General Archives
How can I pay you for your plug-ins?
I’ve said before that I intend to introduce paid versions of my plug-ins, especially Search Replace Transfer which finds and replaces metadata text, and Open Directly which sends the selected files to other programs such as Nikon Capture NX. It’s just taken much longer than I’d hoped. Rather than half-bake my own licensing mechanism, I’ll …read more
Grain is good
Some of the thinking behind Lightroom 3's grain effect is revealed in this 2008 article by Eric Chan, one of the top guys in Adobe's Camera Raw team Ten Tips for Better Prints The digital printing process requires resampling an image from its original resolution to a printer's own resolution. This resampling process can produce …read more
More free Light(room)
After a spurt of premature announcements from dpReview (not their fault) and Adobe's own TV, there is indeed a Lightroom 3 Beta 2. See Tom Hogarty for the official announcement. The product's appeal has been broadened by including support for tethering and for the management of video files. But for me the beef of this …read more
What has Aperture done to my x@%king metadata?
I'll be posting some of my own thoughts on Aperture 3 soon, maybe tomorrow. But I just noticed David Riecks has some issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata and I recommend you read his article very carefully indeed: Apple has made some significant changes to how Aperture handles metadata with this latest release. …read more
Plug-in to evolution
Mark Wilson has just released a Lightroom plug-in Nature Data LR which, at first glance, is about adding to your Library a group of nature-related custom fields: The fields provide a formal and structured approach to organising your images of natural subjects such as birds and mammals. The plug-in adds a new metadata panel to …read more
Great cable
Terry White shows how to shoot tethered into Lightroom. It’s not perfect, not by a long means, but far from difficult. Wish I could think of a better pun though – conVince Cable?
Tough love…
If you’ve ever used iView or Extensis Portfolio, or many other non-Adobe programs, you will have learnt long ago that Photoshop’s Maximize Compatibility dialog box did exactly what it said on the tin – it maximised the PSD or TIF file’s compatibility with other programs. Failing to choose this setting would save disc space at …read more
Lightroom’s 10 strongest points
Over at Lightroom forums someone asked what people think are the 10 strongest points of Lightroom? While my initial reaction was a Keanesque “you've got eyes, haven't you, what do you think?”, it's actually not a bad question and nicely follows up my post from the other day. After all, for all the moaning about …read more
Alamy and Lightroom
There's a apocryphal story that you can be waiting forever for a London bus, probably while it's raining, and just as you've given up and started walking home, two or three will turn up at once. Well at the end of a very enjoyable evening at Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society, someone asked me about …read more
10 Things I Wish I Could Tell A Slightly Less New Lightroom User
It was interesting to read Scott Kelby’s 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users and I was surprised to see how many of his points would also be on my list. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are good, though 9 and 10 are very questionable. That article was actually inspired by recent Aperture …read more
Custom metadata and Lightroom
Maybe later this week I’ll wheel out the new LR3-friendly version of my Search, Replace and Transfer plug-in. There’s still a bit of testing to do though because I’ve had to find ways to work around LR3’s database access change – when your plug-in’s dialog box provides immediate feedback, you’ve a bit of a problem …read more
Publish to the cloud
When the LR3-Beta came out, one of my posts highlighted the less obvious aspect of the new Publish Service – the hard drive option – and I mentioned that I’ve already found it handy as a stepping stone between LR and InDesign. There will be plenty of other uses too, and I’ve already seen a …read more
LR3-Beta : my plug-ins
My Lightroom plug-ins are intended for those who are more serious about DAM, so I didn't really expect people to be using them with the LR3-Beta. That important thought aside, I should have looked sooner, because some of them aren't working. The reason is that the plug-ins rely on features which were first introduced in …read more
Bright news from a dark island
The clocks going back always make me grumpy, and the blog's been a bit boringly-Lightroom recently, so here's some cheerful news about Britain: We have wine labels in English dialects - by eck, this Shatto Burnley's reet tasty Students love their brands - proof that Exeter University is indeed full of Oxbridge rejects Someone found …read more
Will it “register”?
My enthusiasm for LR3-Beta's new import dialog box is, as I responded here, best described as “complete indifference”, so see Richard Earney and Wade Heninger for opinions on the new experience. One opportunity Adobe have lost (though it's not too late) is a semantic one - change its name from “import” to “register”. It's a …read more
Tom says
Derrick Story interviews Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty about the LR3-Beta in this short podcast
LR3-Beta : Slideshow music
Slideshow has always seemed a very secondary activity for Lightroom users, and I see little value in it attempting to rival programs like ProShow which are designed to author multimedia DVD slideshows. Incremental improvement is all that's needed. That said, LR2's inability to export a slideshow with music was a big shortfall, which is why …read more
Flashing (getting it out in public)
I noticed the other day that in the darkest corners of my hard drive are some Flash files dating back to 1999. That I've been dabbling with Flash for ten years was a surprise, but these were Precambrian era fumblings and very primitive life forms indeed. As the second Christian Millennium stumbled onwards, every so …read more
LR3-Beta : The round up
For some it was too early to go bed, others seem to have stayed up to make their LR3 Beta post goes out on the 9pm Pacific Time dot, while one Lightroom geek regularly burns the midnight oil till dawn. Here after double checking the time difference, then adding an hour, I left my blog …read more
LR3-beta – just 6 posts
OK, yesterday's big news was United winning in Moscow, and down here in leafy Dulwich the raucous laughter about beach balls has little to do with the Windows 7 launch party I didn't hold, nor with a premature celebration of the Lightroom 3 Beta that would come gushing from Adobe's servers at 9pm Pacific time. …read more