LR_HowTo, LR_Reference, Why, LR2, LR3

Lightroom: Smugmug Publishing Plug-in

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 2. February 2012 - 6:10

One of the least used feature, but very powerful feature of Lightroom, is the Publish function. Basically, Lightroom will export the photo to the destination if there's any “important” change to the photo. The important change could be the description/caption, the title, the keywords, the Develop treatment…

I use Smugmug for my photo “back-end.” I chose Smugmug over Zenfolio because Smugmug is integrated in Lightroom (I didn't know then, what I know now.)

  1. I'm not saying that Smugmug is better than Zenfolio. It's your personal choice. Each one has its good, its bad and its ugly.

The Recovery Slider in Lightroom

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 1. February 2012 - 6:32

Lightroom Develop Module Sliders, recovery/fill/black

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... The problems are due to Adobe's "poor documentation". I will attempt to clarify.

The recovery slider works best with RAW photos. It will still work with JPEG photos, but not as well.

Lightroom: You Have a Bad Backup

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. January 2012 - 6:10

Do you have a backup? The vast majority of the people do not even have a backup. My personal experience is that less than 1 in 10 people do have a backup. The problem is that people that claim to have a backup, actually have a bad backup! People claim that they have RAID 1, 5 or 10 or they use a Drobo box. Those are not backups.

The purpose of a backup is:

What's the cost of re-entering the data?

— Syv Ritch, http://www.foto-biz.com

  • A guy, that I know, does weddings. He just raised his price from $199 to $249 per wedding.

Running Out of Ideas for Keywording?

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 17. January 2012 - 7:02

What's the purpose of keywords?

The purpose is to find the photos among the thousands of photos in your catalog. It can be for you or it can be for customers or it can be for internet searches.

The keywords are associated with a photo to describe:

  • subject matter
  • status
  • style
  • use

The simplest way of creating keywords is just add another keyword when you need it. The problem with just adding them on the fly without any structure is fine for the first few dozen keywords. Then it becomes unwieldy when it becomes thousands.

The “cleanest” way is to create base categories, then expand these various categories.

Lightroom Keywords Categories

First: Always fill in the IPTC information. The problem, with the IPTC information, is that you can't search for it! The IPTC search is so limited that I find it useless. It's only possible to search if you already know the exact word and you cannot select in which IPTC field.

Speeding up Lightroom, not so Cheap

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 5. January 2012 - 6:00

Just before Xmas, I started to have problems with my computer (again.) This time, it was the video card. Either the video card was on “the fritz”, or the problem was with the driver. I had an nVidia 310GT video card that came with the computer. So I bought an Asus nVidia 550GT video card for the grand total of $129 Canadian.

This new video card with the current video driver, from nVidia's website, supports hardware acceleration. This means that any of the screen operations are not done by the CPU but by the video card.

Lightroom: Remember the Why of a Virtual Copy

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 16. December 2011 - 9:16

Lightroom has this wonderful concept of the virtual copy. A virtual copy is just a set of adjustments that is stored in the catalog, it's not an actual file. The beauty of the virtual copies is that it's possible to have hundreds of virtual copies of the same photo but with different adjustments, crops, colors, black and white…

Some people are amazing, years later, they remember every single detail of why they did… and then, there's me. I need to see some notes, then I can remember the tiny details. That's why I need to keep track of why I created the virtual copy.

Renaming a virtual copyLightroom has this wonderful concept of the virtual copy. A virtual copy is just a set of adjustments that is stored in the catalog, it's not an actual file. The beauty of the virtual copies is that it's possible to have hundreds of virtual copies of the same photos but with different adjustments, crops, colors, black and white…I use the `Copy Name` to type in my explanation of what I did and/or why. For me, a large number of the virtual copy are the balck and whites and that's obvious. But I also do virtual copies for printing the different size that forces me to crop such as 8½ by 11 vs 11 by 17 vs … That way I know what's what.lightroom-virtual-copy-name.jpg — ©2011 Syv Ritch -- foto-biz.com: http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms

Lightroom: Renaming A Virtual Copy to Remember the Why of a Virtual Copy

Lightroom: 3.6 is Out

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 13. December 2011 - 11:27

Adobe has release Lightroom 3.6. It's the final, it's not a release candidate. Lightroom 3.6 is available at: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/ and scroll down to Lightroom Windows or Macintosh. I can't give the direct link, because it changes on regular basis.

What's different between the Lightroom 3.6 Release Candidate and the Final/Production Release? At least one bug fix:

  • When printing large images that are “on the warm side” the print/jpeg output was orange. That's the one that affected me, and this was introduced with Lightroom 3.6 Release Candidate.

Lightroom: Where is the Selection Criteria: “Description”

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 13. December 2011 - 6:00

I use Smugmug for my photo back-end for photos.foto-biz.com. The problem that I have is that I wanted to make sure that all the photos have a description.

The proper way would be to use Lightroom with a smart collection. If the description is empty then display the photo in the collection. Should be simple. Yes? No!

Lightroom: Selection Criterias I want to find the photos in Lightroom that do not have any description.The question is where is the description selection criteria?Nowhere to be found.

Lightroom Available Selection Criterias

Lightroom: Default Keyword

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 9. December 2011 - 7:46

lightroom-default-keyword

Right-Click on the keyword > Use this as Keyword Shortcut will either enable or disable the default keyword.

183 Megapixels Photo

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 1. December 2011 - 6:44

This is a humongous, ginormous, image: 183 megapixels. As you can see from the Lightroom screen capture, it is: 37,717 pixels wide by 5,110 pixels high, that's 192,733,870 pixels.

I did this image on a Canon 7D. It's a composite of 42 photos. It was part of a serie of photos that range from 35 megapixels to this one at 183 megapixels.

183 Megapixels photoThis is a humongous, ginormous, image: 183 megapixels. As you can see from the Lightroom screen capture, it is: 37,717 pixels wide by 5,110 pixels high, that's 192,733,870 pixels.I did this image on a Canon 7D. It's a composite of 42 photos. I'm not that interested in a Nikon D800, a D900, a D4, or a whatever the name will be and their rumored 36 megapixels sensor. Where are the lenses for such a sensor? At 18 megapixels per photo, it took me 2½ hours to compile the image on an iCore 7 8Gb RAM. I have so much detail that I can read the labels in the background.I can't put it on my website, I tried and it brought the web server to a crawl. I can't upload it to Smugmug. It's too big. Luckily this image is for printing. I haven't yet discussed it with the printer. I'll do that on Friday.I was able to import it in Lightroom but now Lightroom is extremely slow. The raw image is 1.6 gigabytes, that's a lot of disk IO for the preview. Looks like after the printing, I will have to delete the image from the catalog and recreate it as a JPEG with a 40% to 50% quality to make it manageable.

Lightroom: Don't Import Suspected Duplicates

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 30. November 2011 - 6:10

Usually, when importing photos into a Lightroom catalog, the Do No Import Duplicates is checked on. The question is what's a duplicate? Everybody in their right mind would assume that 2 duplicate photos are 2 identical photos. It turns out that for programmers, 2 identical photos are not the same as 2 identical files.

What Lightroom really mean is 2 identical files. What are identical files?

  • The same name like: charlie-20111129-1234
  • The same file extension like: .cr2

This means that charlie-20111129-1234.cr2 and charlie-20111129-1234.jpg are not identical files.

Lightroom: The Case Against DNG

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 23. November 2011 - 6:24

Adobe created the DNG format: Digital NeGative, we are at version 1.3. According to Adobe:

Key benefits for photographers:

  • DNG format helps promote archival confidence, since digital-imaging software solutions will be able to open raw files more easily in the future.
  • A single raw processing solution enables a more efficient workflow when handling raw files from multiple camera models and manufacturers.
  • A publicly documented and readily available specification can be easily adopted by camera manufacturers and updated to accommodate technology changes.

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — My Summary

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 22. November 2011 - 7:21

After a few major crashes, I decided to start from scratch, almost (I had saved all of my XMPs.) I created a new catalog and imported 93,259 photos. I was able to import all of them in less than 5 days!

Here's my summary for the:

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 3

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 18. November 2011 - 6:40

In this blog post we will discuss the crux of the matter when it come to importing a large amount of photos like I had to do, 93,259 photos.

The “standard” advice is to:

  1. Render Previews 1:1 so that you don't have to wait when you are scrolling through the Develop module or browsing at 1:1

Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 2

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 16. November 2011 - 6:50

In Lightroom: Importing 100 Thousand Photos — Part 1 I spoke about the importance of checking vs un-checking the Include Subfolders on the performance. Now we'll look at the basic import operations, the different ways of getting the photos into Lightroom:

Lightroom: Import Options

  1. Copy as DNG
  2. Copy
  3. Move
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