My New Lightroom 3 Presets App Is On Sale!

Happy fake-manufactured-online-shopping day everyone! Just wanted to let you know that I’ve got a brand new Lightroom training app out. It’s called “Lightroom Creative Presets”. Of course I always provide free presets here on the site. But I get a lot of questions about creating presets so I created an app that goes through my thought process for a bunch of different styles of presets. The app is broken up into 10 lessons. Each lesson concentrates on a certain style of preset: Color Effects, Edgy Effects, Black and White, Vintage, borders, etc… Plus, you’ll get a big zip file containing a bunch of my presets to go along with it. This app (and all of the Kelby Training apps) are on sale through today only. Then they go back up to their regular price of $9.99.

OK, on to Cyber Monday. Yep, I know it’s really just a way for retailers to extend the mega holiday shopping weekend, but there’s an upside if you’re a consumer. There’s a lot of good deals to be had. I can totally tell you that the prices you get from NAPP and Kelby Training today only come on this day every year. There’s still good deals throughout the year, but none of them are ever as good as the ones you see here. So stop by and at least take a look. I know money is always tight, and if you’re thinking about buying a Kelby Training subscription, book, dvd, etc… then today is probably the best day to do it. Thanks!

How This Blog (and your comments) Changed My Lightroom Backup Strategy

In this blog post a few weeks back, I wrote about a question that I got quite a bit during my Lightroom 3 Live seminars. The question (so you don’t have to go back and read) was how many Lightroom backups do I save. You know, when you quit Lightroom you can set LR’s preferences to backup your catalog. By default it will do it every week or so, but you can tell it to backup every time you quit Lightroom if you want. Well, each time it backs up it saves a folder of your backup. If you’ve got a decent sized catalog, those folders can grow to take up quite a bit of space and I heard from a lot of people wondering how many of them they should save.

My answer to them was none. I simply backup my computer every night using Super Duper for Mac. So I not only have a backup of my computer, but also a backup of Lightroom’s catalog in the process.

After reading your comments, I’ve since changed my strategy though. See, when Lightroom backs up your catalog, it does an integrity check. Several people pointed out that they’ve had corruption problems with their catalog before. So theoretically, my backup plan could cause a problem. What if my catalog became corrupt? Then, that night I backed up to Super Duper. But instead, my backup now became the corrupt version? Now, it’s never actually happened to me. And I don’t personally know anyone who’s had a corrupt catalog either. But there were enough comments from people who’ve had a corrupt catalog that I thought it was worth giving some thought to.

My new strategy has changed slightly. I set Lightroom’s backup preference to once a week. Then I make sure I delete all prior backups (you don’t need ‘em). I continue on with my usual backup plan of backing up to Super Duper every night. So now Lightroom’s working catalog is backed up, Lightroom’s backup catalog is backed up (with full integrity check so I know it’s not corrupt), and my entire Mac is backed up too.

As a side note, that’s why I love this blog. It often takes on a life of it’s own. The comments, questions, answers, etc… all have a huge part in feeding it and giving me plenty of things to think and talk about when it comes to Lightroom. And that all happens because of you. So… thank you

One of My Favorite Plug-ins Was Just Updated

One of my favorite plug-ins, Topaz Adjust, for Photoshop and Lightroom was just updated. It’s got a bunch of new presets (I’m a preset fan if you haven’t noticed ), a Lightroom-like brush to dodge, burn and remove adjustments from certain parts of the photo, and the ability to stack presets which is HUGE for me.

Here’s the link to their website. Looks like there’s a 30% off deal right now too so the price is around $35. Trust me, this plug-in is worth every bit of that! And don’t forget that if you’re using Lightroom, you’ll need to install Topaz Fusion (it’s free).

One more thing… they’re doing a bunch of free webinars next week. It’s a great chance to get a good look at Adjust 5 and it’s new features. Here’s the link to sign up. So far, I’m diggin’ the upgrade, but if you try it out make sure you leave a comment and let us know what you think. Thanks!

My Photoshop Compositing Book Made Amazon’s Best Books for 2011 List!

So, last night (Thursday night) around 12:30am I’m playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 with buddies RC, Pete Collins and Jeff Revell. I get a text message from Scott Kelby to call him ASAP. So I called in my attack helicopter, hid in a corner on the map I was playing and called Scott. On the other end of the line was Scott asking if I was ready for a big congratulations (Which I’m always ready for by the way)

Anyway, it turns out that my Photoshop Compositing Secrets book made Amazon.com’s Editor’s Top 10 Best Books of 2011 for Art & Photography (both print and kindle version).

Wow! I’m incredibly humbled by the pick and I wanted to thank everyone out there for both inspiring me to write the book, and for your support in helping to make it a best-seller. Thanks so much! Have a great weekend everyone!

Video – Installing and Organizing Presets

I was looking through this site the other day and I realized that I have various videos and tips on installing and organizing presets. Since I refer back to this video constantly whenever I release new presets, I thought it’d be a good time for an update. And since I was updating the “installing” video, I figured I could include the “organizing” part too since it goes hand-in-hand with presets. So here’s the latest on installing and organizing presets. No need to bookmark it because I’ll make sure I always mention it whenever a new preset comes out. Thanks!

Lightroom Presets – The “300″ Look

I’m getting ready to teach my Lightroom 3 Live seminar in Arlington, Texas today. As always, my invite stands – if you’re coming to the seminar please come on up and say hi at some point. It’s great to see the faces behind the blog.

Now to the Lightroom presets. This one is another update. Sure the movie it was based on (The 300), isn’t new but I still see the style of this preset used all the time. You’ll notice there are 2 presets in the zip file. One of them is for a harsher stronger look (good if you’re looking for that gritty effect). The other one is for a softer look (better for portraits that have women in them).

Here’s a quick Before/After (click for larger image):

• Click here to download Matt’s 300 Look Preset