Today's 26-Jan-2009. The year is: 2009. Have you updated your copyright settings?

1. Your website's copyright
2. Your import presets copyright in Lightroom

Apple Aperture

I regularly receive emails asking me questions about Apple Aperture:

• How to do this Aperture?

Lightroom & Photos Directory Structure

When you install Lightroom. it install itself onto the C, local drive. The structure is fixed and decided by Adobe's programmers. But the directory structure of where to store your photos is up to you. Proper directory structure is extremely important! Without proper directory structure you can't:

1. Do proper backups

IPTC — XMP — EXIF

The alphabet soup. When using Lightroom, we have to deal with IPTC, XMP and EXIF data but what are they?

IPTC: International Press Telecommunications Council

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

Lightroom & the copyrights for 2010

Today's 8-Jan-2010. The year is: 2010 and have you updated all of your copyright settings? That's:

1. Your website's copyright

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: Backups

Many websites, i.e.: people, talk about Lightroom and backups. The problem is that most people do not understand the difference between a copy and a backup. Not only people make that mistake of confusing copies with backups but Adobe makes the same mistake. And I expected better from Adobe.

When you start Lightroom, Lightroom will ask every week:

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.

DNG vs Original Raw — Revisited

From the “Is this good or is this bad department?”

I am a proponent of DNG as I wrote about it in Raw vs DNG. Why? Because…

When importing photos into Lightroom, Lightroom is supposed to detect duplicate photo and not import the duplicates photos. How does Lightroom know that it's a duplicate photo? Lightroom will flag a photo as a duplicate if:

1. The original filename must be the same.

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: How Many Catalogs?

How many catalogs do you need in Lightroom? Many people have only one Lightroom catalog, some photographers have a catalog per customer with dozens and hundreds of catalogs. How many Lightroom catalogs you have, will dictate your workflow. The more catalogs, the more complicate your workflow. I know of at least 1 photographer that has over 375 catalogs¹. He uses one catalog per customer per session, he is a prolific shooter. Weddings are at least a thousand photos, and sometimes as many as three thousand photos per wedding.

I have 3 Lightroom catalogs:

What's the maximum number of photos that I can have in Lightroom?

Many people on the web say that you shouldn't have more than 10,000 (ten thousand) photos. Then they go on to explain that after that many photos, Lightroom suddenly slows down, so it must be the maximum. So let's look a some of the facts:

Lightroom: IPTC Common Entries

We are supposed to use the IPTC tags in Lightroom. Many stock photo libraries require it and will charge you for fill it in for you.

What's IPTC?

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 — 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 ARC². Since the beginning, Lightroom has supported the DNG³ format and at all the versions of Photoshop CSx support the DNG format.

Printer Profiles

It's a slow warm wet winter on the “wet coast”. We are getting ready for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. So I'm using the time to market, upgrade and test. I decided to test my main current printing lab. One of the printers that they use is the LPS-24 Noritsu laser printer.

I downloaded the profile and used the same photo, already cropped to 5” by 7”. The only difference between the “no profile” and all the 3 profile combinations is a stamp with a 1,2,3 and 4.

Lightroom — RAM vs. CPU

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

Lightroom: RAW vs. DNG

Lightroom process all kind of raw files⁴ You have the choice of converting to or using JPEGs, Native RAW or DNG⁵ RAW.

The standard way of storing all the extra information such as IPTC, keywords... is to save them in an extra file with the same name as your photo but with an extension of XMP. So you end-up with 2 files: Test-20090130-0003.cr2 and Test-20090130-0003.xmp. That second file is called the sidecar, because it's supposed to come along with the main file, the photo.

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 — 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 Previews

Lightroom has 3 types of previews:

1. The thumbnails. The size will depend on what you have set in the zoom factor. It applies to the Library module and to the strip at the bottom in the Develop module.

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 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 — Why Are Previews Different From The LCD or from Photo Mechanic?

Why are the previews in Lightroom so different from the previews I saw on the LCD of my camera, from Photo Mechanic⁶ or from InfranView⁷?

First some technical background: In the camera you only shoot RAW. No JPEG or whatever. All cameras only shoot RAW. Period! The RAW photo is then always converted to a JPEG. All photos, it doesn't matter if you have selected RAW or JPEG, get converted to a JPEG. Then depending on your settings, your camera will keep the RAW photo or throw it away. If you've decided to keep the RAW format, the JPEG portion will be compressed, a lot, and will be embedded in the RAW photo. What you see on the LCD of your camera is that JPEG. The RAW photo contains 3 sections:

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

When looking at the histogram⁸ 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.

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.

Lightroom supports 3 different colour spaces:

1. sRGB
2. AdobeRGB

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 dpi⁹? So if you want a photo to be 4 inch¹⁰ 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:

Monitor Calibration — Debunking Unit

I just finished a very painful phone discussion. An existing customer wanted me take some photos that would colour match. The kicker was that the photos have to be delivered on a couple of DVDs. I tried to explain to the customer how colour matching and calibration works but…

So I decided to spend the big bucks and bring the debunking unit. So please sit down, fasten your seat belt and get ready for the bumpy ride.

Monitor Calibration — Follow Up

Last week in Monitor Calibration — Debunking Unit, I wrote about the “facts and shortcomings” of monitor calibration. Then, I received an email from Ismaeli. Ismaeli was arguing both sides of the calibration debate. A few emails later and there is a major clarification that is needed.

Ismaeli was saying:

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.

Why Discuss Date Formats in Lightroom?

How boring can it get? Dates? What's wrong with dates. A date's, a date is a date. Actually not, there are 30+ ways of representing date and time. What's 07/08/09? Is it July 8th, 2009? or August 7th, 2009? or August 9th, 2007? Date formats are so complicated and there are so many of them, that “they” created a body to regulate and standardize date formats!

What's that got to do with photography? It's actually very important in the digital world. All digital photos have a date and time in the EXIF and most importantly, I always include the date in the name of the photos.