Lightroom-News.com

The Edit in command in Lightroom opens files as TIFF or PSD depending on what you’ve set in Preferences. One option you don’t have is to open the original Raw file in another Raw convertor. Seeing this gap in functionality, John Beardsworth has stepped up with an ‘Open Directly‘ Plugin. This open the file in the Raw convertor of your choice.

There are alternate means of accessing the Raw file, but this usually means finding the original file in Finder/Explorer, or Exporting as ‘Original’. The latter makes a copy of the file though. This plugin is free to try until July 7th.

The need for video import into Lightroom has been high on peoples feature list, and of course when the King of Lightroom Plugins takes a look in that direction, something might just happen. Jeffrey Friedl, well known for his Flickr, Smugmug and Facebook plugins has announced the ‘Video Asset Management‘ plugin. This plugin allows you to select a folder and scan for video via a Plugin Extras command. When a supported video is found, a frame grab is created and imported into Lightroom. You can then Play the video via Plugin Extras menu command. The frame grab (placeholder image) also has a neat video icon, making it easy to recognise as a video file, even in Grid mode.

The control you have is basic. The video must already be imported onto the hard drive (No importing from Cards). If you move the placeholder file, the video remains where it is. The video will still play from this location, but it’s not a good way to manage the files. If you move the video on disk, you must delete the placeholder image and re-import the video.

For further information and better detail on the plugin, go to Jeffrey’s ‘Video Asset Management‘ Page.

There’s been a series of new plugins released recently, so I thought I’d bundle together the ones we’ve not mentioned yet.

LR2/TreeExporter from Timothy Armes, is Lightroom 2 export plug-in that allows you to export your images while preserving your folder tree (also known as the folder hierarchy). While there are other plugins with this theme, this one automatically finds the common root folder for you, instead of requiring manual entry.

Matt Dawson at The Photo Geek has released the Config-Backup plugin. This Plugin Extras tool allows you to back up your preferences and catalog, along with compressing them to save space. Update: It now saves presets, plugins, and other Lightroom bits (I’ve tested with the 78Mb of web galleries I have, so I can confirm it works with even extreme amounts of information)

While I hate hate pushing my own work on Lightroom News, I have 2 plugins just out: Lr2Twitpic and Lr2TweetPhoto. Both provide access to a photo hosting service that allows you to post photos to your twitter.com account. TweetPhoto has additional tagging and geoencoding built in.

For Developers, Jeffrey Friedl has provided SHA1 and Twitter OAuth routines in Lua.

Finally Don McKee has announced his Shutterfly Upload plugin, allowing Lightroom users to upload to their Shutterfly accounts.

Matthew Campagna has announced an update to the recently released TTG Highslide Gallery. With input from our own Martin Evening, some improvements to header have been made. Other additions include:

Matthew has been helpful and supportive of my work, so I was glad to be able to return the favour with help that led to the ‘Set Path to Shared Resources’ being implemented.

Here’s a short video taking you through finding and relinking missing photos. As well as showing the process, it also shows that ticking ‘Find Nearby Photos’ can find other missing pictures that are at the same location as the current missing picture.

Recent Hallmark graduate Matthew Campagna has been busy in the creation of a brand new gallery for Lightroom. Dubbed TTG Highslide Gallery, this flexible and robust gallery offers a wealth of features requested by users. The heart of the gallery is Torstein Hønsi’s excellent Highslide JS image framework. Written from the ground up, the many new features in this gallery include:

Loads happening in the Lightroom world this week:

Anita Dennis has announced some of the changes in Lightroom Help.

Speaking of Lightroom Help, they have a good list of tutorial videos related to Lightroom.

Lightroom Blog has a video on using the DNG Profile editor to create an IR profile to use in Lightroom.

Matt Kloskowski has a nice tip on Grid Thumbnail Sizes, along with a Q&A Post, and more free presets.

Adobe Community Expert Gene McCullough has a post on Single or Mulitple Catalogs over at Lightroom Secrets.

You can also catch up with the current Lightroom headlines using Alltop.

It would also be remiss to mention that Camera Raw 5.4 is out on Adobe Labs. While Lightroom versions tend to coincide with Camera Raw versions, no mention has been made of such an update yet.

Continuing in the series on the Toolstrip, here’s a short movie on the Graduated Filter. This video is in Quicktime format. A player can be downloaded from apple.com.

Around this time last year, Thomas Hawk detailed his then current workflow, which entailed use of Bridge and Camera Raw. This year, he has migrated to Lightroom and has a new workflow post to detail the change.

“Last year I wrote a blog post detailing my photography workflow. Since last year though my workflow has changed a bit as I’ve migrated from Adobe’s Bridge software to Adobe’s Lightroom software and thought that I’d post an updated article detailing how I process my images from start to finish. Questions about my workflow are some of the most common questions I’m regularly asked.” Read More

If you are creating a new Catalog or brand new Lightroom system, you may have a set of Keywords that you have used in other applications or even a set you had left over from your archive of negatives or transparencies.

You might find that it is simpler to create or edit your Keyword list outside of Lightroom to speed up the process, especially if you need to create a complex list.