In my quest to track my photos out in the wild, I’ve settled upon an efficient but slightly–less–than–ideal solution: drag the photos in question from Lightroom (both the filmstrip and grid will work as drag sources) to my destination of choice. I’ve settled upon a VoodooPad document with one page for each publication; dragging photos from Lightroom into VoodooPad will result in a link back to the file, wherever it happens to be located on my computer. I include any relevant publication information that I wish to catalog alongside the link back to the file. Here’s one page that illustrates my simple solution:

Last week, over on the Inside Aperture blog, Micah Walter mused on what would happen if his RAW workflow tool went away. What would happen to the metadata and the image adjustments? I have to admit, it’s a thought that I’ve wrestled with quite a bit myself having used both Aperture and Lightroom and moved between the two. It’s a different set of issues than we had with back in the good (*cough*) old days of film, but it’s just as important.

Luckily, thanks to XMP and the like, transporting metadata such as titles, copyrights, and descriptions between tools is no longer rocket science. But, what can and does get lost in a move between tools is all the work you put into adjusting images. Given that each RAW processor works differently, and supports a different set of image adjustments, it’s probably not going to be possible to come up with a standard for preserving the processing instructions that go along with each image. I could be wrong (and I hope I am), but I think it’s a long shot.

This problem, however, doesn’t just manifest itself between tools. It also manifests itself between versions of a tool. As RAW converters are improved, the images you made adjustments too last year might not look the same after upgrading Lightroom. I’m aware that Aperture provides a way to use previous converters, but how far back will that support go?

So what is one to do if they perfectly tweak an image to their liking and want to keep it for posterity? At this point, the only sane thing to do is to bake—my pet term for export—a TIFF or PSD file, preferably in 16-bit format. This will ensure that you can keep your currently processed image no matter what happens in the future with your choice of tools. Of course, now you have another file to manage. And that becomes another problem.

Maybe DNG could help us out with this. It’s already possible to include multiple representations of RAW data in a DNG file. Maybe if the keepers of the DNG spec were to add an ability to include “snapshots” in TIFF or PSD format into a DNG, we could package our processed versions of a photograph together with its RAW data in such a way that could survive the test of time in one handy package. That way, even if you move from Lightroom to SuperDeluxRAWTool in the future, you can always access how your photos looked when you made your edits in late 2007.

Last week, Dominey Design, the makers of SlideShowPro, announced that they have created a new version of the popular slideshow software that works within Lightroom. Ever curious to find new ways of using Lightroom I downloaded a copy of the software and have been playing with it all weekend. The array of slideshow options is dizzying. The interface is excellent - basically it is like using any other module in Lightroom. The only downside to the interface is the bewildering number options. Hence, it will take some time to figure out all the possible changes that can be made. It is hard to call options a downside though - just more to figure out and I’m sure the results are worth it. Below is a screen shot in mid-production of a slideshow I made using SlideShowPro in Lightroom’s web module.

Strangely enough the SlideShowPro software eliminates some keystrokes while working in Lightroom. For example, while in the web module - which is where you work with SlideShowPro - if you want to get back to the Library tapping the “G” key does nothing. You have to physically go up to the upper right menu to chose Library to get back to the grid. Not to worry though, the software is powerful and incredibly customizable and a little strangeness is worth it. Once you exit the web and SlideShowPro module then all of the keystrokes work normally.

Looking around the web, you might be surprised to find out how many photographers have used SlideShowPro to display their images on the web. I have seen a few websites that were pretty much entirely built around SlideShowPro galleries. As you can see in the sample slideshow layout below the resulting slideshows are simple and elegant.

While working on a recent slideshow I realized that for the best results, i.e. to have your images sized properly and sharpened correctly it is best to export the images and constrain them to the size that you’ll create your slideshow. For example if you are creating a slideshow that is 800 x 600 pixels, export horizontal images so they are 800 pixels wide and verticals are 600 pixels tall. I would then apply some sharpening to the images in Photoshop (in a batch) and then re-import those images into Lightroom to build the slideshow so they will look their best. This is kind of a pain but it works nonetheless - and since I don’t know how to use Flash very well it is easier to use SlideShowPro in Lightroom.

Once you are finished with your slideshow, you can preview it just as you can with any Lightroom web gallery and you can also export it to your desktop or upload it to a website directly from Lightroom. The SlideShowPro software pretty much acts just like any other web gallery template except it is building slideshows and flash web galleries. What would be nice is to be able to customize the gallery around the actual SlideShowPro interface in a similar manner as the other web templates offered by Adobe.

If you are interested in checking out SlideShowPro you can download a copy here.

At $25, the software won’t be breaking any banks. It is one heck of a deal for the money. I am going to start playing around with a few slideshows and look into incorporating them on my website. I have put up a sample slideshow created in Lightroom just so you can check out what they look like. To see it go to:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/slideshow/index.html

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

As most of you probably know by now, a few days ago Adobe released ACR 4.3.1. In the release notes it mentioned that there was an update for the new Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 cameras (among other things). I was kind of surprised at this because I thought that the Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 had already been included in the 4.3 update. (You have to excuse my present slightly disoriented state, I seem to have caught some kind of flu a few days ago, that is making it difficult for me to think clearly).

Anyway the appearance of a new ACR gives me an opportunity to run some more comparison tests, this time between Lightroom 1.3 (with the old 4.3 ACR) and Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the new and improved ACR 4.3.1.

I realize that to get the most out of an image in either application, I actually need to push some buttons, slide some sliders and use my brain, but the only way to make a head to head comparison is to let the programs work on auto-pilot and accept their default output.

In Lightroom I just chose Export straight out of the Library, reduced the image and saved to the maximum JPEG quality. In Photoshop CS3 I opened the image in Bridge (which applied the ACR 4.3.1 RAW conversion) with the default setting, reduced the size, applied the USM filter, and saved to JPEG at maximum quality.

Not surprisingly the results are actually quite similar, the only difference I see using Apple Preview (on my Mac) is a very slightly lighter image from Lightroom 1.3 (the preview of this blog actually shows me the opposite in a Mozzila browser), as usual the results will vary on different computers, monitors and browsers.

Update: I checked the results in Safari browser after publishing the Blog posting and the colors are more saturated and the best result (in my opinion) are from Lightroom 1.3 but the Photoshop CS3 images could easily be adjusted to be the same.

The images are of a temple very near my house and were taken on my morning bicycle ride a few days ago. The camera is the Nikon D300 and the lens used for these images is the 60mm f/2.8 AF Micro Nikkor.

Lightroom 1.3 - New temple construction.

PS CS3 & ACR 4.3.1 - New temple construction.

Lightroom 1.3 - Detail of a shrine residing on the side of a tree.

PS CS3 & ACR 4.3.1 - Detail of a shrine residing on the side of a tree.

Lightroom has a new “feature” in release 1.3 that I’ve not yet heard anyone mention: When you ship your image over to Photoshop to do the things that Lightroom can’t, then bring the image back into Lightroom, it’s no longer two or three stops brighter than it was before it left. Once I realized that all I had to do to make it match the previous adjustment of the RAW image was to drag the Brightness slider to the left while watching the thumbnail in the film strip. BTW, if you’re going to make a Develop module adjustment to an image you want to compare with another, the Before and After view doesn’t help much. You only see the difference in how the same image looked before you adjusted it. So what you have to do is simply make the images in the Filmstrip large enough so that you can get a better idea of how the match looks. You won’t need to match up images for the same reason, but you may still want to do that if you’ve made adjustments in Photoshop or LightZone or whatever that you want to compare to the original.

There’s another “new” development in Lightroom 1.3. I have “new” in quotes because it’s been lingering in the background for a while now, but there are actually downloadable “next-gen” Web gallery templates that you can try. Actually, my first attempt to do that wasn’t very successful and there are some fairly interesting installation considerations. Those who understand XHTML and CSS programming, at this stage, will likely have the best luck. But even if you know nothing, taking a look at the samples and the claims can get you pretty excited. Most of the new galleries are stated to only run in Lightroom version 1.3. Still, they do seem to load and run faster, as claimed. So I’m sure it won’t be long. The prospects look or sound downright exciting. The designs are very clean and professional but some also promise to allow you to make it possible to let the gallery’s viewers make comments on the individual images and that allow for a PayPal sale of your images.

The big buzz is about Slimbox galleries, downloadable from http://theturninggate.net/blog/adobe-lightroom-slimbox-template.

You might also want to take a look at this link: http://www.lightroomgalleries.com/. There are several of the new galleries that you can download and try. My favorite, so far, is a gallery called the Airtight AutoViewer that just slowly moves a “filmstrip” from left to right, showing a feature-size image of each of the shots in your gallery. This gallery seems to work right off, in Windows XP, at least. I’ve placed a screenshot of AutoViewer immediately below. Note how clearly you can see the descriptive caption for the image and it’s number in the slideshow. So you’ll have no problem communicating with your audience about which images they prefer and the changes they may want to make.

Ideally, most of us preach that you should organize your Lightroom workflow along the lines of the order in which the Lightroom modules appear. So you should start in the by adding the metadata and keywords, delete the images that will never have any value

My workflow may not be suited to everyone. A lot of what works for you depends on the type of work that comprises the bulk of your shooting and on the personal habits that make you most comfortable. Just so you know, most of my work these days consists of beauty shots that I submit to stock agencies.

All the metadata steps I take in the first run-through of the images are in this paragraph. I don’t want entering metadata to slow down my winnowing process and I don’t want to add a lot of individual metadata to images that may later be eliminated. I start by clicking the Library Module’s Import button.

My last post describes how I started (loosely) keeping track of where my photos end up. For example, my photos published in Fast Forward have the “Fast Forward” keyword applied to them through my “Exported” keyword set. However, I’d like to add a little more detail to this process: I want to keep track of exactly where my photos are published by cataloging their URLs on the web and the print publication’s name & issue number when printed.

My first idea was to store the information in the “Large Caption” view in the Metadata list, thinking that it was separate from the plain ol’ IPTC Caption field. However, it turns out they’re one and the same: the former is enlarged to make verbose captions easier to enter and edit than in the teeny tiny text field provided in the regular IPTC metadata view. And unfortunately the caption field is important enough that I can’t clutter it up with URLs and such.

And there aren’t really any other places to hang extra metadata on. I don’t see keywords as a valid solution, as I don’t want to clutter up my dictionary with URLs and other information that will only be used once; applying the keyword “http://www.readmeansrun.com/blog/2007/12/christmas_tree” seems wrong to me (although it would get the job done).

So for now I’m using an external application to keep track of this information. I’m crossing my fingers that future versions of Lightroom will allow flexible & customizable metadata fields that can be defined by the photographer. And providing one free-form notes field in which photographers can jot down random ramblings for each photo would be a blessing. Here’s to hoping that something along these lines is coming down the pipe in a future update.

Viva Lightroom updates!

Sometimes when you’re out making photos, things don’t always go just as you’d like. You can be in the most stunning scenery, but the light won’t cooperate. This happened to me a few days ago while traveling through the Big Bend area of Texas. A storm front was on its way, but instead of spectacular brooding skies, there was just a high layer of clouds turning the world into one big low contrast shadowless scene.

Of course, I still made a few photographs for myself to remember the place. Here’s an image I shot of the Rio Grande and Texas route 170 in Big Bend Ranch State Park:

In the image above, I’ve done a bit of initial processing a bit to neaten up the exposure and added a bit of vignette, but you can see that there’s not much pop in the scene. Out of curiosity, I started making some extreme adjustments in the luminance color panel—much more extreme than I’m used to making. Here’s what I ended up with:

Looks pretty extreme doesn’t it? But, with these adjustments and a little vignette, here’s the resulting photograph:

The sky is still featureless and lifeless, but there’s a lot more pop in the ground vegetation and the mountains. It’s still not one of my better shots from this trip—at least in my opinion—but it’s a nice record of where I was. And, more importantly, by playing boldly with the controls on this image and seeing the results, I’ll be more open to working up some of my other images using some of the same techniques.

This week I was reminded of my old workflow when I first started shooting with digital SLR cameras. I was late to jump into the digital game - starting with a Nikon D70 back in 2003. I dipped my toes into the digital pond with a healthy sense of skepticism. The biggest pitfall with digital back in 2003 was the workflow. It was painful. Editing my images took days, not hours or minutes as it does now. I processed images one at a time. It took me six to eight months to become comfortable with digital imaging and the workflow.

My first workflow used Nikon Capture and while it produced very nice results it was so slow that I just couldn’t get into the swing of things with digital. I moved up to an Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Camera Raw workflow when I saw the results were on par with Nikon Capture. While it was a huge improvement in the workflow it was still sluggish. And with the release of the Nikon D2x the image quality of digital capture improved significantly. I jumped in with both feet and while I still shoot some film it is the exception rather than the rule.

Then Lightroom came on the scene and well, you know the rest of the story. I marvel at how many days it used to take me to caption, edit and process images just a few years ago and how quickly I can do the same tasks now, usually in just a few hours for medium size shoots where I capture 300 to 500 images. So what is the point to all of my ramblings here? The point is if we have come this far in just a few short years; imagine how much faster and painless dealing with digital images will be in another few years.

There are still many issues to be ironed out in the new digital world we live in. Color management has got to be the biggest issue that holds digital back from all it really can be. I still see many images reprinted quite poorly in even the biggest magazines. This has always been an issue - even with film - but with digital it has become a much larger issue. Lightroom, along with Photoshop, has given more control to the photographer than we have ever had before but along with that control comes a minefield of hazards. I have worked with a professional retoucher on a few images in my career and watching him at work shows me that while I may know Photoshop fairly well, I have no where near his expertise.

I have been saying for many years now that we are in the infancy of digital imaging. Ten or fifteen years from now I am certain that we’ll all be joking about how we created images back in early digital days. The latest batch of new digital SLRs from Canon and Nikon are a prime example of just how much better the tools of our trade can get. 14-bit processing is perhaps the biggest upgrade for any camera you can now purchase. Someday we might be working with 24-bit or even 36-bit cameras that have incredible exposure latitude and see just as our eyes do. In fact I have heard from several camera manufacturers that their real goal is not just making better cameras but cameras that can automatically reproduce an image just as our eyes saw that scene.

Now imagine how much different the image editing and processing experience will be in another ten years. Never the less, still photography is still about light, timing, composition and hard work. No matter how good the technology gets, photography is still about the image. Better digital cameras don’t suddenly eclipse the talent of Henri-Cartier Bresson or Robert Capa. Hence, we’ve come a long way with the technology of photography but is still the same as it was a hundred years ago just with new tools.

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

This is now part three in a series of Lightroom 1.3 vs. Capture NX 1.3 comparisons, some of you are probably getting tired of these posts, but if you either have or are thinking about buying one of the new Nikon D300 digital SLRs, you might find this interesting.

If you remember with the Nikon D80 NEF file comparisons, the default images out of the two applications was actually fairly similar but the default Nikon Capture output was a bit brighter and some of the colors were more realistic and vibrant.

The main advantage that Nikon Capture NX 1.3 has when it comes to editing the image, is the U-Point technology, which allows you to edit individual areas of the image (like for instance the sky) and punch it up (or even de-saturate it entirely to gray scale) without disturbing the rest of the image.

The main advantage that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 has is a much better user interface and workflow, especially when dealing with larger numbers of images, but also when trying to squeeze the most out of a single image.

Both applications allow you to export to Photoshop CS 3, so more advanced editing is not an issue, but for basic color and vibrance control a lot of Nikon photographers feel that (especially when they are confronted with a particularly difficult image), they can squeeze more image quality out of Nikon Capture than any other application.

Warning: I have not tested the Nikon D300, or the NEF files it produces, in depth yet, so this is a very early analysis and my findings and results may change dramatically as I start getting used to the camera and the image files that it produces.

Nikon D300 - Capture NX 1.3 - default image, resized, and saved to JPEG

My initial impression from processing the Nikon D300 NEF files in Capture NX 1.3 was that the files were somewhat soft and pastel like. Not really unpleasant but also not what I was expecting.

Nikon D300 - Lightroom 1.3 - default image, resized, and exported to JPEG

Imagine my surprise, to see more sharpness, vibrance and contrast in the Lightroom 1.3 default image file. It is actually kind of hard to see in these small images but in the application widows and at larger size, there is a noticeable difference. For the Mac users with the latest version of Safari, the difference will be pretty dramatic, even in these small images.

Conclusion: Well I don’t really have a conclusion yet, but am reminded why I continue to use a number of different editing applications to get the results that I am after.

Lightroom’s keywording infrastructure is pretty straightforward: by applying any number of keywords to your photos, you are essentially creating a catalog that can be searched through to retrieve photos that match your desired criteria. I have been pretty diligent about cataloguing the subject and whereabouts of my photos.

Having recently started my own photo blog (check it out!), I wanted to keep track of which photos I had posted within Lightrooom. Sure, I could always go ahead and check the archives of my site if, at some point in the future, I’m unsure whether or not I’ve posted a particular photo. But that process requires a few extra steps; I want the information to always be at my fingertips when flipping through my catalog. It turns out that Lightroom’s keywords are perfect for this situation, too: by simply creating an appropriately named keyword (“RMR”, in my case) and applying it to the photos I can keep track of which photos have been posted to my blog.

After seeing the value in this process, I took things one step further and created a keyword set named “Exported” to allow me to quickly flag—and retrieve—photos that I’ve sent to be published (both online and in print). Sure, I canfind this information elsewhere, but I had yet to consolidate it in one place until now.

Viva Lightroom!

Entering in metadata about your photographs is one of the more tedious jobs in the digital darkroom. Most of the time, I consider it to be a necessary, but unexciting step. Sometimes, when I’m feeling less charitable, I find it to be a pain in the arse. But, one of the big advantages of the digital darkroom is being able to find images in your library with a quick search, so it’s always valuable to do.

While performing this chore in Lightroom, I’ve found that I spend most of time focused on one of two views of the Metadata panel. The first of these is the Location view, which emphasizes setting up the places where you’ve taken your photographs. I find this view is most useful when I’m on road trips and care most about getting the right location set for my photos.

The second Metadata panel view I use is the Quick Describe. This is most useful to me for static events where I’m setting the location data at import time.

The trick is to find which one of the Metadata views works best for applying the metadata that you work with most often. You could, of course, always show the “All” view, but unless you’re on a large screen monitor, that results in quite a bit of scrolling, which is a drag.

One of the things I’d like to see in a future version of Lightroom is the ability to customize the view settings within the application. It would make me happy if I could take half of each of these views and smoosh them together. Apparently, there is an online tool for creating Metadata panel view sets, but it’s advertised as being for Lightroom 1.1 and we’re now up to Lightroom 1.3. Maybe I’ll play with it soon and see how it works. But for now, I’ll merrily keep toggling between the two views as needed for the particular task at hand.

This week as I was thinking about a topic for this blog I remembered some features that I would like to see in a future version of Lightroom and I thought I would share those with you. Of course all of this is just conjecture - luckily for all of us Adobe is listening and we can all submit our feature requests for future versions of Lightroom online. You can submit your own feature requests here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

So here are some features that I have wished for since I first started playing with Lightroom - as it is currently Lightroom is better than anything else out there that I have found - but to make it even better here are some things I would add:

1. Make it even faster.

With the latest upgrade to 1.3 Adobe has made Lightroom faster but it would be nice to see it run even just a little faster. I also just updated my imaging machine to a very fast Apple MacPro and that has vastly improved the operating speed of Lightroom. It isn’t slow on the new tower but it would be nice to see the import process get a little faster - especially the time it takes to render previews. This improvement might require faster computers rather than a change in the software.

2. Make Lightroom the Digital Asset Management tool!

As I have mentioned before in my blog posts, there really isn’t anything out there that I like in terms of a digital asset management tool. I am hoping that the Lightroom engineers can make Lightroom the DAM tool that we have all been waiting for - one where we can have huge catalogs (100,000 + images) of high resolution raw image files imported into Lightroom with no performance penalties.

3. Make the compare mode work with more than just two images.

As a sports photographer it would be really nice to be able to view five or more images side by side and go to the 1:1 preview on all of them at the same time instead of just two images as it is in the current compare mode. This would make the editing process much faster for those of us that shoot lots of high-speed sequences. Even for portraits this could be very useful to compare facial expressions and sharpness.

4. Add local adjustments for contrast, saturation, vibrance, etc.

Lightroom already has some local adjustments - red eye correction and cloning/healing, but it would be really sweet to have the ability to adjust hue, saturation, luminance, vibrancy and other aspects of a part of an image in a similar manner to Nikon Capture NX’s U-Point technology. This would keep us in Lightroom just a little longer and perhaps simplify what can be a complex process in Photoshop. Of course we already have this capability in Photoshop but it would be nice to make basic adjustments in Lightroom and not have to deal with time-consuming selections in Photoshop.

5. Add sharpening to the web gallery images.

One of my long time issues with the very powerful Web Module is that the large previews aren’t quite as sharp as they could be - they need some form of sharpening so that they look their best when viewed by a client. If Adobe were able to introduce a sharpening dialog like the one in the print module it would be a huge improvement to the Web module.

Well, there you have it, just my thoughts on some additions that would make Lightroom a little nicer for my workflow. Lightroom has come a long way in a short while if you ask me. And my workflow has been improved immensely by using Lightroom - I can’t even imagine using my old workflow anymore.

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

This has been a week full of Nikon anxiety for me and little less. The big question for the last week has been, will I get one of the first batch of the new Nikon D300? And the answer is, yes it has been picked up from the dealer and is on it’s way to me.

Strangely enough I have bought one in Orlando, Florida and a friend (who just happens to be traveling in this direction) is bringing it to Thailand for me. Those of you who are Nikon users, are of course wondering why I am having a Nikon brought from the US to Thailand, where it was manufactured in the first place. Why didn’t I just buy it in Thailand?

There are two very good reasons that I am carrying the proverbial coals to Newcastle, one being that the camera costs quite a bit less in the USA than it does in Thailand, and two is that I want to have a Nikon USA warranty on the camera, it makes it much easier to get the camera serviced in the USA (if necessary).

I promised to make some corrections to the images I used in lasts weeks blog, but in addition to the new camera release Nikon also threw us all a curve ball by coming out with a new version of Capture NX. Somehow it also seems more fair though, now that we are comparing version 1.3 of Lightroom with version 1.3 of Capture NX.

So on with the show. Basically all I want to do for this exercise is improve the sky a little bit.

The original default Lightroom 1.3 image.

The enhanced Lightroom 1.3 image. I tried to match the saturation enhancement I was able to make with Capture NX in the sky, but was held back because the blues in the rest of the image became over saturated.

The original default Capture NX 1.3 image.

The enhanced Capture NX 1.3 image. I used four color control points to boost the blue saturation of the sky and three control points to boost the contrast of the clouds. I have to say that Capture NX is really great for manipulating the sky, without affecting the rest of the image.

Conclusion:

Capture NX allows me to easily and quickly add (color, contrast, exposure) enhancements to specific areas in an image. I know I can do the same thing from Lightroom by round-tripping to Photoshop CS, but Capture NX allows me to do it without exporting or converting the RAW (NEF) image, right in the application. And if I may repeat myself in Capture NX it is very easy to do this.

I know the following may be impossible for both political and practical reasons, but I have to state it anyway, in the hopes that maybe someone can implement at least part of what I would like to see happen.

I would like to see a Capture NX module made available for Lightroom so that Nikon photographers can both get the image quality and enhancement advantages of Capture NX and at the same time have access to the more practical and easier to live with Lightroom workflow. If it is at all possible I would like to hear some comments on the topic. If you think it is not possible or practical I would like to hear your comments on why you think it is impossible too.

Although I rarely use the Split Tone panel in the Develop module (and I bet you can say the same), there are a couple of situations in which I find it extremely useful: Toned Black and Whites and full color nature scenes that are designed for emotional impact.

Here’s a black and white in which I first used the HSL panel in Grayscale mode to adjust each of the primary and secondary colors to give a black and white exactly the tone shades in black and white that I want. Then I used the Split Tone panel to assign blues to the Highlights and Sepia to the shadows. You can see the color, black and white, and split-toned versions in the illustration below.

Here’s a Sunset in Guayabo, Costa Rica, first as it looked when I adjusted the color as I normally would, then when I used Split toning to emphasize the reds in the Sunset sky and the greens in the tropical lushness of this pasture.

In the world that goes in my laptop, I find that there are few things more refreshing than grabbing an updated piece of software that I rely on and taking a walk through its halls, both in familiar and unfamiliar nooks. There are a couple benefits to taking this time out from my regularly scheduled editing:

• the first benefit is to see what new features and tweaks have been added to the piece of software, and
• the second — and secondary — benefit is to notice features that have been around for a while but that I haven’t even considered adding to my flow.

For applications — like Lightroom — that have a non-trivial learning curve, taking a fresh look at what’s inside the box can shake up your workflow in ways that go beyond the itemized feature list in the release notes. We all like getting things done in the most comfortable way possible; we appreciate comfortable surroundings and thrive in simplicity through repetition. That’s all part of the learning process.

But sorting through gigabytes of data in an effort to stay afloat in your sea of photos can lead you to form a groove that is difficult to break. Every once in a while it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture (so to speak) and see how we can adapt our flow as we learn all of the nooks and crannies of our tools. Setting aside some time to take a step back and look at your workflow after an application update can pay off in the long run.

And for those of you running Lightroom on Leopard, it never hurts to have the application actually work on your operating system, either. Viva Lightroom 1.3!

Compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard is one of the bullet points of the recent Lightroom 1.3 release. Now that I’ve had a few days to work with the release, I can indeed confirm that Lightroom 1.3 gets along with Leopard, at least for the most part. There are, however, a few small issues I’ve run into.

The first of these issues appeared for me when importing files directly from a compact flash card. I’ve seen some spurious error messages on a few of my imports, including an odd message indicating that there was a problem with 0 of the images imported. Also, on one occasion, an image wasn’t copied as part of the import process. For the time being, I may start copying images over to my local drive in the Finder and then import them. I did this with a previous version of Lightroom to work around import problems. This would be a real drag, but incomplete imports are also a drag.

Second, I’ve seen Lightroom crash a few times while working with the Print module. This was reported in a few places on the first day of release. The workaround talked about on the net is to minimize the print preview window, as shown to the right. I can report that this seems to work for me so far.

And last, as you’ve probably heard, there have been warnings concerning Lightroom’s database and Time Machine. For the time being, I’ve followed the recommendations to exclude my Lightroom catalog from Time Machine backups. I’ve also excluded the preview folder as well, since it only includes data that can be easily rebuilt from my image library.

This doesn’t mean you have to skip backups of your Lightroom database, however. If you make backups of your catalog from within Lightroom—I have mine set to make a backup every time I run Lightroom—those backups will be nicely stashed away for you by Time Machine. Also, if you have Lightroom automatically write XMP data, those XMP sidecar files will be faithfully backed up by Time Machine as well, providing a fairly complete backup solution.

With the recent update of Lightroom to Version 1.3 late last week I thought I would cover some of the improvements that have been made with this latest version…so without further ado here they are:

1. Vastly improved Speed!

I don’t have any hard numbers to back up this observation but version 1.3 seems quite a bit faster than any previous version of Lightroom. I first noticed this improvement when I imported my last assignment into Lightroom. It took only a few seconds for the 300+ images to be imported before Lightroom went to work building the 1:1 previews. I was shocked how fast it loaded the previews. Then while editing and processing these recent images Lightroom was much faster than I have ever seen it. All in all, the new speediness is a very welcome upgrade.

2. Ability to render 1:1 previews on import.

With version 1.3, we can now have Lightroom build the 1:1 previews on import. This is a feature I have been hoping for now for quite a while and it is nice to see it. Thanks Adobe! This just cut one extra step out of my workflow.

3. Improved version of the “Automatically write changes into XMP” preference.

In the past, choosing the preference to “Automatically write changes into XMP” files for each image resulted in a significant slow down. Adobe has now upgraded Lightroom so the slow down is practically nil which is a very nice feature for those of us that rely on the XMP files as a backup and so that the raw files are rendered with our develop settings in Adobe Bridge. This is yet another small but very significant upgrade in version 1.3.

4. Compatibility with Apple’s latest Mac OS X Leopard.

Since I had my G5 tower crash hard a few weeks ago and I have already purchased a new Apple Mac Pro, I am very glad to see the folks at Adobe have made Lightroom fully compatible with Apple’s latest Mac OS X Leopard. I’ll find out later today how seamlessly it works with the new operating system as my Mac Pro arrives today! Very exciting.

5. Better rendering of Nikon RAW files.

One other feature I have noticed but need to look into further is that my raw Nikon D2x files seem to look better than they have in previous versions of Lightroom. It seems with the Adobe Camera Raw upgrade to version 4.3, the folks at Adobe have also improved the auto-rendering of some Nikon camera models. I’ll write more about this as I work up recent images.

Even though the upgrade to 1.3 might not have seemed like a big deal I am very excited about the improvements that have been made. For my workflow specifically these improvements will help make Lightroom even more user friendly and hopefully shave off a bit more time that I have to spend in front of the computer.

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

Since we now have two brand new versions of the RAW image processor from Nikon and Adobe, I thought that today would be a good day to do a quick comparison test of a Nikon NEF file from a Nikon D80, arguably the most popular consumer level Nikon Digital SLR on the market at this time.

Basically I took one image and quickly ran it through Nikon Capture NX 1.2 without making any changes and did the same with Adobe Lightroom 1.3.

These images were not edited at all in either program, only resized and saved to jpeg at a value of 80. From what I can see on my computer screen they are fairly similar but the Nikon Capture NX 1.2 image is a little blown out in the highlights and the Adobe Lightroom 1.3 image is a bit dark in some of the shadows and some of the colors are a little dull. I will make some corrections and enhancements in both applications and try to post those images tomorrow. Comments would be appreciated, especially if you have made similar tests.

Image processed with Adobe Lightroom 1.3

Image processed with Nikon Capture 1.2

It’s out. The release we’ve all been waiting for—at least for the last few weeks. Lightroom 1.3 has hit the streets and brings support for running Lightroom on Leopard, some new camera models, and an export SDK.

The new cameras supported are Canon’s 1Ds mkIII and G9, Nikon’s D3 and D300, Olympus’ E-3 and SP-560UZ, and Panasonic DMC-110. Additionally, there’s support for Canon’s sRAW format and Fuji’s compressed RAF format.

As far as Leopard compatibility goes, the print module is working again, but there seem to be a few issues with the newly minted Leopard 10.5.1 release and some of the presets. I’ll know more about this shortly as I’ve just downloaded the release right now and will be giving it a full workout.

You can read more at The Lightroom Journal and the Photoshop Services site.

I really like emailing slideshows as a way of showing the results of a shoot or of telling a story, rather than just emailing a series of shots. For one thing, most slide show programs have some way of automatically reducing file size to make the whole thing more e-mailable. It’s also nice if you can put a little music in for drama. Finally, I like to use the image description metadata so that there can be some verbal guidance under each slide for the story being told. By putting that information in the metadata, I’m also able to keep that description with the image when it’s sent to clients, stock agencies, and the like.

Lightroom does a pretty decent job of most of these things. The objection I have is that it only produces PDF slide shows. I usually tell my audience to make sure they have the latest version of Adobe Reader installed, but that scares some people away. I know, it couldn’t be simpler, but lots of people are downright paranoid of installing anything that their consultant or The Genius Bar didn’t tell them to install. It’s also difficult to add a soundtrack to a PDF slide show or to create your own background from scratch in Photoshop.

Here is an example screen from a quick and powerful alternative:

After picking up my bags (and other things) and moving to Southern California this past week, I did what I always do when arriving in a new location: I picked up my camera and headed out to take some photos. Upon importing my shots into Lightroom and adding the appropriate metadata, I was treated with the small sugar–rush of a new branch in my Metadata Browser: Santa Monica.

Poking around in the Locations browser reminded me that Eric Scouten, one of Lightroom’s developers recently explained how to geocode your images after they have been imported into Lightroom. His tutorial uses a Mac application named HoudahGeo to embed the location into your images existing metadata, but the steps taken outside of Lightroom will be similar if you use another tool to get the job done.

Being a total GPS neophyte who doesn’t own a camera with built–in GPS support or even an external tracking unit, I resorted to manually grabbing the latitude and longitude of my photos through HoudahGeo’s Google Maps integration. Dropping a pin on the location of every photo you take will definitely get tiring quickly, but it’s a great way for those without the necessary hardware to dip their toes into the pool of geocoding.

About a week ago, my Apple G5 tower suffered a fatal crash. Initially it just froze up - upon restarting, it froze again in several minutes. Sadly, earlier that day, the hard drive I backup all of my business files to also crashed so at that point I had to get the information off my G5 tower as quickly as possible. Luckily I was able to get the information off and all of my important data before the G5 tower wouldn’t start up at all.

I find it quite amazing how unreliable hard drives are - and I seem to have some of the worst luck of any photographer I know when it comes to faulty hard drives. As a result I back everything up on a minimum of three devices. For my images they are always on at least two hard drives and burned to DVD for offsite storage. My computer is also backed up completely to an external hard drive each night. And every few days I back it up to a third hard drive just in case. I have had four hard drives crash on me this year alone.

I have used several methods of backing up my main computer - LaCie’s Silverkeeper, Superduper and others. The point is to find something that works for your system and be vigilant. I covered backing up Lightroom catalogs in a previous post. You can check that out here.

Because I back up my entire computer’s hard drive I have not been using the Lightroom back up solution. My Lightroom catalogs are already backed up each and every night when I run SilverKeeper. And since I have many catalogs - sometimes one catalog for a single set of images it would be a pain to have to go through and let Lightroom back up all of the catalogs individually.

Whatever your systems, I would say backup your images and important information to a minimum of three locations. And whatever your backup solution, whether you use Lightroom’s very good backup option or a different method make sure it is robust and can withstand a fairly severe catastrophe. If your office or home burns down do you have your images and important information somewhere else?

This week’s blog post is just a cautionary tale for those of you out there that have never had a hard drive fail. It happens much more often than hard drive makers like to talk about. Luckily, with my many backups, I was up and running within a few hours on my laptop and will have my tower either repaired or replaced this week.

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

A few days ago John Nack posted an interesting story on his Adobe Blog. The title of which being, “Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash”. The article compares the development of Photoshop over the last twenty years as being very similar to the story in the Johnny Cash song, One Piece at a Time. In the song Johnny Cash presents himself as a Cadillac assembly line worker who stole individual parts of a Cadillac over a period of twenty years and when he finally assembled it not all the parts fit together seamlessly and the car looked kind of funny but it ran well, like a Cadillac should.

The point of the story being that although Adobe Photoshop is a top class application and arguably performs better than any other competing graphics arts application, it is not very pretty and many think it is badly in need of a graphic user interface overhaul, as well as a judicious pruning of some fairly obviously obsolete functions. A possibility that he also hinted at is that Adobe may opt to produce various versions of Photoshop for different industries and professions, or that the application can be configured more easily and completely to suit the individual user.

What he goes to great pains to explain to his readers though, is that Adobe is not intending to revolutionize the Photoshop experience, but rather to continue down the well trodden evolutionary path of Adobe Photoshop user interface and feature development and not throw out anything that could be of possible use to anyone. Kind of like getting married to a new wife every couple of years to keep up the appearance of vitality, but keeping all the old wives in the house because they are needed to take care of the children. In the process some of the rooms and joint family activities will inevitably end up getting pretty messy.

Oddly enough Photoshop Lightroom is not mentioned even once in this article. I say oddly because not long ago Adobe went to great pains, to make us aware of the fact that Lightroom is indeed a member of the Photoshop Family of applications. What that tells me is that Adobe is planning to go into two (or maybe even three) separate directions with the Photoshop Family.

The old Photoshop (or as I like to call it, Photoshop Classic) will remain pretty much the same as it is now and continue to evolve for many years to come, until the user numbers fall too low to support further development.

The new Photoshop (Lightroom being the first of this group) will be cloned into separate but equal applications for a new generation of graphic arts professionals who are either new to Photoshop or willing to adopt a new way of doing things. My guess (actually my wish) would be a Photoshop Webroom (or maybe Webstudio) will be the next one in this series. I can also imagine a version of Photoshop Lightroom that is designed for photo retouching only with a simple browser interface instead of the current Library system and no Web or Slideshow modules.

I don’t want to go to far into conjecture concerning specific versions here, but I think by now you might understand what I am aiming at. Everything that the “Classic” Photoshop now does can be offered in a number of separate software packages using the Lightroom Graphic User Interface. As long as the “Classic” Photoshop version is still available this should not really upset anyone, and if I am right it would explain why there is so much overlap between the current Photoshop CS and Photoshop Lightroom applications.

One of the very few annoying things in my Lightroom Experience has been what I perceived as the awkwardness of storing and moving my photographs to different media and drives as my work moved along. Often, in fact, if I was shooting a big job for one client, I’d just do all the “Lightroom” processing for that job in Camera Raw and store those files in their own folder. After all, I’m not usually going to use those photos to submit as stock or sell as fine art. To boot, not having hundreds of 16MB files in the Lightroom Library speeds everything else up quite a bit.

I knew that Lightroom 1.1+ makes it a lot easier to create separate catalogs for different purposes, but I was just lazy enough to stick with the system I had. The irony is, now that I’m working in a foreign country with only one computer at my disposal (my laptop, of course), working with one catalog is getting to be more, rather than less problematical. The main reason for that is that there just isn’t enough room on my laptop hard drive for the library of pictures I want to have at my disposal;especially since I’m wanting to spend a lot of my time here creating collections for submission to various stock agencies.