Friday Tip and Weekend Reading
Once again, I’ve been shown a tip by one of my readers. That’s one of the reasons why I’m really happy that I turned comments on way back. Okay, here’s the tip. I’ve written about the fact that you can hold down Alt/Option and drag on the Exposure and Blacks slider to get a temporary clipping preview. But I never knew you could do the same with the Recovery slider. It sounds silly but it’s kind of cool because I’m not really one to turn on my clipping warnings all the time since it shows big red blotches on my photo. But I use Recovery all the time and this trick is a good way to get a preview of what the slider is doing. So I’d like to say thanks to Jason for showing me this one.
OK, a couple more things. First, Marc Rochkind has been doing some cool stuff with his LRViewer software. Sounds like a neat idea and you can read more here.
Finally, some weekend reading. Jon Tehero has an interesting article on Aperture vs. Lightroom when it comes to presets. Hey, I know this is a Lightroom site but it’s always good to see what other software can/can’t do. Click here to read the comparison.
Well campers, that’s it for the week. I called you “campers” but I’m actually the one going camping this weekend. My son is in cub scouts and we’ll both be braving the wild this weekend. Luckily it’s only about 10 minutes from the house so if he gets scared (read: I can’t figure out how to put the tent up), we’re really close to home. Wish me luck!
Christina, Lightroom can’t be run over a network like that, it has to be on a mapped or actual attached drive as far as I can work out
I have a set of photos on a shared drive. I want to apply keywords to those photos to make them searchable.
The goal is to allow any user of Lightroom to open the application and then do a find to get all the photos with those keywords.
How do I do this?
1. Does everyone have to import the photos themselves and apply the keywords?
2. Can I create a collection or catalog and export that to the shared drive?
Help!
Hey matt,
Watch your podcasts every week. great stuff.
couple things/ off topic from this post – (ps, have you thought of setting up a message board/forum for people to communicate with each other? that would be good i think)
One issue I have with lightroom is that when you go to export images to jpeg or whatever, the export location is always outside of the home directory of the raw files (wherever you saved to last). my workflow has a folder for the shoot, inside of that a folder for the raws and a folder for jpegs, psds etc.. i think most people work like this. keep things together, so why doesnt LR on default set the save path to the same home directory that the RAW file folder is in?
ex/
pictures/wedding/RAW
pictures/wedding/JPEG EXPORT Default location to save to.
(maybe pass this suggestion (or at least the option to set it as such) along for ver 2.0?)
Also, one more thing quick. ACR and LR both do not render icon previews on the mac (sure you can turn on the option to show icon previews in finder’s view options) however this isn’t ideal , it wouldn’t be hard to include a “render image thumbnail” check box on export, (PhaseOne CaptureONE PRO does!) I’m not the only user who would like to see this option!
And since i’m making wishes, ill make one more.
Tethered Capture in LR 2.0 – PLEASE.
I figured since you’re kinda “inbed” with Adobe you might be able to pass along this kind of stuff.
keep up what you do.
– James.
Hi Matt,
I’m a long time fan and I have a question that I know is tailor-made for you and/or other Lightroom super users. Until this passed weekend my workflow was to import all my photos on to a 1TB external hard drive at home, back it up to my on board hard drive (MacBook Pro) and when I got to my office move it to a second 350gB hard drive. The problem I ran into is that my 350gB drive fill up. To fix that, I bought a second 1TB external hard drive and yesterday I used SuperDuper to create mirror image of my first 1TB.
So far, so good except.. now when I try to open up Lightroon with only the new drive nothing happens. Any ideas. Also, the new hard drive is quieter and faster, is there an easy way to make it the primary back-up without having to “reconnect” a whole bunch of folders or reloading entire libraries?
Thanks, you’re the best.
Matt:
Off topic here but hopefully you or one of the many who view this site can help me out.
I want to start doing a instructional video screencast of a piece of software we use in house at my company.
Can you tell me what software you use to record your screen for your video podcasts? I have both a Mac and a PC setup so could use either.
Also do you record your voice using the application or over dub on to the screen capture using another application?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
BTW, I love these Podcasts and have been using LR since it was beta and bought it as soon as it was out of beta.
Matt,
Another cool use for the option key is when split toning an image.
Rather than having to run up the saturation slider so that you can then pick a suitable hue – just hold down the option key and use the hue slider. It simulates a 100% saturation effect and makes choosing a hue color easy.
Then just set the saturation you want and voila.
Keep up the great work!
Josh
Matt:
Have fun with the camping! I’ve been Cub Scout camping with my son now for 4 years straight – you’ll quickly find that storing your dry / warm clothes is a top priority. Larger-size Tupperware-style containers are great, they stack well and keep things organized a little-bit better.
Tent assembly is great fun too. Nothing seems to quite match up. :-).
Best of luck!
Brian
Hi Matt,
I would like to thank you first for helping us with this site.. =)
I’ve been using Lightroom fo 6 months now and so far I haven’t used the brightness and contrast slider. More often I used the tone curve, exposure, recovery, blacks and fill light sliders.
Am I missing something with what I do? Thank you very much
In fact you can use the Option Key for a number of items, one I like is the Sharpening tool, for each item you will see the Radius, the Amount, but what is especially cool, is the Masking option, where you can see just waht and will not be Sharpened, VERY cool.
Good luck camping Matt! I’m the Den leader (not the den mother like my friends call me) for my son’s Tiger scout group – our big camp out is in August – so let me know how the weekend goes and if you’ve got any pointers for me.
Thanks for the LR tips.