September 28, 2008
While I was in Las Vegas earlier this month for Photoshop World, I recorded a couple of Lightroom 2 tips for a Peachpit ‘Author Tips’ podcast. This first podcast demonstrates how you can speed up the process of using Lightroom 2 to export a series of images to build a Panorama or Merge to HDR image in Photoshop.
September 19, 2008
Adobe have made a ‘release candidate’ of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.1 available for Mac or PC from their Adobe Labs website.
The link is http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Lightroom_2.1
From the Adobe Labs site:
“The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.”
September 17, 2008
Adobe Labs is the domain of public program testing for Adobe, allowing us glimpses at programs prior to release. Both Lightroom 1 and 2 were available there, and now Camera Raw 4.6 and the associated DNG converter are available from there to download. This is a release candidate version, meaning that it has been internally tested, but needs more testing in the public domain before being released as an automatic update.
New cameras fully supported by this version include Fuji Finepix IS Pro, Nikon D700, Nikon D90 and the Nikon Coolpix 6000. Preliminary (i.e. uncertified) support is provided for Canon Rebel XS, 50D, Olympus SP-565 UZ, Sony A900 and Sigma DP1 (the DP1 support is not finalised).
You can read more from Product Manager Tom Hogarty over at Lightroom Journal, where he made the announcement.
September 17, 2008
Timothy Armes has updated LR2/Mogrify to version 1.10. This adds the ability to allow up to 3 independent text annotations and fixes a recent bug that prevented the metadata from being copied to the mogrified file. Updates are available from the LR2/Mogrify page.
September 17, 2008
John Beardsworth has a great link to a photo.net interview with retoucher and digi tech Patrick Lavoie.
“Now that my editing station and the camera are set up and I have defined a workflow with the assistant and have checked in with the photographer, I open Adobe Lightroom (LR). I find this software very versatile and complete and it’s all I need to use during and after a photo session. I used to use Capture One Pro 3.7 before, when it was THE one to use when you shoot tethered or to professionally develop your RAW files, but since the apparition of Lightroom, I don’t use it anymore.”
Read the whole article.
September 13, 2008
Continuing from our last post about creating your own Web Galleries for Lightroom, we now tackle adding Styles to our gallery.
Probably the easiest way to get a look going in your gallery is to simply add some CSS code. In the <head> section of our HTML file, simply add a <style> tagset and enter CSS info.
<style>
body{background-color:#000000;}
<:/style>
That will give you a black background. You could also place the body section in a text file and call it. Create a blank text file and call it gallery.css. Enter body{background-color:#000000;} into it and save it in the folder with the other files. Instead of the <style tag, we now need to use a link tag. In the <head> section: <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”gallery.css” />. Now even though we done this correctly, Lightroom also needs to be told we’ve added a new file to the gallery. This is done in the manifest.lrweb file and uses a new command.
September 5, 2008
Welcome to Part 3 of our introduction to creating Web Engines for Lightroom 2. We’ve looked at the galleryInfo.lrweb file, so now we need to look at the other 2 files we need to make a gallery, the manifest.lrweb file and a HTML file.
Manifest
As the name might indicate, the manifest.lrweb file tells lightroom what files we need to make the gallery. Here we map template files to real files, and keep resources to help with our gallery, such as CSS and Javascript files. Here’s a very basic manifest.lrweb file:
importTags( "lr", "com.adobe.lightroom.default" )
AddGridPages {
template='grid.html',
rows=5,
columns=3,
}
September 2, 2008
It seems that nVidia users seem to draw the short straw with Lightroom. When Version 1 was released, it took a while to find out that certain performance issues were due to the use of nView. Now with Version 2 it seems there are different performance issues with nVidia.
However Flickr user MarkW Photo has found settings that greatly aid in the speed of the brush tool for Lightroom 2 nVidia users.
“I have finally fixed my slow performance issues with LR2! Today I did a bit of playing around with different performance settings. I’m using LR2 on a HP Pavillion 6258se Laptop. It has an 80GB Hard Drive, 2GB of Ram and the processor is a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion ™ 64 X2 Dual-Core. I had Windows Vista installed months ago but I downgraded back to XP due to Vista issues. First I opened the windows task manager so I could monitor the performance of Windows while using LR2. I noticed when using the develop tasks the performance stayed around 50%. When I used the retouch brush tools the performance still stayed around 50% but the brush tools were still slow. The more I brushed on the image the slower the brush refresh became. This told me that there must be a video performance issue and not necessarily a processor problem.
September 1, 2008
Timothy Armes has announced that LR/Enfuse version 3.00 is finally here.
After many requests Tim added a batch processing option. Simply group images to be blended into stacks, select all and then run enfuse in batch mode.
As an added bonus LR/Enfuse can now automatically reimport the blended images and even stack them with the originals.
http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php?sec=quickguide#batch
Both of these new features require Lightroom 2.