Lightroom-News.com

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.

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.

One feature sorely lacking in Lightroom is a good watermark on Export. Using the fabulous 3rd party plugin LR2/Mogrify from Timothy Armes solves this issue for a straight export, but unfortunately post process plugins are not available in the Web Module. So how can we do it?

Well for my recently launched music photography website Muso Foto, I wanted nice (i.e. not the normal Lightroom one) watermarks on my images. Nothing intrusive, but something that doesn’t take away from the image.

Here’s the steps I took:

TTG Highslide Gallery Pro has been updated to version 1.41. This release updates TTG Highslide Gallery Pro with support for Fotomoto’s new card products. Using Fotomoto, you can now sell greeting cards, flat cards and postcards directly from your web gallery.

A full list of changes follows:

v1.41 (2009-08-09)
Support for Fotomoto’s new card products — sell greeting cards, flat cards and postcards through Fotomoto!.
Improved form validation for Selection Gallery.
Fixed form compatibility for Form-to-Email Pro.
Improved handling/protection of Highslide license.
Fixed bug that prevented text customization for ‘Close’ button in Slideshow mode.
Added capability to enable/disable individually Fotomoto “Buy Print” and “Send E-card” buttons.
Fixed IE bug for View Cart button width.
Package includes a modified Form-to-Email script and readme file for use on Yahoo Small Business accounts.

In addition the non Pro version has also been updated.

Timothy Armes has released LR/Mogrify 2.00, with a new, and much requested, compression feature which finds the optimum JPEG compression value to produce the best image quality for a specific output size.

Other features include:

• Watermarks can be scaled to the shortest or longest edge, ideal for same size watermarks on Landscape and Portrait images.
• Annotations now work the same way.
• Unnecessary punctuation will be removed as well.

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.

Recent Hallmark graduate Matthew Campagna has been busy in the creation of a brand new gallery for Lightroom. Dubbed TTG Highslide Gallery, this flexible and robust gallery offers a wealth of features requested by users. The heart of the gallery is Torstein Hønsi’s excellent Highslide JS image framework. Written from the ground up, the many new features in this gallery include:

If you are creating a new Catalog or brand new Lightroom system, you may have a set of Keywords that you have used in other applications or even a set you had left over from your archive of negatives or transparencies.

You might find that it is simpler to create or edit your Keyword list outside of Lightroom to speed up the process, especially if you need to create a complex list.