Seth Resnick and Jamie Spritzer, the Co-Founders of D65 also announced  their new book , D65’s Lightroom Workbook, Workflow, Not Workslow in Lightroom 3. This book details everything you ever wanted, or needed to know about the five modules in Lightroom, including setting up preferences for optimal results and organizing catalogs. Included is an entire chapter which details the D-65 legendary workflow;  an advanced, yet simple workflow from capture through editing, tweaking, processing and exporting.

John Beardsworth is a member of the core Adobe Lightroom beta testing team, so as you might expect, he should know a thing or two about Lightroom and in particular how to organise photos in a catalog, which is one of his main specialities (apart from being a professional photographer too). So I was interested in the following article where John expresses his views on the usefulness of multiple catalogs.

Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should : one or many Lightroom catalogues
Lightroom 1.1 made it easier to create and work with more than one catalogue, and it’s making some people think that’s how they should work. I’m not talking about when you’re travelling or need to move pictures between computers, but as a routine way of working. Apart from seeing it in blog posts and forum threads, I’ve been asked about it on a couple of occasions recently, and was also forwarded a discussion where one photographer quoted from my book:

Another way to think of Lightroom is as a centralized inventory system managing a warehouse – you no longer need to look through each pallet or bin to find the parts. And as your business grows, and you rent the neighbouring warehouses too, you still only need one system to keep control of your work.

The trouble is that those who are actually advocating the idea of using multiple catalogues (eg another one popped up just today at O’Reilly’s blog and has a particularly rich selection of dumb ideas) never reflect all that deeply on their true reasons for doing so. When you read between the lines, there are essentially two strands to their arguments:

• It’s a workaround for performance problems they’ve experienced with large catalogues

• They’re working “Bridge-style” and don’t really think about DAM

Looking first at the “necessity” argument, if it is indeed so, then clearly you do have no alternative. Just don’t believe, let alone advocate, that such working methods are the Holy Grail of good practice.

Is it necessary anyway? That’s a maybe. It is not yet possible to give simple guidelines (unlike iView’s 2Gb file size limit) for when a Lightroom catalogue might run up against a performance limit*. As a DAM program and image processor, Lightroom probes most areas of your computer’s operations, and let’s also allow for the possibility of some less than optimal code. Many factors other than the number of records in the database could be degrading performance, and so you may not really gain much, if anything, from splitting it up into smaller catalogues.

If performance limits did indeed force you to break your work up into multiple catalogues, there’s plenty to lose. For one thing, there is no better way to let some of your pictures slip through the cracks when you forget to import one folder, or when you add more images to a folder and forget to update the Lightroom catalogue covering those folders. As well as omitting items, you can easily duplicate them. Images may end up recorded in more than one catalogue, with adjustments and their descriptive metadata diverging, keyword spellings too, singular here, plural there. And unless your search needs are very primitive, you’re going to have to repeat searches in each catalogue file. So there’s a time cost. Frankly, while you may think you are smart enough to cope with such a “system”, few of us are, not for long anyway.

Read the full story…

Earlier this year on Lightroom-news we brought you news of how to use GPS metadata in Lightroom to link to Google Maps and Google Earth. Ian Lyons of Computer-Darkroom mentioned how on a trip to Antarctica he used the LoadMyTracks and GPSPhotoLinker software to take the GPX data from his GPS device and synchronize this with the capture files he had imported to Lightroom. I was going to post a follow up story myself showing how this could be done using the above software programs. But meanwhile, Eric Scouten of the Lightroom team has posted a tutorial showing how to accomplish the same thing, but more simply by using the HoudahGeo software

Eric writes:
I’m kind of a metadata addict. And a map junkie. So it should be no surprise that I’ve been waiting for a long time for a program \to help me mark up my photos with the exact location of capture. I was very happy to learn this spring of a new application called HoudahGeo. Most of the geocoding apps I’ve seen before only write to JPEG files. HoudahGeo actually works directly on PSD and DNG files, among others, meaning I can actually mark up my master files instead of a derivative.

HoudahGeo is available only for Mac OS, and I’m not aware of any plans to make a Windows version available. I haven’t looked for a similar Windows application, but the tips below regarding how it would interact with Lightroom should apply if so. (Please add a comment if you’re aware of a good counterpart for Windows.)

In the Field

If you have a hand-held GPS unit that you can carry with you, the main thing you need to be concerned with is ensuring that your GPS and camera clocks are in sync with each other. Spend the time to get your camera within a minute or less of the GPS clock. If it’s not the same time zone, that’s OK; you can take care of that later.

And, of course, you need to have your GPS running while you’re shooting. I keep mine permanently tethered to the outside of my camera backpack. When I’m packing, I simply put the GPS in an outside pocket, leaving the tether cord in place. When I take the camera out of the pack to start shooting, I pull the GPS out, turn it on, and run its tether through the top handle on my camera bag so it’s not dangling. As long as the camera backpack stays on my back, I’m logging my location continuously.

Downloading Data

How you download data will, of course, be dependent on the make and model of your GPS unit and the software that comes with it. HoudahGeo claims to be able to read directly from the GPS unit. I like to keep the original GPS track log files, so I haven’t tried this feature myself. What is important is that you wind up with a GPX file. GPX is a standard interchange format for GPS marker data; you should be able to save to that format from whatever software comes with your GPS unit. The MapSource software that comes with my Garmin GPS can generate GPX files through its “Save As” menu item.

When you’re downloading data from your GPS, you should take a moment to look for bogus data in your track logs. Whenever you move with your GPS unit turned off (even a short distance), it will generate a lot of noise when you first turn it on again. (For example, see this rather improbable traversal of 105 miles in northern Minnesota that I supposedly accomplished in 30 seconds.) HoudahGeo isn’t able to sort out this errant data, so any photos taken shortly before or after turning on your GPS might get tagged with wildly incorrect locations. Take the time to use your GPS software to delete these incorrect data points.

Once you have a cleaned up GPX file, you’re ready to go!

A Caution

I generally convert all of my camera raw files to DNG as part of my import workflow. I’ve only occasionally used HG with original RAW files, and the results were not quite what I had hoped. If possible, I recommend using PSD, JPEG, and DNG files instead; I’ve done thousands of these files successfully.

Read the full article…

Peter Krogh, author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers has added a new video companion for the book on his DAM Useful website.

Complete RAW workflows for pro photographers
Peter Krogh provides an in-depth, 4-hour presentation of his proven workflow featured in The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. This video training covers two end-to-end RAW photo workflows that include editing, file conversion, adding metadata, client feedback, backup, archiving and more.

These workflow videos feature the following software:
• Adobe Bridge
• Adobe Camera Raw
• Adobe DNG Converter
• iView MediaPro, iView Catalog Reader
• DAM Useful plug-ins: RapidFixer, Rank and File

Workflow tasks featured:
• Import from camera
• Batch rename
• Batch metadata
• Review a shoot and rank favorites
• Fast adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw
• DNG file conversion
• Create catalogs with iView MediaPro
• Organize photos in DAM catalogs
• Email photos
• Create slide shows
• Create Web galleries
• Share catalogs with your clients

The DAM Book Workflow Video are availalbe for $99.95 plus shipping.
• 2 CD-ROMs packaged in a standard DVD case
• Approx. Run Time: 275 minutes
• Requirements: QuickTime 6+ for movies
• Language: English

Video Table of Contents or Watch sample movies

About the author
Peter Krogh is a professional photographer and author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O’Reilly Media, Nov. 2005) and co-creator of DAM Useful software. Peter is the former chairman of the American Society of Media Photographers’ Digital Photography Standards and Practices Project and regularly conducts seminars and workshops on digital asset management.

• Action log now reports activity for more features of MediaPro.
• Added support for cameras in PTP mode (Win).
• Batch rename now sorts as the view order and appends an incrementing number to the filename if filename clash occurs.
• Improved Scroll Lock mode in Light Table. On Macs, the Option key resets offsets while scrolling
• Dates displayed in the Info Panel now adjust to changes in the date format preference.

“You can all continue to use and buy iView products knowing that they will be fully supported as Microsoft evolves the products in the future on both the Windows and Mac platforms,” says Yan Calotychos, founder of iView.

For a complete list of improvements, please download this version history document (PDF).
http://downloads.iview-multimedia.com/ivmp312vh.pdf

Download iView MediaPro 3.1.2
This update is free for registered users of MediaPro 3.x. This update works best with the latest version of QuickTime (7.1.3) from Apple, which is strongly recommended to both Windows and Macintosh users.
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/downloads/index.php

Press Release: PORTLAND, Ore. – July 26, 2006 – Extensis, a division of Celartem Inc., today released a free update to Portfolio 8 — the leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution for creative professionals. This update is a Universal Application, adding native support for Intel-based Macintosh systems. The free update supports Portfolio single-user, Portfolio Client, Portfolio Server, Portfolio NetPublish, Portfolio NetPublish for Server, Portfolio SQL-Connect and Portfolio Browser. This is a Macintosh only update.

Registered owners of Portfolio 8 are eligible to receive the free upgrade immediately through the Extensis website at http://www.extensis.com/portfolio.

“Extensis welcomes Apple’s move to Intel and has already successfully enabled our Suitcase Fusion product to work within an Intel-based Mac computing environment,” said Martin Stein, Director of Product Management for Extensis. “Releasing this UA version of the entire Portfolio 8 product family was the logical next step for Extensis to support its customer base and provide leading technology solutions for creative professionals.”

Some of the thousands of companies with multi-workgroup implementations of Portfolio Server include: Christian Aid, Conair Corporation, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Ducati Motors, MTV Networks, Chicago White Sox, REI and Young & Rubicam.

About Portfolio

Portfolio 8 is the perfect software solution for marketing and creative workgroups-it streamlines workflows through efficient organization, viewing, routing, archiving and distribution of creative assets. A surprisingly affordable solution, Portfolio Server 8 ensures proper use of a brand’s creative assets across all internal and external teams, partners and vendors, while eliminating the guesswork involved in hunting down and tracking creative assets. Portfolio — trusted by IT; approved by creatives.

Individual creative professionals can also supercharge their workflow with Portfolio 8, the surprisingly affordable, easy-to-use desktop version is a top choice of graphic designers and photographers.

Pricing and Availability

Portfolio 8.1 is immediately available via download from the Extensis website and is free of charge for registered Portfolio 8 users. Portfolio 8.1 for single-users is available for a suggested retail price of $199.95US for full product. Please visit http://www.extensis.com for information on client/server pricing.

French and German versions of the Portfolio update are also available now for download from the Extensis website. Japanese versions of the Portfolio update are available from http://www.extensis.co.jp.

For information on where to purchase the Portfolio family of products visit http://www.extensis.com/portfolio.