Command(Mac)/Control click(PC) on any panel to collapse all the individual panels. Especially useful if all the panels are open and the one you want is at the bottom.

Option (Mac)/ Alt (PC) click on a panel header to activate ‘Solo Mode’. In Solo Mode, only one panel at a time is open. Repeating the Alt/Option click will deactivate Solo Mode.

Hovering on the inner edge of a panel will turn the cursor into a double headed arrow. Click and drag to change the panel width. There is a fixed limit to how wide the panel can be.

By right clicking (or control clicking on Mac) on a panel, you can bring up a menu where you can remove or restore panels.

To hide/view the Left and Right Panels, simply press the Tab Key. (Shift Tab will toggle the Filmstrip and Module Picker also).

You can control how the panels react on mouseover by right clicking (or control clicking on Mac) on the outside of the panel scroll bar. From there you get options to Auto Hide and Show, which is the default behaviour of opening and closing as you mouse on or off the edge of the scroll area. Auto Hide means you have to click on the triangle in the middle to open the panel. Mousing away lets the panel close automatically. Finally Manual forces you to click on and off the panel every time. There is one more control, and that is Sync with Opposite Panel, which is useful when you want to apply your settings to the other panel.

“Last year I wrote a blog post detailing my photography workflow. Since last year though my workflow has changed a bit as I’ve migrated from Adobe’s Bridge software to Adobe’s Lightroom software and thought that I’d post an updated article detailing how I process my images from start to finish. Questions about my workflow are some of the most common questions I’m regularly asked.” Read More

The humble Blacks slider plays an important role in allowing you to optimize the contrast of your photos as you process them in the Develop module. This movie clip is all about how much to safely clip the blacks when working with different types of images as well as how the black clipping point you set in Lightroom relates to the black clipping point of the print output process. The answer to the question ‘how black should I make my blacks’ may be easier than you think.

Note that in the final section where I compare different output profile conversions, the Black Point Compensation box must be kept checked (which is the default setting). You would also want to make sure this box is checked when making a print via the Photoshop Print dialog. And in the case of Lightroom printing, this is always enabled anyway.

Please note this video is in Quicktime format. A player can be downloaded from apple.com.

One such issue I’ve had in the past, and one that was mention on a forum recently, is that of getting a log of the activity of the internal FTP Client. I was keen to find out where my FTP transfers were failing in order to fix the issue. With a little help from Andy Rahn, I was able to get a log of activity going. Here’s how

Once you’ve traced the issue, you should remove the config.lua file and restart Lightroom. While this particular settings doesn’t affect performance generally, debugging settings can, so it’s wise to only use it when necessary.

It’ a collection of over 25 tips and techniques that he’s been progressively posting. It’s not the first time you’ve seen the name either, because he also had one for Lightroom 1. As with the first book, this is free, but donations are accepted.
Tips include:

However Flickr user MarkW Photo has found settings that greatly aid in the speed of the brush tool for Lightroom 2 nVidia users.

“I have finally fixed my slow performance issues with LR2! Today I did a bit of playing around with different performance settings. I’m using LR2 on a HP Pavillion 6258se Laptop. It has an 80GB Hard Drive, 2GB of Ram and the processor is a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion ™ 64 X2 Dual-Core. I had Windows Vista installed months ago but I downgraded back to XP due to Vista issues. First I opened the windows task manager so I could monitor the performance of Windows while using LR2. I noticed when using the develop tasks the performance stayed around 50%. When I used the retouch brush tools the performance still stayed around 50% but the brush tools were still slow. The more I brushed on the image the slower the brush refresh became. This told me that there must be a video performance issue and not necessarily a processor problem.

Here’s how I fixed the problem.

Mark “

Mark also mentions seeing an increase in the speed of Large Preview rendering.

As with all settings, your mileage may vary. Remember to note your original settings if you feel the need to go back.

Just as you can use the Lens Correction sliders to remove a vignette, you can use them to apply a vignette too. I often like to deliberately darken or lighten the edges of a photograph and use the Lens Correction sliders as basic dodge or burn tools for the corners of a photograph. Here are some suggestions as to how you can extend the vignetting options when working with Lightroom 2

Figure 1 At zero Roundness, the vignette shape matches the proportions of the cropped image. At +100, the Roundness slider makes the post-crop vignette more circular.

In Lightroom 2, we now have Post-Crop vignette controls that can do the same thing as the Lens Corrections sliders, except they are applied relative to the proportions of the cropped photograph and feature a Feather slider that allows you to soften or harden the vignette edge (see Figure 1).

Figure 2 This shows the original photograph used to create the examples shown in Figure 3, as the image was in the process of being cropped.

This is very much a tool for making creative effects. To give you some inspiration I have taken a single photograph and applied four different Post-Crop vignette settings (Figure 3). The main thing to point out here is that the Post-Crop sliders work just as well on uncropped images and the ability to apply both a global and a local vignette means that you can even experiment with combinations of the two settings when editing a cropped photograph. For example, in the bottom image in Figure 3, I combined a negative global vignette with a positive Post-Crop vignette.

Figure 3 Examples of different post-crop settings applied to the image in Figure 2.

NOTE
When you use the crop overlay mode to edit the crop setting, the vignette effect is temporarily disabled.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book, by Martin Evening and published by Adobe Press (Peachpit) is now available for purchase from the usual book shops and on-line book stores.

Now available for order at:

Peachpit.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

This brand new edition contains 624 pages and has been fully updated for all the new changes to the program since version 1.0.

ISBN: 0-321-55561-9

List Price: $49.99 (US)

A recent ISO accident led to the creation of this little video tutorial on noise reduction in Lightroom. While it doesn’t offer as much control as dedicated software like Neat Image or Noiseware, it’s still quite usable. The one great thing about it, is that once you’re happy with the results on one image, you can batch it to the rest of the shoot, far quicker than with the dedicated packages. Click here to watch the MP4 video.

Once this has opened, go to the Backup section of the General Tab. Clicking on the drop down menu reveals the frequency of which you can backup: Never, Monthly, Weekly, Daily, every restart or just the next restart.

For this part of our example I selected ‘Next time Lightroom starts only’. The Dialog in Fig. 4 appears when I restart Lightroom. A little trick to make the restart easier is to go to File>Open Recent and then click on the name of the CURRENT catalog. This will restart Lightroom with the same catalog we’re working on.

Looking at Fig 4., we can see 3 buttons and a check box. We can either Skip Now or Backup. We can also check the box to test catalog integrity before backup, which is wise, as a broken backup file is useless. The last button is the Choose button (See Fig 5). This allows us to select the location to which the backup Catalog is written. I recommend an external drive at minimum. If you do select an external drive and it is unavailable at backup time, Lightroom will write to the default Backups folder inside the folder where the Catalog resides.

If you choose a repeated option, then a fourth button appears, allowing you to skip this backup, but allow further backups to continue as normal. See the images below for a screen capture of the other available options in Backup.

When you’ve allowed a few backups to happen, you’ll start to notice something about catalog files, especially if you have a large photo library. They can get quite big. My main Catalog file is 1.1 Gb for 70,000 photos. When you’ve a few backups done, I recommend you delete older ones that are no longer necessary. Also you can use either the system archiver on Mac, or Winzip on PC to compress the file down in size. The file is full of text and compresses down significantly. For example my 1.1Gb file compresses to 140Mb. Quite a difference!

Personally I have the automatic backup set to Weekly, but I do backups after major imports/edit sessions, just to be safe.

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.

NOTE
This first tip works fine if you are using Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.4.9 or earlier. It won’t work apparently if you are using Mac OS X 10.4.10.

Adding Lightroom as a Favorite in Bridge

1. Wouldn’t it be good if you could have a hot button in Bridge that took you directly to Lightroom? Well, you can. All you need to do is navigate to the Applications folder and add the Lightroom application, or an alias (Mac) shortcut (PC), as a favorite in Bridge. Just drag the application icon to the Favorites panel to add to the list of other Favorites.

2. Once you have added Lightroom as a favorite to the Favorites panel, you can simply click on the Lightroom favorite to jump straight over to Lightroom from Bridge.

3. And then when you are in Bridge you can use the Command–H (Mac) or Alt–Tab (PC) keyboard shortcut to hide the Lightroom window and return to the last used program, which in this case will be Bridge.

Adding a watched folder in Bridge

1. Following on from the last example, you can add an auto import folder as a Bridge favorite. In Lightroom, choose File ➯ Auto ➯ Enable Auto Import and follow this by opening the Auto Import settings dialog and choose a watched folder. Then go to Bridge and add this folder as a Bridge favorite.

2. Now you can drag and drop images from Bridge into the designated auto import folder. They will then be auto imported into Lightroom and appear in Lightroom’s Auto Imported Photos folder.

Importing folders into Lightroom via Bridge

1. Unfortunately, you can’t drag and drop folders from Bridge onto a Lightroom favorite and have them import into Lightroom. But if you keep an alias/shortcut of Lightroom on the desktop, you can drag and drop a folder from the Folders panel in Bridge to the alias/shortcut.

2. In this example I dragged the folder shown in step 1 to the Adobe Lightroom alias icon and this launched the Lightroom Import Photos dialog shown here. This workflow technique will let you use Bridge to browse your computer hard disks to inspect image folders in detail before choosing to import them into Lightroom.

This last tip can be really useful if you are just starting out in Lightroom and beginning to add photos to the Lightroom library. You can use Bridge as a preview browser to inspect folders before proceeding to import them. This can easily save you lots of time since you won’t have to go through the Import Photos dialog to preview the images before you import them. Bridge will offer you a much faster route for browsing the photos beforehand.

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The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book by Martin Evening is available from Peachpit, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all usual bookstore outlets.

Martin Evening has worked on the development of Adobe Photoshop as an alpha tester from the program’s earliest beginnings. The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book describes all of Lightroom’s features in detail, with photographers in mind. Photographers who routinely work with raw (and even jpg & tiff) images will find Lightroom–and The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book–an indispensable tool in their digital darkroom.

Lightroom-news has a free PDF download of Chapter 1. (click here to download-4.6MB PDF).

Free Lightroom 1.1 PDF update

You can also download a free PDF update for the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom book. Go this link for the full instructions on how to access the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book 1.1 update.