Lightroom-News.com

Timothy Armes has just released version 4.00 of LR2/Mogrify – his Lightroom plugin for adding watermarks, text annotations and borders to exported images (among lots of other things).

This version adds quite a few features that users have been asking him for:
There’s a new “Canvas” section for placing the (resized) image onto a fixed size canvas. Useful when images have to have a fixed size but you don’t wish to crop them (such as for sending them to photo labs or displaying them on a digital projector).
Multiple different watermarks may now be added to an image.
PNG watermarks may now be scaled proportionally.
Watermarks can now be specified as a percentage of the width or height of the image while preserving the aspect ratio.
Horizontal/Vertical insets now work in each of the nine watermark positions.
The limit of 3 text annotations has been removed – add as many as you want.
Fixed a recent bug that stopped TIFF’s being exported in 8-bit mode.
Fixed a recent bug that stopped borders having no width or height.

As a suitably impressed X-Rite user, the new X-Rite ColorChecker Passport looks like a great tool for easy colour correction with Lightroom. ColorChecker Passport is designed as a ‘capture to edit’ color solution, using 3 colour target cards (Color Checker, Creative Enhancement Card and Gray Card). When used with Lightroom, combined with the ColorChecker Passport software, these cards can create custom DNG Profiles. The cards themselves sit in a protective case, which also serves as a stand. The product is designed for both landscape and people photography. It also allows a range of colour tones besides neutralising colour casts, via the Creative Enhancement card.

Seth Resnick (D65/Pixel Genius) introduces the CC passport in the video on the website, along with showing how to use it on the shoot and in Lightroom (Wordpress won’t allow the video to embed, or I’d simply show it here!). The video is educational and well worth watching.

After a short public beta Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom have been updated to 5.5 and 2.5 respectively and are available through the Adobe software update mechanisms or at the Adobe.com updates page.

Matthew Campagna has launched TTG Pages 3.0. TTG Pages 3.0 is a spiritual successor to TTG LR Pages featuring many improvements, as well as integrating features from TTG Auto Index and TTG Stage. It’s more powerful, more flexible and easier to use than any of its predecessors. Features include:

- Creates Home page, About page, Contact page and self-populating Album Index.
- Much improved Contact form featuring flexible visual and positioning customization and input validation.
- Full integration of TTG Stage, supporting the following Flash galleries: Autoviewer, Postcardviewer, Simpleviewer, Monoslideshow 1.x and 2.x, Slideshow Pro, FlashNifties, Dimin Slideshow, Polaroid Gallery, the Lightroom Flash Gallery and Flickr.
- Pre-built site navigation menus.
- Six new site templates.
- Includes TTG MSS2 XMLer for creating Flash galleries with Monoslideshow 2.x.
- More user-friendly for novice and veteran Web module users alike!
- Longer subscription terms for updates.

The cost is $25. Those previously subscribed to TTG LR Pages have been sent discount codes for the upgrade.

More information is available at The Turning Gate.

And a live demonstration here: http://demo.theturninggate.net/

Timothy Armes, author of many Lightroom plug-ins, has just released his first Web Engine.

‘Elegance’ is designed for photographers wishing to showcase is small number of images in an elegant display that’s free from navigation bars or other ornamentation that can make the gallery feel out of place on a web site. Fades and transitions are implemented in Javascript, so there’s no need to for visitors to install Flash.

iPhone users get a special treat too – the finger swipe gesture moves from one image to the next!

You can read more about Tim’s motivations for this gallery on his blog, see an example in action on his site and download the Web Engine from the Photographer’s Toolbox.

As with his plug-ins, this this donationware.

Some interesting Lightroom links from around the Net.

Wade Heninger has his weekly round up of Lightroom Links over on his blog with Lightroom Tuesday.

Lightroom Blog has a post to help those trying to get Lightroom Flash Galleries working with Windows Servers.

X-Equals has a good post on Lightroom Presets and Plugins.

In a continuing series from Adobe, you can get to meet the Lightroom Team. This time it’s the turn of Craig Marble.

Slightly older is a handy tool from Jeffrey Friedl that lets you extract the Preview images from within Lightroom.

Portraiture 2 from Imagenomic is now available as a plugin for Lightroom. This retouching plugin is designed to reduce the time it takes to retouch a photo, and being a Lightroom plugin, means one less trip to Photoshop for retouching. This is an ‘Edit In’ or Export plugin and works on a generated image, rather than being Metadata based editing. Once an image is opened in Portraiture 2, it can be edited in the same way as in the Photoshop Plugin version (bar the ability to add the results as a new layer). All the processing and masking features are available in the Lightroom version also.

Portraiture 2 costs $199.95. A video tutorial explaining how the plugin operates is available also. For new users, Portraiture 2 can be used on a 15-Day Free Trial basis.