October 30, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Lightroom Forums Guru Mark Sirota has written a most excellent tip over at Lightroom Forums
“Since the very early pre-1.0 betas, I’ve wanted to organize my files by date, but using a hierarchy unavailable in Lightroom — specifically, YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD. In other words, shots from today would go into 2008/2008-10/2008-10-30.
Lightroom offers eight different ways to organize by date, but this isn’t one of them. I’ve just discovered how to do it.
The Trick:
July 29, 2008
Posted by LRN Editorial Staff
Source: Computer-darkroom
Author: Ian Lyons
When Adobe released the public beta of Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 back in early April 2008 it was with the express intention of providing the user community with an opportunity to try out many of the new features. Obviously, there was an expectation that the users would provide feedback on the new features and other aspects of the Lightroom workflow. So, here we are some 4 months later and the final release version is available, the question on everyone lips is – has the public beta delivered on it’s objectivesSo what’s new and improved?
July 29, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
As part of the newly launched Lightroom 2, there is also a new SDK. In addition to the new features from the original SDK, this one contains a wealth of details on creating your own galleries using Lua. While I learned the hard way, from other galleries, I found this explained things well. It provides a solid basis in coding, along with sample galleries.
For user help and interaction, there’s the new SDK U2U forum. You can also upload your product to Adobe Lightgroom Exchange.
July 12, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Matthew Campagna has updated his TTG Client Response Gallery for V2. In this case it’s for the Beta, but there are further additions to be made with potential features from the release version of Lightroom V2.
This gallery is especially useful to those who interact with clients online. From the gallery page:
June 24, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Michael Clark has an excellent article on Film Scans in Lightroom, over at O’Reilly’s Inside Lightroom blog. He discusses everything from film choice for scanning to scanner setup, to final tweaks in Lightroom. It’s a well balanced article that should be encouraging to any film buff looking to start using Lightroom with their slide or negative collection.
Read the article.
June 3, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
In an interesting change from the norm, Matt Kosklowski has posted a new type of free Preset: Keyword Sets. For those not aware of Keywords sets, I’ve a detailed post about them in the archives of Lightroom-blog.com.
The presets Matt has for readers today are ‘Children’ and ‘Baseball’. Head over to Lightroom Killer Tips to pick them up, along with instructions on installing them.
One good thing about them is that it might get you thinking about Keywording. A photo that you can’t find has no value, to you, or anyone else. In fact, if you can’t locate it, you may as well not have taken it. Keywords really help when locating files. As is Good captioning. So remember to include them when you’re managing your files!
(Via Adobe Lightroom Killer Tips.)
May 28, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
Shangara Singh has announced the release of the Photoshop Lightroom ACE Exam Aid for Exam Aids. Exam Aids have a large collection of study aids for those undertaking the ACE exams, this one being the latest. If you don’t know what the ACE program is, you can find out more about becoming an Adobe Certified Expert from the Adobe Website.
Exam Aid Key Features
Includes 226 questions, divided into 8 discrete modules (as per official exam)
All original questions based on the Prep Guide published by Adobe
Supplement answers that explain and/or clarify the concepts behind the questions
Paths to corresponding pages in the Photoshop Lightroom help file to enable further study – all paths hyperlinked to LiveDocs for easy access
A Study mode with the option of previewing correct answers and supplement answers on demand
A summary screen at the end of each module for reviewing the module content
A Practice mode for testing your knowledge in a simulated official exam environment
Mock practice tests based on the pool of questions contained in the study section
Countdown clock, flagging, and sorting that create the experience of sitting for the official exam
Scoring for each individual module and collectively at the end of each mock practice test
Option of comparing your answers against the correct answers after sitting a mock practice test
A printable PDF containing the supplement answers that you can use to study when you are away from your computer
Ability to raise the threshold by increasing either the number of questions delivered or the passing score or by decreasing the allotted time to each mock practice test
An easy to use interface, leaving you free to concentrate on the task of studying
Disclosure: I did some tech editing on the questions for Shangara, but have no commercial involvement with this project.
Read more
May 21, 2008
Posted by Sean McCormack
If you’ve been following either my own personal blog, or that of Jeffrey Friedl, you might have noticed us talking about Lightroom, time lapse and scripts. Now that Jeffrey has posted his script for modifying Lightroom crop metadata, I’m going to show you how I’ve been using the script.
The background to the script is that I’ve been interested in time lapse photography for a while. I’d not consider myself a videographer, or have much interest in it, but I do really love time lapse. So I’ve shot lots of sequences. But ultimately the static nature of the shot made me wish for something a little more interesting. Searching the web I came across sites that had panning in their timelapses, ‘very cool’ I thought. Then a guy called Chris Tierney showed up locally, with a bunch of cool timelapses. He’d been using After Effects to do his panning. I wondered if it could be done with some addons to Lightroom.
My pondering didn’t last long when Jeffrey came up with a Perl script that would do what I needed. Jeffrey explains the mechanics in detail in his post.
Sometimes though a video can help. So I put one together, it’s slightly rough because I’m using new software and doing it with a USB mic on my Macbook Pro, rather than the iMac I normally use. That’s because all my recent work for timelapse is there!
One or 2 quick points to note: Work with BACKUP files. While I’ve done 20 or more videos with no issues, that doesn’t mean that something won’t get corrupted. Jeffrey says the script is delicate and that means he’s not kidding. Also it may not be obvious in the video, but when I move the final crop, the aspect ratio is fixed. In fact it makes no difference if the size changes, because that will zoom the image, BUT the aspect ratio HAS to stay the same. Otherwise your video will be wonky..
Enjoy!
If you do create anything from this, be sure to post a link in the comments.
PS, Jeffrey tells me his website is pronounced reg-ex from Regular Expressions, his book, not the ‘rej-ex’ way I pronounced it.. Opps. Sorry Jeffrey!
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.”
