Scott Kelby’s latest post, As Photographers, Are We Backing Up Too Much? touches on a crucial aspect of workflow and storage. In essence, what are you going to do with all those photos that are not Picks or Keepers?

I, like Scott and Terry White, mentioned in the blog post, keep everything, but am forever fighting with diminishing disk space - and this is with 4.5 TB of storage!

My workflow is that anything rated with a star or more in Lightroom is a “Keeper”; so what am I doing with all the zeros? Well at the moment keeping them, but recently my thinking has been aligning with Scott’s, is it worth keeping them?

Every so often I will traverse the zeros and see if there is something I have missed, but perhaps 10% of them might be upgraded so that leaves a big fat 90% clogging up the Catalog.

Perhaps the solution is to Export them all to another catalog, and store that on DVD or Blu-Ray, and delete them from the main Catalog, so keeping the storage requirements at a more manageable level and making your Catalog leaner.

Interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts, both here and on Scott’s blog.

After a few weeks on Adobe Labs, Adobe Camera Raw 4.6 has been released.

It is available for Mac and Windows

It includes support for 15 new cameras:

• Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F) 

• Canon 50D

• Fuji FinePix IS Pro

• Kodak EasyShare Kodak Z1015 IS

• Leaf AFi II 6

• Leaf AFi II 7

• Leaf Aptus II 6

• Leaf Aptus II 7

• Nikon D700

• Nikon D90

• Nikon Coolpix P6000

• Olympus SP-565 UZ

• Pentax K2000 (K-m) 

• Sigma DP1

• Sony A900

Yes this is a Lightroom Blog, but when something interesting happens with the ‘daddy’, Photoshop, it will be worth a mention.

Adobe Configurator will be out soon on Adobe Labs and it is a really interesting customization utility for Photoshop CS4. It allows you to create your own custom panels for CS4, which can contain the most frequently used tools, scripts, actions etc. It uses the Adobe AIR platform and John Nack has a blog post about it, with links to videos and screenshots.

When you get CS4, if you do, then run and fetch Configurator, it will really open your eyes!!

Michael Tapes in Scott Kelby’s Guest Blogger spot announced “Instant JPEG from Raw”, and application that allows you to extract a JPEG from the Raw file at lightning speeds. Read the article and download the software for free.

Maybe I am easily pleased but this movie by Vincent Laforet, which was shot with a Canon 5D Mk II is very impressive. I’m not sure I feel comfortable with video in the same way as stills photography, but it looks like something we will get used to as we upgrade our cameras in the next few years!

Adobe have updated Photoshop to CS4 and CS4 Extended. New features for Photographers include:

• Adjustments panel
• Masks panel
• Auto-blending of images
• Extended depth of field
• 360-degree panoramas
• Fluid canvas rotation
• Industry-leading color correction
• Better raw image processing
• Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow
• Efficient file management with Adobe Bridge CS4
• More powerful printing options
• File display options
• Higher performance on very large images (Windows only)

Adobe have released a Release Candidate of version 2.1 to Adobe Labs. This (as you might imagine) is not the final version, but a version to iron out any last minute issues.

There are many bug fixes and tweaks to some of the ways Lightroom displays images in certain circumstances.

Full release notes are available at the Labs site.

The compatible version of Adobe Camera Raw is 4.6, and for full interoperability it is recommended that you install this alongside Lightroom 2.1RC.

Feedback is requested at the Adobe User to User Forums rather that at Adobe Labs.

A release candidate of Adobe Camera Raw 4.6 has been posted to Adobe Labs. It is not the final version, but is at a level that can be used and tested by the community.

It includes support for the following cameras:

Fuji Finepix IS Pro, Nikon D700, Nikon D90, Nikon Coolpix P6000.

Note that previous support for the Nikon D700 in ACR 4.5 was provisional.

4.6 also contains provisional support for these new models: Canon Rebel X, Canon 50D, Olympus SP-565 UZ, Sony A900, Sigma DP1

Troy Gaul, Lightroom project lead, recently gave a talk at the Mac-dev C4 conference where he took a look at the structure of Lightroom. The slides are online, with audio, hopefully, to come soon.