Jay Kinghorn has a piece at Creative Pro magazine about adding drama to your photos with Lightroom’s Graduated filter.
You can buy an extensive set of Graduated Filters from Sean McCormack’s site. Sean has created a vast number of grads, both hard and soft, horizontal and vertical.
The Macintosh Performance Guide has published an article with a section on Optimizing Lightroom. This is Mac based but will be of use to Windows users as well.
Thomas Hawk offers his Photography Workflow for 2009. It is interesting but I am not sure if it couldn’t be improved using better software than Canon Camera Window, and he could also use Trails on his iPhone.
Peter Krogh has backed up his new edition of The DAM Book with a new blog.
Nik Software has now added the Sharpener Pro 3.0 Update to its expanding collection of Lightroom software. Whether you see any benefit over the built-in sharpening which is based on the Pixel Genius routines is a moot point.
And last, but not least Wade Heninger posts a Lightroom Tuesday column.
Sean McCormack has posted a new tutorial about the Spot Removal tool on Lightroom News.
Martin Evening has posted a video about using the Black slider in Lightroom to optimize your photos.
When you upgrade/install Lightroom 2.2 a set of colour profiles are now installed - these are the new profiles which aim to emulate some of the camera manufacturers’ ‘looks’ and are seen in the Calibration panel of the Develop module.
If you had previously installed the beta profiles you will now potentially have multiple profiles to choose from. Matt Kloskowski from Lightroom Killer Tips posts a quick piece on how to remove the old ones.
Sean McCormack has an interview with Timothy Armes of LR/Mogrify and LR/Enfuse fame over at Lightroom News. Tim’s LR/Mogrify was recently upgraded to include control over borders. Sean’s LRB Portfolio web gallery was recently upgraded to 1.1 and can be found on the Lightroom Blog.
There seem to be some issues with Lightroom 2.2, described by some as a memory leak, but it is more a case of Lightroom overusing memory to help with the performance of Adjustment Brushes et al. You may prefer not to upgrade at the moment or to maybe try 2.2 on your machine on a spare Catalog just to verify if you are having problems. You may find that there are no problems, in which case upgrade away!
Windows users may be interested in the ProShow Plug-in for Lightroom, by Photodex. Users of ProShow Gold or Producer can now quickly and easily set-up slideshows in Lightroom and export directly to ProShow Gold or Producer. From there you can further refine the Slideshow. As ProShow is PC only, the plugin is also only for PC users.
Recently, I have become interested in Geotagging images for use in Lightroom. Lightroom supports images that have been Geotagged but not ‘official’ in app Geotagging (Note that there are Plug-ins to assist with this from Jeffrey Friedl and Jeff Barnes). Before spending money on a proper GPS device, I decided to investigate what could be done with the apps and devices I already owned.
HoudahGeo for Mac and RoboGeo for Windows are highly regarded GPS tagging software apps and these offer a connection to Google Earth, so you are able to locate where you were when you took the images to Geotag. Obviously, the main drawback with these apps is that a) you have to remember where you were when you took the images and b) it won’t be as accurate as a proper GPS device.
Both also accept files from GPS devices and after a bit of reading on the subject, I saw it was possible to use the iPhone as a proper GPS device. To facilitate this, I downloaded Trails which was recommended on the HoudahGeo website (apparently for a $1.99 app it is more accurate than a $200 Garmin device!). Once loaded, you set Trails to run while you are on a photoshoot.
It is worth mentioning that Trails needs to be running all the time, so you will want to ensure your battery is fully charged or even have a backup battery, and to turn off your Auto-Lock in settings. You will also save time if you can align your iPhone and Camera clocks, so there is no time offset to worry about.
In the Settings screen I set it for Hiking (which was the nearest I could think of to a photoshoot!) and entered my email address, which is needed to email the files Trails creates.
In the Main screen I setup a new ‘track’ called Forty Hall, and set it to Record.
Then as with normal GPS devices, it locks onto a signal and starts logging GPS information.
Once you have finished, then you ’slide to stop tracking’, this lets you view your journey, as a list, as a road map, as a satellite view or as a terrain view with or without the altitude.
To use the GPS location information you email the .gpx file to your email address and align this information with the images you took.
I use HoudahGeo on the Mac, so my workflow is to:
1) Save my current Metadata in Lightroom, this ensures I have all the other edits made (such as Keywords and Copyright info) in the file.
2)Drag the images to HoudahGeo and they appear in the main window.
3)import the GPX files. (using the Load GPS data from file button). Houdah Geo supports GPX, NMEA, CSV, and Sony LOG files. Tracks saves its data in the GPX format.
The images get the correct GPX data added - it works out when the photo was taken - the guesses it makes seem accurate but you may want to double check to make sure.
Once you have done this and saved the GPX data to the DNG files, return to Lightroom, select the images you have added the GPS information to, select Metadata > Read Metadata from File…
This will read the updated Geolocation metadata, and Lightroom will display the link to the Google Earth Map and the GPS information. If you Option/Alt click the link you get sent to Yahoo Maps.
The Trails website also has an article on this subject.
Sean McCormack has a short movie showing how to create a Tryptich from 1 photo using Lightroom
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.
Eric Scouten, one of the Lightroom Development team has written about how he organises his Lightroom Catalog, with some sensible advice.
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