Weekly Worth-a-click
Hi everyone. Hope you’re having a great week so far. Here’s a few links that are worth a click:
A blog reader from last week pointed out that Adobe is offering a 30% discount on Lightroom 2 if you upgrade with Photoshop CS4. Throw in another 15% if you’re a NAPP member and the total cost of upgrading to both is $238. Not too much help if you already bought LR2 but if not, now ain’t a bad time to do it. Here’s a screen capture of my shopping cart. The one trick is that you’ve actually got to add both to the cart to see the discount as I found it very convoluted to get details. But sure enough, when both items were in the cart I saw the reduced price.
HDRSoft (makers of the HDR software, Photomatix) has a beta of Photomatix 3.1 out.
The makers of the SlideshowPro Lightroom Web module plug-in (the best interactive web galleries around in my opinion) have released a few updates in the past month or so. Make sure you check out their site.
The strobist jet pack. Clever or dorky? A little of both probably but you decide.
Hi Matt,
I know you are a Photomatix user and as I recall from one of your videos you re-import processed tone mapped files back into the same source folder and stack with the RAW files used to create the tone mapped file. I’m trying to convince Photomatix to automatically re-import the tonemapped files into the source folder like LR/Enfuse does but Photomatix wants more users to tell them that’s the way it should work. See my post at:
http://photographyforrealestate.net/2008/10/08/photomatix-31-adds-a-lightroom-export-plugin/
I’m looking for help in my crusade to get them to make photomatix do the autoimport back into the source folder.
I could use some help from you and your readers.
Best,
Larry Lohrman
To make using Slideshow Pro easier to use, and more integrated into my workflow, I have written a few Perl scripts, that add a copyright watermark into the larger images (as per Dave Cross’s Photoshop tutorial), and process the separate albums and images into a single multi-album gallery. These are separate scripts, so I could just run the script to make the multi-album gallery, by itself.
The web contents can change from within LR2, as I use the Smart Collections to gather all the images for each of the albums (couple of keywords means I can choose which images I wish to send to the web, or not). Then the next time I publish the web pages, I just make the new albums using the Slideshow Pro plugin, and put them through my workflow using the Perl scripts.
It took a while to sort out all the details, but I found that consistency in approach, naming of folders, choosing and applying keywords, and a bunch of other stuff helped in making this work easier.
I wish that Adobe would mak a discount available to those of us who sent in our hard earned dollars months ago and have been forced to serve as ACR5 (aka LR2.0 develop module) beta testers.
What really gets my goat is the fact that there are people who have been running pirated copies of LR2 who will now be able to go legit for less money than those of us who played by the rules from the start. Go figure.
Matt,
Great day for a “blog in the park”. I went and updated my software because of this Blog
Thanks
Ken in KY
I love SlideShowPro for LR. I use it all the time. It took a bit of getting use to, but now I have it integrated with my WordPress blog.
True, you need the Kimli plug-in if you want to post it directly, but that’s just because it’s a flash object.
I actually use an easier approach and use the Shadowbox plug-in. Much less problems and frankly, I think it’s a bit cooler.
The worst part about the integration with LR is it’s difficult to create a multi-album gallery. For that, I wrote a Windows EXE (www.software4nerds.com).
Matt,
Sometimes I fail to appreciate just how good you are at this LR stuff and how you make it apply to everyday, real world situations.
Example: I was pondering moving my laptop LR work to my desktop and thought, “I bet Matt has done a video on this.” Sure enough. I did a search and there it was.
Thank you for doing such a good job and presenting your expertise in such a clear and simple way that even I can understand it.
Thanks again,
As others have mentioned in other user forums, beware that SlideShowPro is not too well “productized” (is that a valid English word?). User instructions are sometimes not as well articulated as they could be, using the product correctly can get complicated for some, and technical support can be uneven and not very responsive. Having said that, the Lightroom plug-in product can deliver quite nice results and, sadly, has not much competition.
Hi Matt,
The link to the “strobist jet pack” video is wrong.
It should be this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pea5e2Z5gyE
Best
Yeah, kinda wish I waited to upgrade LR2! Darn … could have really used that discount. Hmm, that’s even a better deal than buying the programs with my student rate. 🙁 Ah well, that’s life I guess!
Photomatix is King for getting serious HDR shots. I use it a lot. Looking forward to the next version.
Slide Show pro is certainly easy to use in LR, and cool because it’s so integrated, but embedding it in Word Press sites is a pain, and sadly their customer support on the isue was not real impressive. I found out that to embed it in WP you need a plugin like Kimili Flash Embed. Kind of a pain.
My favorite for making slideshows is ShowIt Web (not affiliated with me). It isn’t integrated with LR, but has loads of cool features like syncing images to music time and works on Win/Mac. I have.
Thanks for the good links… Gav
seimeffects.com