Lightroom-News.com

Source: George Jardine on Lightroom and digital photography
Author: George Jardine

Earlier last month I carried out a photo shoot at the studio I work from in London, where Jeff Schewe and George Jardine from Adobe came over to document the entire process from discussing the concept, to the model casting and the actual shoot itself (see the Photoshopnews.com London story). The purpose of this photographic shoot was two-fold. Firstly, I wanted to capture some new pictures that could be used in my Lightroom 2.0 book (published by Adobe Press/Peachpit), including a new cover shot, plus Adobe were interested in acquiring new images that could be used to demo Lightroom and Photoshop. I am pretty pleased with the way it turned out. Even though I now notice that I stupidly got the first model, Yuliya’s name wrong. Sorry Yuliya!

News has been announced that Mark Hamburg has decided to leave Adobe after having worked at the company for over 17 years. Mark joined Adobe in the Fall of 1990, not long after Photoshop 1.0 was released and was instrumental in devising many of the ‘wow’ features we have all come to love and rely on daily when we work with Photoshop.

Mark left the Photoshop team after Photoshop 7 shipped and went to work developing a new paradigm in image processing which would finally ship as the product named Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Due to the high number of people who have linked to and visited Ian Lyons Lightroom 2.0 Beta review, the original site link has had to be updated. If you want to check out Ian’s review, then please use this link instead.

With the changes to detail in the new Beta, some people are uncertain about what can be done with the small preview window in the Detail pane of Develop. Here’s another quick movie (again MP4, I’m trying to keep the movie at a veiwable size), detailing this preview window (pardon the pun).

Here’s a short video on making a bunch of photos have a similar exposure, despite being from different cameras, with different settings. This feature is in V1 also, in case folk think it’s a new V2 feature! Video is in MP4 format, so you may need to right click and download.

Here is a quick tutorial about one of the subtle new features in the Lightroom 2.0 Develop module.

A less obvious innovation in Lightroom 2.0 is the ability to apply a negative Clarity adjustment. But now that it is implemented, one can foresee quite a few creative possibilities. Negative Clarity does the opposite of a normal Clarity adjustment as it softens the midtones, and the way that it does this produces an effect that is not too dissimilar to a traditional darkroom diffusion printing technique. The net result is that you can create some quite beautiful diffuse soft focus image effects which are particularly suited to black and white photography. It’s a bit like being able to add a cloudy sky lighting effect. Here’s how it works…

Tom Hogarty has announced the release of both Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera RAW 4.4.1:

The Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera Raw 4.4.1 updates have been posted to the following locations: Lightroom(Mac, Win), Camera Raw(Mac, Win). The updates provide all of the changes included in the original Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 releases but also include corrections for issues described below and in previous blog posts.  The Camera Raw plug-in will also be available later this evening via the Adobe Update Manager and the Lightroom update can be located by choosing ‘Check for Updates…’ under the Help menu. 
The Lightroom and Camera Raw team apologize for any inconveniences caused by the issues presented in the initial updates.

Go to Lightroom Journal for full details.

Press Release: LRViewer, the Lightroom-catalog viewer, now has PhotoSelectLink to automatically send client selections and notes back to the photographer.
Here’s how PhotoSelectLink works:

One unannounced feature of Lightroom 2 beta has to do with a beta SDK. I don’t know much about it, but Timothy Armes does and he’s used it to create a new Export ‘Post Process’ plugin. This means that it can work in any Export Plugin. You could for example use Mogrify with your Flickr Export plugin. The upgrade for this plugin is free. As with older plugins, this is donation ware for users, although the trial allows you to export up to 10 images at a time. Lightroom 2 users can check out the plugin over at Tim’s site.

One of the key new features in Lightroom 2.0 is the Filter bar, which is accessible in the Content area whenever you are in the Library Grid view mode. The Filter bar combines Find panel and Metadata Browser features into one, along with the search functionality of the Keyword Tags panel. Basically we have a new, more streamlined approach to the Library module panels layout where one can broadly say that the left panels contain the catalog source locations such as Folders and Collections and the right hand panel contains the catalog edit controls, such as the Quick Develop and Keywording panel. The Filter bar is now the main place to go for making refined filter selections of photos in the catalog (although you can still use the Filmstrip controls for filtering by rating and labels).