Lightroom Worth-a-click

A few Lightroom-related items worth checking out today:

• The folks from Kodak have teamed up with Jeffrey Friedl to create a Kodak Export Plug-in for LR. According to Kodak, the plug-in will make it easy for Lightroom users to upload their photos to KODAK Gallery where they can order prints and photo books.

• This isn’t really “new” but Tim Armes has created a very cool Lightroom gallery called Jigasawrus. It’s for showing off a lot of photos on one page.

• Free Collage Templates for Lightroom 3 Beta’s Print Module

• If you’re looking for some HDR inspiration check out the HDR gallery from Talke Photography. Sweet!

Lightroom Pro Q&A with Rob Sylvan

Hi everyone. Here’s another in a series of mini-interviews with some of the Lightroom pros out there where they’ve answered a short series of questions about how they use and feel about Lightroom:

Today’s Guest: Rob Sylvan.

Bio/Intro: Rob, a trainer and photographer, is the author of Photoshop Lightroom 2 for Dummies, the Lightroom Help Desk Specialist for the NAPP, instructor for the Perfect Picture School of Photography, and Site Director for iStockphoto. Check out his Lightroom tips and tutorials at http://lightroomers.com.
Q. How many presets do you have in the Develop module?

A. Too many to count actually. I went through a crazy hoarding phase, and though I’ve cleaned out a lot, I still have quite a few of yours and a bunch from X-Equals that I’m keeping. I’ve learned a lot from using the presets and from seeing so many creative possibilities. Over time they’ve helped me to re-define my camera raw default settings too. Some of my favorite and most used presets are the ones for local adjustments, such as brightening teeth and eyes (adjustment brush) and darkening skies (grad filter). I only have about 10 local adjustment presets, but they get used a lot more regularly.

Q. What’s your favorite panel besides the Basic panel ( Sorry the basic panel is too much of a gimmee)?

A. This is a tough one as I have a few favs. I adore the Camera Calibration panel since the addition of the camera profiles. It has given me such a better starting point for my raw files. However, I’d have to say my favorite is the Detail panel. Perhaps I’m a pixel peeper at heart, but I do love the fine tuning I can do there, and thanks to the improvements to sharpening and noise reduction in LR3 Beta 2 I’m seeing much higher quality output as a result of that panel, which to me is what matters most of all.

Q. What panel/slider/feature do you use the least?

A. That would have to be the Split Toning panel. Aside from testing and some demonstrations, I never use it as a part of my own workflow.

Q. Do you keyword (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. I feel guilty for not saying “all the time”, but then I’d be lying if I said I did. I do it when I need to for stock purposes, and then I try and go back and add keywords as I go for other important shots, but I don’t lose any sleep over it. For the most part I rely on collections, folders, the Filter Bar and good old looking at thumbnails when I need to find something.

Q. Do you use Collections (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. I can honestly say I do use collections all the time. I use both the regular drag-n-drop kind as well as smart collections. I love smart collections. For a given shoot, I will set up a collection set for organizing, then several smart collections for filtering out by dates, ratings, color labels and sometimes keywords. I’ll also use output collections in certain situations for web galleries and printing.

Q. Favorite Lightroom Plug-in?

A. Lr2Mogrify is my all time favorite. It completely changed my output workflow, and made Lightroom 2 much more useful to me. I am glad to see the watermarking improvements in Lightroom 3 Beta 2, but I still like some of the features of LR2Mogrify, such as being able to add both a text and graphic watermark at the same time. That said, the new watermarking integration in all LR3 Beta 2 output modules is such an improvement I know I’ll use Lr2Mogrify less in the future. My second favorite (though you didn’t ask) is probably Metadata Wrangler because it is nice to have that level of control over metadata during output.

Q. If you could add one feature to Lightroom what would it be?

A. Being able to access a catalog stored on a network drive. I realize it is no small thing (else I’m sure it would be there already), but if I could make a wish it would be for that.

Thanks for asking!
Rob

http://lightroomers.com/

Lightroom Q&A Day

Here’s some more Q&A’s for ya.

Q. Matt, is there any chance you’ll update your presets for the Lightroom 3 Beta?

A. I’ll definitely update them. I may wait until the final version of LR3 comes out though (please don’t ask me when) The process version has caused the old sharpening presets to be outdated and too harsh.

Q. When creating web galleries in Lightroom, it seems to only export photos at 240 ppi, which makes for a pretty big, slow loading file on my web server. I’ve been re-exporting 72ppi files, then re-importing them and using those in my web gallery. Is there a better way?

A. There sure is. Basically it doesn’t matter what PPI (pixels per inch) the web photo is. Generally, PPI only comes into play when you talk about printed document sizes. Your monitor screens don’t have inches, they have pixels so pixels per inch only matters when inches matter (in print). So whether an 800×600 image is 72ppi or 240ppi, the pixel dimensions don’t change. It’s still 800×600 no matter what and the file size is still the same. If you don’t believe me then try it out yourself. Open a photo in Photoshop. Go to Image > Image Size and check the resolution (probably 240ppi for one of the photos you mentioned). Then go to File > Save As and choose JPEG and set the quality to something like 8.

Now go to Image > Image size again. Turn off the Resample checkbox. Now change the resolution to 72. Notice pixel dimensions (which control file size) don’t change. Now save that as a JPEG (with a different name) with a quality of 8. When you look at both files they should have the same file size.

Q. When the full version of Lightroom 3 comes out, will I be able to get the work I’ve done in the Lightroom 3 beta into it?

A. Yes. Adobe has always given us the ability to move our catalogs from the beta into the full version and I’d have to assume they’ll do the same here.

Q. I’ve reprocessed some files from Lightroom 2 in the Lightroom 3 beta. So now I have duplicates of the files now in two versions of Lightroom. What should I do?

A. That’s a tough one. One version of LR has no knowledge of the other version. So it’s up to you to figure out which one you want to keep and go delete the other one. If you haven’t made a physical copy of the photo, then just press the Delete key and remove from the Library, but not the actual drive. Unfortunately, there’s no automatic fix for this though.

Q. You were talking about keyboard shortcuts the other day, and mentioned something about camera profiles being so handy. They’re the first thing I do and it makes me want a quick keyboard way to get to them. Any ideas?

A. You can’t assign a keyboard shortcut to them, but you can create a preset. In fact, I have right here. Then you can always assign that preset upon import if you don’t want to think about it in the future.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great Thursday.

Catch me at the Peachpit Photoclub on Tuesday evening

Come join my friends from Peachpit (my publisher) and I tomorrow evening from 8 to 9 p.m. ET (5 to 6 p.m. PT), for a 1-hour webcast on Photoshop and photography. I’ll be teaching some Photoshop stuff as well as answering questions so it should be a lot of fun. Here’s the link to register. Hope to see you there.

Lightroom “Pro” Q&A with Sean McCormack

Hi everyone. Today is the first in a series of mini-interviews with some of the Lightroom pros out there where they’ve answered a short series of questions about how they use and feel about Lightroom:

Today’s Guest: Sean McCormack from the LightroomBlog.com (photo credit: David Hobby)

Bio/Intro: Hey Matt, thanks for the chance to do this. By education, I’m an electronic engineering graduate, but all through college I mixed sound. From that I started shooting band photography in 2003. That lead me into photography proper eventually. These days I shoot people and landscapes, often together! I love location shooting with artificial light, and am now based off an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system. My Lightroom involvement began with the first public beta in 2006. Since then it’s been my program of choice for photo management and Raw development.

Q. How many presets do you have in the Develop module?

A. Hundreds. I’d actually be afraid to start counting. There’s over a hundred in the grad pack, and that’s only one small part of them. A lot of them are partial presets, so they allow me to preview a change quickly by hovering over them and viewing the Navigator panel. I quite like your Sunset presets actually.

Q. What’s your favorite panel besides the Basic panel ( Sorry the basic panel is too much of a gimmee)?

A. Easy. Split Toning. I’m a lover of the cross processed look and have 50 or 60 presets based on variations of this look using the Split Toning panel.

Q. What panel/slider/feature do you use the least?

A. While I do make use of Profiles in Camera Calibration, I rarely ever use the rest of the panel. In fact, if Profiles were moved to Basic (where I think they should be), I wouldn’t touch it at all.

Q. Do you keyword (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. I always put in generic descriptive keywords at import. I keyword additional tags on final/keeper images. I do think keywording is important, but I don’t think every single image I take deserves that attention. If there was something specific in a photo that I suddenly needed, I can still get close with generic keywords to be able to find it quickly with a visual search (90,000 images in the Catalog). If I was a stock photographer exclusively, then I would probably spend more time on it.

Q. Do you use Collections (All the time/Sometimes/Never)

A. All the time. My entire workflow in Lightroom is Collection based and I recommend them to anyone who’ll listen. They’re just so versatile. I do keep a structured folder system (just in case), but Collections are king.

Q. Favorite Lightroom Plug-in?

A. I’m not trying to get a free plug, but I really love my own web plugins. My 3 photo websites were built with them. See I’m not even going to name them. After that it would have to be Tim Armes LR2/Mogrify, which is great for branding and watermarks. While LR3 does have a very cool watermarking system, Tim’s plugin still does a better job.

Q. If you could add one feature to Lightroom what would it be?

A. Well, now that Tom Hogarty has announced there will be Lens Corrections in Lightroom 3, I guess that means my next favourite request is on top: Books. I really want to be able output books from Lightroom. I know Custom Package gets us closer, but I want more layout options and export options. For example Blurb and Lulu can take PDF files to print from. I know we have ‘Print to Jpeg’ in Print, but the quality from it, is not as good as from Export. Mark Sirota, a fellow Lightroom Guru, recommends 600ppi/No sharpening when using Print to Jpeg. From there you import the files and then export at 300ppi to get the best quality output. Can we fix this and add books for LR4 please?

Thanks!
Sean McCormack

http://lightroom-blog.com

Author: Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy

4 Lightroom Productivity Tips I Can’t Live Without

Last week I posted about 5 common Lightroom slip-ups. I gotta admit, I’m really digging this numbered tip thing that’s out there a lot lately. It kinda gives me a place to stop, otherwise I’d continue writing and my articles would just run on forever
Anyway, this week I’ve got 4 Lightroom productivity tips that I simply can’t live without. I’m sure there’s more than 4 but these are the ones that come to mind first. They’re things I do without thinking – basically, tips that have significantly sped up my work in Lightroom.

1. Smart Collections – I started using Smart Collections a while back for managing my HDR photos (here’s a video about smart collections). I realized that all of my HDR photos had the word “tonemapped” in their filename. So I created a Smart Collection that automatically included anything with the word “tonemapped” in the filename. That gave me a quick easy way to always see my final HDR images. But there’s lots of other uses. You can have a smart collection created from a keyword, label, rating, etc… Let’s say you reserve 5 stars for the absolute best of the best. I don’t just mean your selects from a photo shoot though. I mean the absolute best photos you have (the stuff you’d show if you had 30 seconds to impress some one). So this collection shouldn’t be huge right but should just be one click away in case you want to quickly show off your stuff. Just create a Smart Collection that automatically adds anything rated 5 stars in it. And force yourself to only use 5 stars when it’s one of the best photos you have.

2. Copy/Paste – Copying and pasting Develop settings is another big one. I’ll often apply some settings to a photo and realize I want to apply the same settings to another one. Sure you could use the “Sync” feature but I like to copy/paste because I can just pick and choose which photo to apply the settings to whenever I want. Just select the photo and press Cmd-Shift-C (PC: Ctrl-Shift-C) to copy the settings (and choose which specific settings you want copied). Then you can just press Cmd-Shift-V to paste them on to other photos when you come across them.

3. Presets – Come on, you knew this one would show up here. Presets are just cool and useful. They’re one-click ways for you to get a specific effect (or at least get pretty close) to your photos without re-adjusting the sliders for them ever time. Plus, I give them away every so often here on the site too. Presets just make things faster. If you don’t use them, then start. They’re one of the single fastest ways to make you more productive.

4. Instantly Jump to a Specific Panel – I use this a lot as well. Let’s say I’m working in the Basic panel and I realize I want to try some of the Calibration profiles on the photo. I could scroll down on the right but that takes time. Remember, we’re talking productivity tips here right? Instead just press Cmd-7 (it’s the 7th panel on the right) to get down to the Camera Calibration panel. Lightroom jumps right to it. If you want to jump to Split Toning then press Cmd-4 (it’s the 4th panel). You can also check out the Window > Panels menu to see all of the shortcuts.

OK, so those are my top 4 productivity tips. Have any ones that you want to share? Remember, not just any tips though. They’ve got to be things that make using Lightroom a lot faster for you. Thanks!

Lightroom 3 beta, CS5 and Sharpening

Morning everyone! Hope you had a great weekend. I wanted to cover something today that I’ve seen mentioned quite a bit (in the comments) here on the blog – sharpening and how it affects Lightroom 3 beta and Photoshop CS5. See, Adobe introduced something called the process version in LR3 and CS5. You can watch a video I created about it here. It’s a whole new way of reading the raw file. By default, any new photos will automatically be converted to the new process version. But if LR3/CS5 detect any previous camera raw settings on the photo (whether its a sidecar XMP or info in the DNG file), it’ll keep the photo in the old process version and let you convert later. So what’s the problem?

Well if you’ve added, say, sharpening to photos and you convert them to the new 2010 process version (in the Camera Calibration panel), sometimes that sharpening may appear overbearing (which is why Adobe doesn’t do the conversion for you automatically). Check out the example below (you have to click to see it larger to see what I mean). On the left is the 2003 version with (some liberal) sharpening applied. It looks fine. On the right is the same photo and I just changed the Process version to 2010 manually. As you can see, the 2010 process version shows the sharpening effects more.

So what’s the answer? I guess it depends. Visually, the process version only really affects sharpening, noise reduction and vignetting. So if you haven’t used any of those on your photo then there’s nothing to worry about. Also, even if you have used those settings, sometimes changing process versions leaves the photo just fine. In that case, you don’t have to do a thing. But depending on the amount of sharpening you’ve added to a photo, you may need to adjust the sharpening settings for your photos which can be a total nightmare. There are ways to make it easier. If you always used a large sharpening setting like 90-100 then chances are it’s going to look bad. So you could always just sharpen one photo with lower settings and sync that with a group of other photos that were similar. There really is no “great” answer though. As LR3 officially comes out (again, please don’t ask me when) I guess we’ll see how big this really is but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the meantime. Especially if you’ve already upgraded to CS5. Have you seen any issues with some of your older photos?

Video – Anatomy of a Lightroom Preset

I thought it would be cool to take a quick look at the anatomy of a preset. What goes on behind the scenes as I come up with a preset and then what kind of things to take into consideration when you’re actually saving the preset itself. For example, some presets of mine include white balance and toning adjustments (Exposure, blacks, etc…) and some don’t. In this week’s video I’ll go into why that is along with some ideas of how you can create your own. I hope you enjoy and by all means let me know what you think. Thanks!

Click here to download the video to your computer. [Right-click and choose the "Save As" option]

5 Common (or Potential) Lightroom Slip Ups

It seems every article these days has to have a number attached to it. You know what I mean right? The 5 Most Common Something-or-others. 10 Reasons Not To Do Something-or-other. 25 Websites That’ll Make You Something-or-other So I figured I’d join in with a few FAQ’s and little slip-ups that I’ve seen from fellow Lightroomers lately. Here goes:

1. Moving photos while not in Lightroom
This is by far the biggest slip up that I see or hear about. If you move, reorganize or do anything to your photos outside of Lightroom then you essentially break the connection that Lightroom has to them. If you want to move your photos to another folder or hard drive, then do it from within Lightroom. It keeps things intact and keeps Lightroom in the know about where your photos live. If you want some more info on the topic, then watch a video I did about folders and hard drives a while back.

2. Reimporting your JPG exports
Here’s one that, for some people, makes sense. But for most of the Lightroomers I run into, it just tends to confuse things. When you export your JPEG photos from Lightroom there’s an option to reimport the JPEGs back in to your catalog (watch a video to see how). If you absolutely need a fast reliable way to be able to send a client exactly the JPEGs that you sent them the first time then maybe this option makes sense (barely though). In reality though, you’re pretty much polluting your catalog with a bunch of stuff that just gets confusing. If you don’t fall into a category where you constantly wish you just had those same exact JPEGs you exported a while back, then a good Collection workflow along with the File > Export dialog should keep you from having to worry about the final JPEG files. They don’t need to be in your catalog because they’re just a click away if you ever need to create them again.

3. Resetting a photo’s settings just to see it in a different way
This one sounds a little weird I know. Bus I’ve see a lot of people develop a photo a certain way in the Develop module. Then at some point, they’ll want to see it with a different effect or as a black and white (or some other “look” than what they currently have). So they undo or reset the photo and apply the effect. But what they really want are versions. They want to see their photo one way, and then maybe as a B&W and maybe even as a sepia tinted photo or something similar. In that case, Virtual Copies are the key and really easy to use. Here’s a quick video where I show Virtual Copies and a really cool way to use them.

4. Not using collections
Folders are where all of your photos go when you import them. Collections are where your good photos should end up. And the fact that Lightroom 3 now has the Collections panel in all of the modules makes them a no-brainer. Use Collections to sort your best photos. Trust me. It’ll make life a lot easier. Here’s a quick write up that Scott Kelby did that talks a little more about a good Collection workflow.

5. Thinking that Lightroom has a color space you can change
Lightroom’s color space is ProPhoto RGB. Plain and simple. You can’t change it. That’s the way it is. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with ProPhoto for everything. You can of course choose what color space you want (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc…) when you head over to Photoshop. Check this video out if you want to learn more about it. Don’t forget, you can also choose what color space you want when you go to File > Export to save your photos as JPEGs.

Bonus: Not deleting your backups.
I could have named this “6 Common Lightroom Slip Ups” but 5 just sounds cleaner So here’s a bonus. If you’ve got Lightroom’s auto backup setting turned on then you may likely have a ton of backups in the LR backup folder. But do you need all of those backups? Probably not. They’re really just there in case of an emergency and if that emergency need ever comes up, you probably just want the most recent backup right. Sure, there are probably people who may want a backup from an exact certain day, but that’s the minority. So go into that Backups folder periodically and delete the old ones.

If you’ve got any others to add (or feel particularly strong about one above) feel free to post it here as a comment. Thanks