With the growing popularity of D-SLR’s being able to shoot video, Lightroom’s lack of import/management for these file types has become a limitation. Jeffrey Friedl has created Video-Asset Management a Plug-in to allow a small amount of video management within Lightroom.
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.
It is much more efficient to create big Keyword lists outside Lightroom and my article for Lightroom News explains the ins and outs of the process.
Article by Tyler Ginter on the improvements needed by Lightroom to match PhotoMechanic. Tyler is a military photographer and needs to input Keywords and Metadata fast…
ImageIngester Pro has emerged from beta and its maturity is now rated as “high”.
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
Chapter 2: The Ideal System
Chapter 3: What’s New in 2?
Chapter 4: File Management and Workfow
Chapter 5: A Develop Workflow
Chapter 6: Lightroom Presets
Chapter 7: Lightroom Resources
Adobe Resources
News and Tutorial Sites
Podcasts
General
Eric Scouten, one of the Lightroom Development team has written about how he organises his Lightroom Catalog, with some sensible advice.
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.
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.
Inside Lightroom preset contributor Patrick Lavoie has written an article on Fashion Photography Workflow for Photo.net. (via John Beardsworth)
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