Why Isn't My Canon 7D Sharp?

I just spent $2000 on the “best” APS camera and it's not sharp. Is it bad focus? Is it a bad sensor? What did Canon screw up? Not really.

1. The current price of the Canon 7D is significantly less than $2000, in Canada. I was one of the first sucker pioneer in Canada and paid the full price. I needed the camera then.

Q: Lightroom — Where Are My Presets?

A: It depends, they are stored where you have set it. To see where they are:

1. Edit → Preferences

Lightroom: Exposure vs. Brightness

Finding Photos With Only Given Keywords

The problem with searching by keyword, is that Lightroom will show all the photos containing that keyword, whatever other keywords are present in that photo. What about the photos containing only that a specific keyword or keywords?

1. Switch to the Grid view of the Library

Flags — Lightroom and Photoshop

In Lightroom, I use P to “Pick” aka Flag a photo and U to “Unpick” aka UnFlag a photo. There are also the ratings and labels.

Lightroom is basically a photo editor, the curves are applied to the whole photo while Photoshop is a pixel editor. In Photoshop, I work at the pixel level, whether it's with layers or the other various tools, I modify the pixels.

Grayscale Adjustments

You can easily convert colour photos to a grayscale¹ in the Develop module, either by:

1. Pressing the V

A couple days ago, I posted: How To Apply Presets To Multiple Photos?. and at the end of the post I mentioned, that if anybody knew of a better, please let me know.

Joel Robertson's of http://www.joelrobertson.com told me of a much better way. It's not done in the Develop module but in the Library module.

Q: How To Apply Presets To Multiple Photos?

A: There's no direct way that I know of to apply a preset to many photos at the same time, up to the current version of Lightroom 2.5. But there's more than one way to skin a cat² There are a couple of alternatives:

• Apply the preset during the import. It's just a regular edit and doesn't change the original photo, Lightroom just applies the preset to the preview.

How To Correct Misspelled Keywords in Lightroom

You've misspelled a keyword and you have assigned the misspelled keyword to a few hundred photos. It's not the end of the world. Lightroom makes it easy to fix, without have to delete and reenter…

1. Switch to the Develop module, Grid view.

Q: How to Delete Keywords From Photos in Lightroom?

A: It's not obvious, if you highlight the wrong keywords in the Keywording box and deleting them doesn't work. Why? Because Adobe decided not to provide it. The solution, instead, is to use the keyword list

1. Select all the photos that you want to remove the keywords.

Lightroom Navigation: Is There A Way To Go Back To The Previous Folder?

When moving between photos in different folders in Lightroom, it's inconvenient to have to scroll back between the various folders or collections involved. Luckily, Lightroom has the Go Back in the Grid view:

Lightroom — Importing Hierarchical Keywords

Hierarchical keywords allows you to organize the information such as: "Canada | British Columbia | Vancouver" This mean that the photo is made in:

1. The country: Canada

How To Go A Few Steps Back Into The History

I am processing a whole bunch of files in Lightroom. Now I realize that I don't like the recent steps that I did and want to go back more than 1 step backward. Ctrl-Z / Command-Z only undo the last command, and if you did a select, that's the last one that will be undone. So are you stuck?

No, not really. Lightroom does not make any change to the original photo. This means that every time I look at a processed photo, Lightroom has to apply all the changes that I have done and in that order. So Lightroom keeps track of the history. Going to the “Develop” module, in the left pane, you can view the history of what has been done to that photo³.

Lightroom — Adding Keywords To Many Photos

There are two main ways of adding keywords to many photos in Lightroom:

1. The simplest way of adding keywords in Lightroom to your photos is to add them during the import.
2. In the Library module, select all of your photos that you want to add keywords to.

Lightroom — Backing Up Your Catalog

I've always wished Lightroom would allow me to backup my catalog when I wanted. No, Lightroom does not allow me to backup catalogs. Lightroom decides for me when to backup my catalogs. And I often disagree with Lightroom.

1. I want to backup my Lightroom catalogs when I'm finished with my session and I have done important changes such as importing photos, mass updates...

Lightroom: Catalog Speed

My first article on Lightroom was: Lightroom: Slow As Molasses Or Lightning Fast?.

I did some further testing with actual numbers: What's Lightroom's speed when browsing the same 100 photos of the same catalog with all these photos after having generated the 1:1 preview:

Lightroom: Colour Labels

1. You can set your own color labels with: Metadata > Label Set > Edit
2. Or you can also type text directly into the label description in the Metadata panel.

Lightroom: Copyright Watermark

Most of the times, when I export photos, I want to have my copyright watermark. Now Lightroom does not have the flexibility of Photoshop. If you want to insert not just a copyright watermark but a logo watermark, you can you use: LR2/Mogrify from Tim Armes.

Lightroom — Crop & Overlays

Some photographers are geniuses, some photographers are purists. However a photo comes out of the camera, it is and cannot be changed or altered. The photos are always full-frame... Painting is the "art of adding to a blank canvas". Photography is the "art of removing from real-life onto a photo". I don't have that luck of being such a photographic genius. I'm no Cartier-Bresson, I strive, but I'm not there yet. I crop most of my photos.

Everybody knows that Lightroom includes cropping tools. By Typing R, in any module, Lightroom will take you to the crop tool in the Develop module. Then you can crop left, right, top and/or bottom.

Cropping to Fixed Size In Lightroom

I'm in process of making moo cards. For the one that don't know, moo cards are business cards where you can set as many as 50 photos per batch of 50 business cards. The requirements are that the photos must be 1039 pixels by 697 pixels at 300 dpi. These dimensions include the bleeding areas.

So how to crop the photos to 1039 pixels by 697 pixels?

Lightroom: Deleting Keywords

I have imported all whole bunch of new keywords, then OOPS! I realized that I imported over a 1000 wrong keywords. It was the wrong file! There are 3 alternatives:

Delete 1 keyword at a time

Lightroom & Develop Module Workflow

I'm currently processing 1000+ photos in Lightroom. It's hard, it's painful. My first step is go though all the photos and delete all the out of focus photos, the junk photos, the wrong timing… The keywords, the IPTC info is the easy part since they are all for the same customer, Sync Metadata does the trick, but the hard part is the Develop module.

Here are my steps for the Develop module:

Whenever I open a specific Lightroom catalog, I get the error message that the Lightroom catalog is used by another program

At some point when you were using this Lightroom catalog, you either:

• Aborted Lightroom with closing it properly

Lightroom — Export Settings for DNG

Lightroom allows you to export your photos in:

• JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group

Lightroom: Exported JPEGs vs. Web JPEGs

There 3 ways you can get JPEGs with Lightroom:

1. Convert to JPEGs in your camera or during the import into Lightroom.

Lightroom — File Locations

You have done a "whole bunch" of photos on a tripod, and you have cropped the first one. Now how to make sure that you will have the same identical crop for the "rest of the bunch" of photos.

In the Develop module, select a "whole bunch" of photos to be cropped.

Q: Where's my EXIF data?

A: Lightroom is so versatile, it has everything. Lightroom does the digital asset management with the keywords…, the processing of the photos with the develop module, the printing, the web… I'm sure that somewhere in that huge beast, there's a small hidden module to make coffee. Very few people have the 2 monitor setup. I'm not one of them. I have what used to be a huge 22" monitor, now it's getting small. Since there's so little screen space, Lightroom hides a lot of things. One of them is the EXIF data. You can see it from Library module.

1. Switch to the Library module.

Q: Where's my EXIF data?

A: By default, Lightroom doesn't display the EXIF data. The EXIF data is hidden in the Metadata panel.

1. Switch to the Library module

Lightroom: Another 20% in Performance

Last month I order a new computer from Dell, a powerhouse, a monster, it took 3 weeks to arrive. It's an Intel iCore7, a 4 CPUs with hyperthreading behaving like an 8 CPUs computer with 8Gb of RAM and a terabyte hard drive. I bought the Dell because it was so cheap, almost $600 less than the equivalent computer at the “cheap” and high volume computer place.

It seems that Dell, HPs and the other computer manufacturers make more money loading the computer with all these 30 days preview softwares. I hate that, so I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install. Lightroom performance is very much dependent on the speed of the computer. Today's tips are for Windows only! It applies to both Vista and Vista 1.1 Windows 7. But they will again improve the Lightroom performance since the computer will not be busy managing the display.

Lightroom: How To Remove All The Flags From All The Photos

Yesterday somebody asked my how to remove all the flags from all of her photos so she could start again from scratch. So today it's short and sweet:

1. Library → Catalog in the left panel → All Photographs

Lightroom — How To Remove EXIF Data

When I export photos, I often don't want to give away all of information, camera, lens, EV settings... Lightroom allows me remove all the EXIF data from my photos. But... One thing that I always want exported: my copyrights.

Lightroom has 4 different export format options:

Lightroom — How to Remove Keywords From Many Photos

You forgot to change the keywords from the last Lightroom import, and have now imported hundred of photos into Lightroom with the wrong keywords. How do you remove the keywords from these hundred of photos?

1. Select all the photos that you want the keywords removed⁴.

Lightroom — How to See Before & After

One of my favorite feature of Lightroom, is the non-destructive editing. Lightroom tracks every change that you apply in its database. So you can always see:

1. The original photo
2. The modified photo

Lightroom — How to Set File Names

Most people, including Adobe's default, use the date as the directory for the name of the photo, so the names look like: 2008 then 05 then 01 then the filename. So when did you travel to New York? Do you remember the year and the month? I don't, because I don't think that way.

I like my filenames to be NewYork-20080501-0345.dng. This means that I took the photo in New York, on 1-May-2008, and that was the 345th photo of that series.

Lightroom — How to Set Panels Behavior

The Lightroom panels are driving me nuts! They come, they go. Whenever they come and go, it changes where things are. If I move the mouse too quickly, the panel does show up again, I have to click on the panel actuator, the triangle. So I prefer to switch to manual.

To control the appearance and disappearance of the panel, you will need to right click on the panel actuator, the grey triangle.

I set my keywords in Lightroom, I also make sure that I save them, but Bridge does not see my keywords

That's because Lightroom, by default, only save all information and changes in it's own database. Lightroom doesn't save it to the photo if it's a DNG file or to the XMP sidecar if it's in another format. You need to tell Lightroom to save all the changes to it's database and to the XMP sidecar or the DNG file with:

Q: I select many photos with Ctrl-Click and try to apply some keyword to all the photos. It just doesn't work. The keyword is applied only to the first photo.

1. In the develop module, switch to the Grid View.
2. If there is more than one monitor, switch to the primary monitor.
3. Make sure that: Menu → MetaData → Show Metadata for Target Photo Only is unchecked.

Lost My Picks

Q: I picked over 200 photos, copied them to my main collection and now when I filter for the picked photo, I get nothing. Zippo. What happened? Where did my picks go? What should I do?

A: Yes, that's right! Somebody at Adobe in San Jose decided that flags, both “Pick” and “Rejected” are local to the current collection. This means that when you copy or move a photo from one collection to another collection, the flag is not copied along.

Lightroom — Lousy Photo Rescue

The photo is lousy! A few photos can be rescued, most of them can't. How do you quickly judge if you should spend the time to rescue it? But you can quickly try by switching to Black & White. Press the “v” in the Library module or the Develop module just to see if the photo will work. Black and white photos have a different feel. Then you can later improve the conversion with the Gray Scale Mix.

It's quick, just the letter “v”, lowercase. You don't like the photo in black and white? Either Ctrl-Z / Command-Z to undo and not having the action in the history or “v” again to return the photo to its original colour.

I exported a dozen photos and some of them are missing the copyright watermark. Why?

To add the copyright watermark, you need to select it during the export:

Lightroom: Add Copyright Watermark

Lightroom — Move To New Computer

Here are the steps if your computer is dying or you want to upgrade your hard drive/computer.

1. You should install Lightroom on your new computer/hard drive.

Lightroom: Negative Queries

What's a negative query? A negative query is when I want to know what it's not. For example, I want to see in Lightroom all the photos that are not about Walter, a dog. When we look in the selection it says “starts with”, “ends with” or “contains”, but most of the times it does not say: “Does NOT contain”. It would be nice but Lightroom does not allow it.

But wait! Lightroom does allow for the negative queries in the Library Filter, but it doesn't say it in the selection menu. Lightroom has the “!”, without the quotes, operator which means NOT.

Lightroom — New RAW Formats And DNG

You have just bought a new Nikon D3x or a new Olympus E30 or a new Canikon Z45, and either you don't want to upgrade your Lightroom or your Photoshop or can't upgrade your Photoshop or your Lightroom because of some plug-in will not work with the new version or some killer bug that will affect you.

Adobe tells you that you will have to upgrade or no new camera support. In fact, Adobe provides free support for all the same cameras as the latest Lightroom or the latest ARC⁵. Since the beginning, Lightroom has supported the DNG⁶ format and at all the versions of Photoshop CSx support the DNG format.

Lightroom — Photos Without Keywords

Lightroom — RAM vs. CPU

Every couple of weeks, I get an email that asks:

Lightroom: Recovery Slider

Attach:lightroom-sliders-01.jpg Δ|Lightroom Develop Module Sliders: Recovery, Fill & Black

Everybody uses the Exposure slider to make their photo lighter or darker. Then the problems starts, what to do with the recovery, fills… The problems are due to Adobe's “poor documentation.” I will attempt to clarify.

I have already rendered the 1:1 previews and I still get: "Rendering: File Changed…"

It means that you have changed the photo in Lightroom since rendering the last time you rendered the 1:1 preview. Either you have done:

Lightroom — Rendering Previews

Previews are controversial, somebody will tell you that you should render them 1:1 on import of the photos. Somebody else will tell you that you shouldn't generate the 1:1 previews.

When do I save my changes in Lightroom?

As you work on your images in Lightroom, all of the changes are being saved automatically into the Lightroom/SQlite database. The only time that you have to be concerned about "pushing" the information from the Lightroom database, SQlite, to the individual files⁷ is if you want to use another application such as Bridge to view and process your images or archive the changes.

How to select a catalog when starting Lightroom

It's always a pain when Lightroom opens, it opens the last opened catalog. That's OK if you just have 1 catalog, but when you have, like me, more than 1 catalog, it's a problem. So either open Lightroom with the last opened catalog, wait for the opening and then switch or:

• On the Desktop, Press CTRL and double-click on the Lightroom shortcut, and you will get:

Lightroom — Slow As Molasses

I have been processing many photos and my Lightroom is becoming extremely slow. People would say that it's the size of the catalog 10,000+. It's not! I just recently changed one of my setting in the hope of making my slow computer much faster⁸.

Edit → Preferences → File Handling → Camera Raw Cache Setting

Lightroom — Slow As Molasses Or Lightning Fast?

Adobe claims that Lightroom is extremely fast. Tons of people on the Internet complain that Lightroom is slow as molasses. Who's right? Both. You can make Lightroom either run slow or fast depending on how you operate it. The major problem is that most people don't bother to understand how Lightroom works, they only learn press this key or that key... They must be the same people that take photos instead of making them.

Let's first understand what Lightroom does, and then you can operate to make Lightroom fast. Lightroom is a database program to catalog photo, to track them, to rate them and retrieve them. It has some editing facilities that are very similar to the raw processing in Adobe Photoshop.

Lightroom — Sorting Photos

Lightroom is great at selecting, displaying and organizing photos. One of the most important way of organizing the photos in the catalog is to sort them. To sort the photos, you must be Library module, Grid mode.

Sorting Photos

Speed tip — Raw Cache

Lightroom and Photoshop use the same ACR, Adobe Camera Raw module to process the photo into the Develop module. The difference between Lightroom and Photoshop is that the ACR is built-in Lightroom, while in Photoshop, it's a stand alone application.

When Lightroom reads the a photo for the first time, Lightroom adds that photo to the Camera Raw Cache. The problem is that there is only so much cache. By default it's only 1 Gig in size, it's not that many photos, so the older photos are removed from the cache to make space for the newer photos.

Lightroom — Speedup Your Computer

In today's blindingly fast computers with the burning hot CPU and astronomical amount of RAM, the slowest part of your computer is the hard drive. Modern hard drives are fast but they are from 50 times to 500 times slower than your RAM.

Lightroom is extremely disk intensive. Although most of its catalog is loaded in RAM, the photos, the cache, and the previews are not loaded in RAM but are read from your hard drive.

Lightroom — Standard Previews

Importing a photo into Lightroom is a 2 pass process:

1. Create all the database entries to keep track of the photo and convert it if necessary

Lightroom: The Fill Light Slider

Attach:lightroom-sliders-01.jpg Δ|Lightroom Develop Module Sliders: Recovery, Fill & Black

Everybody uses the Exposure slider to make their photo lighter or darker. Then the problems starts, what to do with the recovery, fill light… The problems are due to Adobe's “poor documentation.” I will attempt to clarify the fill slider.

Lightroom — Troubleshooting Part 1

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot the start up of Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

1. Create a new user

Lightroom — Troubleshooting Part 2

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot the start up of Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

1. Shutdown all other applications

Lightroom — Troubleshooting Part 3

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot the start up of Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Optimize the Catalog

Lightroom: Troubleshooting — Part 4

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot the start up of Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Re-create the Photoshop Lightroom preferences file

Then Adobe says:

Lightroom Troubleshooting — Part 5

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Close Lightroom.

Lightroom: Troubleshooting Part 6

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Update the video card driver.

Lightroom — Troubleshooting Part 7

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Set a Postscript printer as your default printer

Lightroom — Troubleshooting Part 8

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

• Cleanup and delete all of your temporary files

Lightroom — Video Speed

Sometimes it's Lightroom that's slow, but most of the times, you shouldn't blame Lightroom, it's the computer. How your computer is setup will influence most of the performance of Lightroom. One of the most important factor is, surprise, surprise the video card's configuration.

Photos, images, the video card, how shocked should you be that they are related. There are 2 major video card manufacturers:

Why is the histogram not the same on Lightroom and on Photoshop?

When looking at the histogram⁹ in Lightroom vs the the same photo in Photoshop, the histogram look very different. There are lot more clipping in the Photoshop histogram than in the Lightroom histogram?

This is due to the fact that there are different colour spaces in Lightroom and in Photoshop. Most likely the colour space used in Photoshop is sRGB and Lightroom is either Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB.

Lightroom — Workflow & Smart Collections — Part 1

A large part of my Lightroom workflow is implemented via the magic of Lightroom's Smart Collections. Smart Collections are dynamic filters, where you assign a few rules, and Lightroom will update the filter according to your selection criteria. So it will match the photos as they are changed or as they are updated.

Collections are static listing of photos. You will need to add the photo manually by dragging and dropping the photo in the "regular/plain" collection.

Lightroom: Workflow — Importing Photos

Earlier I explained my workflow in: Lightroom: Real Life Workflow.

My first step is always: Before importing the photos, I always copy them from the memory card to the hard drive.

Zoom Levels

In the Library Module, you can zoom with the Navigator. The standard zoom levels are FIT, FILL, 1:1 and the variations of 1:…

Too many people check their photos at 1:1 or 100% zoom level, to examine all the pixels. I used to do it too. The problem with 100% zoom level is that in “real life” it's never used. I'm not the only one to harp on the pixel-peepers. Adobe also recommend using the 1:1 or 100% zoom level only in the Develop module and when using the brushes.

Lightroom Misconceptions

Lightroom looks like a very simple product but it's very advanced and can be very complicated. It's so good that I almost don't use Photoshop anymore. But there are many misconceptions. Here are some the biggest misconceptions:

1. Lightroom will not match your cameras rendering when working with raw files. The camera shows only the jpeg preview, not the raw data. Lightroom applies its processing to the raw data. You can emulate the camera preview with presets or create your own camera profile.

Q: How to to create a Lightroom preset that adds +0.5 to whatever the current exposure instead of an absolute value?

A: Lightroom does not provide relative values in the Develop module. The Develop values are always absolute values, so Lightroom presets can only use these absolute values, such as exposure: 0.83 or red: 23.

Lightroom supports 3 different colour spaces:

1. sRGB
2. AdobeRGB

Lightroom: Corrupted Database — Part 1

There are many people on the forums complaining about having corrupted Lightroom catalogs. The whole catalog can be corrupted or just some of the Lightroom data can be corrupted. Today, we'll look at the worth case scenario, the whole Lightroom database/catalog is corrupted.

You start Lightroom and you get the following message:

Lightroom — Export Settings for PSD

Lightroom allows you to export your photos in:

• JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group

Lightroom — Export Settings for TIFF

Lightroom allows you to export your photos in:

• JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group

Lightroom: Finally a good camera profile, now what?

After using your new Canikon D6xMk3, finally somebody comes out with a great camera standard. The photos, with this new camera profile, are outstanding. National Geographic, here we come, too bad Life folded a few years ago. The only problem is how to apply it to all the photos and not one at the time.

• Select the Develop module

Lightroom: Horizontal vs. Vertical

When people want to buy photos from you, especially from stock, they have certain requirements. One of the more often used requirement is the photo to be horizontal or vertical ¹⁰. If you are like me, I don't record it every time, instead of that I let Lightroom almost do it for me. I say almost because it's not fully automated, just very simple and quick to do.

I have 2 smart collections:

Lightroom: How to Delete All Keywords at Once

I am reorganizing my keywords in the WIP¹¹ catalog. I need to delete 1394 keywords. I explained in Deleting Keywords how to delete one keyword at a time, but over a thousand keywords? Very, very, very painful! Too painful.

Lightroom does not provide the facility to delete all the keywords, but you can...

Lightroom — How To Generate The 1:1 Previews After Importing

All processing done by Lightroom in the Develop module is always done with the 1:1 previews, except for the cropping operations. You have the choice of when Lightroom will generate the 1:1 previews, either before you will need them or when you will need the 1:1 previews. You have read my article Lightroom: Slow As Molasses Or Lightning Fast? where I mention that Lightroom has to build it's previews on the fly if they don't already exist. This will make Lightroom and your computer very, very sloow. But you didn't generate the 1:1 previews during the import.

How to have multiple photographers in the same Lightroom catalog, and identify the photos for each photographer?

In the import, create a metadata template for each photographer. The metadata template has the Creator's Name as the photographer's name, see #1.

Lightroom: Photos Without Location

Some people do their metadata in bulk. I don't, I don't have the patience. A big portion of my metadata is done during the import, but not everything can be entered during the import of the photos.

The 5Ws: What, When, Where, How and Why. I often need to answer these questions. One of them is the Where. I have a smart filter that allows me to identify what I have not entered. I work at it, in small doses. My smart filter catches the Country, the State/Province, the City and the Location. The important part is the Match any.

Lightroom — Real Life Workflow

Everybody talks "Workflow". What's a workflow? It just a sequence of operations¹². So here is my sequence. It's the best! For me! Why because it works for me! I have processed as many as 5000 photos in a month in Lightroom.

I hear you say: wait a second, there are people that claim that with their workflow, they can process 3000 photos in an evening. Actually, it's like comparing "hamburger flipping" and cooking "a full gourmet meal". They only import and while only assigning a couple of keywords and only delete the "bad" photos. My other limitation is that I can do this photo editing for only so many hours in the evening. Today, you will get the overview, then in the many following installments, you will get the actual details, including the why of such and such step.

Smart Collection Within Smart Collection

I want to create a smart collection within an existing smart collection.

No, you cannot create smart collections within smart collections. A smart collection is an active “filter”, that is updated every time it does get a “focus”.

What size you you make your photos for web display in Lightroom?

Lightroom allows you to set the size of a photo in pixels when exporting the photo. Everybody has their own “recommendations”. Some says to make it 500 pixels wide, some say 250 pixels wide... How big do you want your photo to be at 72 dpi¹³? So if you want a photo to be 4 inch¹⁴ wide then make the photo to be 4x72 = 288 pixels wide.

Wrong! What's wrong with these “recommendations”? The assumption that the standard screen resolution is 72 dpi. Most of these people are Mac users. The standard Mac resolution for the screen is 72 dpi, but the standard Windows resolution is 96 dpi! Many Windows users have set their computer to use the large fonts which convert their desktop to 120 dpi. A few extremely “poor sighted” people will have a resolution of up to 196 dpi. The use of 72 dpi makes it easy to convert the fonts from pixels to points, because they're the same.

Lightroom: Why Wait For The "Loading..." Overlay

When processing photos in the develop module, I have to wait for the image with the message at the bottom: "loading..."

Lightroom Develop Loading Message

Lightroom: Workflow & Smart Collections — Part 2

A large part of my Lightroom workflow is implemented via the magic of Lightroom's Smart Collections. You can see part 1 at: Lightroom: Workflow & Smart Collections — Part 1.

Smart Collections are dynamic filters, where you assign a few rules, and Lightroom will update the filter according to your selection criteria. So it will match the photos as they are changed or as they are updated.

Lightroom: Megapixels vs. Print Size

You just bought the latest Canikon at 18 megapixels or at 24 megapixels. How big of a print can you do? Almost unlimited. How can that be unlimited? Won't your photos become just dots? Actually that depends on a few of things:

People And Keywording

In my keywording tags, I have the category: People. It's divided in people that I know and people that I don't. So far it makes sense. Either you know the person or you don't.

I do a lot of photos about dogs and street scenes. A vast amount of these photos do not have anybody in them, but I still have them tagged under the category people.

Selecting Photos During Import In Lightroom

When I am importing photos in Lightroom, Lightroom gives me only 2 options:

• Check all

Lightroom: Selecting Photos In the Grid View

Lightroom has so many ways of selecting photos that it becomes confusing. But selecting the right way will reduce your workload and avoid a lot of frustrations.

To select in the grid view of Lightroom:

Setting The Order Of Photos For A Gallery In Lightroom

The Keepers

Today, all cameras have a motor drive that can take at least 3 photos per second, some as many as 10 frames per second. 32Gb memory cards are becoming common place, that's 1200 photos per card for a full frame camera.

What are the keepers? Those are the photos that awe the customer. The keepers are the photos you want to keep 10 years down the road. The basic question is: “How do to find the keepers?”

Lightroom: Very Slow Speed

Yesterday, I got a phone call from Alice, a friend, complaining about how slow her Lightroom has become. She uses Mac and I'm a Windows guy. She wanted me to come, I wasn't too keen, she uses Mac and I'm no Mac expert. I can identify the screen, the mouse and the keyboard but what about the right clicks on a Mac? Nothing that important yesterday so I went.

I arrived and Alice showed me how slow her Lightroom was. It was slow, very, very painful. Actually, it wasn't just Lightroom, the mouse was very sluggish and I noticed that every time she was doing something on the screen, lights on her router¹⁵ were flashing. Why were they flashing? Was something wrong with her network? Now that's something that I understand. So I started asking questions, like:

Why is my Lightroom so slow?

I got an emergency phone call from Patrick, a photographer friend:

Working With Stacks in Lightroom 2

Many people complain that the stacks don't work. It's usually because they didn't read Lightroom's RTFM¹⁶ or maybe it's because there is no manual supplied and no much of a help file. Here are some of rules for stacking photos in Lightroom 2.x.

• You cannot create a stack using images in a Collection or Quick Collection. You need to be in a folder for creating stacks.