Here is another great one from the fine folks at Photographer's Math. The 32gb flash card:

32Gb Flash Card

Saturday morning, I checked my emails. In the middle, I decided to go and make myself an americano¹. I started the screen saver, and came back 10 minutes later. Moved the mouse to reactive the screen. Nothing, dead! I checked that the computer is turned on, yes the fan is on and the computer light is on the computer case. Tried a few variations of the Alt-Ctrl-Del, nothing, no reboot. Nothing, dead.

I bit the bullet, turned the computer off, waited 15 seconds and turned the computer back on. Before the even Windows started, during the boot process, I got a hard drive SMART² error, and the drive was completely dead. Obviously the SMART did not anticipate the drive failure.

Daylight Saving Time

Yesterday: 2-Nov-2008 was the end of the daylight saving time, back to standard time. I had to change 11 clocks manually³, and another half dozen were done automatically⁴.

The important question is: Did you change the clock on your cameras?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

Daylight Saving Time — Fall 2009

Today: 1-Nov-2009 is the end of the daylight saving time in North America. I still had to change 11 clocks manually⁵, and another half dozen were done automatically⁶.

The important question is: Did you change the clock in your cameras from daylight saving time to standard time?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

Daylight Saving Time — Spring 2009

Today: 8-Mar-2009 is the start of the daylight saving time in North America. I still had to change 11 clocks manually⁷, and another half dozen were done automatically⁸.

The important question is: Did you change the clock in your cameras for the daylight saving time?. You should, you must, and you need to do it!

What do you mean: is my camera approved? I went to the store bought it with some lenses, I paid for it. Now I need a license? No, you don't need a license⁹, but...

If you want to sell photos to stock agencies like Getty, your camera needs to be among the cameras that Getty has approved:

Value Of A Backup

What's the value of a backup? $10, $100 or $1,000?

15 years ago, the quality of the camera did not affect the quality of the photo. The quality of the photographer made the difference. You couldn't tell the difference in a photo between a Nikkormat and a Nikon F3. Same film, same lens, same photographer therefore same photo. The recommendation was always spend you money on glass. Good lenses, better lenses and if you could afford it buy professional zoom lenses.

Today, the quality of the camera is the difference¹⁰.

Formatting Memory Cards — Debunking Unit

Everyday somebody complains, on one of the forums, about problems with their memory card be it Compact Flash, CF, or Secure Digital, SD, card. And the standard answer is: “Reformat card in the camera after every upload to your computer”.

There are so many misconceptions, so at great personal expense, I had to call the “Debunking Unit”. Those guys don't come cheap.

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.

If you operate a photography business, and you do not have some kind of regular¹¹ blog, you are seriously holding back your business.

Even when I do not get new clients from the blog, my existing clients read my blog and make comments about this or that article. I have had more extra job from existing clients because of the blog.

What happened? The website didn't go down. I lost no article. Yesterday, Tuesday 14-Jul-2009, I was doing some maintenance when I realized that the "Tags", the column on the left and the link at the bottom of each blog entry with Biz101, Marketing, Pricing... where not being updated. As a matter of fact, the last update happened on the 7-Apr-2009, 3 month ago.

No problem, just reindex, about 5 minutes and everything should be OK. So 5 minutes later, I checked the tags and nothing, most of the tags are empty. So delete the index and just redo the index, right? Nooo! Still nothing.

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

Archival CDs

http://DataMediaStore.com, among many others, offers DVDs with 100 years of archival and CDs with 300 years of archival! Can you believe that? I do believe that the CD/DVD could last the 100 years if properly stored, but how are you going to read that CD/DVD?

Hardware

Archival Media

1. I store my photos on the hard drive. I Photoshop them on the hard drive, then store them in another folder once processed.
2. I back them up on 2 other hard drives.

Backup vs. Archival

Backups are different from archives. Many people use their backup as an archive. Wrong!

Corrupted Flash Cards

1. You are in the middle of taking pictures and suddenly, as you press on the shutter button of you camera, nothing happens.
2. You just connected your flash card to your computer and none of your photos are there.
3. You get the error message: card needs reformatting or...

Crashing Memory Cards

I am on assignment in Lodz, Poland and was talking to some tourist who complained about corrupting his memory card. Actually memory cards are a very reliable piece of hardware. They are very rarely defective¹²

So how do you corrupt a memory card. Here are some sure ways of crashing your memory card:

DAM and Buckets

Peter Krogh wrote a book: The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers published by O'Reilly in 2005. It's a very interesting book. Digital Asset Management¹³ become very important once we switched from analog/film based photos to digitally based photos.

The book tries to answer the basic question of how to store the photos and how to make it so you can find and retrieve the photos.

Depth of field from the debunking unit

I was having a discussion with a few photographers and debated, actually more argued than debated, the APS-C¹⁴ versus the full frame cameras. The knives were drawn out. Blood was in the air, the wrong word and blood was going to be spilled! Unbelievable!

Isn't it about photography? The study of light? Light, images … For many people it's about technology, the toys and only on occasion to press the “button” aka the shutter. It came down to the main standard arguments that full frame cameras are better than APS-C cameras because of noise and depth of field.

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

Disabling the right click for your photo website

Every once in a while I stumble onto discussions of photographers whose photos have been pirated / stolen by the worth scum of the earth. The stolen photo was used on the front cover of Time, Life, Fortune or whatever…

Then the standard recommendation is:

Often on forums and sometimes on blogs, you will see people mixing up DPI and/or PPI and they use it interchangeably. They are wrong.

1. DPI = Dots Per Square Inch
2. PPI = Pixels Per Square Inch

Drobo

So many photographers talk in glorious way about the Drobo from Data Robotics.

Attach:drobo.jpg Δ|Drobo

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: Exposure vs. Brightness

Filename Compatibilities

All digital files have to have a file name. You will notice that your camera names all the digital files in the format: XXXX9999.EXT or XXX99999.EXT. An 8 characters file name with an extension of JPG, TIF, CR2, NEF, PEF...

Why? Don't file names are pretty much unlimited? Actually not, and that depends on the operating system, Windows, MAC, OSX, Linux... They all have different rules:

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 grayscale¹⁵ in the Develop module, either by:

1. Pressing the V

HD Video & Card Speed — Debunking Unit

Now both Canon and Nikon produce DSLRs with video. Let's not forget the other guys, Olympus, Panasonic and Pentax. Canon seems to be the most advanced in video¹⁶. The new Canon 7D does HD 1080p in 24 frames, 25 frames or 30 frames. Nikon “only” goes up to HD 720p.

With all these video modes, there is so much BS floating around, that I wanted to clear the air about the relationship between the memory speed and the different video modes. So, at great personal expense, I called back the “Debunking Unit”, those guys don't come cheap. Big warning, there's math involved.

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 cat¹⁷ 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

Incremental Backups

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 photo¹⁸.

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: 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.

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:

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.

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

Lightroom — File Naming Conventions

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 catalogs¹⁹. 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:

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 removed²⁰.

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:

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?

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 ARC²¹. Since the beginning, Lightroom has supported the DNG²² format and at all the versions of Photoshop CSx support the DNG format.

Lightroom — PhotoME

I don't do too many software reviews. But some tools are indispensable. Digital photos contain all kind of data. It even contains metadata. What's metadata? Metadata is data that describes data. That's what makes it meta. What's in there? What are all of the fields? Lightroom has limited metadata information viewing capabilities. But, you'd be amazed by what the camera manufacturer keeps track in the metadata, such as:

• Camera temperature

Lightroom — Photos Without Keywords

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 files²³ You have the choice of converting to or using JPEGs, Native RAW or DNG²⁴ 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: 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 files²⁵ 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: Selecting Photos

There are 3 ways of selecting photos when in Grid View:

1. In the grid of the grid view, which you already know.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Collections

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the collections...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Comparing Photos

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Help

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Metadata & Keywords

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom: Shortcut Keys For Panels

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! and these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom: Shortcut Keys For Print Module

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Processing Photos

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Rating Photos

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Secondary Windows

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Slideshow Module

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Switching Modules

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom: Shortcut Keys For The Develop Module

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom: Shortcut Keys For Viewing

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

Lightroom — Shortcut Keys For Web Module

Adobe has gone nuts! In Lightroom there is a key combination for everything. There is even a key combination for taking the dog out and another one for feeding the cat but only if you have the left panel enabled with... in the develop module...

As far as I have figured out there are 235 key combinations in Lightroom! And these Lightroom key combinations do different things depending on the context.

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 faster²⁶.

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: 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 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:

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 Mechanic²⁷ or from InfranView²⁸?

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 histogram²⁹ 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 ³⁰. 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 WIP³¹ 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 operations³². 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 dpi³³? So if you want a photo to be 4 inch³⁴ 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:

Memory Cards — Debunking Unit

Over the last month, there has been plenty of news on the memory cards front. Both the SD³⁵ and the CF³⁶ formats have brought us news. There is too much BS floating around, so I had to hire the debunking unit to clear the air.

CF: Compact Flash

Memory Cards Lifespan

I follow a whole bunch of photography blogs. Recently one of them, no name mentioned, had an entry on how to extend the life of your memory card. Now that's a concept! Before we explore that concept, let look at a few facts, I'll deal with my opinions later.

1. The memory cards do not have any moving part.

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.

The RAW file format is the unprocessed data as captured by the camera's image sensor. The only camera controls that affect the quality of the RAW file are:

1. ISO speed
2. Aperture

Recover Photo From Archive

Attach:earth-from-moon.jpg Δ|Earth from the moon ©NASA

I still remember 43 years ago seeing this photo in the newspapers. That was the only thing we spoke about in school. It was the news lead for more than a week. The NASA has spent over $250,000 to recover this single photo³⁷. This photo of the earth, with the moon in the foreground, was taken in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1 and became the most famous photo of earth from the moon. The recovery of this single photo was only a quarter million dollars because it was done by non-NASA people. If NASA would have done itself, it would have cost around a couple of million of dollars. Why did it cost so much? Because the photo was stored on old tapes.

The SD name comes from Secure Digital media. All the amateurs cameras and the many of the semi-pro cameras accept SD cards. There are 2 type of type SD cards:

1. SD cards: regular cards formatted with FAT16.
2. SDHC cards: High Capacity cards formatted with FAT32.

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

Should you buy one the new Compact Flash ultra fast cards?

Sandisk, Transcend and a few other CF³⁸ manufacturers have come up with new, extra, super-duper fast cards. The previous top speed was 45 Megabits per second or 300x. It's megabits and not megabytes, huge difference, there are 8 bits to a byte: 45 Megabits = 5.6 Megabytes per second. The new cards have a speed of 90 Megabits per second or 600x. UDMA 6 is a new bus standard to transfer data from the computer camera to the hard drive memory device.

1. It's only for Compact Flash cards. It's not for the SDHC³⁹.

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?”

Third Party Lenses

This week I finally had a long discussion, sometimes more than a discussion it was almost bordering on arguments, with an old friend. As usual between geeks we talked “geekhood” topics. He's Nikon, I'm Canon. You can imagine the conversation: Mine's bigger than yours. Mine's better than yours … And don't forget the mine's more expensive than yours.

So we spoke not only Nikon vs Canon but also Sigma, Tokina, Tamron…

Types of Backups

Backups, everywhere they tell do your backup, you must have a backup,... But what kind?

1. Full backups

Useless Backup

A friend told you about his computer crash, and now you say to yourself:

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 router⁴⁰ 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:

What's the best camera?

Canon has released their Canon 7D. It also announced the Canon 1DMk4 with 16 Megapixels and an ISO of 100,000+. Nikon has released the Nikon D300s and the Nikon D3s with 12 Megapixels and an ISO of 100,000+. Think about it, usable cameras that can take photos of a black cat in a coal mine and all that for around $5000. Amazing!

Pentax has the first camera, that I know of, that is rated for -10°Celsius or 14°Fahrenheit with their K7 at a very reasonable price of under $1500. Many cameras like the Canon 1D and Nikon D3 often operate at these temperatures but they are not certified for those cold temperatures.

When Is Backup A Backup?

It's been such a long time since you have done a backup, you decide that tonight's the night. Get the external USB hard drive, check that it will be large enough. Oops! It's not, you will only be able to do the photos. In anyway, that's what the most important. Right?

After 4 hours, you're done. You have your backup. Actually, NO, you still don't have a backup, you only have a copy.

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.

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 RTFM⁴¹ 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.