LR2

Lightroom 2

Lightroom: Vibrance

The Vibrance in Lightroom saturates the colors that are unsaturated. It's different from the saturation which saturates all the colors.

This photos is part of my project on the cats and dogs of the "Downtown East Side".

Here's the before the vibrance and after the vibrance. The before is not the Lightroom default, everything is set to 0.

Lightroom: Slow as Molasse on a Cold Day

A friend/customer of mine, Rich, was having problems with his Lightroom 3.3 (current). It was as fast as molasses on a cold day.

I tried to help him over the phone, no luck. Time for TeamViewer. It's some software so I can log onto his computer without having me to drive there.

Yes, it's slow, very slow. A quick looking around, nothing too obvious. Switching to the Grid View is extremely slow. I start the task manager to see what's happening and I see a very high IO, it's the one in red. IO is Input/Output.

Lightroom Mistakes

I was at Best Buy. You know the place where the sales people are not on commission. I was looking for some parts and the sales guy was explaining Lightroom to the “soon to be customer”. I claim, BTW it's a self-claim, being a “Lightroom Expert” but there are days when I shouldn't. There was so much B.S that came out from the sales guy that I decided to clarify a few points…

  1. Lightroom doesn't keep your photos.
  2. Lightroom doesn't store your photos.
  3. Lightroom stores information about your photos.

Lightroom Develop History

It takes me many steps to get the crop to what I want. Often 10 steps, 15 steps or even 20+ steps.

Lightroom Develop History

Lightroom Develop History

The question is should I delete all these steps and have them merged into one step?

  1. The history does not involve any change to the photo itself.
  2. Each step of the history is only one entry/row of the database that only involves two dozen bytes.

Lightroom: Imports and Previews

When importing photos into your Lightroom, you have 4 choices for your previews:

  1. Minimal
  2. Embedded and Sidecar
  3. Standard
  4. 1:1

Why the choices? Lightroom generates the previews on the fly as needed, whenever you zoom in the photo at 100% or in the Develop module. The problem is speed versus convenience. No matter what, you will have to pay the piper, either front-end or back-end, but you will pay the piper.

Lightroom: Multiple Copies of One Photo

Lightroom is fantastic when it comes to classifying, organizing, and retrieving photos. Any photo can be placed in dozens and dozens of collections. The collections can be manual collections, like the photos that I like or the photos in smart collections, like all the photos taken in the month of January.

The problem of all of these collections and “copies” of the photos is that they all point to the same photo, the original photos. I placed the word copies in quote because they are not copies, they are just pointers. The pointer points to the original photo.

Lightroom: Sorting Photos Your Own Way

Sorting photos your own way in Lightroom is called “User Sort”. You do it by dragging and dropping the photos from the Grid into the film strip. Then you can have your gallery with the photos in the “right order”, or for printing of the photos in the “right order” or, for…

A lot of people can't make it work. The problem is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. Why? Because Lightroom has rules for the User Sort:

  1. You must be in the Grid view.
  2. You must be in a folder without any sub-folder.

Lightroom & XMP Sidecars

Normally, aka by default, Lightroom does not save its work to the sidecars. You can create the sidecar by pressing Ctrl-S or Cmd-S. The problem is that the sidecar file does not include everything. DNG files do not have sidecars. All the sidecar information is embedded inside the DNG file.

What's a sidecar you ask? It's a text file that has the same name as your photo, except for the extension replaced with .XMP .

Lightroom: EXIF vs XMP vs IPTC

Doesn't this sound like alphabet soup?

  • EXIF: Exchangeable image file format
  • XMP: Extensible Metadata Platform from Adobe
  • IPTC: International Press Telecommunications Council

I don't know if you have experienced it, you've typed in your copyright, Lightroom and Adbobe Photoshop will show you one thing, and other software will show you something different, especially web galleries. “But I typed it in! It shows in Lightroom but not in…”

The main problem is due to the alphabet soup. There's EXIF, there's XMP, and then there's IPTC core and IPTC extensions.

Lightroom: The Basic Panel

The vast majority of the changes done to a photo done in the Develop module are done in the Basic panel. Many people move this slider here, that slider there… But what do they do?

Lightroom: Develop Module Basic Panel

Lightroom: Develop Module Basic Panel

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