Photography

Lightroom Community Help

2008-07-29T06:07:55-04:00

Along with the new Lightroom™ 2.0, Adobe has launched a new and very useful Community Help site. Now you are able to search Adobe content as well as other great content from around the web!

You can ask questions, make comments, help your fellow Lightroom users, and get the help you need! The site is moderated by Adobe personnel and other outside Pro Contributors (including yours truly!) so you can expect that someone will answer your question or direct you to the proper site for help.

This Community Help site has been in place for Flex™ users for a few months and has been a great resource. Now Lightroom™ users can benefit from the same excellent technology.

Head on over and see for yourself!

[From Adobe Community Help - Homepage]

Compositional Overlays

2008-06-09T06:47:17-04:00

In a previous post I wrote about the Rule of Thirds as a way to compose your images. When you crop your photos in Lightroom you are conveniently provided with an overlay for the Rule of Thirds.

But Lightroom offers a few more overlays for other compositional guidelines. I don't believe it's a documented feature (or at least not very well documented!). When you are in the crop tool press the O key (that's the letter O) and the overlay will change! Here are the other overlays:

A Diamond overly:

A Basic Grid:

There are three overlays based on the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is one of those naturally occurring numbers like pi. It is basically the ratio between numbers in a Fibonacci series where each successive number is the sum of the preceding two numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.). That can be used in the following three overlays available in Lightroom:

The Golden Mean version of the Rule of Thirds:

The Golden Triangle:

The Golden Spiral:

Another slick feature with the last two overlays is the ability to change their starting point. By pressing SHIFT-O when one of them is on the screen the layout will change. If the first Golden Triangle doesn't look right press SHIFT-O and see if the new one is right.

The Golden Spiral offers eight variations. Here are three:

Next time you are looking for other ways to compose your images try these overlays out. You may go down some creative roads you haven't travelled yet and discover a whole new world of composition!

Apple Releases Aperture 2.0

2008-02-12T19:10:12-05:00

Apple, feeling the mounting pressure from Adobe, has released its latest upgrade to Aperture. Now at 2.0, Apple says it has added many new features and addressed the well acknowledged sluggishness of its photography workflow software. The new features fall into several categories:

30 new features in the User Interface
10 in Raw Image Quality
4 in Compare and Select Tools
9 Workflow Enhancements
16 in Image Processing Tools
15 new Photo Management features
16 Web and Print Publishing enhancements
3 Applescript features

That's 103 new features! Sounds good until you start looking at them. Many are not features at all but badly needed corrections to existing aspects of the program. Still more are "me too" features that Lightroom users have been using and enjoying since Lightroom Beta!

Apple is trying to sneak in the back door here by dropping the price of Aperture to $199. (The upgrade price for existing users is $99.) That price undercuts Lightroom by $100 but is it enough to win back Mac users who have abandonded Aperture infavor of the more robust Lightroom? I don't think so. Lightroom hasn't even hit version 1.5 yet but Adobe has it on a fast track and is giving their users much more frequent updates and feature enhancements. This may be too little to late on Apple's part.

One glaring ommission from Aperture 2.0 (perhaps I missed it and it's there) is the continued lack of presets! Lightroom came out of the starting gate with preset abilities and photographers use this feature extensively. Many Aperture users left the fold because of this flaw in Apple's offering.

Lastly, Aperture is still only available to the Mac crowd so Apple continues to ignore the large Lightroom user base over on the Windows side. I think Adove has got it right here and Apple needs to take notice! All that being said, Aperture is still a fine photography workflow program. Some of it's unique (for now) features are loved by many photographers. If you're a Mac user you have a choice.

Selecting Images Not in a Collection

2008-01-06T22:32:47-05:00

One of Lightroom's great features is the ability to put images into collections. An image can appear in several collections so you can build groups of images that make sense to you. If you click on a collection name you can see and select all the images in that collection and create a web gallery or prints.

But what do you do if you have a large number of images and you need to find out which ones are not in a collection? Here is a step-by-step way to select all your non-collected images.

While in the Library module, open your Collections panel on the left.

Now click on the first collections in the list to highlight it.

While holding down the shift key click on the last collection in the list. You should now have all your collections selected and all the images in them appear in the grid.

To select all these images either press Control-A (Command-A on the Mac) or go up to the Edit menu and click Select All.

What's that you say? You're right! Now you have all your collected images selected. Here's how we get to our goal of select all images not in a collection.

Go to the Library panel and click on All Photographs.

Now the grid shows all your images with the collected ones selected. To finish off got to the edit menu and click Invert selection.

Viola! Now the grid shows a selection of all your images that are not in any collection!

301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers

2007-11-22T22:32:46-05:00