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of LR3 comes out though (please don’t ask me when) 🙂 The process version has caused the old sharpening presets to be outdated and too harsh.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) donÂ’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.

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