February 13, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Infrared Photography is based on capturing light in the 700-900nm section of the light spectrum. We normally perceive it as heat, but with certain filters it is possible to capture this in a photo. However most digital cameras have IR filters to prevent oversaturation in the red channel. Canon Digital SLRs have quite a strong filter, but you can still capture photos by using long exposures. Other cameras have weaker filters and are more suited to Infrared. In fact, there is a whole industry based around removing the IR filter from a camera, specifically for IR photograpy. Like I said you can still shot with longer exposures to compensate for the filter.
February 3, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Matthew Campagna has announced a replacement for the TTG Gallery Index over at Lightroom Galleries.
“TTG XML Album Index is a new album indexing template for the Lightroom Web module, and replaces the newly discontinued TTG Gallery Index.
Through a combination of PHP and XML, the album index is easier than ever to update with new web galleries. It’s no longer necessary to regenerate and re-upload the entire index for every update, as was the case with TTG Gallery Index. TTG XML Album Index gathers album information from a simple XML file. To add a gallery to your index, you need only provide a thumbnail image and four pieces of information — thumbnail path, gallery path, gallery title and description — to the XML file.
TTG XML Album Index is written in Lua. It requires Lightroom 1.3 or higher, and a web server running PHP. Updates require an FTP client and a text-editor. Coding experience is not necessary.
TTG XML Album Index outputs valid XHTML and CSS.”
January 21, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Anita Dennis from Adobe has officially announced the introduction of the Lightroom Community Help Wiki. This community help system incorporates an updated version of the Lightroom LiveDocs, in addition to a new interactive design. Well known figures from the Lightroom Community have been involved with setting this up and will be involved with as moderators on a rotating basis.
The interactive nature of the Wiki means that any Lightroom user can add comments and links to the existing documentation. Obviously these will be moderated to keep them relevant to educating the user about using Lightroom.
The announcement was made in a number of places: Lightroom Forums.net, Adobe Lightroom on Flickr and the Adobe User forum.
January 18, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Just a quickie with some current Lightroom News:
Scott Kelby has a long Version 2.0 wishlist over at Photoshop Insider.
Stephen Shankland interviews Kevin Connor about what’s on the Lightroom Radar for CNET.
Marc Rochkind of Imageingester fame has released ImageReporter. This tool will query your catalog file and give all the stats on your images including average focal length, type etc.
Matthew Campagna has updated the TTG HTML Gallery to version 1.12, adding onImage Navigation.
Matt Kloskowski has a great tip on Auto Stacking over at Lightroom Killer Tips.
That’s it for now. Have a nice weekend!
January 16, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Created as a replacement for default Lightroom HTML Gallery, Matthew Campagna has announced the launch of his TTG HTML Gallery.
“TTG HTML Gallery is a Web module template for Adobe Lightroom. Generated galleries are laid out using valid XHTML and CSS, and offer a bevy of customizations, providing an alternative to the table-based and relatively inflexible default HTML template boxed with Lightroom.”
This new gallery is based on the code from the TTG Slimbox Gallery 2.24. Unlike a lot of galleries created by Matthew, it makes no use of the Slimbox code. Instead it opens the photo in the current page, meaning the gallery operates in pure HTML, with no Javascript for formatting. Besides this change, the gallery offers all the features from the Slimbox gallery. This includes annotations, color labels and ratings.
Read More
January 15, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Regular Expressions Guru and Export Plugin Consultant Jeffrey Friedl has announced the creation of Piglet technology. A Piglet is a plugin that goes inside a plugin, a sub Plugin, if you will. Using the thought process of Plugin-Plugin –> Sub Plugin –> Plugin-ette –>Pluglette –> Piglet to get to a name, Jeffery explains “I think it’s cute, but you’ll be forgiven if you think it’s corny”.
January 9, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Despite the recent updating of LR/Mogrify, Timothy Armes has found time to create another useful Plugin. LR/Transporter can create sidecar text and summary files on export. These files can then be optionally FTP’d with the photo and copied to another location.
What I find this useful for is my Folderblog based Photoblog. Folderblog seems to be unsupported by the author, but I’m loathe to change with so many photos uploaded with it. in LR/Transport I create a text file that contains the photo title on the first line and the caption on the second, from the file Metadata. This is saved as a text file with the photo and both are FTP’d to my server. This way I’ve no further editing to do on the page. Perfect! By way of disclaimer, Tim did ask me to test this prior to release, which I was more than happy to do. The plugin information would have been posted even if I had no involvement.
From the LR/Transporter page:
“LR/Transporter is a Lightroom export plugin that I’ve written that allows you make use of the metadata embedded in your photos.
January 7, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
LR/Mogrify is a great new Export plugin from Timothy Armes. It’s currently at version 2.43, but could easily have been updated by the time you read this. Tim is very busy with this plugin, adding features and fixing the odd bug, on an ongoing basis. This plugin adds a significant amount of features that have been requested for Lightroom including:
Output Sharpening
Border Creation
Custom Watermarking
Custom Text
Conversion to Custom Colour Spaces
Custom Resizing using alternative methods to Lightroom’s Lanczos Kernal method
With Borders you can add text before or after creation, meaning you can add text to the border. LR/Mogrify makes use of the Open Source Image Magick photo tool. While it takes a small amount of setting up, the results from the program are more than worth the meagre effort. Between the Image Magick page and the LR/Mogrify page, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. The great thing is that because this is a Lightroom Plugin, you can save your settings as Preset, making for excellent automation.
Due to the amount of work involved in the creation of the Plugin, Tim has designated this as donationware. The free version allows up to 10 images to be exported at once, with no limit on the amount of times per session.
January 7, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
As well as bringing us video tutorials, Matthew Campagna has been busy updating his TTG Selection Gallery. This wonderful gallery allows clients to make photo selects inside the gallery and have these emailed to the photographer. Using cut and paste the photographer can use the Find Pane to make a collection of these Selects quickly. I’ve used the original version quite a bit and have recommended it on to others also. This new version builds on the newest TTG Slimbox Gallery and has feature parity with it. The other big change is that the Selection Gallery is now Lua based. While this means nothing to the average user, it means that it is fully compatible with the current galllery creation standards in Lightroom 1.3.1.
Read more about the TTG Selection Gallery.
December 20, 2007
Posted by Sean McCormack
Not content with releasing Export Plugins for Flickr, Zenfolio and Smugmug, Jeffrey Friedl has just launched the first version of his ‘Export to Picasa Web’ Export Plugin for Lightroom. While testing has been minimal, Jeffrey has very fast turnover on any bugs found, so there’s no fear of this being an supported product. The best news for all is that, as with the other plugins, Jeffrey has released this for free.
Download the plugin and read more about it here.
