Welcome to our first blog post about Lightroom 4! (LR 4 Beta at this point).  A number of tutorials and videos are already available about the new features of LR 4; you can find several of them on our ‘Lightroom Links‘ page.  One of the new features [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

Welcome to our first blog post about Lightroom 4! (LR 4 Beta at this point).  A number of tutorials and videos are already available about the new features of LR 4; you can find several of them on our ‘Lightroom Links‘ page.  One of the new features in Lightroom 4 is the ‘Map’ module, and if your computer is connected to the internet the Map module will connect with Google Earth, read each image’s metadata and overlay a map of the earth (or portion thereof) with the location where your images were made.  It’s not a feature I’ll likely use much, but I can see its use in certain applications.

In order to use this feature you need to know where your images were made to begin with.  I’ll get to that in a minute, but before I do I wanted to mention quickly what GPS technology is and is not.  You may have seen a movie where someone has a ‘GPS-device’ the size of a grain of rice injected into their body and all of a sudden they can be tracked around the world by satellite.  Nice, but pretty much pure Hollywood.  Basically, if an electronic device is able to pick up a radio signal it’s called a receiver.  If it can send a signal, it’s called a transmitter.  If it can do both, it’s called a transceiver.  A GPS device is a receiver.  The GPS system begins with over two dozen satellites in ‘geostationary’ orbit around the earth.  Geostationary is a fancy word that means that the satellites’ positions (with respect to the earth) doesn’t change.  Each satellite knows where it is and they each send out a signal with a location and a time code (in UT – Universal Time, also known as ‘Zulu Time’ or ‘Greenwich Mean Time’).  Even though light (and electrical signals) travel at roughly 186320 miles/second, the amount of time it takes to receive a signal from one satellite or another will vary depending on the receiver’s location.  Essentially what a GPS receiver does is receive signals from a few satellites (more is better, but that depends on where you are in the world), and by measuring the time differences for the signal to travel from each satellite, the receiver can determine where on the earth it is.  The accuracy of this information depends on several things, including the quality of the signal, the number of satellites and the quality of the receiver.  There are hybrid devices that will receive GPS signals, determine the receiver’s location and then transmit that information by other means, but that’s something else entirely.  Okay, enough about that.  If you want more advanced knowledge, there are innumerable resources available!

Now, in order to work with Lightroom’s map module, each image needs geolocation information.  There are essentially three ways to do this:

1) Some cameras (my cell phone has a camera, for example) have a built-in GPS receiver, and as such they record the geolocation of every photograph they make.  For some cameras, third party GPS receivers are available that plug in to a camera socket and add this geolocation information to every image as it’s made.  That’s one way.  When you import your images into Lightroom and go to the map module, the images’ geolocation will be shown on the map.

Here’s an example showing three images taken nearby using my cell phone, as well as a preview of one of the images (shown by clicking on the icon).

2) If you don’t have geolocation information for your images, all is not lost.  What you can do is simply select an image or images from the bottom image strip and drag the images onto the appropriate location on the map.  Doing so will automatically add geolocation information to the metadata of each image added.  You can of course zoom in or out on the map before placing the images, depending on the level of accuracy required.

3) The first two methods have been covered in good depth on other sites, but there’s one other method that hasn’t been covered as much, and that’s to use a GPS receiver without linking it to the camera.  That’s really the essence of this blog post.  Since a GPS receiver is recording both the time and the location of the receiver at that time, if you move the receiver and it takes another reading it will have a new time and a new location for that data point.  Join those two location ‘dots’ together with a line and you have the beginnings of a ‘track’.  Virtually all GPS receivers have the ability to record such ‘track’ information and can output that information into a text file called a .gpx file.  A .gpx file is basically a list showing date/time and geolocation in Latitude/Longitude.  Here’s an example of a data point from a .gpx file:

<trkpt lat=”48.48452″ lon=”-123.38307″><ele>8</ele><time>2012-01-19T23:18:28Z</time></trkpt>

This is simple HTML code showing the location (lat/long in degrees and elevation change in feet) for a specific date and time (UT).

What you can do with this information is link the location/time data from the .gpx file with the date/time that the images were taken and assign the geolocation information to the images.

NB: In case it’s not immediately obvious, for this to work you need to coordinate the clocks of your camera and your GPS receiver.  We’re not talking millisecond accuracy, but if the two clocks are off by five or ten minutes, the assigned locations are also going to be off.  If you forget to do this, you can shift the capture time of the images in Lightroom after uploading.  More on that later.

So, the first thing (after returning from your outing) is to create the .gpx file from your receiver and transfer it to the computer on which you have Lightroom.  Read your manual if you’re not sure how to do that.  I’ve created a ‘GPX files’ folder inside my Lightroom folder for these files.  Of course, you also need to import the images into Lightroom.

Now, go to the map module, and at the bottom of the screen is a symbol that looks like a squiggle (the Tracklog icon):

If you don’t see it, check your toolbar options to enable it. If you don’t see the toolbar at all, press ‘T’ to reveal it.

Click on the drop arrow beside the Tracklog icon and select ‘Load Tracklog’.  You can also do this from Map/Tracklog/Load Tracklog.  Lightroom will read the file and add the Tracklog information to the map, like this:

Second, you need to associate the images you made on that trip with the tracklog data.  You do this by selecting the images (either in the Grid module or from the bottom image strip), then clicking on the drop arrow beside the Tracklog icon and selecting ‘Auto-Tag ___ Selected Photos’.  Lightroom will match up the capture times of the images with the tracklog times, add the geolocation information to the metadata for each selected image, then display them on the map, like this:

And you’re done!  Where you have an image icon with a number over it, it means ___ images were taken at that location at that scale on the map.  Zooming in will space the images out, and zooming out to a small enough scale will eventually render them all to one location.  You can turn tracklog visibility on and turn off, although you can only load one tracklog at a time (otherwise it would be challenging to point out which images were to be associated with which tracklog).

A couple of points to note. First, while the GPS location is associated with the metadata of each image, in some cases you may not want this information publicly available: your home, for example, or an ecologically-sensitive area that you don’t want to highlight to people on your favourite social networking sites.  To that end there is a facility to make certain locations ‘private’.  Second, while I mentioned above that you can edit the capture time of your images in Lightrom after importing them, there is something else that may occur in that you may be on vacation or assignment and have moved to a different time zone.  In that case, your GPS receiver will now be recording in local time while your camera may still be recording the time ‘at home’.  To facilitate this, there’s a ‘Set Time Zone Offset’ function in the Tracklog menu.  This came in really handy for me the first time I used the Tracklog feature.  I used my walkaround camera to make the images used as examples for this blog post and I used my Android-enabled cell phone as my GPS receiver.  There are a few different GPS apps for Android (including one from ‘Instamapper‘) but the one I used is ‘My Tracks‘ from Google.  Both are free.  So, I went out the first time, recorded a track, made some images, uploaded it all to Lightrom and it linked… none of my images.  Okay… after some head scratching and wondering what I was doing wrong, I discovered there is (was?) a bug in the My Tracks software.  While my phone knew what day it was and the tracklog was labeled with the correct date, the track information within the log was set forward by 24 hours.  Essentially the .gpx file was telling me I had created the log one day in the future.  That would be nice sometimes, but…  What I did was to offset the tracklog by -24 hours and all of my images lined up as they were supposed to.  I sent a message to the folks at My Tracks with a copy of the tracklog to let them know of the bug, but I don’t know if they’ve yet had a chance to fix it.

One last thing.  As part of the geolocation feature, there’s a new icon on the images in the Lightroom Grid module.  Looking like a push pin, this icon in the bottom of an image means that it has geolocation information.  If you click on the pushpin icon for an image, Lightroom will move to the Map module and display the place where that image was made.

Now go out and make some pictures!

Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Well, my first photo of the month post for 2012, and also my first image posted here that was processed with Lightroom 4 Beta.  Marcia and I were ‘up island’ briefly in Campbell River this past month, and took the opportunity to go for a short walk [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

Well, my first photo of the month post for 2012, and also my first image posted here that was processed with Lightroom 4 Beta.  Marcia and I were ‘up island’ briefly in Campbell River this past month, and took the opportunity to go for a short walk along the shore at Willow Point.  The tide was out and some of the rocks that were revealed were incredible.  I liked this one in particular.  This is an HDR image, 3 exposures at -1/0/+1, shot hand-held and joined together with Autopano Pro then finished off in Lightroom.  I trust you like it!!

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.

Hi Folks:

This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.

To begin with we need to cover a few terms. One is that, as I mentioned in our Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…? post, a digital image isn’t really an ‘image’ in the traditional sense. It starts as light, gets converted into electrical impulses by the camera’s sensor, and is then translated into binary code – 1s and 0s – as a digital file. Be that as it may, there are two aspects to each digital image. One is the image information itself – the code that is assembled to create the image on your computer screen or as a print, and the other is information about the image. This starts in the camera and can include the camera make/model/serial number, the exposure information, date and time of the image capture, the lens, focal length (for zoom lenses), GPS information and more. When the image is transferred to the computer one can add copyright information, keywords, owner contact information… All of this is collectively called ‘metadata’. This metadata is stored in one of two ways, depending on the type of digital image you’re working with. For .TIF, .PSD, .JPG and .DNG files, the metadata is stored within the image file itself. For raw images, a second file, often called a ‘sidecar’ file is generated. Sidecar files have an .XMP extension. Therefore, for a Canon raw file for example, one would have IMG0001.cr2 for the image data, and IMG0001.xmp for the metadata information.

The second thing to understand is that while programs like Lightroom will do raw file conversion, printing, slideshows, web galleries and more, Lightroom is primarily a database management system (DBMS). A database is an organized collection of information, and a DBMS is a program that allows someone to work with and manipulate this information. To me, this is the most important part of the Lightroom program, because it doesn’t matter whether you have 1000 images or 100,000 images, eventually you’re going to be looking for one specific image. How easy (or not) it is to find depends on how well you’ve managed your data. In general terms this is called digital asset management (DAM) (with thanks to Wikipedia!)

The Lightroom Catalog(s) that you have are the database system. There are pros and cons to using one or more than one Lightroom catalog; Julieanne Kost discusses some of them here. For most people, having all of your images in one catalog offers a lot of advantages but the choice is ultimately yours.

Good file structure is also important; how you organize your files is up to you, as long as you make it consistent. If you’re interested you can read about My Lightroom Workflow. Just to be clear, we’re now dealing with 3 separate entities – the image file, the metadata (which may be contained within the image file or in a separate ‘sidecar’ file), and the database system (the Lightroom catalog).

The first step in working with Lightroom is to ‘Import’ one’s images into the Catalog. ‘Import’ is a bit of a misnomer because Lightroom does not store your images in the catalog. What it does is create a line (record) in the catalog for each image that says, ‘This image is located at this location on the hard drive’. That location may be on an internal hard drive, on an external hard drive, or even at an online location. Lightroom doesn’t really care where you store your images, although there are certain advantages to having all of the images stored within one parent folder. When you ‘import’ an image or series of images into Lightroom, the program does several things:

1. It will move/copy the image(s) to the specified location, or add a link to them at their current location. In so doing it creates a pointer so that it knows where the image is located.
2. It will read the metadata information associated with the image(s) and add that information to its database of information for each image.
3. It will create a preview of each image, based on the specifications you set in the Preferences. NB: for raw files, Lightroom will initially display the .jpg image embedded in the raw file until it builds its own previews.

Now that Lightroom knows where the images are located, one should always move images and folders from within Lightroom’s Library module. Doing so ensures that Lightroom will update its pointers as to where the images are located on the drive. If you move an associated image outside of Lightroom, this connection gets broken and you end up with a ? in the top right of each image in the Library module. What that means is that as far as Lightroom is concerned, the image is ‘missing’. If you end up with ‘missing’ images, you can do the following:

1) Open Lightroom and go to the Library module.
2) Click the Library menu in the top toolbar and make sure ‘Show photos in subfolders’ is checked.
3) If the parent folder isn’t showing in the left panel of the Library module/folders panel, right-click on one of the top-most folders showing and select ‘Add Parent Folder’.
4) Once you have the topmost folder showing, click on it and all of your images should be present. Click on the ? mark of one image and select ‘Locate’. Navigate to the new location of that image and click on the image, creating a new file association. Lightroom should now update the locations of all of the missing files within that folder and subfolders.
5) Remember: Once images have been ‘imported’ (associated) with Lightroom, always move them within Lightroom.

The next thing to understand is that in Photoshop for example when you edit an image you’re actually editing the image part of the file – you’re changing pixels – and that’s why it’s important to work with layers to avoid damaging the base layer. Lightroom on the other hand uses a completely non-destructive workflow – called ‘parametric editing’. Rather than altering the pixel information of the image, what it does is write a history of the steps taken in the Develop, Print or other modules. When you ‘Export’ an image from Lightroom it takes the image information from the original file, modifies it according to the history steps and creates a new image file according to the parameters you set.

Now: by default any changes made in Lightroom to either the metadata (adding keywords, copyright information, etc.) or the image (the history steps) are stored only in the Lightroom catalog. That’s why it’s important not to move images outside of Lightroom; it loses track of what information pertains to which image. That’s what the ? means. You can also instruct Lightroom to output that metadata information (including copyright info, keywords, etc. as well as the history steps) to the image metadata (the sidecar file in the case of raw files). You can either set Lightroom to do this automatically or you can do it by selecting one ore more images and pressing Cmd/Ctrl-S. The advantage of doing this automatically is that you have a continual backup of this information. The disadvantage is that it takes computer resources to do this and you may suffer a slowdown in performance. At the risk of being redundant, if you don’t save out this information, then all of the metadata information is stored only within the LR catalog and not with the image itself. This is fine as long as you use Lightroom exclusively as a file manager and you back up regularly.

When you import an image into Lightroom it reads the metadata stored with the image file. However, if you didn’t save the metadata out to the files and you re-import the image as a ‘new’ file, Lightroom won’t know that any changes have been made to it and will treat it as an unedited file.

Let’s construct a hypothetical scenario. Take Image 1, import it into Lightroom, and upon import Lightroom will read the metadata and gain whatever information is in there about the camera, lens, exposure, etc. Make some changes to the image in Lightroom, which are stored in the catalog (database). Now, move that file outside of Lightroom and you get a ? beside the image. When you relink the image at its new location back to the catalog Lightroom lines up all of the changes made in Lightroom with that image at its new location.

Take Image 2, import it into Lightroom and Lightroom will read the metadata, etc. Make some changes in Lightroom and once you’ve finished in the Develop module, write those changes to the image metadata. Now the information is stored in both the Lightroom catalog and the image metadata. Now, remove the image from the Lightroom catalog (but don’t delete it from the hard drive). Move that file to a new location outside of Lightroom. Import that file into Lightroom again and when Lightroom reads the metadata it will say, “Oh, I’ve already created a history file for this image” and show the image with the changes made in Lightroom. NB: Some things like Pick Flags, Collections and Virtual Copies are stored only in the Lightroom catalog no matter what.

Take Image 3, import it into Lightroom… Make some changes to the image, which Lightroom stores in its catalog. Do NOT write the changes to the image metadata. Remove the file from the Lightroom catalog (but don’t delete it from the hard drive). Move the image outside of Lightroom, or leave it where it is, doesn’t matter (because when you remove the image from the catalog Lightroom deletes the association it had with that file). Re-import that image into Lightroom and because all of the Develop settings, history, etc. were only stored in the catalog and not written to the image, when Lightrom imports the image it will read the camera, lens, exposure information, etc. from the image metadata but all of the keywords, edit changes, etc. made in Lightroom will be gone and it will treat it as a new file.

See the difference? If you store the metadata added by Lightroom to the image file before removing a file or folder from the catalog, when you re-import them Lightroom will read the edit information from the image metadata. If those images were removed from Lightroom where the edits, keywords, etc. were stored only in Lightroom, then you’ll still be able to re-import the original files but all of the changes you made in Lightroom will be gone.

In that event you may be able to get the information back, depending on whether or not you backed up the Lightroom catalog. If you did back up the catalog before you removed the images, go to the folder where your Lightroom catalog is stored there will be a Backups folder. Within that folder will be a number of folders, each with a backup date. Pick the most recent folder before the images were removed from Lightrom and within that folder will be a Lightroom catalog. Hold down the Alt/Opt key and click on the catalog to open Lightroom with that catalog. The metadata/history information should be there, although if the files/folders have been moved the images may have question marks. Relink them if necessary. Now, go to File/ Export as Catalog and export the catalog somewhere like the Desktop. Go to File/Open Catalog, open your default Lightroom catalog, then go to File/ Import from Catalog and select the catalog you just saved to your Desktop. If you cross your fingers and hold your tongue just right, it will add the files/folders that are not currently in the Lightroom catalog along with the Develop changes, etc.

I trust that makes some kind of sense! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below. Now go out and make some pictures!

Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

]]> http://www.wolfnowl.com/2012/01/lightroom-file-management-and-metadata/feed/ 2 http://www.wolfnowl.com/2011/12/2012-photo-calendars/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2012-photo-calendars http://www.wolfnowl.com/2011/12/2012-photo-calendars/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:52:58 +0000 Mike Nelson Pedde http://www.wolfnowl.com/?p=5607 Hi Folks:

While there are usually several templates made every year to make photo calendars in Lightroom, (with many thanks to their respective providers, you can find one here, one here, one here, one here, a Photoshop script here, and while not a template, Matt Kloskowski has a video [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

While there are usually several templates made every year to make photo calendars in Lightroom, (with many thanks to their respective providers, you can find one here, one here, one here, one here, a Photoshop script here, and while not a template, Matt Kloskowski has a video on using downloaded calendar images in Lightroom here (corrected the link, December 20).  NB: He begins in Photoshop, but you can do most of what he does straight in Lightroom.  I’ll add more links as I come across them)  last year I created a template in MS Word that allowed people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars.  Thought I’d do the same again this year.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file.  Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

The large square at the top is a blank picture file.  If you click on it and go to Insert/Picture, you can replace the existing (blank) picture with one of your own.  The easiest way is to select 12 images that all have the same size/shape; otherwise you may have to fiddle with the cell heights to make the calendar line up from month to month.  Where it says ‘Caption’, you can highlight and type in your own caption for each image, or you can simply highlight and delete the text if you don’t want a caption.  Here are the template files:

2012 Calendar template – Word 2007
2012 Calendar template – Word 97-2003

Last year I also made my own photo calendar available, and some people seemed to appreciate that so I did it again this year.  It looks like this:

As before, all of the images were made on Vancouver Island.  The image for March was made at Botany Bay in Juan de Fuca Provincial Park, and the others were all made in the Victoria area; all were made in the month they represent (i.e. the image for January 2012 was made in January 2011, etc.)  I saved it as a .pdf file, then zipped it to save a little space.  Clicking on the picture will enable you to download the zip file.

BTW, all of the images in the calendar are covered by a Creative Commons license, non-commercial, non-dervis.  That means you can use them for personal use but not for business, you can’t modify or change them in any way, and if you do use them you’ll give me credit for them by adding my name and linking back to this site or our Flickr site.  Thanks!!

Our best wishes to you and those close to you for a new year full of as much love, excitement, joy, peace and harmony as you can handle!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Ed Weaver kindly provided one of the Lightroom template sets linked above.  He also passed along this advice:

“By the way. I do them in gray scale so I can color them in LR.

If you go to Split Toning in the develop module, you can set the balance to -100, (more shadow). Turn up the saturation slider up to 100, (max color in shadows), using the shadow hue slider you can change the color of the grays. Play with the hue and saturation and balance sliders until you get what you like. To match your pictures.”

P.S. II, the sequel You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

This is going to be a very short (for me) post, and is really just a pointer to some excellent articles written by someone else.  Photographer Alain Briot recently wrote a series of three articles for the Luminous Landscape, and while they’re primarily written for the understanding [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

This is going to be a very short (for me) post, and is really just a pointer to some excellent articles written by someone else.  Photographer Alain Briot recently wrote a series of three articles for the Luminous Landscape, and while they’re primarily written for the understanding of photographers, I think the points Alain makes have a broader reference to the criticisms we all deal with in our daily life.

You can find them here:

Understanding Criticism, Part 1: The Many Faces of Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 2: Responding to Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 3: A few words on perseverance

Okay, that’s it for now!

Hugs,
Mike.

(See, I told you it was going to be short… )

One thing I see frequently on Twitter is that someone has decided to import or export a large number of images and is then distraught about how long this particular process is taking.  There can be many reasons for this; some of them you can change, and [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

One thing I see frequently on Twitter is that someone has decided to import or export a large number of images and is then distraught about how long this particular process is taking.  There can be many reasons for this; some of them you can change, and some you can’t but I thought I’d put together a few tips.  These have been cobbled together from both my own experience and from a number of other sites, so my thanks to those others!

1) Your computer.  This one’s pretty obvious, but Lightroom is a memory-intensive program, both for RAM and for video memory.  More RAM, a faster hard drive or SSD drive, and an up-to-date video card will obviously make things go faster.  My one complaint about my current laptop is that I didn’t check before I purchased it to see if it has separate video memory.  It doesn’t, and so a portion of RAM is going to that and that cuts down on how much is available to the processor.  If you’re trying to run other memory-intensive programs at the same time, well, there’s only so much RAM to go around.  If you’re on Windows, be aware that if you have more than 4GB of RAM you need to be running a 64-bit version of Windows and you need to run Lightroom in 64-bit mode in order to make proper use of that extra memory.  Oh, one more thing to check is to see how much available space you have on your hard drive and when was the last time you optimized it.  This can also slow things down.

2) Lightroom itself.  Some people want Lightroom to work more like Adobe Bridge, but there’s a fundamental difference between the two programs.  Bridge is a file browser – more advanced but not much different than Mac Finder or My Computer on Windows.  It does have direct connections to other Adobe programs like ACR or Photoshop.  Lightroom on the other hand is a database management program.  Yes, it does RAW conversion, post-processing, slideshows, printing and more, but at it’s heart Lightroom is a program that handles ‘digital asset management’ – keeping track of and organizing your files.  The core of the Lightroom program is the database or catalog.  Everything related to every file connected to Lightroom is stored in the catalog file, and that information needs to be created, distributed and marked.  Julieanne Kost has a great video tutorial on this and you can also read our “Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…?” post.  While I’m talking about the Lightroom program, keep the ‘File/Optimize Catalog’ command in mind.  It’s a reasonably quick way of going through your catalog, straightening the shelves, dusting things off and making the catalog more efficient.

3) Multiple Processes.  Based on this article: Optimizing Adobe Lightroom, breaking up your imports/exports into two or three simultaneous processes can be faster and more efficient, depending on what you’re importing/exporting.  In other words, if you have 1000 images to import/export, try doing 500, then while Lightroom is chewing on that, import/export the other half.   NB: This article was written for Lightroom 2; I’m assuming the folks at Adobe have made the process more efficient for Lightroom 3 but I have no numbers to verify that.

4) Import Strategies.  There are several ways to associate your images with the Lightroom catalog, and two main ways of dealing with your images once they are.  Your workflow decisions impact a number of parameters.  To start with, you can either import the images directly from the card on which they were captured, or you synchronize them with Lightroom once they’re already stored in their destination.  NB: never import your images from the card by connecting your camera to your computer.  Yes, this is possible.  It’s also abysmally slow.  Get a good card reader.  Whether you use USB2, USB3 or Firewire to connect your card reader depends on what hardware you have available, but all are faster than connecting and transferring from your camera.  If you have more than one card reader you can connect them both (all) and transfer more than one card at a time.  Depending on your computer this MAY cause a bottleneck but there are too many variables to say.  Now, as I said, you can either Copy your images directly from the card into Lightroom and have them stored somewhere on an internal or external drive, or you can copy them to their destination(s) first and then Add them to Lightroom from their existing locations.  There are pros and cons to both.  The other factor is how you handle your images once they’ve been imported.  Some people keep every image they import, bar none.  They find it faster to deal with the images they want to work with and simply ignore the rest.  Coming from the film days, I tend to be very scrupulous about weeding out and deleting images I don’t want to keep.  Again, pros and cons to both, but this decision impacts several others.  For example, see the next 3 categories.

5) Previews. Every image associated with Lightroom, whether RAW, .JPG, .TIF or whatever has two preview images associated with it, one for the Library Module and one for the Develop Module.  It’s also possible to generate previews of different size and quality, up to 1:1.  Now, it’s obvious that generating 1:1 previews will create bigger files and take longer, and so this is something you’ll want to consider when importing.  If you generate 1:1 previews on Import, it will take longer initially but Lightroom won’t have to take time to build a larger preview later when you zoom into an image.  On the other hand, if you’re going to do an immediate cull of images after importing, there’s no point in generating previews for images you’re only going to trash.  Under Edit/Catalog Settings (Windows) or Lightroom/Catalog Settings (Mac) under the File Handling tab you can set the Standard Preview size and quality, and in the Import Window under File Handling (top right tab) you tell Lightroom whether to create Minimal, Embedded and Sidecar, Standard or 1:1 previews.  If you choose to make smaller previews on import, in the Library module you can select an image or images and go to Library/Previews to render Standard or 1:1 previews after importing.

6) To DNG or Not to DNG?  .DNG is Adobe’s open-source (i.e. free) RAW file standard.  A few camera manufacturers use it as a RAW file format on capture; some people like it and some people don’t.  On the plus side is the fact that proprietary RAW file formats are getting more and more diverse, and as software gets updated, older file formats become unsupported.  Think of it as a language that nobody can read.  Somewhere in a box I have a couple of CDs of images that were scanned using Kodak’s .PCD format, and no current software that I know of can read a .PCD file.  I keep an old copy of Corel Photopaint for just such a purpose.  Imagine ‘losing’ your images simply because they can no longer be opened.  On the other hand, camera manufacturers are putting more and more metadata and other information into their proprietary files (to be opened, preferably with their proprietary software) and a .DNG file is more general than that.  One alternative is to embed the original RAW file within the .DNG, at a cost of disk space (Edit/Preferences/File Handling – Windows or Lightroom/Preferences/File Handling – Mac).  Again, however, if you’re going to go through and purge files from Lightroom after importing, rather than ‘Copy as DNG’ on Import you might want to select files from the Library module and use Library/ Convert Photo to DNG afterward.

7) Backups.  In our Help! I Deleted My Lightroom Images!! post I talked some about backups.  All computer data is ephemeral, and prone not only to equipment failure but also to various kinds of damage such as fire, theft, etc.  Backups are vital.  As to how/when, etc. there are a number of strategies, but the essential question remains, “How much can you afford to lose?”  When importing images into Lightroom, you have the option of backing them up to a secondary location on import.  Again, your workflow decisions determine whether it’s worth backing up every file immediately or whether you want to cull some images first, but AT LEAST back them up before reformatting the card on which the images were stored.

Exports.  Okay, that should give you a few ideas on optimizing imports… that leaves Export strategies.  Since Lightroom uses a completely non-destructive workflow, none of the editing changes in Lightroom are made to the image itself until you export it.  Depending on how and where the exported image is going to be used, you have some choices to make.  From the perspective of speeding up exports, the trade-offs are finished file size vs. quality.  Remember step #3 above – Multiple Processes as well.  There are several options for export settings, and the first one is file type.  Whether you export as .JPG, .TIF, .DNG or .PSD depends on where and how the image is going to be used, and different options open up depending on file type.  JPG files for example are ‘lossy’ files, and the quality slider in the export module determines overall quality and thus file size.  These options have been covered well by others before me, so rather than reiterating them here I’ll just point you to those articles:

Adobe Help Resource Center: Export file settings
Jeffrey Friedl: An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings

Okay, that’s it for now.  Go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our Lightroom and photography tutorials here, and links to over 2oo other sites with Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

End of the month again, and while Hallowe’en is tomorrow, I’m not going to post pictures of zombies, ghouls, ghosts or other Hallowe’en characters.  I thought I’d mention something else entirely: serendipity.  Roughly defined as a ‘happy accident’, serendipity from a photographer’s perspective often comes about from [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

End of the month again, and while Hallowe’en is tomorrow, I’m not going to post pictures of zombies, ghouls, ghosts or other Hallowe’en characters.  I thought I’d mention something else entirely: serendipity.  Roughly defined as a ‘happy accident’, serendipity from a photographer’s perspective often comes about from having a camera at just the right moment, to capture something you might otherwise have missed.  Most of my photography is landscape work, and while I do go out on photographic expeditions, I usually have a camera with me wherever I go – even if it’s just the camera in my cell phone. I chose two images for this month’s ‘Photo of the Month’ post because they were both taken under similar circumstances.

The first image was made when I was walking along the path that runs between Dallas Road and the Juan de Fuca Strait.  I’ve made many photographs along there, but on this day I was just out enjoying the evening.  I wandered down to Finlayson Point just as the sun was setting and the clouds were just amazing.  I had just enough time to dig my camera out of my backpack and make one image before the light changed.

The second image I made when Marcia and I were waiting for the bus near the blue bridge, downtown.  Again, I’ve made many images of the inner harbour area, but on this occasion we just wandered down to the water and came across this sunset.  This image is a composite of 18 images, an HDR panorama of 6 images with 3 exposures for each image.  I didn’t have a tripod with me so simply balanced the camera on top of a fence post.

They both worked out pretty well, I think.

Okay, that’s it for now.  Remember to keep a camera with you ‘just in case’, and go out and make some pictures!

Hugs,
Mike.

There was a question on Twitter today asking people about their favourite Lightroom plugin.  While I have a few that I use (including Jeffrey Friedl’s export plugin for Flickr), one of the plugins I use the most is the LR/Enfuse plugin from Timothy Armes.  In essence the [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

There was a question on Twitter today asking people about their favourite Lightroom plugin.  While I have a few that I use (including Jeffrey Friedl’s export plugin for Flickr), one of the plugins I use the most is the LR/Enfuse plugin from Timothy Armes.  In essence the LR/Enfuse plugin allows you to combine multiple exposures into one image, and I use it in three different ways:

1) HDR

HDR is an acronym for ‘High Dynamic Range‘ and essentially refers to making several images of the same scene at different exposures to capture detail in the highlights, midtones and shadows beyond what’s possible in a single exposure.  For more on this you can read our ‘Why Use HDR‘ post.  Many people associate HDR with images that have been greatly tonemapped, but HDR need not be used in that way.  What the LR/Enfuse plugin allows you to do is to combine images made at various exposures into single-image composites, extracting the best detail from each base image.  LR/Enfuse doesn’t have the tonemapping capabilities of HDR Efex Pro, Photomatix or PTGui for example, but it will allow you to create realistic-looking images with more dynamic range than you can get from a single capture.  Here are a couple of images as examples:

LR/Enfuse also has a ‘batch’ feature, so by grouping the images for each composite into an image stack in Lightroom, one can select all of the stacks and process them at once.

2) Movement

I’ve done three blog posts now on ‘Photographing Moving Water‘, describing how I use LR/Enfuse to create an effect that is similar to but different than that created using very long exposure times.  The image below, for example, was created using 20 images combined together using LR/Enfuse.  NB:  This is also an HDR image, so the individual exposures were made at varying shutter speeds.  Often when doing this work I’m not sure how many images will be appropriate for a final composite so I usually begin by creating batches of four or five images, then comparing and selecting from those results, stacking them and running LR/Enfuse again on the previously-created composites until I get the look I want.  It’s very much trial and error, as described in the second ‘Moving Water’ post.

3) Image Composites

Entire books have been written about creating image composites in Photoshop, and the LR/Enfuse plugin can’t begin to approach that.  For example, there’s no masking feature per se and no layers, either in Lightroom or in the LR/Enfuse plugin (there is a Layers plugin for Lightroom from On One Software, but I haven’t yet tried it).  However, back in the film days I would sometimes take two 35mm slides and simply sandwich them together in the same frame.  LR/Enfuse can do the equivalent of this, with the advantage of selecting the ‘best’ pixels from each image at the same time.  Here’s an example from a couple of images I made recently in a local park.  I was making images of tree branches reflecting in the water of a pond, and was caught by the abstract quality of the images I made.  I also made a series of exposures of fallen leaves that were floating in the water.  Individually they look like this:

They’re not bad on their own, but they looked to me like good candidates to be combined together.  The final result looks like this:

So, those are just a few ideas for you to play with.  LR/Enfuse is ‘charged’ by donation, but remember that paying what you can gives independent developers a means of living and also encourages them to create new products.  For me, the LR/Enfuse plugin is well worth it.

Now go out and make some pictures!!

Hugs,
Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find a list of nearly 200 sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

A few years ago photographer Alain Briot did an article for the Luminous Landscape titled, “Just Say Yes” as a way of answering this question.  The thing of it is, the answer is ‘yes’ for everyone, but a lot of people don’t seem to think so.  Thought [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

A few years ago photographer Alain Briot did an article for the Luminous Landscape titled, “Just Say Yes” as a way of answering this question.  The thing of it is, the answer is ‘yes’ for everyone, but a lot of people don’t seem to think so.  Thought I’d write a short (for me) blog post about it.  To begin with, we’d best get that word ‘manipulate‘ out of the way.  From Dictionary.com:

ma·nip·u·late

[muh-nip-yuh-leyt]
verb (used with object), -lat·ed, -lat·ing.

1. to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner: to manipulate people’s feelings.
2. to handle, manage, or use, especially with skill, in some process of treatment or performance: to manipulate a large tractor.
3. to adapt or change (accounts, figures, etc.) to suit one’s purpose or advantage.
4. Medicine/Medical . to examine or treat by skillful use of the hands, as in palpation, reduction of dislocations, or changing the position of a fetus.

See, that’s not so bad.  If you asked the average photographer whether or not s/he is able to ‘handle, manage, or use‘ his or her camera, ‘especially with skill‘, I don’t think they’d take offense.  Still, somewhere along the way the idea of manipulating one’s images has taken a wrong turn.  There are a couple of reasons for this, I think.  One is the general idea that photographs (unlike paintings or drawings) represent ‘reality’.  If a photograph is seen not to represent some form of reality, people can take offense to this.  The other is that programs like Photoshop allow those with the skill to create graphic manipulations that have no bearing on ‘reality’ at all.

Leaving those gross forms of image manipulations aside, do you manipulate your images?  Yes.  Everyone does.  Let me explain.

To start with, when we point a camera at a subject we’re rendering a three-dimensional scene into a two-dimensional representation.  Now, we choose a lens (an amount of positive or negative magnification, among other things), we choose a point in the scene on which to focus (a camera to subject distance), and we choose a range of distances (depth of field) to be in focus.  Depending on the light and other factors, we set an ISO, a lens opening (f/stop) and a shutter speed to create a desired effect.  We also look through the viewfinder or at the LCD and we move the camera around to create a composition – including some subject matter in the frame and exluding others.  Before you press the shutter you’ve already contrived to create the scene you want and you haven’t yet made an exposure.  Have you put a filter on the lens or (intentionally) moved the camera during exposure?

If you’re using film, you choose the film you want that will give you a certain ‘look’.  Fuji Velvia and Kodal Tri-X Pan are two very different films, just as an example.  The chemicals and processing times for the film (among other things) contribute to the look of the final print, as does the paper and the printing process.

Okay, but this is a digital world and (almost) NOBODY shoots film anymore.  In fact, “I proudly display images right out of my camera!“  Right?  Well… not exactly.  See, every digital camera makes two types of images – RAW files and .jpg files.  I’m not going to cover this in any depth, but if you’re interested you can read our ‘Photography and Colour Management‘ post.  Some cameras don’t give you the option of working with the RAW images and only show you the .jpgs but all cameras make them.  In the digital world, this is where an image begins – with light hitting the camera’s digital sensor.  That information, collected and converted to digital 1s and 0s is the ‘raw’ image information from the sensor.  It’s the purest form of digital capture.  It also looks like crap, and nobody would show it to anyone outside of a very small circle of people involved with digital camera sensors.  In order to actually see this information as an image you need to convert that information (I could use big words like linear demosaicing, but I won’t) into something that looks like a picture.  You need to assign a colour temperature (white balance), and you’ll want to make at least some basic contrast and sharpening adjustments.  Now, there are two ways to do this.  One is to take the raw files from the camera and import them into a ‘RAW converter’ software program like DxO, Lightroom/ ACR, Aperture, Capture One, ACDSee Pro or something similar.  In this way the photographer uses the processing power of his or her computer to customize the look of each image to the best of his or her ability.  This is definitely ‘image manipulation’, but mostly we call it ‘post-processing’.  I often wonder… why ‘post-processing’?  Isn’t that something you do ‘after‘ processing?  Anyway…

There are those who, for various reasons, choose not to use the RAW images from their camera.  These people choose, by intention or default, to use the ‘post-processing’ capabilities of the computer in the camera.  They may not think of it that way, but in the camera’s various menus the photographer sets a white balance, a sharpening level, and maybe uses one or more pre-baked ‘scene modes’.  This is also image manipulation, (aka post-processing) except that amount of user control or input is minimal and the results are standardized based on existing algorithms within the camera.  Each route has its place.  A lot of newer photographers wonder why the RAW image they’re looking at on their computer screen bears little resemblance to the little preview picture they saw and loved on the back of the camera.  The answer is because the preview image they saw was the post-processed .jpg image embedded inside the RAW file and not the RAW image data.

But what about stitched panoramas, tonemapped images, composites and ‘Photoshopped’ images?  Those are also image manipulations, some of them more overt than others.  They appeal to some people and not to others, but it’s a big world.  The bottom line is that the answer to “Do you manipulate your images?” is the same for everyone, for every image.  Just say ‘Yes’.

Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find a list of nearly 200 sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

One of the basic tenets in photography is that every image has to stand on its own merit – as the saying goes, “Nobody cares what you went through to make that photograph.”  Still, I’m reasonably proud of the image below because of the circumstances in which [...]]]>

Hi Folks:

One of the basic tenets in photography is that every image has to stand on its own merit – as the saying goes, “Nobody cares what you went through to make that photograph.”  Still, I’m reasonably proud of the image below because of the circumstances in which it was made.

About the middle of September Marcia and I took the ferry over to Saltspring Island to take in the market and the Fall Fair, and we caught a late afternoon ferry to return.  There was a storm brewing, so, fool that I am, rather than being safely ensconced in the cabin I was out on deck making photographs of the clouds.  This image is a panorama stitched together from 19 images, shot handheld on a moving ferry.  The 19 images were stitched together in Autopano Pro, and the final image was pushed around a bit in Lightroom.  I trust you’ll enjoy it!

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Saltspring Island Storm Clouds