General Archives
If you’re looking for reasons to use Bridge….
Let's say you have a bunch of raw files adjusted with Adobe Camera Raw, and you want to make a load of JPEGs. It's not a novel nor a difficult task - Lightroom's export function is designed for the job, or if you're using Bridge you might reach for the Image Processor which runs the …read more
Trojan horses
Not long ago I almost linked to Micah Walter's Inside Aperture article Seeing RED. He's now doing more video and is having problems managing the new file types: What would save my day would be Aperture. If only Aperture supported AVCHD (and many of the other tapeless formats) I could import my AVCHD card just …read more
A Lightroom podcast
A quick pointer to Image Doctors podcast for November 13th which is on Lightroom 2.0 and is essentially a 45 minute interview with Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's Product Manager. You can see one of the presenter's Yosemite pictures here - most aren't as artificial-looking as this one though.
ProShow and Lightroom
I've had ProShow Producer for a year and intended to use it to prepare a multimedia slide show of a wedding I recently shot at Cliveden. And just in the nick of time, there's now a ProShow Plug-in for Lightroom. It's another export plug-in - these things are beginning to pile up, aren't they? As …read more
CS4 File Info panels
One annoyance of Photoshop/Bridge CS4 is that it won't read any existing custom File Info panels. These let File Info display XMP metadata from other applications such as iView or Expression Media, and they were written in a text file format which was reasonably easy to create and edit. In CS4 though, the panels are …read more
Percentage shares
Tom Hogarty updates the what pros use for raw file conversion comparison. Both Lightroom and Aperture increase their share, Lightroom leaping 50% on 2007 and Aperture a respectable 36%. Among Mac users only, Aperture’s share is static though, indicating the overall increase is due to people shifting to the Mac. Of course, using one of …read more
Why iView, still?
I was asked recently for a few reasons why I still use Expression Media (I still call it iView) rather than depending entirely on Lightroom, so in descending order, here goes: By far the biggest reason is to manage in a single place all files related to photographic projects. For me, like very many photographers, …read more
Metadata from Lightroom to InDesign
I recently saw a wedding book some friends had created using Photobox. They wouldn’t claim to be computer-savvy, but they’d done a great job and were able to give copies to close family. It should be just that easy, shouldn’t it, and I am more than a little frustrated that Lightroom still doesn’t have a …read more
Strange (and missing) words
Over at the McCreate site (which first adorned the web as Aperture Professional Users Network, soon dropped the word “Professional”, and then dropped the rest) John Omvik does a lengthy comparison of Aperture 2.1 vs Lightroom 2.0 – Different Approaches to Local Image Corrections: So Which Method is Best? Both methods offer advantages and disadvantages …read more
A couple of Lightroom pointers
Lightroom 2 lets you send a panorama's component frames directly to Photoshop, but they're sent full size. Unless you really want a massive full size stitch, that slows down Photoshop's panorama processing. Instead, Martin Evening has done a video showing a method which gets round this. Initially Lightroom sends the files to Photoshop as layers …read more
Borrowdale Fell Run
Although Sunday’s annual Borrowdale Shepherd’s Meet had been cancelled, I knew the fell run was still happening. A book I’d been given last Christmas contained Patrick Ward‘s great wide-angle photo of the nearby Wasdale fell run, and I wanted to exploit the combination of the D700 and my 17-35mm f2.8 lens in a similar way. …read more
A rant about hierarchical keywords
It’s not specifically a Lightroom thing, and I say the same about Aperture and Expression Media 2. And I admit that I am a bit out on a limb here in holding these opinions….. But I find hierarchical keywords to be an utter pain, and simply not worth the effort. It doesn’t matter how much …read more
Mileage varies
Ben Long reviews Silver Efex Pro and correctly points out one of its best features The Black and White adjustment in Photoshop is very good because it allows you to make changes to specific color values in your image. The problem is that if you tell it to darken the blue tones in an image, …read more
Lightroom architecture
One of the Lightroom developers, Troy Gaul, has put online the slides from a presentation he did on Lightroom's architecture. It has odd nuggets of info - for me the mention of a possible IDE written in Lua was most interesting. So if you're writing scripts or web engines, there's the promise of a debugging …read more
Patrick Lavoie
I'm not really into navel-gazing descriptions of workflow, or into fashion photography, but here's a pointer to Patrick Lavoie's thorough description of Digital Photography Workflow: Fashion Photography: As a professional photo retoucher and digi-tech (digital assistant), my job is fairly simple yet stressful during a photo shoot. My job is to make sure everything is …read more
My not quite famous enough 5 – #4
I'm not that keen on Lightroom 2's new Filter Panel, as I said here. When I do use it, it's usually because I want to temporarily filter the visible items down by key such as rating or sometimes by masters or virtual copies - ie by one of the old Lightroom 1.4 filters. Display the …read more
Lightroom web galleries from the ground up
One reason why I still use iView rather than switching completely to Lightroom is because I prefer its HTML web gallery templates. iView takes about a third of Lightroom's time to output a big contact sheet style web gallery of say 100-300 pictures because it uses my DNG files' embedded previews, while Lightroom seems to …read more
Plug-ins (Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy)
It's easy to see real positives in Aperture's announcement of plug-in architecture. Taking advantage of existing third party tools can quickly flesh out its features, while positioning it at the centre of a viable “ecosystem”. Meanwhile third party developers can be working on fully-integrated solutions. On the other hand, it's a long way short of …read more
My not quite famous enough 5 – #3
The third feature in this little list is something which I won't swear is new, but which if it was there in version 1 is something I never noticed and can't get working now - autocomplete drop down lists. Previously Lightroom remembered whatever you'd entered in the Metadata panel, and would then autocomplete your entry …read more
SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom – update
OK, I tried it out. After my little joke about Ahmedinejad and his centrifuges, I should say that this little toy didn't work 100% properly first time…. The Lightroom side of it worked perfectly, and the plug-in also created a new album (a grouping of pictures) on my server, but it didn't send the payload …read more