Lightroom-News.com

Source: George Jardine on Lightroom and Digital Photography
Author: George Jardine

The Lightroom Catalog – Part 1, or “Where Are My Pictures?”

How many people really understand the relationship between the Lightroom catalog and the underlying system folder structure? On one level I suppose it does not always have to matter, so long as Lightroom knows where everything is stored. But of course, it is always more reassuring to know how Lightroom is managing everything.

George Jardine has just posted a video podcast “that covers the basics of understanding Lightroom’s catalog model. We cover where Lightroom stores your previews and metadata, how Lightroom links to your source files, and how to use Lightroom with Bridge’s browser-based workflow.”

Read the full story and how to download the video podcast

Duration 22.31

Source: Lightroom Journal
Author: Eric Scouten

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.

In part 1 of this story, which was published last week, I showed how you could use a drag and drop method to open a photo directly in Photoshop and also how to open as a Smart Object. In this second part we are going to look at drag and drop to a Photoshop droplet and how to link a photo back to a folder view in Bridge.

Last month I wrote a tutorial feature on how to use Bridge as a front end to Lightroom. Staying on that theme, there are a few more drag and drop tips you might like to be aware of such as drag and drop opening. This is not a standard Lightroom feature, it is more of a unofficial workaround and as such, not everything will work as expected. For example, you can’t drag and drop virtual copy photos from Lightroom and you need to pay special attention to the warning about opening images that have unsaved metadata via a drag and drop.

A little discussion in Lightroom Forums.net led me to create a video on how to make text slides in Lightroom. The main use I have for this is as a separator between types of image in a Slideshow. While the post was done on my personal Lightroom Blog, I’m posting it here for all you delightful Lightroom-News readers. The video is in iPod m4v format so Right click to download. Enjoy.

Although Lightroom is advertised as being a member of the ‘Photoshop family’, Lightroom and Photoshop do at times feel more like distant cousins rather than close relatives. People are often puzzled about the relationship between Lightroom and Adobe Bridge and why it is you can browse images easily via Bridge, but in the case of Lightroom, you have to import everything first.

The following tips do assume that you already own Phtoshop CS2 or later, and therefore have access to Adobe Bridge which is the browser component of the Creative Suite (Adobe Bridge comes with Photoshop whether you buy the entire Suite package or just the standalone program). So let me show you how you a few ways you can improve the workflow between working in Bridge and working in Lightroom.

A little while back we posted a story linking to an article on the Luminous Landscape website (Do curves throw you a curve?) in which author Mark Segal offered some interesting perspectives on the nature of curve adjustments in Camera Raw and how these compared with traditional RGB composite curve adjustments made in photoshop. In this feature article for Lightroom-News I have concentrated on analyzing the difference between Tone Curve adjustments made in Lightroom and Photoshop curves. I show you here a method for testing curve comparisons between the two programs and some observations on how and why they differ.

Eric Scouten © 2006 George Jardine. Used with permission.

Lightroom Engineer Eric Scouten has posted a highly informative article over at the Official Lightroom Blog: Lightroom Journal

Eric: “So you want to make sure you’ve identified all of the people you know in your Lightroom catalog, but … you have several thousand photos in your catalog and you don’t want to spend time reviewing photos you’ve already keyworded. How to avoid that?

This is where a technique I call worklist keywords comes in handy. The idea is simple: Use another keyword to keep track of which photos you’ve reviewed for a certain subject area. Here’s how it works:”

Read the whole article

As if he was reading my mind on the matter, Matt Kloskowski has produced a video tutorial on using Collections. This was subject matter I was going to cover but seeing as Matt has done a great job on it, I’ll defer to him on this.
Matt says, “I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of features in Lightroom that a real-world use is not immediately obvious. I started thinking about collections the other day (that’s what I do on my time off ) and realized that there are so many real-world uses for them in Lightroom but I haven’t seen them covered much. So that’s just what we’ll do in this video. Collections are something I use every time I step into Lightroom and I think they’re incredibly useful so I figured I’d share my thoughts on them and hopefully make things easier for you too.”
Just as a quick addendum to the video, one thing Matt doesn’t mention about Collections, is that they remember the presets you use with them. So if you have a particular Slideshow preset you wanted to use with a collection, select it and the collection will remember it. The same applies for Web galleries.

Adobe have posted a video tutorial, created by George Jardine, to their Design Center Tutorials. Covering techniques for White Balance setting, it really is a helpful video for getting started with Develop. If you’ve been following George’s podcast, then this may seem a little familiar to you. It was originally posted as Podcast number 33 from George’s Lightroom Podcasts.

Via John Nack