Lightroom-News.com

Anita Dennis from Adobe has officially announced the introduction of the Lightroom Community Help Wiki. This community help system incorporates an updated version of the Lightroom LiveDocs, in addition to a new interactive design. Well known figures from the Lightroom Community have been involved with setting this up and will be involved with as moderators on a rotating basis.

The interactive nature of the Wiki means that any Lightroom user can add comments and links to the existing documentation. Obviously these will be moderated to keep them relevant to educating the user about using Lightroom.

The announcement was made in a number of places: Lightroom Forums.net, Adobe Lightroom on Flickr and the Adobe User forum.

In this new Podcast, George Jardine interviews National Geographic photographer Gerd Ludwig. They discuss Gerd’s work with the Chernobyl reactor and the victims of the associated disaster. Along with the speech, iTunes users will be able to see a range of photographs by Gerd.

This podcast, which lasts 43:59, was recorded by George at the home of Greg Gorman. It can be downloaded from his iDisk at:

http://idisk.mac.com/george_jardine-Public?view=web

This podcast is labeled “20071120 Podcast - Gerd Ludwig” in the Public directory.

Or, it can be found on iTunes (shortly) by searching under Podcasts for “Lightroom”. The RSS feed is:

http://rss.adobe.com/www/special/light_room.rss

Just a quickie with some current Lightroom News:

That’s it for now. Have a nice weekend!

Created as a replacement for default Lightroom HTML Gallery, Matthew Campagna has announced the launch of his TTG HTML Gallery.

“TTG HTML Gallery is a Web module template for Adobe Lightroom. Generated galleries are laid out using valid XHTML and CSS, and offer a bevy of customizations, providing an alternative to the table-based and relatively inflexible default HTML template boxed with Lightroom.”

This new gallery is based on the code from the TTG Slimbox Gallery 2.24. Unlike a lot of galleries created by Matthew, it makes no use of the Slimbox code. Instead it opens the photo in the current page, meaning the gallery operates in pure HTML, with no Javascript for formatting. Besides this change, the gallery offers all the features from the Slimbox gallery. This includes annotations, color labels and ratings.

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Regular Expressions Guru and Export Plugin Consultant Jeffrey Friedl has announced the creation of Piglet technology. A Piglet is a plugin that goes inside a plugin, a sub Plugin, if you will. Using the thought process of Plugin-Plugin –> Sub Plugin –> Plugin-ette –>Pluglette –> Piglet to get to a name, Jeffery explains “I think it’s cute, but you’ll be forgiven if you think it’s corny”.

Source: Photoshopnews.com

This is a cross-posted Photoshopnews story in which I have tried to unravel the question of how should you set the shadow output levels when editing an image in Camera Raw. You will find that the exact same principles apply when working in Lightroom.

Some image editing habits become so ingrained that it is hard to unlearn them when newer ways come along and make the old favorite methods redundant. An example of this is the subject of setting the output Levels in Photoshop for the print output. For many years Photoshop users were taught to set the output levels for the shadows at a slightly higher value than 0,0,0, even though (as you will read here) it has not been necessary to do so for quite some years now. Then came along Camera Raw and Lightroom and some photographers have been agonizing over how to set the output levels for an image when there is no output levels control in Camera Raw or Lightroom. Hopefully the following article will help shed some light on how Photoshop is still able to manage the output levels for you and why the solution is really a lot simpler than you would think.

Read the full story…

Source: Peachpit: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Resource Center

If you’re a serious photographer who works with a lot of images every day, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom software can help streamline your workflow, enabling you to get more done, faster. Whether you’re just learning Lightroom for the first time or looking for pro-level tips to help you do more, better, we’ve got the resources to help. On this page, you’ll find excerpts from our latest books as well as free articles, interviews, podcasts, and downloads from today’s leading Photoshop and Lightroom instructors.

Despite the recent updating of LR/Mogrify, Timothy Armes has found time to create another useful Plugin. LR/Transporter can create sidecar text and summary files on export. These files can then be optionally FTP’d with the photo and copied to another location.

What I find this useful for is my Folderblog based Photoblog. Folderblog seems to be unsupported by the author, but I’m loathe to change with so many photos uploaded with it. in LR/Transport I create a text file that contains the photo title on the first line and the caption on the second, from the file Metadata. This is saved as a text file with the photo and both are FTP’d to my server. This way I’ve no further editing to do on the page. Perfect! By way of disclaimer, Tim did ask me to test this prior to release, which I was more than happy to do. The plugin information would have been posted even if I had no involvement.

From the LR/Transporter page:
“LR/Transporter is a Lightroom export plugin that I’ve written that allows you make use of the metadata embedded in your photos.

LR/Mogrify is a great new Export plugin from Timothy Armes. It’s currently at version 2.43, but could easily have been updated by the time you read this. Tim is very busy with this plugin, adding features and fixing the odd bug, on an ongoing basis. This plugin adds a significant amount of features that have been requested for Lightroom including:

With Borders you can add text before or after creation, meaning you can add text to the border. LR/Mogrify makes use of the Open Source Image Magick photo tool. While it takes a small amount of setting up, the results from the program are more than worth the meagre effort. Between the Image Magick page and the LR/Mogrify page, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. The great thing is that because this is a Lightroom Plugin, you can save your settings as Preset, making for excellent automation.

Due to the amount of work involved in the creation of the Plugin, Tim has designated this as donationware. The free version allows up to 10 images to be exported at once, with no limit on the amount of times per session.

As well as bringing us video tutorials, Matthew Campagna has been busy updating his TTG Selection Gallery. This wonderful gallery allows clients to make photo selects inside the gallery and have these emailed to the photographer. Using cut and paste the photographer can use the Find Pane to make a collection of these Selects quickly. I’ve used the original version quite a bit and have recommended it on to others also. This new version builds on the newest TTG Slimbox Gallery and has feature parity with it. The other big change is that the Selection Gallery is now Lua based. While this means nothing to the average user, it means that it is fully compatible with the current galllery creation standards in Lightroom 1.3.1.

Read more about the TTG Selection Gallery.