Lightroom-News.com

Timothy Armes has jut released his third web engine. Whereas Elegance and Impact were designed for showcasing a fairly small number of images, Jigasawrus is designed for photographers who wish to present a large number of images on a single web page (see the demonstration gallery). The images fit together in a jigsaw like fashion and rearrange themselves as the browser changes size.
Clicking on an image displays it at a larger size.

The plugin is available on the Photographer’s Toolbox.

Last night, Lightroom Product Manager, Tom Hogarty announced the availability of Lightroom 3 Beta 2. This second Beta adds and improves on the features of the first Beta.

• Camera Parity with LR 2.6 along with preliminary support for new cameras
• Tethered shooting for Nikon and Canon Cameras
• Luminance Noise reduction added
• Improved Import, including Video handling, Loupe from cards, and dockable folders
• Improved Watermarking
• Point Curve now available
• Improved visibility of Process Version, including year naming (2003 and 2010)
• Crop rotation via shortcut, increased Print resolution, local lens blur

For more detail check out the official Lightroom Journal announcement post.

Timothy Armes has just released version 1.20 of his Elegance web engine for Lightroom.

Version 1.20 offers a few bug fixes, but the most interesting change could be prove to revolutionise the distribution of Web Engines in general – Elegance is now distributed as a Lightroom plugin.

Traditionally Lightroom Web Engines have been treated as second class citizens. In comparison to plugins, which are installed and managed easily using Lightroom’s plugin manager, the installation of web engines has been a little ‘old-fashioned’, requiring the user to create a specific folder on his or her file system and then copy the Web Engine inside that.

Lightroom doesn’t afford Web Engines the same degree of flexibility as plugins either. The most obvious disadvantage is that updates have to be done manually since there’s no convenient way for a web engine to check for updates automatically.

Timothy decided to use his experience developping Lightroom plugins to circumvent these issues. Distrubuted as a plugin, Elegance is now installed using Lightroom’s plugin manager. The plugin then handles the installation of the Web Engine on the user’s behalf, provides easy access to the user’s registration and also checks for updates automatically. It’s really a very ‘Elegant’ solution (pun intended).

This isn’t the first time that Timothy’s squeezed an extra mile out of Lightroom’s plugin support. When export plugin support was first added to Lightroom 1.3 he quickly thought well outside the box to create the very popular LR/Enfuse – a plugin used to blend multiple exposures together directly from within Lightroom – thereby providing a service that didn’t seem to have anything to do with exporting at all…

You can learn more about Elegance from here:

http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/elegance.php

Tom Hogarty has announced the availability of Lightroom 2.6 and Camera Raw 5.6 as final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2. These updates include camera support for the following models: Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, Canon EOS 7D, Canon PowerShot G11, Canon PowerShot S90, Leaf Aptus-II 5, Mamiya DM22, Mamiya DM28, Mamiya DM33, Mamiya DM56, Mamiya M18, Mamiya M22, Mamiya M31, Nikon D3s, Olympus E-P2, Panasonic DMC-FZ38, Pentax K-x, Sigma DP1s, Sony A500, Sony A550, Sony A850,

Release Notes:
Camera Raw 5.6 and Lightroom 2.6 provide a fix for an issue affecting PowerPC customers using the final Lightroom 2.5, Camera Raw 5.5 and DNG Converter 5.5 updates on the Mac. The issue, introduced in the demosaic change to address sensors with unequal green response, has the potential to create artifacts in highlight areas when processing raw files from Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and various medium format digital camera backs.
The Lightroom 3 beta has not been updated with this new camera support. If you’re working with one of these newer cameras and the Lightroom 3 beta, please use the DNG Converter 5.6 to convert proprietary formats to DNG files that can be used in the Lightroom 3 beta.
This release includes improved camera profiles for the Leica M9 and Ricoh GXR.

Camera Raw 5.6 Download: Mac, PC. Lightroom 2.6 Download: Mac, PC.

The Turning Gate has released a meaty update to TTG Highslide Gallery Pro with version 1.9. This latest version includes a new PHP-based proprietary shopping cart that allows gallery visitors to submit purchase orders without online transaction. A sample gallery demonstrates the new shopping cart system. Also included is the ability to set separate pricing for individual gallery items via IPTC metadata, configurable download links, and a number of other fixes and improvements.

A detailed overview of new features as been posted to The Turning Gate blog. The 1.9 update is free to existing subscribers, and available for $40 to new, unsubscribed users.

These new features come in addition to previously included e-commerce features for Fotomoto, PayPal and FoxyCart.

Additionally, updates have been released for TTG Pages, TTG Simpleviewer-2, TTG Stage and the standard version TTG Highslide Gallery. See The Turning Gate for full details.

Tom Hogarty has announced the availability of Lightroom 2.6 and Camera Raw 5.6 at Adobe Labs.

Improved camera support includes the following cameras: Canon EOS 7D, Canon PowerShot G11, Canon PowerShot S90, Leaf Aptus II 5, Mamiya DM22, DM28, DM33, DM56, M18, M22, M31, Nikon D3s, Olympus E-P2, Pentax K-x, Panasonic FZ38, Sigma DP1s, Sony A500, Sony A550 and Sony A850.

There are a number of bug fixes also. An issue limited to Mac customers using PowerPC hardware has been corrected. The issue, introduced in the demosaic change to address sensors with unequal green response, has the potential to create artifacts in highlight areas when processing raw files from Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and various medium format digital camera backs. In addition there is a fix for a visual glitch on Snow Leopard in loupe when panning.

The additional camera support is not available for Lightroom 3 Beta, but users can access this functionality using the DNG Convertor.

Anita Dennis has been in touch to get word out that Help is now available for Lightroom 3 Beta.

Pressing F1, or using Help>Lightroom Help will take you there. For the official announcement and links to specific topics, check out the official documentation blog Phosphors.

The new Publish option in Lightroom 3 Beta allows you a handy way to control what photos are on your iPhone without iPhoto. Fortunately iTunes allows you to select a folder that will sync to the iPhone instead.

First up, create a folder called iPhone on your hard drive. Next, in Lightroom 3 Beta’s Library Module, go to the Publish Services section on the bottom of the left panel. Click on the ‘+’ beside ‘Publish Services’ and choose ‘Manage Publish Connections’. This opens a dialog box that’s remarkably similar to Export.

Timothy Armes has today announced the public release of PLUS for Lightroom, a plug-in for embedded PLUS usage rights into images exported from Lightroom 2.

With publishers such as McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson adopting the PLUS Picture Licensing Glossary and announcing their support, the international PLUS standard is rapidly becoming recognised as the definitive way to specify usage rights for digital works, and is the result of years of collaboration between the many and varied members of the PLUS coalition (http://www.useplus.com).

With PLUS for Lightroom it’s easier than ever for Lightroom users to create and embed PLUS licenses. You may read more about Timothy’s motivation and objectives on his blog (http://www.timothyarmes.com/blog/2009/10/plus-for-lightroom-manage-your-rights/), and you can download the trial version from the Photographer’s Toolbox (http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/plusforlightroom.php)

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have an interest in Timelapse photography. I’ve had Jeffrey Friedl write a panning script (thanks yet again, Jeffrey!) and I’ve even gone as far as writing a plugin that uses ffmpeg to create video from exported files. But now thanks to Andy Rahn, Lee Jay Fingersh and Matt Dawson, I’ve achieved an even better goal: Timelapse video straight from Lightroom.