly complicated workflow, however since the majority of the tools involved are self-updating smart collections I put forth virtually no effort in order to keep track of thousands of …read more

Syncomatic 1.23 now syncs into stacks

Version 1.23 of my Lightroom plug-in Syncomatic is now available via Photographers Toolbox. The new feature is that now, as well as handling files with matching names, it can now synchronise metadata and adjustments within stacks When you add metadata like the title or keywords to a stack, Lightroom only updates the picture on the …read more

Syncomatic plug-in – now syncs adjustments too

I’ve just released a new version of my Syncomatic plug-in. Syncomatic’s original purpose was to tidy up metadata when you are faced with sets of pictures whose names match but whose metadata is out of sync. For instance you may have lots of TIFs or JPEGs which have been output from your raw files, but …read more

More about the pen’s eraser end

I really wasn’t sure whether yesterday’s how to make the Intuos pen’s eraser erase Lightroom’s local adjustments was a discovery of the magnitude of Columbus reaching the New World or belonged in the same “so what?” league of interest as Britain’s red tops revealing that another highly-paid footballer can’t keep it in his pants and …read more

As good as a mouse?

A bit late, but see this year-old guest appearance on Scott Kelby’s blog by Wes Maggio, an Application Specialist for Wacom where he talks about the pen/tablet combo and its role with Photoshop and Lightroom. Still, everyone’s workflow is a little bit unique. At the end of the day, if you find that your particular …read more

Lightroom, Photoshop and timelapses

There’s an excellent couple of movies by Julianne Kost on using Lightroom and particularly Photoshop for timelapse movies . Part 1 is the relatively obvious Lightroom work, but the much more interesting part 2 shows Photoshop (Extended) assembling the movie, adding lens blurs in a batch, and – the bit I didn’t know – including sound. …read more

Whatever you want

Lightroom’s SDK forum, never the busiest or most informative place on the net, has become a bit of a no-go zone lately as one particularly pungent forum member (let’s call him Borat) seems to feel the need to advertise his opinion on every topic. A period of  silence followed by modesty would probably make everyone, …read more

Syncomatic 1.21: -edit and other suffixes

Syncomatic’s original idea was to sync the metadata of files where their names are the same but they have different file types – for example, from 123.cr2 to 123.tif. However, by default Lightroom adds -edit to the file suffix when it sends a file to Photoshop and plenty of photographers identify different versions of a …read more

Syncomatic available now via Photographer’s Toolbox

Tim Armes’s Lightroom plug-in site, Photographer’s Toolbox now has a blog to announce new plug-ins from Tim, me, and from Matt Dawson. There’s also a Twitter feed for quick announcements. My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available. Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to …read more

Dossier de Presse

Dossier de Presse is a Lightroom-WordPres plug-in from Luc Renambot: I’m using WordPress with the NextGEN gallery plugin and I used to export my images to disk and then create a gallery and upload the images. They are (better) plugins to upload to WordPress, but I couldn’t find one that supported NextGEN gallery plugin. So …read more

Locktastic available

Locktastic is now available through Photographer’s Toolbox. This simple plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 is designed for photographers who lock or tag files while shooting events, and once they’re in Lightroom it marks those thumbnails with the red label.

Never was so much owed by so many to so few…

CNET’s Lightroom 3 review includes some interesting comments from Tom Hogarty, Adobe’s product manager The time was not yet ripe for Adobe to add face recognition into Lightroom, Hogarty said. “There’s a lot of interest in that area, especially as more consumer-grade applications such as Photoshop Elements have added facial recognition. I think the bar …read more

Lightroom 3, IPTC Extensions, and my plug-ins

One of the less obvious changes between the beta and Lightroom 3 is the inclusion of the “IPTC Extensions“,the extra metadata fields agreed last year (specification here – PDF). Great to see Adobe’s keeping up with publicly-agreed standards rather than doing what the competitor does and pretending they don’t exist! Some of the fields could …read more

Lightroom 3 – the rolling release

The trouble with prolonged public betas like Lightroom 3’s is that it’s harder to make a big splash when the time comes to announce the real thing. People become used to a big leap in image quality and take it for granted. They know they can now manage the videos their camera takes, and start …read more

Double click that stack badge

I’m not a big user of stacking features in any software – it’s a good way to hide pictures and never see them again – and in Lightroom there’s a further reasons I avoid them: applying metadata. If images are stacked and the stack in closed, when you add some metadata it only applies to …read more

Lightroom to Mobile Me

When I set up my Mac laptop, I remember they tried to get me to set up a .Mac account, what’s now called MobileMe. My first reaction – you’ve just taken my money and you’re trying to tie me up even more – certainly wasn’t meant as positively as Max Mosley might have uttered it, …read more