Video – White Balance for JPEGs and TIFFs

I gotta say, when I discovered this week’s video tip I was pretty excited. I shoot in Raw 100% of the time now but I’ll still have to deal with JPEGs because a) I have older files that I didn’t shoot in raw, b) I’ll have files from my wife’s point-n-shoot that are JPEGs, c) some one gives me a file to work on that isn’t raw. Well, one of the biggest challenges is getting the right color balance and Lightroom’s white balance preset list (Cloudy, Flash, Daylight, etc…) help out a lot. But they don’t work on JPEGs right? Wrong! They do. I’ll show ya how in this week’s video.

Have a safe and happy new year everyone!

Click here to download the video

Presets – 2×2 Print Presets

Hey there! I hope everyone had an awesome Christmas and enjoyed the holidays – I know I did. Now that things have settled down, I wanted to share a preset that I created for a family member over the weekend. It’s based on a contact sheet but instead of a lot of photos across and down, I created one with just 2 across and 2 down. Then I added an identity plate right below in the white space and it turned out pretty darn cool. Now I personally used (and like best) the vertical version but I’ve also included a horizontal one too.

Print presets work pretty much like other presets. The best thing to do is just go to your Template Browser in the Print module, right click on “User Templates” and choose Import. Then select the file that you’ve downloaded from here (don’t forget to Unzip it first). Enjoy!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Single Photo Flush Left/Right presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets REMEMBER: YOU NEED TO BE IN THE PRINT MODULE, NOT THE DEVELOP MODULE FOR THESE PRESETS.

Presets – Updated Camera Profiles

It’s time for another update to some presets I released a few months back. If you recall from a previous post, Lightroom 2.2 has included the new camera profiles by default. If you’re not sure what they are then make sure you watch this video. Now, if you went ahead and removed the old beta profiles then you’ll quickly find the presets I created for them back in the summer don’t work anymore. So I’ve updated them for both the Nikon and Canon profiles. There’s actually two downloads so make sure you download the one for your camera brand.

• Click here to download Nikon’s Camera Profiles.
• Click here to download Canon’s Camera Profiles.
• Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

Video Tip – Smart Collections

Happy video tip Friday! I came up with a really neat tip this week for using Smart Collections for finding my processed HDR images. I started writing it down but it just works so much better as a video. Plus, it gave me the chance to extend on it and explain some examples that, even if you’re not into HDR, you can still make use of the tip. If you’ve got any personal ideas on how you use Smart Collections (or this video spurred some ideas) please make sure you share them with us in the comments. Take care and have a great weekend!

Click here to download the video

Guest Blog Round 2 at Scott's Blog

Once again I have the honor of being a guest blogger today on Scott Kelby’s blog so make sure you check it out and leave a comment there for me. (let ‘em all know you’re a Lightroom Killer Tips visitor!)
Last time I had about a month to prepare for my guest blog appearance, but this time some last minute things happened and I only had a day. Luckily I already had a topic I was just itching to write about and this turned out to be the perfect place for it. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it already, but let’s just say that it’s somewhat controversial and puts many of the things that we’re taught in Photoshop (heck, even I teach those things) into question. I also posted a quick tip about removing the old beta Camera Profiles so make sure you check out the next post. See ya!

Tip – Removing Old Camera Profiles

This questions popped up a lot in the comments section yesterday, so I wanted to address it here in a post. The problem is that once you install Lightroom 2.2, it automatically adds the new profiles into the Camera Calibration panel right along with the old beta ones. They don’t actually harm anything but I was really glad to see I’m not the only one who just hated the clutter of having 20 profiles listed in there and half of them with the word “beta” next to them. Anyway, thanks to my friend and blog-reader Howard Ignatius for jumping in and posting the fix for everyone in the comment section. I’m going to post it here as well though.

To remove the profiles go to the following folder (based on your operation system) and delete anything with the word “Beta” in it’s title. Then restart Lightroom and all should be good in the world again.

Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles
(note: go to the Library folder for Macintosh HD, not your user account)

On Windows 2000 / XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles

On Windows Vista: C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles

Hope this helps.

Lightroom 2.2 is Available

Howdy folks. Just thought I’d give you a friendly reminder that Lightroom 2.2 is available. You can read all about it here at Tom Hogarty’s blog (the Lightroom 2 product manager) but I figured I’d cut straight to the chase and tell you, at least from my point of view, the juicy stuff. For starters, YES, Adobe has improved performance of the Adjustment Brush. Although my personal issues with it were sporadic and hard to reproduce, my early indications are that I’m definitely seeing better performance there. There’s a few other fixes included but, to me, the major one is that the camera profiles are now prime time and included in the Camera Calibration panel by default. This is huge! There’s a lot of people that are still hesitant of beta software and wouldn’t download them from the Adobe Labs website (plus, they were buried there anyway). I think they’ll become a lot more useful now that they’re included in the software by default.

Here’s the link to download 2.2 for Mac

Here’s the link to download 2.2 for PC.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Thanks!

Tip – Exporting Original Raw files with changes

If you’ve ever wanted to take a raw file that you work with in Lightroom and send it to some one else to work with, but also include your changes to that file, here’s how. First, it’s worth mentioning that if you just find the original raw file that you worked with in Lightroom and just copy that file you’re not getting your Lightroom Develop changes with it – those are stored in Lightroom’s catalog. You’re just getting the original unedited raw file. But if you go to the File menu and choose Export you’ll get the export dialog and one of the export format options (in addition to JPEG, TIFF, and PSD) is Original File. Choose that option and Lightroom will put your raw file where ever you specify AND it’ll put a .XMP file with the same name in the same place. Just grab both files and send ‘em away and the recipient will be able to open your raw file with all of the changes.

PS: (you don’t see PS’s in blog posts often do you) It’s also worth noting that if you use the DNG format that this tip still applies but Lightroom won’t include a .XMP file because all of the changes are stored in your DNG file – not XMPs.

Thanks for tuning in folks. I know it was a slow week here on the site but I had to jump in and teach a seminar for a co-worker this week and it kind of threw a wrench into my plans. We’ll be back to normal next week with videos, and presets, and tips and all that fun stuff. See ya!

Weekly Worth-a-click

Time for another round of articles, links and whatever else I’ve found interesting over the past week:

• Kelby Training (where my DVDs and online training live) has a really good deal (40% off) on CS3 DVDs. You can pick up most of them for around $33 (if you’re a NAPP member). CS3 is still current and, even if you have CS4, a lot of the stuff works just the same with CS3 so make sure you at list take a look through the list.

• A neat article from Camera Dojo I received following up my watermarking video from a few weeks ago.

• An interesting read from Eric Scouten with his take on organizing the Lightroom catalog.

• Finally, some inspiration from the Boston Globe. This a part of their website called The Big Picture and it’s got some amazing stuff on it. You’ve got to scroll down and go to “Previous” or “Next Entry: for more but it’s worth some time to explore some of them.

3 Tip / Lightroom Live Seminar Day

Happy Friday everyone. It’s about 6:30 am and I just got off the red-eye from LA where I helped field questions for Scott Kelby’s Lightroom Live seminar yesterday. First off, the seminar was a huge success with nearly 700 people and it was such an awesome crowd. They were totally into it and just really seemed psyched about learning more about Lightroom. My sincere thanks to everyone who stopped by just to say hi.

Anyway, as I watched throughout the day, I took some notes on tips that the crowd really seemed to react to and figured I’d combine them into a tip post. So here goes:

1) Believe it or not, one of the tips they loved was something I just take for granted. If you press Tab key you can hide the right and left panels and if you press Shift+Tab you’ll hide all panels. This helps when you’re trying to get a larger view of your photo and the crowd really seemed to dig it.

2) They also really seemed to like the Flash web galleries in the web module. I’ve always thought they weren’t very discoverable since they’re kinda hidden up in the top right corner of the module. So next time you’re creating a website make sure you look under the Engine panel (which by the way wins the worst name panel-of-the-year award) and try out the other gallery types in there.

3) Printing templates seemed to be a big hit. I think everyone thinks of Lightroom as the place to just print one photo on a page but you can make some really creative prints by adjusting some of the settings and even put multiple photos on a page for some neat templates. I did a couple videos on this a while back. One of them was on creating a pano-styled print preset and another was on how to create a print preset in general.

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by. Also, I’ll be taking over some dates in 2009 on the Lightroom Tour and my first one is in Covington, KY on January 23. You can find out more about it and sign up at the Photoshop Seminars website.