LR2

Lightroom 2

Lightroom: Recovery +100

Recovery +100 – we are trying to retain highlight detail, so we are going to bump recover to +100.

Anon Ymous

The recovery, is the recovery of the highlights. When the highlights look “clipped / washed out”, that's when to use the recovery. But…

I need to pounce a nail, what to use?

  • Hammer
  • Head of pliers
  • Sledge hammer
  • …

The recovery slider is the same, if you use it too strong, it will “muck” some of the middle tones. So the question, like the 3 bears, what's just right?

Lightroom: Identity Plates for Printing

Lightroom has the concept of the identity plate where you can place either text or a graphic, like the name of your company… The problem is that I really, really don't like how it's implemented in Lightroom, and it's even worth in Windows.

The identity plates are used at the top left corner of the Lightroom screen, on the prints, and the slideshows. Today, we'll deal with the print.

Screen capture of Lightroom's identity pate in the print module: 1. In Windows, the print identity plate can only be 1 line. 2. In OSx, the print identity plate can be more 1 line by using Alt-Enter (I'm told.) 3. Can't find a way of centering the identity plate, it has to be eye-balled and hope for the best. 4. It can be moved anywhere 5. It's a pain to format. It was so frustrating that since I could copy and paste from Word onto Photoshop, why not try it also in Lightroom. Lo and behold, Lightroom kept the formatting, the fonts and the colors. It's especially useful when I need to have different fonts and colors in the identity plate. The identity plate will truncate if there's “too much” text. The identity plate will truncate if there's a line break.

Lightroom: Finding Which Collection does this Photo Belongs To?

Lightroom's strength is supposed to be its Digital Asset Management, meaning organizing and finding photos. The 2 basic ways of organizing the photos in Lightroom:

  1. Collections: either static or smart collections
  2. Keywords

Occasionally, I have a photo and need to know which collection it belongs to:

  1. Select the photo
  2. Right click on the photo for the pop-up menu
  3. Select Go to Collection

It will show all the static collections that the photo belongs to.

RAM vs. CPU in Lightroom

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

What's more important RAM or CPU when running Lightroom?

The same question comes on regular basis on the various Lightroom forums. My answer is:

Spend your money on the fastest CPU you can and don't worry about the RAM!

Here is a screen capture of the Windows Task Manager. It's only running Lightroom. The Lightroom catalog is fairly standard with around 26,000 photos and 4,000 keywords. This Lightroom is still running under Windows XP on this computer. I have another Windows 7 computer with the same version of Lightroom and the same catalogue with very similar results, just Windows 7 takes much more memory but Lightroom runs at the same speed.

What's Wrong with Lightroom and IPTC

IPTC means International Press Telecommunication Council. It's a set of standards for the news organizations to file, archive and manage news data. There are many standards depending on the type of data, from photos and video to sound… Lightroom proclaims proudly that it supports the IPTC standard and even supports the new extended IPTC.

  • Please note that the IPTC is very different from the keywords. The IPTC information is the title, description, copyrights, location…
  • The new, extended IPTC that came out just 3 years ago includes model information, location, artwork, model and property releases…

300 DPI vs 72 DPI

  1. DPI stands for "Dots Per Inch". DPI only applies to output devices, that's for monitors and printers…
  2. PPI stands for "Pixels Per Inch". PPI only applies to input sensors, that's for camera sensors…

If somebody talks about PPI when talking about screens or printers, they don't know what they are talking about! Many printers do not deal in DPI but in LPI "Lines Per Inch", those are mostly CMYK commercial printers, printing presses, magazines, newspapers…

What's the difference between a 300 DPI and a 72 DPI? None, zero, zilch!

Rendering Previews in Lightroom

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.

  1. There is NO correct answer.
  2. It's a preference.
  3. No matter what you decide, Lightroom needs the 1:1 previews. You will have to pay the piper, the question is when. Will you pay at the front-end or at the back-end?

Lightroom Speed Tip and the Raw Cache

Lightroom and Photoshop use the same ACR, Adobe Camera Raw module, to process the photos in 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 the Develop module reads a photo for the first time, Lightroom renders the photo as a full 1:1 preview and adds that photo to the Camera Raw Cache. So the next time it will not have to render that photo again, instead it will read the photo from the disk. The problem is that there is only so much cache.

How To Remove EXIF Data in Lightroom

When I export photos, often I don't want to show all of information, camera, lens, EV settings... Lightroom allows me remove all the EXIF data from my photos. But... There's one thing that I always want exported: my copyright information.

Lightroom has 4 different export format options:

  1. JPEG
  2. PSD
  3. TIFF
  4. DNG (digital negative)

Selecting Minimize Embedded Metadata will remove all of the metadata, the EXIF data, the IPTC data, and all of the extra info.

Lightroom: SSD vs Hard Drives

Some people are buying SSD, Solid State Drives, to speed up their Lightroom and their various disk operations.

SSD started in 1978 at Texas Instrument with the first SSD drive: 16kb. Yes, 16 kilobytes and that's when the hard drives' size were 1Mb and 5Mb. The single largest user for SSD is the military for their laptops. SSD is more shock resistant, but more importantly, with the push of a 3 finger combination the laptop can be erased instantly to prevent the “enemy” from getting the data. You can't do that with a hard drive.

So back to the speed.

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