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ImageIngester Pro out of beta
Friday, February 6th, 2009ImageIngester Pro has emerged from beta and its maturity is now rated as “high”.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
HoudahGeo 2.0 released
Monday, January 5th, 2009I have mentioned HoudahGeo a few times on the blog and in the book, and it has just been updated to version 2.0.
New features include:
- Enhanced time zone support
- Extended GPS device support
- Access to Aperture masters
- Access to iPhoto originals>
- Lightroom 2 integration (HoudahGeo is able to access images from your Lightroom 1.x or 2.x library.)
- Waypoint geocoding
- Improved reverse geocoding
- Map inspector panel
- Track log inspector panel
- Flickr sets support
The new version is $30 for new users and a free upgrade for 1.x users.
Photowalk London
Sunday, January 4th, 2009This is a quick post to mention PhotowalkLondon which will take place on 10th January 2008.
The first meetup will be outside of Giraffe (a restaurant on the South Bank) near Waterloo at 1pm, and will wander along towards the Millenium Bridge.
For more info follow PhotowalkLondon on Twitter.
Weekend Roundup
Sunday, December 21st, 2008Sean 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.
iPhone and Geolocation
Sunday, December 14th, 2008Recently, 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.
Inside Lightroom 2: The serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency
Friday, November 14th, 2008
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
- 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
Create a Trypitch in Lightroom
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008Sean McCormack has a short movie showing how to create a Tryptich from 1 photo using Lightroom
Photomatix HDR Export Plug-in for Lightroom
Thursday, October 9th, 2008Matt Kloskowski of Adobe Lightroom Killer Tips mentions that HDRSoft have released an export plug-in for Photomatix Pro. Should be useful for the Lightroom and HDR lovers amongst us.
Grab it from here.
Instant JPEG from Raw
Thursday, September 25th, 2008Michael 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.
Canon EOS 5D Mk II in movie mode
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
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!
