Lightroom Tuesday!
Welcome to the first
Lightroom Tuesday of the New Year. Yes, its 2010
already and hopefully you’ve all recovered from your
holiday excesses.
So lets see what is going on in the Lightroom world
this past week...
- Nat Coalson reminds us that Adobe will be releasing Lightroom 3 sometime in the next few months. Lots of interesting discussion features etc. FWIW, I have *not* been using the Beta much. While I like the new features, I’m leery of issues when working in production.
- Lloyd has a tip for you, one that mirrors something I mentioned a few months back. Worth repeating.
- Lightening backgrounds in Lightroom from DPS. Great info.
- Before and After. Its kinda like those shows you see on E! about washed up entertainers and what they’re doing now. Only with your photos and not involving crystal meth.
- Refining your photographic vision using Lightroom. With a hat tip to David duChemin’s book on seeing...
- Peachpit TV - Using Keywords. An oldy, but useful.
- Speaking of Keywords, Lightroom-blog.com has a look at some keyword lists you can use to effect...
- Lightroom Secrets offers you 10 suggestions for 2010.
- The Lightroom Blog looks at Luminous Landscape’s Guide to Assset Management.
- Sean Phillips pointed me to an article on using Lightroom to improve dull skies. Presets included!
- X-Equals has some good stuff for you’re Tuesday (they seem to be offline right now, so stay tuned) Brandon promises a preset too...
- Laura Shoe talks about why images seem to change slightly when imported into Lightroom.
- Happy Lightroom New Year from Matt K
- Lightroom Blog does some navel gazing and reflects on the top 5 posts of 2009.
- Not to be outdone, DPS ups the anty with 21 most popular posts on DPS.
Not Lightroom related, but worth a look:
Well, that is it for this week meus queridos. Have a great Tuesday.
Drobo Win!
Welcome to Lightroom
Tuesday. And the last one before the New Year. W00t!
This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I
gather together the best presets, tips, tricks,
tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them
for you, mes amis.
It is a bit skimpy this week. I guess people have
other things to do during holidays (and more power to
them).
- Lightroom-Blog.com points us to Luminous Landscape’s nice Asset Management Guide for the perennially confused photographer who always wonders where the @#$#@ their photos are. Cost is $30 but comes as a very thorough set of tutorials... Note: This comes from both Michael Reichmann and Seth Resnick, the latter is a great reference for AM topics.
- How to modify a preset to your own liking. Personally I use presets as a starting point and sometimes spin my own based on other’s recipes.
Not Lightroom related, but cool...
Family Time!
So I’ve been slagging on
Drobo lately.
But yesterday the product really came thru for me.
How? Thanks for asking, let me tell you.
A few weeks ago I posted that I was a bit put off by
how Drobo obfuscates the upgradability of their
drives. In essence, you can’t just slap any drive in
there and expect to get its full capacity.
Oftentimes, and this is not obvious unless you read
the fine print, you need to upgrade disks in pairs to
get the total capacity that you think you’re going to
get.
Note: I got a few comments saying “go use the
Drobulator and it would’da told
you that”. And they’re right. But who goes to the
Drobulator to figure out what new hard drive to
buy to replace that yellow-lighted one? Obviously
a few techno-geeks, but certainly not the ‘hands
off, just do it for me crowd’ that Drobo caters
to.
Anywho, so I got the second 2TB drive (paying $60
more than this time - sale was over) and plugged it
in. I totally love how I can just take drives in/out
without a care - and it just figures it out. It
happily started doing is replicating job. This
usually takes days - and in my case it estimated
about 4 days.
Then the unexpected happened - we had a power outage
at the house. Beep! Off the Drobo went with less than
2 hours left to go. Argh!
Funny enough, I’d purchased a UPS a few months ago
because we get a few of these when the wind whips up
but neglected to pug-in the Drobo. Doh! Anyhow, now
my Drobo was off mid backup. I feared the worst and
kept the old 1TB drive handy in case I was hosed
(that is Canadian for screwed).
When I plugged it into the UPS, it sprang back to
life and started copying again. The Drobo Dashboard
said nothing was awry, and reported that my little
data robot was doing its job again.
Frantically searched the web and found out, via the
Drobo website, that the device has a backup battery
to make sure it writes everything to the drive before
going out in case of a power outage.
Sweet. And it finished updating itself and things
look fine.
Thank you to the engineers at Drobo who thought about
potential problems with a backup device like this.
Drobo WIN!
Merry Christmas!
The best part of holidays is family. I seriously love spending time with my family - be it hiking, camping, watching movies, reading together or playing games. Found this on my latest CF card today...
I seriously don’t
understand people who don’t spend most of their
available time with their family. I know several
people what have these wacky arrangements (for a
variety of reasons) that seriously impact family time
and I can only wonder why they’d sacrifice so much
for stuff so silly. Money? Prestige? Fame? Bah!
I’m very blessed to have a great family and the
ability to spend most of my time here with my wife
and 4 kids.
I’ll be spending this
week on some hard core New Year’s clean up. My Drobo
needs a good once over to organize my 2009 digital
life. My documents folder is overflowing with
heaven’s knows what. My machine needs looking at and
probably an update to Snow Leopard (had a failure on
this machine during an earlier SL upgrade, so I’ve
left it).
Probably time to sit down and do some resolutions
too...
Tubing!
My kids pulled a fast one
and pretended that 5:30 AM was 6:30 AM and got their
slightly out-of-it parents into the family room
before we realized their shenanigans. Such goofballs.
So an hour or so later, the presents are all
unwrapped, the front room is a bit of a mess and my
wife is back in bed. Me? I’m making cinnamon rolls
and then heading back as well.
So have a great holiday all!
You'll Get Yours Photog Man!
One of our holiday traditions on Christmas Eve day is to go up Snoqualmie pass and tube. The ski hill has a tubing center that, for a slightly outrageous fee, you can tube for a few hours. The nice thing is they have great tubes, a rope tow and a set period for tubing. You can be done in 4 hours and you’ve gotten a lot of tubing in.
Me? I’m not one for winter sports. True, I skied like a maniac as a teenager, but I grew out of it and now don’t enjoy it much. Shrug. There are a million things I’d rather to these days. But the kids sure love the snow each year they talk excitedly about going up to the pass. Which in my mind is the perfect place for snow - 30 min away in the mountains.
Then we’ll come back, do some Christmas baking and then go out for our traditional Christmas eve dinner - Chinese food.
Its going to be a great day.
So have a wonderful day and celebrate the holidays in whatever form you want. Take some pictures, have some fun and stay safe.
Party!
Lightroom Tuesday!
So here are a few of the picts I did manage to shoot in between eating some yummy hors d’ouvres...
Dance Sunday
Welcome to Lightroom
Tuesday. And the last one before Christmas. W00t!
This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I
gather together the best presets, tips, tricks,
tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them
for you, mes amis.
- Lightroom 2.6 and the accompanying ACR plugin have been posted.
- Laura Shoe has a short pointer to importing photos into Lightroom from iPhoto.
- Lightrom Q&A from Matt K
- DPS has a great rundown of the “5 coolest commands” in Lightroom.
- Another Lightroom 3 Beta tweak that Scott Kelby finds cool.
- A spotlight on Jefferey Friedl from Lightroom secrets
- Black &White from JPG vs. RAW
- In case you missed my review of Victoria Bampton’s Lightroom ebooks...
- X-equals talks Photoshop Droplet workflows.
Not Lightroom related, but cool...
Well, that is it for this week - kind of a slow week in the Lightroom world as everyone rushes around looking for that missing gift. Speaking of which, now that I’ve dug out of all those Nutcracker pictures, its time to do some shopping (I kid, I kid).
Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday or whatever else you wanna have this week!
Lightroom 3 Beta - The Missing Manual
Drobo, Again
I’ve read and reviewed
several of the Lightroom books out there, and for the
most part, find something to like in all of them.
This one is no exception. Victoria has taken a
slightly different approach to her ebook, and I find
this helps her offering stand out in a crowded field.
First, it is primarily an ebook in PDF format
(although I hear it comes or will come in paperback
form as well).
Ebooks are a good thing in my, ahem, book. All I need
are more books crowding an already straining series
of bookshelves. I’m not kidding. I recently bought a
Kindle and love the ability to carry 55 books and
magazines/newspapers with me always. And it helps
keep the bookshelf thing in check. So the fact that
her book comes in an easy to manage PDF is a godsend
for me. Searching is faster too.
Second off, its written in a very different format,
giving the reader a simple, straightforward FAQ style
approach to answering questions. FAQ have existed for
years, and were always focused on brevity in
answering the very specific salient questions people
have about a piece of software. Therefore, one should
consider it a reference book that you go to when you
have a problem - its less for perusing than some
other books.
Yes, there are the obligatory intro comments for each
section (a catalog is...) but they seem complete and
concise for the task at hand. Now I’m no Lightroom
slouch, so not much in the book was news to me, but
it represents a nice compendium of questions that
Victoria has run into over the last several years in
various online forums dedicated to such things. Real
world data in, useful information out. And in my
scanning, I saw all the big questions I get asked
covered.
The book (I reviewed the LR 3 Beta, but there is one
for LR2 as well) is around 400-450 pages depending on
which version you get and is logically organized by
module. This is pretty common for all Lightroom
books, and it helps you to narrow down your search
quickly. Its designed to be a handy reference that
you quickly grab and read for a problem that is
dogging you.
Sections include the obligatory getting started
section, which covers database and catalog issues,
the import and library organization aspects and then
the develop module, where much of the heavy lifting
is done. The question/answer format works well for
Victoria, and I find that she’s very good at getting
right to the point and not overwhelming you with
words. She uses just enough words to get her point
across, and generally has a screen shot to visually
point you in the right direction. Very nice. See the TOC here...
Here is an example of the question/answer format and
the use of appropriate graphics:
Lots of white space, graphical additions and “just
the facts, ma’am” approach works well.
For some, her focus on
just the basics might not give all that they need,
but I found it to be more than adequate for someone
with a basic knowledge of working with Raw images.
I noticed that she also includes some extra chapters
to cover ACR compatibility (Yes we sometimes need to
go to Photoshop or even, heaven forbid, Bridge) and
caps it off with some General Troubleshooting and
other useful information.
Overall it looks like a solid and useful addition to
the Lightroom library (or my Kindle as in my case).
I’d recommend it for anyone who likes the conciseness
and salience of a FAQ.
As to cost, it comes in around $25 US. Don’t let that
squiggly L thing fool you - that just represents a
depreciation in your home currency if you’re on this
side of the pond.
Cheers!
Nutcracker Pano
The latest one is pretty annoying.
The Backstory:
I had 4 1 TB drives in the Drobo. It popped a yellow light saying that drive 1 was running out of space and needed to be replaced. I had about 350 GB of space left, as per the dashboard application.
So, knowing I had about 15,000 to 20,000 images coming shortly from shooting the Nutcracker, I popped onto NewEgg and bought a Drobo-recommended 2TB drive (made that mistake once with a seagate drive that went Tango Uniform because its firmware wasn’t supported).
The drive came, I put it in, and it began its copy routine to protect everything. So far so good.
The Solution (or so I thought)
Several days later, I noticed my second drive bay was yellow. It was now running out of space. And the dashboard app reported it had 150 GB left of free space.
What?
So I added 1 TB and it went down by 200 GB? Serious? Really?
Finally I got around to calling tech support to ask
what was @#$#$ going on.
The tech reported that I had to upgrade drives in
pairs to get it to work.
What?
I remember when I bought the drobo, I was buying into
the idea that you could put any size of drives, in
any order, at any time, whenever drives prices go
down and get the protection you needed.
Even today on their website they state:
I guess that whole “any combination of drive
capacities” has some caveats. Important ones. Ones
that kinda suck.
Feh! I have a bad taste in my mouth over this.
PS. To be fair, I waited in no queue and she was
pretty straightforward about the answer.
Lightroom Tuesday!
Nutcracker 2009
Welcome to Lightroom
Tuesday. W00t!
This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I
gather together the best presets, tips, tricks,
tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them
for you, mes amis.
- Photoshop TV looks at some Lightroom tips and offers a few free presets.
- Foto-Biz presents a short description of its preferred Develop workflow.
- Lightroomers guide to Lightroom - a new online course thru PPSOP (Picture Perfect School of Photography)...
- Scott Kelby looks at a few nice new things in Lightroom 3 Beta.
- Quick and easy web slideshows from Lightroom. I mean, if you can’t spring for a SmugMug account and want to host all your own photos...
- Ask Mac Create offers a free Lightroom 3 Beta Webinar.
- Adobe’s Anita Dennis recently announced a new addition to helpf or the Lightroom 3 beta. Read more from Lightroom News.com
- A nice tutorial from Digital Photo Experience on exporting images from Lightroom. Raw in, Tiff out. Or Jpeg.
- Corrupted Database? Foto-Biz has some hints for you. FWIW, I’ve repaired my catalogs without issue several times.
- Inside Lightroom looks at the new X-Rite Color Checker Passport (part of my Holiday Gift Guide 2009).
- Lightroom Killer Tips offers another preset....
- DNG. Just do it. Here is why from X-equals.
- A nice discussion on filters and digital photography...
- Victoria Bampton has a nice ebook on Lightroom Beta 3, entitled “Lightroom Beta 3” the missing FAQ” which is a good read. Its really good at focusing on the real problems people have when starting with Lightroom. I hope to have a review of it tomorrow.
Well, thats it for this week. Have a great Tuesday.
Dance Wednesday!
Now I have to work on the
second weekend of performances that we concluded
yesterday. Oh, and the backstage photos. And the rest
of the individual and class portraits I shot of the
dancers in costume...
Egads. Back to Lightroom...
And here are some of my all time favorites from the
posted galleries.
Lightroom Tuesday!
Nutcracker Season!
Welcome to Lightroom
Tuesday. W00t!
This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I
gather together the best presets, tips, tricks,
tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them
for you, mes amis.
- Kevin Swan (of KISS books) has a series of online tutorials for Lightroom, Photoshop and other photo-related tasks.
- A lightroom keyboard cover. Kinda cool.
- Where are my files! A newbie question that pops up periodically. People, this is file management, so pay attention when you’re importing. I once had a woman swear to me that Lightroom imported directly to her trash can and then emptied it. I kid you not.
- Top 10 Lightroom Tweets of the week.
- ProSelect to Lightroom - a new plugin for taking photos from the aforementioned studio management tool (via Lightroom-news.com)
- Matt K presents an Adjustment Brush Extravaganza video tutorial for (hopefully) all your brushing needs.
- EXIF and Beyond with Tom Hogarty (@LR_Tom) all up in the metadata grill.
- A dark and stormy preset.
- Got a fairy tale to illustrate? Matt K has a preset for you.
- Graduate! Learn to use the Graduated Filter.
- Chosing a new “Before” image when comparing photos.
- One of the items I recommended in my gift guide - here is mini review of the X-rite Color Checker Passport and its integration with Lightroom.
- Mad stacks, yo! A look at stacking from X-Equals.
Not Lightroom related, but worth looking into
SmugMug Coupons!
Its always a gargantuan task just to manage that many pictures - 10,000 images, each weighing in at 22-25 MB can make for beaucoup file management before the editing/processing step can even start.
One of the fun things this year is that my daughter was dancing as Clara, so here are a few of my quick picks as I start into the editing process...
Many more to come...
Lightroom Tuesday!
I have two Canon flashes for my 5d MK II - a 580 EX II and a 430 EX II. I’ve mostly used the 580 EX II over the past year and have been happy with it - until recently when it just stopped affecting exposure. I know, weird huh.
Its almost like the timing is off and the flash is going off at inappropriate times - i.e. when the shutter isn’t open. Regardless of what mode used, it just seems to have no observable “flash” effect on the photo.
Lets visualize this...
First, a tripod exposure on the camera with no flash:
The same shot in P mode with the flash on Auto.
For comparison, here is the same camera shooting in P
with the 430 EX II:
So, here are some details
to consider:
- No Exposure Comp dialed in.
- No Flash Exposure Comp either
- It’s the same regardless of program mode
I’ve reset the flash custom functions and it changes nothing.
And, not so happily, it seems like I just went out of warrantee on the flash. Awesome.
If anyone out there has any ideas what is going on or some suggestions, feel free to ping me.
Flash Issues
SmugMug is proud to release a new feature for its professional users - Coupons. Sing it with me. Coupons! Coupons! Mighty Mighty Coupons!
We’re so excited.
This is a feature chock full of uses - from print
credits to percent discounts to at cost printing for
family - this feature has most of what our
professional users have been asking for over the past
few years. I see this feature as one of the biggest
new additions to our SmugMug Pro brand yet. And it’s
hawt - because a few certain someones at SmugMug rock
it like a hurricane. Names withheld to protect the
awesomes.
First off, you need to be
a SmugMug Pro customer. Then head to your Control
Panel on the Pro Tab. Note that you’ll have to verify
your billing information and then you’re off to the
races. Good luck.
Personally, this feature is going to save me loads of
time over the next few weeks as I roll out hundreds
of new Nutcracker photos.
Cheers!
PS. Read about it in detail
here...
2009 Holiday Gift Guide
Welcome to Lightroom
Tuesday. W00t!
This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I
gather together the best presets, tips, tricks,
tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them
for you, meus queridos.
- Biggest news of the week? Amazon was selling Lightroom for $170! Was, as in its over and you missed it. But seriously, who is still sitting on the fence? Get it already.
- LightroomKillerTips.com has a great free preset available, entitled “Wedding Fantasy”, which sounds pretty darn fantastical. More here...
- Into making slideshows? A new plugin called Bragit does just that.
- Some tips on how to move from iPhoto to Lightroom.
- Raplh Norstrom has put together a few tips for those wanting to do some HDR work.
- Quick Batch resizing for print output. Crop happens, and we have standardized on funny sizes, so get used to it.
- Batch Cropping must be in this week.
- I’m not much for the look, but if you want some frames on your images, OnOne has a package for you.
- PhotographyBB has a new issue of their e-magazine for you to check out. They cover the LR beta and some other tutorials. New to me... (via PhotographyBlog)
- Foto-Biz has a tip on how to select a catalog when opening Lightroom. Its the little things...
- Here is a free preset from photographer Kirsten Cox
- Another article on improving LR performance from Rob Sylvan. Must be in the air.
- Get your Nerd on! Metadata presets from LightroomSecrets.
- X-Equals brings us a great look at Creating Panoramas in Lightroom (includes at least one preset in there)
- Stephen Zeller has a nice video tutorial of his Lightroom workflow. Be a fly on the wall, I dare you.
- LRSaver is a screensaver app that uses Lightroom (and its cache) for image organization (Windows now, Mac support in a few weeks).
- Super cool bonus of the week - The Monochrome Toolkit
- Michael Gray has a nice Tmax 3200 preset for you to enjoy. Note: I think this requires LR3 Beta. Tmax, kids, was a type of high speed film used to shoot in crappy light.
- TOP has another look at the online photo critique. Very funny.
- If you didn’t notice, I posted my 2009 Holiday Gift Guide yesterday. Scroll down for more giving goodness.