General Archives
LR3-Beta : Collections in Develop
Another feature I really like is that the Develop workspace now includes the Collections panel. All Adobe have really done here is to take one logical step further from Lightroom 2 where the panel was made available in the output workspaces, Print, Slideshow and Web. Making Collections more readily available is a quick win, and …read more
LR3-Beta : Slideshow export
In Lightroom 2 you could only export Slideshow layouts to two formats. One was JPEG, which might occasionally be handy for printing or for getting slides into ProShow. The other export possibility, to Adobe Acrobat, was a less-than-enthralling way to distribute slideshows - apart from anything else, it stripped away your carefully-chosen music. So another …read more
LR3-beta – Publish Services
Like many of the features in LR3-beta, Publish Services seems a small step forward. Its obvious use is for those who use services like Flickr, Smugmug etc, and before long I hope SlideShowPro’s Director can also be included. But it isn’t just about the web – there’s also the Hard Drive option. This lets you …read more
LR3-Beta : Black and white!!!
How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand? Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer …read more
LR3-Beta : Filter lock and stickiness
A subtle change - but one which will change they way people work - is the addition of a little lock symbol in the Library's filter panel (shortcut ). Its purpose may not be clear from the tooltip “if locked, the filter will not disable when changing sources”. In plain English, when the lock is …read more
LR3-Beta : Auto Sync
Last week I gave a talk to a room of photographers and showed some of my favourite Lightroom features. Not for the first time, the one that caused the most surprise was Develop's AutoSync mode - even among audience members who were already Lightroom enthusiasts. Lightroom 3 Beta now has a little switch next to …read more
A late winner
I imagine this will interest a very small crowd, but here's a year-old presentation to a Mac developers conference by Adobe's Troy Gaul on how Lightroom is coded. He shows the development environment they needed to build because they were using Lua rather than a more widely-used language. One thing (as well as a new …read more
Lightroom keyword synonyms
From a forum answer, here are a few bullet points about synonyms in Lightroom: You can use them to save on data entry (eg using the common and Latin names of species) You can see them by double clicking a keyword in the Keyword List See them by switching the Keywording panel to “Will Export” …read more
Lightroom noise reduction
Jeff Schewe gives a succinct summary of Lightroom's noise reduction in this Adobe forum thread: In terms of use, you can't separate the noise reduction from the image sharpening in the Detail panel. If you don't have optimized sharpening, you won't get optimal noise reduction (other than color noise reduction which is pretty good at …read more
5 things I just don’t get
1. Lightroom's Density slider 2. Mac OSX's Spaces 3. Lightroom's default Sync mode 4. Bing (just Google it if you don't know it is “is a search engine that finds and organises the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.” Yeah, right) 5. Why GCSE's aren't percentiles (even if Tom got …read more
Scrubbers
Adobe's user experience blog Inspire lists 8 Things Your Mother Should Have Told You about Lightroom: Last year, we ran a study on 75 new home users of Lightroom and listened in as they tried to work with their photos. From that, we
Seeing stars
Just writing something (for book 7) on the use of star ratings. A great way to develop consistency is by defining what your star ratings actually signify. This varies depending on what type of photographer you are, so for example a studio photographer might define 5 stars as what is good enough for the studio …read more
Dragging from History
Well, I could tart this up as a Lightroom tip, which it is, but I should confess that no matter how well you know something, there’s a lot that passes you by. Credit for this is due to Rob Sylvan of Lightroomers. I frequently use the Develop workspace’s Before/After view, usually via the shortcuts Y …read more
Shortcuts
Matt, the PhotoGeek, shows how to accelerate access to Lightroom Plugin Extras: If your directory does contain a TranslatedStrings.txt file: 1. Open TranslatedStrings.txt in a text file editor 2. Search for the string “AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras” 3. If the string does exist, add an ampersand (&) into the text following the equals (=) sign. This should be …read more
Lightroom Plug-in #5 – Open Directly
I rarely feel the need to edit a raw file in Nikon Capture, and I don’t find much advantage from doing so. In my case, it’s an admission of defeat as I should be able to do all I want in Lightroom. For others I suspect it’s a somewhat dubious faith in the camera makers’ …read more
Where’s the beef?
Ars Technica reports Expression Media ripped out of Microsoft Expression Studio: Expression Media, Microsoft's digital asset management software for cataloging photos, video and music, will continue to be available as a standalone product but will no longer ship with Expression Studio, effective with the upcoming Expression Studio 3 release. Microsoft will continue to market Expression …read more
DPi and an announcement
Last week's DPI show was fun. Only doing one platform session a day, it was a lot less arduous than the three daily sessions I did at Focus, and it meant I spent my time doing Q&A on Lightroom and Photoshop. Working one to one, or with small groups, you're able to establish their needs …read more
Zipping Lightroom backup files
While Lightroom's backup files are self-standing catalogues, and can be run without any further fuss, they do take up a lot of disc space - until you realise how much they shrink when zipped. I've always zipped them because of this space issue, but another reason requires me to break a little confidence…. A while …read more
SlideShowPro 1.96
SlideShowPro's latest update is a bit more significant than most - it introduces a “Ken Burns” pan and zoom effect - so I'm downloading it right now. A Lightroom version of this is here now.
Search and replace – the very first release
The term Release Candidate reminds me as much of Ronnie Biggs‘ impending release from jail, but here is a Release Candidate of BeardyReplace, my Lightroom 2.3 plug-in designed for changing text in Metadata Panel fields. It does three things: 1. Searches and replaces metadata text 2. Appends text to metadata fields 3. Transfers text between …read more