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Archive for the ‘Lightroom Tips’ Category

Backing up your photos is essential. In the digital world, there is no strip of negatives that you keep in a shoebox. If you have a single copy of your images, you are at risk of losing them. All it needs is a disk error and you may have lost all your precious images. Backing them up is the only safe way of ensuring you will not be heartbroken should something unforeseen happens to you PC.

Determining how you back up, how often and where to, will depend on several criteria such as amount of photos you have and budget. Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you even noticed that when a preview first appears, it looks nice and bright, then suddenly changes to a more washed-out look? I bet you have and have wondered what’s going on.

Well, the image you first see appearing is the JPEG preview that is embedded in the Raw file. It is an image that was created by your camera. Canon users may have one of the PictureStyles selected which gets used when these JPEGs are created.

Canon Options

Upon import, Lightroom creates its own previews and because you have not done any post-pressing yet, the preview is built from the unadjusted Raw file, which will typically not be very bright or saturated so the Lightroom-generated previews will rarely look the same as the embedded JPEG.

Thankfully, Adobe has worked with the manufacturers and have created camera profiles that can be loaded into Lightroom and which closely match what the camera would do. These profiles, while still in beta, are an essential download in my opinion. Here is how they work and where to get them.

Here is how they work. And, by the way, they will only work with Lightroom 2 and ACR 4.5 or later.

They are “context sensitive”. In other words, they only appear when appropriate. So, if the EXIF data in the photo indicates the picture was taken with a Canon 5D, only the Canon 5D camera profiles will be displayed.

Here, on the left, you can see these profiles in the camera Calibration panel (Develop Module).

Canon users will immediately recognize them as being similar to the PictureStyle names. And that is precisely the intention of these camera profiles.

They aim to duplicate the manufacturer’s color appearance.

See the example below, where the top image is the untouched Raw file, while the one below that has the Landscape Profile assigned to it.

Not a huge difference, but definitely an improvement. You are now in a much better starting point to commence your post processing. It’s sort of like starting by setting your white balance.

Original, untouched Raw

Using the Canon "Landscape" Profile

The link to get these profiles from Adobe website is here: Get the profiles from Adobe

At the moment only Canon and Nikon camera profiles are provided.

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The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom 2.1 release candidate is now available on Adobe Labs. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of Adobe’s customers.

The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

The release candidate is readily downloadable, but obviously only works if you have a valid V2 license key. By default, this Lightroom 2.1 release candidate will remove or overwrite your existing Lightroom 2.0 installation so caution is called for.

If you wish to return to Lightroom 2.0 after installing Lightroom 2.1, simply reinstall Lightroom 2.0 from your original download file or from the CD after performing the following:

• Mac: Delete this file before reinstalling Lightroom 2.0: Library/Receipts/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.pkg.
• Windows: Uninstall Lightroom 2.1 using the Windows add/remove program utility.

Both versions of the application share the same catalog format allowing your catalogs to be opened by either version without complications.

Go to the Adobe Lightroom 2.1 page

What’s New?

Support was added for some new cameras, notably the Fuji Finepix IS Pro, Nikon D700, Nikon D90 and the Nikon Coolpix P6000.

For the rest, the release mainly dealt with addressing some stability issues and performance bugs. The “Edit in Photoshop” bug was addressed too. For a full list, see the Adobe page found by following the link above.

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One of Lightroom’s great productivity features is the ability to save your post processing work as a preset, allowing you to use the same settings time and time again on different photos.

However, over time, as you collect more and more presets, your preset panel can grow to unmanageable proportions. Time to get organized by creating preset folders into which you can organize your own presets or import presets downloaded from the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

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Did you know that Adobe’s Lightroom has an “Auto Sync” function? It is well hidden, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know about it.
So what does it do, I hear you ask – follow the click below and find out.

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When Lightroom first came out, there was a lot of discussion in online forums about the need for importing your photos. Many people argued that it was unnecessary. They wanted to browse their folders, just like they were used to before Lightroom. As a result, many people did not change their filing system after they installed Lightroom, and, even today, first import their photos into a folder, then import them into Lightroom.

Let’s take a look at how efficient this this.

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