October 25, 2010
The LRB Graduated Filters Presets pack from Lightroom Blog has been updated to Version 3. The addition includes 3 new ‘Tilt Shift’ effect presets. More details and information from Lightroom Blog’s announcement post.
June 30, 2010
Timothy Armes has today released yet another new plugin. FTP Publisher will be of great interest to anyone who needs to upload images directly to an FTP server via Lightroom.
Although this plugin will function in Lightroom 2, users of Lightroom 3 will gain the most benefit since FTP Publisher makes use of the new Publish Services. This allows users to create a collection hierarchy containing images that need to be uploaded and synchronised with a server. Lightroom remembers which images have been modified or removed from the collections and will apply these changes to the server when you ask it to do so.
The plugin is donationware and may be downloaded from the Photographer’s Toolbox.
February 12, 2010
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:
January 18, 2010
With the recent update to the Lightroom Adobe Certified Expert exam to version 2, Examaids have updated their self help study guide for the exam. The aid contains 335 questions to help the user hone their study for the exam. It also covers the topic list as set out in the new ACE guidelines. There’s a study mode and a practice mode to get you prepared.
January 7, 2010
Matthew Campagna has announced TTG Highslide Gallery Pro 1.9.1 is now available with the following updates:
He also recently released a cool new tool, TTG Viewport Sizer. The tool is available as a free download from the website, and is fully explained and demonstrated here:
http://lightroom.theturninggate.net/special-purpose-templates/ttg-viewport-sizer/
And finally, The Turning Gate has been given a new, Lightroomy redesign for 2010.
December 1, 2009
Nir Dremer has announced the availability of LrSaver. LrSaver is a screensaver which dynamically generates a slideshow according to Lightroom meta-data information.
LrSaver design enables key advantages such as:
Flexibility – Smart grouping of your favorite photographs according to any meta-data fields
Efficiency – Minimal resource utilization by using Lightroom cache (no need to export)
Simplicity – Simple & intuitive user-interface
LrSaver is currently available for Windows, a 14 days trial version is available for download (link).
Mac support will be introduced in few weeks. You can subscribe on LrSaver website to receive Mac support release notification (subscribe here).
LrSaver is currently available in a special introductory price of $9.99.
March 4, 2009
Nik Software has that their Viveza plugin is now available for Lightroom, with other products coming on stream shortly. While Viveza retails at $249, Nik are offering a preorder plugin pack for $299 containing the 5 plugins Nik offer. This will bring Nik’s U-Point technology to Lightroom platform at last. Files sent to the plugins will be the Edit In.. menu and send a rendered Tiff to the program for processing, in a similar manner to Aperture.
June 22, 2008
With browser makers starting to see the light about colour management, we can finally see our colours as intended online. Safari has been doing this forever, but now Firefox 3 is colour managed. Except, it’s not on by default. So here’s how to do it.
In the address bar of Firefox, type in about:config.
Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled. By default it’s set to false. Double click on it to change it to true. Restart Firefox. Viola.
Version 3 is much faster, which of course is another bonus. Your Lightroom galleries and exports will now look better online.
May 28, 2008
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
Disclosure: I did some tech editing on the questions for Shangara, but have no commercial involvement with this project.
April 4, 2008
Press Release: LRViewer, the Lightroom-catalog viewer, now has PhotoSelectLink to automatically send client selections and notes back to the photographer.
Here’s how PhotoSelectLink works: