Weekly Worth-a-click

Here’s a few things that I found worth a quick visit this week.

• Nik Software has been busy. Seems like their Color Efex Pro Lightroom plug-in just came out and now Silver Efex Pro has been released as a Lightroom plug-in too. Silver Efex has become, by far, my favorite way to convert to black and white (oops sorry, grayscale).

• Speaking of Silver Efex Pro. I actually did a quick demo of a comparison to Photoshop’s B&W adjustment in episode 179 of Photoshop TV. The comparison touches on something that I’ve noticed for years about creating black and whites in Photoshop. It’s at the 22:30 mark and it’s worth viewing if you’re really into black and whites.

• The coolest web plug-in for Lightroom, Slideshow Pro, has been updated to 1.4.3. If you already own it then make sure you grab the update. If not, check it out over at their website.

• This isn’t too Lightroom-related but for those of you that are into scripting, I noticed Jeff Tranberry (scripting guro from Adobe) has a resource page from a some scripting classes he did at Photoshop World. It’s definitely worth looking at, even if you didn’t make it to the conference.

• Again, not Lightroom related but it is photo-related (and Dave’s just a good friend of mine). Dave Cross has launched a neat addition to his blog called “The Fix It Challenge”. People download a photo, fix it, and then upload to Flickr. It’s very cool to see what other people would do to a photo.

• Don’t forget that each Thursday a new episode of DTown TV (our Nikon show) goes up. It just so happens that today is Thursday so hop over and check it out at DTownTV.com.

• HoudahGeo 2.2 Geocoding Software for Mac OS X now supports Lightroom collections and folders.

• And finally some inspiration. Check out the photography of Jon Paul Douglass. He’s got a very unique style along with some really cool post-processing techniques.

Enjoy your Wednesday everyone!