Hey everyone. It’s time for another quick round of Q&A’s. As always, keep the questions coming and I’ll do my best to keep answering them. Let’s get started:

Q. I noticed that Lightroom 2.3 has recently popped up on the Adobe Labs site. Any thoughts on this?
A. Yeah, good question actually. There is indeed a beta of 2.3 on the Adobe Labs site. Honestly, I haven’t installed it yet for two reasons: 1) I’ve been knee-deep in a few projects lately and haven’t really had the time to “test” software and, 2) I’ve been pretty happy with performance in LR 2.2 and I haven’t seen anything in the release notes that prompted me to go try it. Quoting the actual release notes, “The goal of this release (2.3) is to address several bugs and provide additional camera raw support.”. Well, I looked at the bugs and I wasn’t experiencing any of them and I don’t own either of the two cameras that support was added for. So I figured I’d patiently wait until the “real” release of 2.3.

Q. I have to sign all prints digitally in the right bottom corner and know that I can use an identity plate image to do that. But is there any way to free rotate my signature? I only find 90/-90/180? Or do I have to do that in PS and then import a already rotated signature image?
A. Unfortunately this would be a Photoshop thing. As the question points out, LR only gives you 0/90/180/-90 as a rotation option.

Q. How do I properly move my photos from my local drive to my back up drive, and keep the edit and history in tact. When I’ve done this in the past, I end up physically moving the files via the the finder, then re-importing from the back up drive.

A. If you want to move your photos from one drive to another you can just drag-and-drop them via the Finder on the Mac (or Windows Explorer on the PC). When you do this, you’ll break the link Lightroom has with these photos and you’ll see little question marks on the photo thumbnails when you look at them. To fix this, you don’t have to re-import though. Just right click on the Folder in the Folders panel and choose “Find Missing Folder”.

Also, here’s a video on a semi-related topic of moving existing folders that may help.

Q. Why was everyone hatin’ on Adobe after your Post-Crop vs. Lens Vignetting video the other day?
A. OK, “hatin” is a strong word. I think there was a pretty healthy discussion but there did seem to be some people really frustrated by this difference in functionality. I really just thought it would open up a discussion on which sliders people prefer (which it did for the most part). I’m not sure Adobe did something wrong here so I wouldn’t expect a fix – there’s nothing really broken. They responded with a new feature that people were asking for. Edge Darkening vignettes (not the actual lens correction fix) work that like everywhere in every software you find. They add black or white around the edges. It’s a special effect. All I was trying to point out is that I never really knew that old Lens Vignetting sliders did it a different way.

Oh yeah, for those of you that asked that I get this in front of Adobe, they already know. Here’s a link to a discussion on the Adobe forums that’s worth looking at.

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