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.