While I’d previously evaluated Adobe Portfolio, which is included in the Lightroom subscription, and had considered moving my photography site to it, it was only last week that I finally made the move – and here is my photography web site now on Portfolio.

When it happened, the switch was unplanned and was forced upon me by my web host taking my previous site offline without notice (they had acquired my previous host and never reminded me to pay the annual renewal). Fine, if that’s typical of how the new guys do things… And after a day or so I was up and running again and Portfolio johnbeardsworth.myportfolio.com URL was replaced by my own beardsworth.co.uk.

In short, while the site is not yet finished (if web sites are ever truly finished), maybe you’ll find it helpful to learn that I found Adobe Portfolio viable as a replacement for a self-hosted site.

All the photo pages are integrated with my main Classic Lightroom catalogue, so each page corresponds to a collection which is “synced” to Adobe’s LrMobile cloud. So any edits to pictures, titles or captions, or changing the picture order, will be synced automatically to Adobe. I then just have to go into Portfolio and “reset” the page’s integration to update the live site.

While Wayback Machine meant I could rescue plenty of the text from my vanished old site, I lost one or two bits of custom code and things that I’d set up in WordPress. Most I can live without, but an awkward one was the Instagram panel which I’d included in the old site – awkward because I know of people who went to see if I was still alive and kicking!

Portfolio does have a way to “embed” some external content in its pages, and this is documented at this Portfolio FAQ page. It  means that you just add an embed box and enter a little code, and the FAQ examples including YouTube. But Instagram was missing and while there are some hints offered in Adobe’s forum the solution was quite simple once I had figured it out with a bit of experimentation.

Here the crucial details are:

1. your Instagram USERNAME must be followed by “/embed”
2. in Instagram>Settings>Sharing and Re-use, you need to enable “Website embeds”

Other than the width and height, I don’t see a way to customise how Portfolio displays the Instagram grid, for instance having more rows or columns. If you do know, I’d like to hear it.

But I hope that’s useful. Portfolio can’t please everyone, but I hope my experience indicates that there’s plenty you can do with it. And it is a lot less effort than maintaining your own WordPress site!

GPU options are in Preferences/Performance

I wanted to test LR’s GPU export options  with the new MacBookPro M4. The export sample was 312 48mb Fuji raw files (with lots of LR adjustments) exported as 2048 pixel JPEGs, and the results were interesting.

First I exported with the default “Auto” setting (ie not using GPU for export) and then I tried again with it set up like on the right.

The initial default GPU-off “Auto” completed in 375 seconds. Enabling GPU for export, it was all done in 215.

Not quite half the time, but a more-than-40% timesaving. More than interesting – rather useful I’d say!

Apart from noticing that Adobe had acquired Frame.io 2-3 years ago, I’ve never investigated the product or gone beyond noting that it seemed to be a cloud-based team collaboration tool for multimedia assets (Frame.io’s Max presentation gives an idea of the product’s marketplace).

But this morning I did notice this intriguing tweet by Adobe’s Terry White about Frame.io’s C2C Camera to Cloud integration with LR. In short:

• If your camera can be connected to the internet, it may also have Frame.io installed.
  • Fuji are already doing it, Nikon and Canon are on the way
  • While it’ll be limited to very recent cameras, it’s a good excuse to take a look in the darkest corner of your camera’s menu system.
  

  Here’s one way Frame.io suggest people might use this workflow

• Once the camera is connected to Frame.io, new photos can be sent from the camera up to Frame.io’s cloud
  • Selectively or automatically
  • There’s a choice of file type
• Frame.io can now be linked to Adobe’s Lightroom cloud
  • New photos in Frame.io are automatically imported into an Lightroom cloud account
  • Lightroom cloud makes them available to the various Lightrooms including Classic
• Frame.io initially announced C2C last year and now seem to have a free basic use plan offering 2gb.

Terry showed the process using a Fuji X-H2S and with my Fuji X-T5 it only took me under 10 minutes to get up and running with these instructions from the X-T5 manual .

I’m not sure I will ever need to use this in practice, but I think someone will, and they may well love the workflow. And it makes me think that if you can upload directly from a camera to Frame.io C2C, why can’t you do so directly to Lightroom Cloud?

I’ve just released an update for a minor but annoying bug.

Also, in response to a new user’s question, I prepared this quick video (watch in YouTube) showing how to use Syncomatic’s options for syncing items in stacks.

Yesterday I released version 5 of Syncomatic which has some big changes:

• It’s now a single menu item and dialog box including all ways of matching files
• It can now copy from Masters to VCs and vice versa, with an option to target only the selected VCs/stack members or to extend the sync to all the source photo’s VCs/stack members elsewhere in the catalogue
• There’s a new Before / After report making it easy to review the results of running the plugin
• Dry run generates the Before / After report but doesn’t apply changes to files

If the plugin is already installed, you may be notified of the update automatically. Alternatively, get it from Photographers Toolbox.

Lightroom 13.3 is out today, and I recommend you watch Julieanne Kost’s excellent video on the new AI-powered Generative Remove tool introduced in Lightroom 13.3. Stay till the end – the three quick tips are real timesavers.

In some cases you may not want or be allowed to publish any AI-generated content in a photograph, but it can be hard to remember if you’ve used that feature. So notice that you can now filter on photos that contain AI generated content.

I’ve updated my Video Metadata plugin with a small but potentially-useful option suggested by a user – saving the Will Export keywords to the video.

Previously the plugin tried to replicate Lightroom’s standard way of saving keywords when you use the menu command Metadata > Save Metadata to Files So it saved only those keywords which have actually been applied to the photos, and didn’t write synonyms or containing keywords into the videos.

While it makes plenty of sense to echo Lightroom’s built-in features, relying on its Export feature to write all the keywords into the exported copy of the video, I can imagine that plenty of users do not always export copies of videos from Lightroom. I know I don’t. Instead I will use the video that’s in Lightroom directly in a Premiere Pro project, so I can see how it would be handy to see all of a video’s keywords including synomyms.

That’s what the new option in 2.1 allows.

For me Point Color is the most useful feature in the newly-released Lightroom 13, allowing subtle and accurate shifts in colour.

If you read anything about Lightroom 13, put aside any of your thoughts about HDR and read this article High Dynamic Range Explained by Adobe’s senior engineer Eric Chan

But if you read anything about Lightroom 13, put aside any of your thoughts about HDR and read this article High Dynamic Range Explained by Adobe’s senior engineer Eric Chan:

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a project for viewing, editing, and sharing [my emphasis] High Dynamic Range photographs. I’m thrilled to announce that this feature is now shipping in all Lightroom products (on desktop, mobile, and web) and Camera Raw. In this post I’ll explain what it is, how it works, and how to get the most from it.

To see the photos in this post in High Dynamic Range, I recommend that you use a macOS or Windows system with Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge version 116 or later and a High Dynamic Range display that supports 1000 nits or brighter. Note that other browsers and platforms may not display the photos on this page in HDR. Recommended displays include Apple XDR displays, such as a MacBook Pro with an XDR display (2021 or later), and any display VESA-certified as DisplayHDR 1000 or DisplayHDR 1400.

Does the term “High Dynamic Range” make you cringe and recoil? Does it make you think of overcooked images with big halos and garish colors? Let me assure you — that is not what this feature is about.

HDR editing may seem irrelevant for those photographers who expect their pictures to be printed and who correct them in that expectation. I am in that group and I am certainly surprised that Adobe prioritised HDR editing.

Look at the second paragraph in this quote and ask if you are using that browser, if your monitor is HDR. Maybe you are, and maybe also when you switch to your other computer or device, but there’s a fair chance you’re not using an HDR display and think about everyone who might be viewing your pictures – certainly you’ll never be able to make a print that is HDR.

While there are lots of HDR screens out there, they’re not universal, but that does seem to be the direction we’re going. So to me Adobe’s prioritising HDR editing is an educated bet on where we are going to be in the not-too-distant future, it’s Adobe trying to get ahead of the game, and only time will tell – no matter how useless I find it.

I’ve recently added a couple of new features to my Capture Time to EXIF plugin (available here), both requested by users:

• You can now set much older years – a user wanted to set 16th century dates for some family photos
• When updating multiple images, you can now add various intervals to each image in the batch. Previously this increment was limited to one second, but not you can choose intervals of up to one day.

I also took the opportunity to update the look, which I hope is clearer.

Why 2.7 so soon after 2.6? Because after I released 2.6 with the earlier dates, I realized that I had forgotten to add the multiple dates increment.

Adobe have recently said that they’re discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service by February 2024. As the Microsoft 365 account for Office includes 1 TB of free storage, what do you think about it as an alternative?

It works – assuming you have a Microsoft 365 account – but it’s a bit opaque in how promptly it will sync non-MS Office files, though until now I had sufficient cloud space from Dropbox and Adobe and have only really used OneDrive for specific projects which mainly involve MS apps.

One advantage is that MS Office files are continually being saved in the background while you’re working on them, and another is that apps like Excel can reopen recently-opened or pinned files even if you’ve used Explorer to move the files around in OneDrive. You’ve also got browser-based access to these files. I suspect there are more little tweaks for MS apps, but these are valuable to me yet may not be to others.

As a general point I wonder how much trust one can ever place in these “bonus” cloud storage services. After all, you may have received the email telling us that “Adobe is modernising the Creative Cloud storage experience” – in this case “modernising” means discontinuing the Creative Cloud Synced files service entirely. Dropbox could do something similar, reducing the allocation or making it too-annoying with ads. Would Microsoft, maybe, but they’re probably expecting that it’ll be used for MS content rather than for the big bytes that Adobe’s customers would generate, and 1tb means you’ve got plenty of headroom if they ever did decide to reduce the space allocation.

So while I’ve already moved stuff from Creative Cloud folders – some to Dropbox, some as Photoshop Cloud files – I’ll probably move the rest to OneDrive.

Is there an option to create a linked smart object instead of an embedded one when exporting a photo to PS?

No, sadly LR cannot directly create a linked smart object, so you have to do something like this:

1. First in LR select the image and do a Save Metadata to File (CmdS on Mac, CtrlS on Windows)
2. Right click the image and choose Edit In > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop.
3. Now in PS, save the file at this point – it makes the next steps less puzzling.
4. Then still in PS, right click the smart object layer, choose Relink to File.
5. Navigate to the raw file and click Place.
6. In the Adobe Camera Raw dialog, click OK.

If you now make changes back in LR and do a Cmd/Ctrl S, you’ll see the Photoshop link being refreshed.

I am pretty sure that’s all the steps.

PS:

Conrad Chavez: Also, once you’ve got it set up as a linked Smart Object, that makes it possible to send the edits back to Lightroom Classic. If you edit the linked raw Smart Object in Photoshop by double-clicking to open it in Camera Raw, Camera Raw writes the edits back to the external metadata. Which means, back in Lightroom Classic, you can select that photo and choose Metadata > Read Metadata from File, and that will update the original raw file in Lightroom Classic.

I’ve just released version 2.2 of my Search and Replace plugin.

As well as a couple of bug fixes for problems reported by people using old versions of Lightroom (as old as 5.7 for example) the main changes are in the Workflow Filters area where I’ve added more fields which can be displayed in Library Filter or smart collections.

The new Workflow Filters fields:

• Exposure Bias
• Crop ratio
• Count of AI masks
• Count of AI spots heals

For a long time there have also been 5 user-definable fields which Workflow Filters can populate. These now show the name of the field which you have defined.

Two new commands can be run independently or as part of the Refresh Workflow Filters command:

• Rename masks from “Mask 1, 2…” to reflect what they contain, so “Lin Lin -Rad” is a mask which contains two linear gradients and one radial which is set to Subtract. It’s disabled by default, but I find it makes the Masks panel a bit easier to read.
• Delete JPEG sidecars for selected raw files to tidy up folders. For a long time I’ve used a separate script to do this, but I thought it made sense to include it as another task in Workflow Filters. Because it’s deleting files, it’s defined quite conservatively.

For those who use Caption Builder, there is a big change which came from user requests – you can now use it write to title, headline, instructions and to the plugin’s 16 custom fields. It’ll still be called Caption Builder but it was an easy change to make.

I should add that while the plugin will continue to support older versions of Lightroom, newer features are disabled – usually hidden. So there’s not much point updating the plugin if you are using an older version of Lightroom.

I’ve just released version 2.1 of my plugin Open Directly which allows you to send raw files directly to other programs. For example, let’s say you want to process a photo in Capture One. If you followed Lightroom’s External Editor method, Lightroom would first convert raw files to PSD or TIF and would defeat the whole purpose of sending them to Capture One. The Open Directly plugin simply sends the photo directly to the other program.

I must admit, it should have been released three years ago.

Back in spring 2020 – just after the first Covid lockdown – someone emailed me asking for a specific improvement to the plugin. As I was already working on big improvements to Search and Replace, it was a perfect time to ask – I certainly had the time, and needed any change of routine. The request was only whether I could increase the number of supported apps from 6, and that was pretty easy, and I ended up polishing a few other aspects of the plugin. As they say, the devil makes work for idle hands….

Quick menu names can display the name of the app which they launch – previously you had to remember which app would be launched

So version 2 has a range of enhancements:

1. Number of apps increased from 6 to 15
2. Second quick menu added, so you can send a photo to an external app without going through the dialog box
3. The user can choose which apps can be launched via each quick menu
4. Quick menu names can display the name of the app which they launch
5. Added reset buttons in Plugin Manager
6. Added a change log

I released 2.0 as a beta, but I really can’t remember why I quickly forgot about it and never released 2.0. At the time I recall mornings lining up outside supermarkets for eggs or flour, and I was pursuing a number projects to make the best of being stuck at home such improving my pasta-making skills (I hadn’t yet learnt to brew beer!). I’d like to think that I must have been thinking through another bright idea but never got round to it. Whatever happened shall remain a mystery, but the plugin is finally available.

The right hand column lets you decide which apps will be available in the quick menus

Like many people I’ve been giving Adobe’s AI-based Firefly and now Photoshop’s beta Generative Fill a good workover and thought I’d share a few words and examples. While there’s a lot of hype – and fear – about Generative AI, I’m still not sure I’ve been able to use it to produce anything that could fool anyone.

So for example, in the first group of images here, I can do better Photoshopping away the boxes myself, although to its credit I thought it was a nice touch that Generative Fill inserted a reflection of a traffic cone. Yet I did spend a lot of time typing in a variety of phrases for it to use to replace the area, and I got lots of artificial-looking results like the basket of roses (and I asked for four) until I tried puddles and hit on one that worked. So was the big benefit for me that the AI had access to stock examples of puddles? That might be valuable, sometimes, but is it really something to fear?

The second set of images came from Firefly, Adobe’s web-based tool, which I asked to create entirely-new photographs, sorry photograph-like pictures. I deliberately used phrases like “Lake District” to test if it would still produce scenery from New Hampshire rather than north west England, and wondered if using “Derwentwater” or “fells” might steer it to the right region. You can see the phrases under the pictures, and while there’s a lot wrong and some strangely-bred sheep, there’s also a lot that is indeed reminiscent of the Lakes. I can recognise an Ullswater and the rainy colour palette.

What practical use is this, I just don’t know!

But of course, the beta’s available and it’s not hard to try it and inform yourself, which has got to be way better than listening to all the hype.

Photoshop’s Generative Fill:

Adobe Firefly:

It’s a pretty good principle that if one person complains or can’t figure something out, there will be many more that I never hear from. Soon after I released Search and Replace 2.0 a few people contacted me with concerns about copying from the four IPTC Location fields, and I had to admit that my changes weren’t as clear as I hoped.

So version 2.1 is released today with more tidying up and polishing, but mainly to bring back the buttons which copy IPTC Locations to keywords and to the IPTC Extension Location Shown/Created fields.

They’re all now on the new Workflow Filters tab:

I’m not sure many people really use the IPTC Extension Location Shown/Created (I certainly don’t) but I’ve taken this opportunity to add some extra detail to make working with those fields less awkward:

• The new World region box lets you enter it in the dialog box, or leave blank, and you are no longer prompted for it when you copy from the four IPTC Location fields.
• The new Change region buttons let you select a number of photos and change all their world regions
• The new Delete buttons let you delete the contents of those fields without opening up the item in the Metadata panel

IPTC Extension Location Shown/Created are now also shown in the Library Filter by the Refresh Workflow Filters command, helping you review entries in those fields.

There are also extra options in the Plugin Manager:

• When you run Refresh Worklow Filters you can also copy from the four IPTC Location fields to Keywords and to the IPTC Extension Location Shown/Created fields.
• You can now keyword the top level keyword (a user requested)
• You can customize the choices for the above World region box

Lightroom 12.3 came out today and the headline feature is an AI-derived Denoise. I’ll admit that I am ambivalent about it:

• I’m not so concerned by noise that I’ve bought any of the 3rd party AI-based apps.
• It’s slow
• I don’t particularly want an extra (big) DNG in addition to the raw file. Maybe it’s only worthwhile for exceptional high ISO pictures?
• I’d have preferred Lightroom to save a series of adjustment or offset values, not a fully-baked independent file.

I’d also strongly recommend reading this Denoised demystified article by Eric Chan:

I recommend applying Denoise early in the workflow, before healing and masking. AI-driven, image-based features such as Content-Aware Remove and Select Subject can be affected by noise, so it’s best to use those features on a clean starting point. If you do run Denoise on an image that already has Content-Aware Remove settings or AI masks, Denoise will automatically update those spots and masks. This is handy, but be aware that the content of those spots and masks may change unexpectedly, so it’s best to review the results carefully.

And watch this video by Julieanne Kost.

The Lightroom URLs and commands are listed in the Plugin Manager. You don’t need to set up all these shortcuts if you don’t want to do so, just those you think you will use

Version 2.0 is released today with a lot of tidying up and polishing, and a few subtle new features.

What I hope will be most popular is that you can now launch plugin functions from keyboard shortcuts. While the Mac operating system already lets you set up a keyboard shortcut to run the plugin’s menu commands, and this change means you can do the same on Windows too. But it’s more than that because it also lets you run other plugin commands which don’t have menu items and without opening Search and Replace.

This feature is not for everyone, but it should appeal to the plugin’s typical or advanced user. And it does not work out of the box – on your Mac or PC you need to set up these keyboard shortcuts and point them to the lightroom:// URLs listed in the Plugin Manager (right). Note that there is more than one way to set up keyboard shortcuts.

I think it will help to give a practical example of where I like pressing a keyboard shortcut to run one of the plugin’s commands. Imagine you often copy from one field to another, such as the IPTC Location to the Title field, or from the Job to Keywords. You can set these up as shortcuts like lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.findreplace/?action=transfer&source=location&target=title&method=replace. The element lightroom://uk.co.beardsworth.findreplace tells the operating system to interpret the URL in Lightroom with this plugin, and then the following arguments tell the plugin it should copy the location to the title.

You may not have noticed this button, and I remember being surprised when I saw it

How do you post to Instagram from Lightroom on your Mac or PC?

About 6 months ago Instagram quietly added a “+” button to their web page. I use this as my usual way to post photos, especially multiple photo or “carousel” posts.

If I am posting a single image, I simply export from LR and use the “+” button, choosing “original” from Instagram’s crop ratio choices.

However I usually make multiple-photo or “carousel” posts, using photos with differing crop ratios, and this causes a small problem. Unfortunately Instagram assumes all the photos have the same dimensions.

So the way I get around this is using Print and a Print template (zip) which outputs square 2048 pixel JPEGs, with white space being added around any non-square photos. After “printing” the photos as JPEGs into a folder on the desktop, I then switch to my web browser and use the “+” button to create the post.

I’ve attached my Print template above, but to create your own these are the key panels:

A second problem is that Instagram strips metadata from your files and doesn’t use the captions or convert the keywords to hashtags. Often I just type them all again, but sometimes I run this little script which displays a dialog box in LR from which I can copy the text. It includes the title and caption,and converts multi-word keywords into single-word hashtags, and notice that it includes some hashtags that I use on many images.

I’ve just released version 2.0 of my Video Metadata plugin which reads and writes metadata to video files, something long-available in Adobe’s Bridge but which another Adobe’s Lightroom still cannot do.

The changes are quite subtle but the main ones are:

• Quick access URLs to allow commands to be launched from keyboard shortcuts (setting up)
• A new Run in Windows/QuickTime command to play videos in the operating system’s default video player

These two features work well in combination. I don’t know about you, but I remain very frustrated that Lightroom doesn’t play videos as quickly or reliably as the operating system, and that’s why I added the Run menu command.

While this simply launches the Windows player or QuickTime, I wanted to avoid having to navigate through the menus each time. So the Run menu can now be launched from a quick access URL.

For example, here in Windows I created a new shortcut on my desktop and copied the URL (see above) into the shortcut’s properties, then set the shortcut key to Ctrl+F1 which doesn’t seem to be used by any other program (the shortcut can be anything you want).

This means that I just select a video in Lightroom, hit Ctrl+F1, and the video is launched in Windows Player.

Released a couple of days ago, Lightroom 11.2 just has a couple of little tweaks to masking and “improved responsiveness in the Library module, especially during multitasking” (see this short video).