Lightroom-News.com

Timothy Armes has today announced the public release of PLUS for Lightroom, a plug-in for embedded PLUS usage rights into images exported from Lightroom 2.

With publishers such as McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson adopting the PLUS Picture Licensing Glossary and announcing their support, the international PLUS standard is rapidly becoming recognised as the definitive way to specify usage rights for digital works, and is the result of years of collaboration between the many and varied members of the PLUS coalition (http://www.useplus.com).

With PLUS for Lightroom it’s easier than ever for Lightroom users to create and embed PLUS licenses. You may read more about Timothy’s motivation and objectives on his blog (http://www.timothyarmes.com/blog/2009/10/plus-for-lightroom-manage-your-rights/), and you can download the trial version from the Photographer’s Toolbox (http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/plusforlightroom.php)

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have an interest in Timelapse photography. I’ve had Jeffrey Friedl write a panning script (thanks yet again, Jeffrey!) and I’ve even gone as far as writing a plugin that uses ffmpeg to create video from exported files. But now thanks to Andy Rahn, Lee Jay Fingersh and Matt Dawson, I’ve achieved an even better goal: Timelapse video straight from Lightroom.

TTG Horizon 1.1 is now available. This update introduces a host of improvements and refinements, including better integration with TTG Pages and TTG Auto Index, new controls allowing for more flexibility in design, better font handling and font stack presets, and fixes for several bugs and validation errors.

The 1.1 update is free to subscribed users and can be downloaded using purchased download URLs. New users can purchase TTG Horizon for $15 from the product page.

Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty has announced the availabilty of Lightroom 3 Beta over at Lightroom Journal. In a similar fashion to Lightroom 1 and 2, Adobe are providing a public preview of the application. In this case it’s much more like the original Beta preview, in that it’s less polished. Hence Adobe warn that it is not to be used as a production tool, but for testing and commenting only.

New features include: Improved Import, Watermarking, better Noise Reduction, Slideshow Video Export, Grain amongst others. Discussion can be had on the Adobe Labs Forum and more information and the download can be had from Adobe Labs.

Steve Sutherland, the creator of the Mapi Mailer export action has gone a step further and created a dedicated Export plugin for emailing from Windows Lightroom.

“Just thought I’d announce to any MapiMailer users out there, that I’ve finally created an Export plug-in version of MapiMailer. The main benefit to users of the old MapiMailer is that the Windows limitation on how many files could be attached to your email is now gone.

For those who have not heard of MapiMailer, it is a plug-in which allows Windows (only) users to export and attach multiple photos to their default email program. Without it, you can only attach a single photo. It is free for anyone to use (donations accepted). It has been submitted to the Adobe plug-in exchange, but you can also download and read about it now at my new website www.sbsutherland.com.

Spread the word.
Steve Sutherland”

Plugins in Lightroom
Lightroom has a plugin architecture that allows third parties to add to the functionality of Lightroom. Often these plugins add to Lightroom’s core functions, but more often they add entirely new features to the program. Plugins are a very different beast to Presets, and sometimes users can get the two confused. Presets are merely stored sets of instructions for Lightroom tools (and for plugins for that matter). Plugins, on the other hand, are additional programming, added to Lightroom.

Plugins for Lightroom originally came in one of two forms, Export and Web Gallery. But programmers being what they are have made much more of the available SDK to create even more than this, along with changes in the SDK. So we can broaden this view into more sections:

• Web Galleries
• Export Plugins
• Metadata Plugins
• Post Process Plugins
• External Editors
• Import
• Utilities