General Archives
SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom
While the existing SlideShowPro for Lightroom generates individual web galleries, when your site consists of multiple galleries you have to do some manual editing of xml files which (a) not everyone can do (b) is still manual work for those who can do it. It's much more efficient to power a site with an online …read more
My Hot 5 – #1
I've never used the word “cool” in the American sense. I remember hearing it as a teenager, but then 1976 and punk reached Bolton and swept away all such hippy Americanisms along with all the rock dinosaurs (for some reason it's always Rush who spring to mind) we'd previously admired as the height of musical …read more
5 new ways to while away the summer
A not altogether random selection of blogs: John Paul Caponigro now has a blog and mentions he has written 3 new artist's statements this summer alone (each a classic of its type). Interestingly, he has also used Blurb for a new book of photos and had a good experience. Interesting as I've been also looking …read more
Smart collections for controlling your workflow
When you have a library of many thousands of pictures, querying or searching is clearly a very important feature. And you’ve got to be able to save those search criteria – after all, each time you narrow down your catalogue to find certain pictures, it’s a fair bet that you may want to find the …read more
Choice cuts
A few other Lightroom links… Product manager Tom Hogarty writes about what’s really a plug-in and how so-called plug-ins (Aperture’s and others) are really external editors. Tom and marketing manager Frederick Johnson are interviewed about LR2 in this new O’Reilly podcast, and Adobe Camera Raw engineer Eric Chan writes about the Adobe profiles. The whole …read more
Stripping while exporting from Lightroom
Jeffrey Friedl has released a set of Lightroom 2 export plug-ins including one feature which really caught my eye - his “Metadata Wrangler” which: allows you to strip selected metadata components from images as they are exported. You can use it, for example, to remove the embedded thumbnail and any Lightroom “develop” metadata, while retaining …read more
Five for Three
Somewhere in one of the “Lightroom 2 Is Out” articles I saw a list of 5 features someone would most like to see in Lightroom 3, and so got thinking about the next 5 steps I would want. In my view, Develop now needs incremental progress rather than a bunch of new features as big …read more
AutoSync, Gradient Presets, and wet haddock
Yes, I do throw up my hands in despair every time I read some Lightroom user saying he has hundreds of Develop Presets. It’s the same personality type who will trumpet the hundreds of Velvia-effect Photoshop actions he’s collected, who’ll leap for his wallet every time another newly-released plug-in promises black and white conversion just …read more
On target
Lightroom 2's out, and there are comprehensive lists of its new features at Lightroom Team Journal, by Victoria Bampton, and Ian Lyons. Here, like I did after Lightroom 1, I'm going to stay away from the detail of how features work and focus on the whys and what fors, and on best practice. I'm going …read more
New stuff
Just refreshed the site with a few new pictures - the new gallery is again all new stuff, as it should be, while the wedding gallery includes newer work as well as some old favourites. Both galleries are Flash-based and use the excellent SlideShowPro. I'm using the SSP for Lightroom web engine purely to generate …read more
A true story
I was going to reply to Sean's comments on filenaming conventions in this Lightroom forum thread: Nothing wrong with using yymmdd-camera sequence, lots of people do. I generally just use Custom Name_YYMMDD_3 dig Seq (or 4 for larger shoots) It's not a pedantic point either - I'll assume his “generally” using a filenaming convention was …read more
Result
Had a surprising couple of days. Imagine you go along to a trade show, and just wander up to see if you knew anyone on the Adobe stand - a gentle bit of networking, nothing more. You ask why they're showing Lightroom 1 rather than 2's public beta, but apparently they weren't even showing version …read more
What’s the buzz?
For years they've been saying web-based office applications like word processing and spreadsheets are not far from becoming mainstream. Since they own Flash, Adobe look in a pretty good position to make this reality and the bundling together in Acrobat.com looks like an interesting effort. You've got Buzzword, a Web-based word processor, ConnectNow conferencing for …read more
Print Lightroom ratings as stars
It's always been an irritant that while Lightroom makes it easy to print contact sheets, it can only print the rating as a numeral, not as stars. My own use of the DNG format means I go over to iView and can print adjusted thumbnails with starred ratings, but that's no use if you keep …read more
Aperture versus Lightroom
Ian Wood ( here too) has written an interesting and lengthy Aperture versus Lightroom 2 beta comparison. He admits “Obviously I'm pretty biased towards Aperture (contributing to an Aperture blog, writing Aperture-related software, top-rated poster on the Apple discussion forum, posting on pretty well every Aperture-related forum on the net etc.), but I like to …read more
Competition
It's not a secret that I find Lightroom the best application for reviewing, adjusting and applying initial metadata - I'd pretty well finished processing last weekend's 2,100+ raw files by Wednesday morning. Equally obviously, it's not the only program that aspires to manage and process large numbers of pictures. I'm immediately referring to the Mac-limited …read more
What’s going on?
Mary Jo Foley speculates about Lightroom designer Mark Hamburg's departure to Microsoft: What?s Microsoft want with Adobe Photoshop guru Mark Hamburg, who recently joined the Redmond juggernaut? Hamburg a programmer who has been part of the Adobe Photoshop team since version 2.0 and helped lead the Photoshop Lightroom one, is now a Softie, as News.com?s …read more
Aperture to Lightroom (update)
Last year I posted a note on how to move master pictures from Aperture to Lightroom and transfer any metadata that you had entered. Essentially you used the Export Masters command and told Aperture to put the metadata in XMP sidecars. This worked fine for raw files, but not for originals whose file formats were …read more
Lightroom 2
What is it about the last couple of weeks? OK, I got good news about the lump - it is edible - but then my internet connection fails, another chunk of time goes down the drain, and I'm forced to go down to the pub and use its wifi…. It does 2 of its own …read more
Shush
Take a look at Jeff Schewe's teasing post in a thread about Aperture 2.1 and its dodge and burn utility: what are you gonna be doing next Wed, April 2nd? (I actually already know what you'll be doing but I can't really tell ya) Rendering out the raw file to run a Photoshop type plug-in …read more