John Nack has announced a couple of tools for Photoshop.

The first is the Pixel Blender Gallery plug-in which offers a set of filters that run a extremely fast speeds as they take advantage of the GPU on your graphics card, should it have one. As John says:

• It runs filters really, really fast on your graphics card (GPU)
• The plug-in is not one filter, but rather a harness into which you can drop Pixel Bender files (.PBK and .PBG)
• Pixel Bender also runs cross-platform in After Effects CS4 & Flash Player 10
• The filters people write for Flash will also work in Photoshop
• We should therefore see an explosion in the number of new Photoshop filters becoming available

This is a post to announce the availability of my book, Inside Lightroom 2: The serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency - available from Amazon US and UK, and elsewhere.

The aim of the book is to help Lightroom users create an as efficient and commonsense workflow as is possible, so differs from a number of Lightroom books on the market which are essentially replacement tutorials or manuals. Some of these are so good (Martin Evening’s, for example) that competing with them seemed pointless when it came to deciding what to write about. Also since the book was on a tight schedule, writing 500 pages was likely to be a huge challenge!

So the book looks at various aspects of Lightroom that can confuse, annoy or seem overly different from other software on the market.

Many users still get hung up on creating complex file structures or using single Catalogs for every shoot so the book tries to gently educate users to drop preconceptions and try to work with Lightroom rather than trying to get Lightroom to fit their system. Doing the latter can lead to frustration (I know exactly how that feels as that is the way I approached Lightroom when I first used it on its release to the public!)

Despite to subtitle, it tries not to be too dry and serious; there is practical advice on choosing the optimum computer spec; walking the reader through the new features; showing how to use the Library efficiently; processing a shoot; developing an image from start to finish; how Presets can speed up Lightroom workflow and a chapter that focuses on the community aspect of Lightroom.

Here is the full chapter listing

Chapter 1: Lightroom Basics

• Conventions
• What is Lightroom?
• Why Choose Lightroom?
• Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw
• Camera Support
• Camera Support in ACR 4.5/Lightroom 2.0
• DNG
• The Lightroom Interface
• Library Module
• Loupe View
• Compare View
• Survey View
• Develop Module
• Slideshow Module
• Print Module
• Web Module
• The Import and Export Modules
• Lightroom and Color Management

Chapter 2: The Ideal System

• Computers
• 64 Bit
• RAM
• Processors
• Storage
• Backup
• Archiving
• A Possible Disk Setup
• Monitors
• Calibration

Chapter 3: What’s New in 2?

• 64 bit support and performance improvements
• Multiple-monitor Support
• File Size
• Integration with Photoshop
• Output Creations
• Collections
• New Library Features
• Library Browsing
• Keywording
• Exporting
• Develop Module Changes
• Detail
• Vignettes
• Camera Calibration
• DNG Profile Editor
• Lightroom’s Tool Shelf
• Graduated Filter
• Adjustment Brush
• Slideshow
• Print
• Revised Print Sharpening
• Print to JPEG
• 16 Bit Output
• Picture Packages
• Web
• What is not in 2?
• The Lightroom SDK

Chapter 4: File Management and Workfow

• File Structure
• File Browser versus a Database Application
• Working With Lightroom
• File Structure by Date
• Creating Catalogs and Importing
• Preference Screens
• Catalog Settings
• Previews
• Preview Management
• Import
• Alternative Import Strategies
• Backup
• The First Pass
• The Rejects
• Dealing with the Undecideds
• The Picks
• Rating and Keywording
• Metadata
• Geocoding Images
• Smart Collections for Workfow
• Collections
• Beyond the Library Module

Chapter 5: A Develop Workflow

• The Develop Mode
• The Histogram
• The Basic Panel
• Tone Curve
• Detail Panel
• Adjustment Brush
• Graduated Filter
• Printing
• 16 Bit and Mac OS X
• Colour Profiling
• Paper
• Lightroom Printing
• Print Profiling
• Print Setup

Chapter 6: Lightroom Presets

• What are Presets?
• Develop Presets
• A First Preset
• Applying Presets to Many Images
• Changing Lightroom’s Defaults
• Develop Preset Possibilities
• Inside a Preset
• Radical Presetting!
• Negative Presets
• Local Corrections
• Filenaming Presets
• Print Presets
• Setting up a Print Preset
• Other Presets
• Web Module Presets
• Slideshow Module Presets
• Library Module Presets
• Export Presets
• Preset Resources

Chapter 7: Lightroom Resources

Adobe Resources

• Product Page
• Adobe Labs
• Lightroom Design Center
• Lightroom Community Help
• Lightroom Support Center
• Lightroom User to User Forums
• Adobe DevNet
• Adobe TV
• Lightroom Journal
• John Nack on Adobe
• Eric Scouten

News and Tutorial Sites

• Lightroom News
• NAPP Lightroom 2 Learning Center
• Lightroom Killer Tips
• Photoshop Insider
• Terry White’s Tech Blog
• Lightroom Blog
• Julieanne Kost’s Lightroom Tutorials
• Luminous Landscape
• Computer Darkroom
• Lightroom Forums
• Lightroom Queen
• Utiliser Lightroom
• John Beardsworth
• Photography by Frederick Van
• O’Reilly Media – Inside Lightroom
• Lightroom Galleries
• Outdoor Images
• The Turning Gate
• SlideShowPro
• OnOne PhotoPresets
• Inside Lightroom
• Pro Photography Show
• Heather Green
• Jeffrey Friedl
• Timothy Armes

Podcasts

• George Jardine
• Killer Tips Podcast
• Lightroom for Digital Photographers
• Photgraphy by Frederick Van

General

• Flickr
• Bluefire Blog

• Keeping Track
• Basic Troubleshooting
• Repeated crashing or not starting
• Catalog Corruption
• Slow Operation
• Missing Keywords
• Edit in Photoshop does not start Photoshop
• Support Resources
• Up to Speed

Sean McCormack has a short movie showing how to create a Tryptich from 1 photo using Lightroom

Sean McCormack has released version 2 of his LRB Graduated Filters.

Version 2 contains Sunset filters and a middle filter for each grad and strength.

Timothy Armes has released version 1/40 of LR/Mogrify. It uses the open source mogrify command to watermark, annotate, ‘borderize’ and manipulate images on export.

1.40 adds more granular border manipulation.

(via Lightroom News)

Lightroom users always love film emulation presets and here is a set from Michael W. Gray.

Jeffrey Friedl, plug-in maker extraordinaire, has just released Jeffrey’s Lightroom GPS Support plug-in. It adds support for Geoencoding photos from within Lightroom.

More features will be added later, so this is just a taster for what is to come.

When the original Inside Lightroom site was setup it was to act as a repository for user-created Presets. While some of the allure has gone out of that meme and the site is now focused more on Lightroom generally and the book Inside Lightroom 2 specifically, we are always interested in people who create Presets. So here are 3 collections for you to explore.

X-Equals have collected their presets up in a single page.

Presets Heaven is a reasonably new presets blog; check them out!

Giovanni Antico looks at Black and White IR Presets

Remember there is also A Better IR Preset available.

You may note that the splash screen on Lightroom 2.1 mentions Camera Raw 4.6 as being the compatible version. This is slightly confusing as the latest version of Camera Raw is 5.1. However they are considered equivalent, so if you have Lightroom you are running Camera Raw 5.1!

This confusion was caused because Lightroom 2.0 was released before Photoshop CS4.

Lightroom 2.1 (Mac, Win), Camera Raw 5.1 (Mac, Win) and the DNG Converter 5.1 are now available on Adobe.com. New camera models are supported.

The beta versions of the Camera Profiles and DNG Profile Editor on Adobe Labs have also both been updated.  The Profile update includes additional profiles and incremental improvements to the previous beta profiles.  The DNG Profile Editor includes minor enhancements.

See Tom Hogarty’s Lightroom Journal post for more information.