February 16, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Installing LR/Mogrify on Mac was easy. Installing ImageMagick on the other hand wasn’t. You either had to put the ImageMagick binaries in the root directory of your system drive, or use Macports to install it. After much work and testing Timothy Armes has compiled a version especially for LR/Mogrify and included it in the new 3.50 version of the Plugin (up to V3.61 at the time of writing). This version is actually built in to plugin.
As with previous version of the Plugin, it is available as a Piglet to use with other Export Plugins.
Also with the release of version 3.60, LR/Mogrify now conserves EXIF when changing format. This is thanks to Exiftool, which is now included in the Plugin.
February 16, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Image Ingester creator Marc Rochkind has been adding to his Lightroom related products with the new Lightroom Catalog reader LRViewer.
LRViewer accesses the Lightroom Catalog and Previews, creating a read only version of the Catalog. It allows you to view image previews without opening Lightroom, or even having a copy of Lightroom present. This is great for sending Catalogs/Previews off to clients that don’t have Lightroom. Simply add LRViewer to the bundle and they can access the Catalog.
LRViewer works with Catalogs with the file extension .lrcat, along with the older .lrdb filetype. For previews, the .lrdata preview file must be present.
The price for this useful (and quite fast) tool is free! Marc is also allowing free distribution of the program, which is necessary for sending it off to clients. The current release is Mac only, but Marc is developing a Windows version as we speak.
Find out more at ImageIngester.com.
February 14, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
John Nack has posted a list of tutorials for the Adode Design Centre.
A wealth of Lightroom tutorials: “
Digital photography experts Rob Sheppard and Tim Grey have created a wide range of Lightroom tutorials for the Adobe Design Center.
From Rob:
February 13, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Infrared Photography is based on capturing light in the 700-900nm section of the light spectrum. We normally perceive it as heat, but with certain filters it is possible to capture this in a photo. However most digital cameras have IR filters to prevent oversaturation in the red channel. Canon Digital SLRs have quite a strong filter, but you can still capture photos by using long exposures. Other cameras have weaker filters and are more suited to Infrared. In fact, there is a whole industry based around removing the IR filter from a camera, specifically for IR photograpy. Like I said you can still shot with longer exposures to compensate for the filter.
February 7, 2008
Posted by Martin Evening
The excitement of getting hold of a new camera can often be tempered by the frustrations encountered when having to learn how to work with a new piece of kit. First off I must say that I have so far been delighted with the EOS 1Ds MkIII camera in terms of the camera’s design and image quality. Canon have made a number of significant improvements that are very welcome. Although there have been some teething problems, the good news is that I have managed to overcome most of these. The main one though has been trying to get the Canon camera to work smoothly with the new Intel 24″ iMac that I bought at the same time as the camera, which has also proved difficult to set up in the studio, but more of that later.
February 6, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
SlideShowPro for Lightroom has been updated to Version 1.1, adding features including:
New ‘Header’ area to display a logo (with link), gallery title and gallery description
New ‘Wet Floor’ effect
4 template groups, each containing 8 variations for landscape/portrait, dimension and aspect ratio (32 options total).
New inputs to directly assign an audio file and caption
New Director formatting panel
As a Slideshow Pro for Lightroom user, I’m glad to see these announcements. A review will be forthcoming. The full version history can be viewed on the Slideshow Pro Forums.
February 5, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Eugene Berman has released an Export to IStockPhoto plugin. Photographers that use the Microstock site can now upload directly to their account from within Lightroom. The plugin allows you to add keywords, title and caption information, along with resolving ambiguous keywords. Categories can also be added to the photo when uploading, along with model releases.
This version 1 plugin is freeware, although donations are accepted from within the plugin. One thing I noticed about the plugin, is that it does not read the title/caption information from the file, which I feel is a minor oversight. Again it’s at version 1, so perhaps this will be a feature in a future release.
February 4, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
I have spoken about ideas for easier backup in the past, but I’m just going to give some detail on the automatic backup feature within Lightroom. To set up Backup in Lightroom, we need to open the Catalog Settings. This is located in the File Menu and can be accessed by using the shortcut Command-Option-, (Ctrl-Alt-, On PC).
Fig 1. The Catalog Settings command.
February 3, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Matthew Campagna has announced a replacement for the TTG Gallery Index over at Lightroom Galleries.
“TTG XML Album Index is a new album indexing template for the Lightroom Web module, and replaces the newly discontinued TTG Gallery Index.
Through a combination of PHP and XML, the album index is easier than ever to update with new web galleries. It’s no longer necessary to regenerate and re-upload the entire index for every update, as was the case with TTG Gallery Index. TTG XML Album Index gathers album information from a simple XML file. To add a gallery to your index, you need only provide a thumbnail image and four pieces of information — thumbnail path, gallery path, gallery title and description — to the XML file.
TTG XML Album Index is written in Lua. It requires Lightroom 1.3 or higher, and a web server running PHP. Updates require an FTP client and a text-editor. Coding experience is not necessary.
TTG XML Album Index outputs valid XHTML and CSS.”
