LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) serial key or number

LR/Mogrify 2 is a post-process plugin for Lightroom that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It's flexible interface allows you to add outer and inner borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images. It's also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

The plugin uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

Implemented as a "post-process" plugin, LR/Mogrify 2 works in tandem with other export plugins. This allows you to process your images using LR/Mogrify 2 and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plugin of your choice.

Donating

LR/Mogrify 2 is a donationware plugin. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards the development of this plugin will provide you with a serial number removes this restriction.

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cfe036a44b LR/Mogrify 2 - Add Watermarks, Border and Text Annotions .Note that LR/Mogrify is not yet compatible with version 7.. An update will be provided in the future.. .. Installing LR/Mogrify 2.. Download and unzip LR/Mogrify 2.Lrmogrify2 Crack, Serial & KeygenFound results for Lrmogrify2 crack, serial & keygen.. Our results are updated in real-time and rated by our users.LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) serial key or numberSerial key for LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) can be found and viewed here.. We have the largest serial numbers data base.lr mogrify 2 Crack Serial Keygen Torrent Free Full Version .lr mogrify 2 Full Download, lr mogrify 2 Cracks, lr mogrify 2 Serials, lr mogrify 2 KeygensMogrify Serial Key - haziker2x4kMogrify Serial Key.. .. Found 6 results for Mogrify.. The word "keygen" means a small program that can generate a cd key, .. Choose "LR/Mogrify 2" from the list of .daemon tools lite 10 serial number freelr mogrify 2 keygen torrent oracle 10g full version free download for windows 7 64 bit nexcare skin crack care uk address pes 2012 patch 3.5 cracklr mogrify 2 pluginLR/Mogrify 2 (Previously called LR2/Mogrify) LR/Mogrify 2 is a post-process plugin for Lightroom 2 and higher that can embellish your images as they are exported .SerialBay - Search Results: Lr Mogrify 2 Serial, Serial .Serials, numbers and keys for Lr Mogrify 2.. Make your Software full version with serials from SerialBay.Atomic Mail Sender Download Crack - sochisonabiAtomic Mail Sender Download Crack .. tester keygen software 22 jump street crack cocaine lr mogrify 2 keygen software chittod ki rani padmini serial number .LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) Serial Number, key, crack .LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) Serial Numbers.. Convert LR/Mogrify 2 (Version 4.33) trail version to full software.

Inside Lightroom 2

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Inside Lightroom 2 The serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency Richard Earney

Amsterdam • Boston • Heidelberg • London • New York • Oxford • Paris • San Diego • San Francisco • Singapore • Sydney • Tokyo • Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier

This book is dedicated to Janette; for everything. Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP, UK 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA First edition 2009 Copyright © 2009, Richard Earney. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved The right of Richard Earney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone: (⫹44) (0) 1865 843830; fax: (⫹44) (0) 1865 853333; email: permissions@elsevier.com. Alternatively visit the Science and Technology Books website at www.elsevierdirect.com/rights for further information Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Earney, Richard Inside Lightroom 2 : the serious photographer’s guide to Lightroom efficiency 1. Adobe Photoshop lightroom I. Title 775’. 0285536 Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008908020 ISBN: 978-0-240-81142-0 For information on all Focal Press publications visit our website at www.focalpress.com Printed and bound in Canada 09 10 11 12

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements....................................................................... xi Chapter 1: Lightroom Basics .......................................................... 3 Conventions ...................................................................................................... 4 What is Lightroom? ........................................................................................ 5 Why Choose Lightroom?.............................................................................. 7 Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw ...................................................... 10 Camera Support ............................................................................................ 11 Camera Support in ACR 4.5/Lightroom 2.0 ......................................... 12 DNG ................................................................................................................... 14 The Lightroom Interface ............................................................................ 15 Library Module .............................................................................................. 15 Loupe View ..................................................................................................... 16 Compare View ................................................................................................ 17 Survey View .................................................................................................... 18 Develop Module ........................................................................................... 19 Slideshow Module........................................................................................ 20 Print Module ................................................................................................... 21 Web Module ................................................................................................... 22 The Import and Export Modules ............................................................. 22 Lightroom and Color Management ....................................................... 24 Chapter 2: The Ideal System ........................................................ 27 Computers ...................................................................................................... 28 64 Bit ................................................................................................................. 28 RAM ................................................................................................................... 30 Processors........................................................................................................ 30 Storage ............................................................................................................. 30 Backup .............................................................................................................. 34 Archiving ......................................................................................................... 34 A Possible Disk Setup .................................................................................. 36

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CONTENTS

Monitors........................................................................................................... 37 Calibration ....................................................................................................... 38 Chapter 3: What’s New in 2? ......................................................... 41 64 Bit support and performance improvements .............................. 42 Multiple-monitor Support......................................................................... 42 File Size ............................................................................................................. 46 Integration with Photoshop ..................................................................... 46 Collection in Lightroom 2 ..........................................................................49 Collections ...................................................................................................... 49 New Library Features .................................................................................. 51 Library Browsing ........................................................................................... 52 Keywording .................................................................................................... 55 Exporting ......................................................................................................... 57 Develop Module Changes ......................................................................... 58 Detail ................................................................................................................. 61 Vignettes .......................................................................................................... 61 Camera Calibration ...................................................................................... 62 DNG Profile Editor ........................................................................................ 66 Lightroom’s Tool Shelf ................................................................................. 68 Graduated Filter ............................................................................................ 68 Adjustment Brush......................................................................................... 70 Slideshow ........................................................................................................ 74 Print ................................................................................................................... 75 Revised Print Sharpening .......................................................................... 75 Print to JPEG ................................................................................................... 76 16 Bit Output .................................................................................................. 76 Picture Packages ........................................................................................... 76 Web .................................................................................................................... 77 What is not in 2? ............................................................................................ 77 The Lightroom SDK ...................................................................................... 79 Chapter 4: File Management and Workfow ................................ 81 File Structure .................................................................................................. 82 File Browser versus a Database Application ....................................... 82

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CONTENTS

Working With Lightroom ........................................................................... 84 File Structure by Date.................................................................................. 85 Creating Catalogs and Importing ........................................................... 87 Preference Screens ....................................................................................... 88 Catalog Settings ............................................................................................ 89 Previews ........................................................................................................... 91 Preview Management ................................................................................. 93 Import ............................................................................................................... 95 Alternative Import Strategies ................................................................... 98 Backup ........................................................................................................... 100 The First Pass ............................................................................................... 100 The Rejects ................................................................................................... 101 Dealing with the Undecideds ............................................................... 103 The Picks ....................................................................................................... 104 Rating and Keywording........................................................................... 106 Metadata....................................................................................................... 108 Geocoding Images .................................................................................... 108 Smart Collections for Workfow ............................................................. 111 Collections ................................................................................................... 113 Beyond the Library Module ................................................................... 114 Chapter 5: A Develop Workflow.................................................117 The Develop Mode .................................................................................... 119 The Histogram ............................................................................................ 120 The Basic Panel ........................................................................................... 121 Tone Curve ................................................................................................... 123 Detail Panel .................................................................................................. 124 Adjustment Brush...................................................................................... 126 Graduated Filter ......................................................................................... 128 Printing .......................................................................................................... 130 16 Bit and Mac OS X ............................................................................ 130 Color Profiling ....................................................................................... 131 Paper ........................................................................................................ 132 Lightroom Printing.............................................................................. 133

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CONTENTS

Print Profiling......................................................................................... 135 Print Setup.............................................................................................. 136 Chapter 6: Lightroom Presets ....................................................139 What are Presets?....................................................................................... 139 Develop Presets.......................................................................................... 140 A First Preset ................................................................................................ 140 Applying Presets to Many Images ....................................................... 142 Changing Lightroom’s Defaults............................................................ 145 Develop Preset Possibilities ................................................................... 151 Inside a Preset ............................................................................................. 152 Radical Presetting!..................................................................................... 153 Negative Presets ........................................................................................ 157 Local Corrections ....................................................................................... 159 Filenaming Presets .................................................................................... 159 Print Presets ................................................................................................. 161 Setting up a Print Preset.......................................................................... 162 Other Presets ............................................................................................... 164 Web Module Presets ................................................................................. 165 Slideshow Module Presets ..................................................................... 166 Library Module Presets ............................................................................ 166 Export Presets ............................................................................................. 169 Preset Resources ........................................................................................ 171 Chapter 7: Lightroom Resources ...............................................173 Adobe Resources ....................................................................................... 174 Product Page ......................................................................................... 174 Adobe Labs ............................................................................................ 174 Lightroom Design Center ................................................................. 175 Lightroom Community Help ........................................................... 175 Lightroom Support Center ............................................................... 176 Lightroom User to User Forums ..................................................... 176 Adobe DevNet ...................................................................................... 177 Adobe TV ................................................................................................ 178 Lightroom Journal ............................................................................... 178

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CONTENTS

John Nack on Adobe .......................................................................... 178 Eric Scouten ........................................................................................... 179 News and Tutorial Sites ........................................................................... 179 Lightroom News................................................................................... 179 NAPP Lightroom 2 Learning Center .............................................. 179 Lightroom Killer Tips........................................................................... 179 Photoshop Insider ............................................................................... 179 Terry White’s Tech Blog....................................................................... 180 Lightroom Blog..................................................................................... 180 Julieanne Kost’s Lightroom Tutorials ............................................ 180 Luminous Landscape ......................................................................... 181 Computer Darkroom .......................................................................... 181 Lightroom Forums............................................................................... 181 Lightroom Queen ................................................................................ 181 Utiliser Lightroom................................................................................ 182 John Beardsworth ............................................................................... 182 Photography by Frederick Van ........................................................ 182 O’Reilly Media – Inside Lightroom................................................. 182 Lightroom Galleries ............................................................................ 183 Outdoor Images ................................................................................... 183 The Turning Gate ................................................................................. 183 SlideShowPro ........................................................................................ 184 OnOne PhotoPresets .......................................................................... 184 Inside Lightroom.................................................................................. 184 Pro Photography Show...................................................................... 184 Heather Green....................................................................................... 185 Jeffrey Friedl .......................................................................................... 185 Timothy Armes...................................................................................... 185 Podcasts ........................................................................................................ 186 George Jardine ..................................................................................... 186 Killer Tips Podcast ................................................................................ 186 Lightroom for Digital Photographers ........................................... 186 Photgraphy by Frederick Van .......................................................... 186

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CONTENTS

General .......................................................................................................... 187 Flickr ......................................................................................................... 187 Bluefire Blog .......................................................................................... 188 Keeping Track .............................................................................................. 188 Basic Troubleshooting ............................................................................. 188 Repeated crashing or not starting ...................................................... 189 Catalog Corruption ................................................................................... 189 Slow Operation........................................................................................... 190 Missing Keywords...................................................................................... 190 Edit in Photoshop does not start Photoshop .................................. 191 Support Resources .................................................................................... 191 Up to Speed ................................................................................................. 191 Index ................................................................................................................... 193

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Acknowledgements There are many people to thank for helping this book to come to fruition. The Lightroom Engineering team, of course, deserve huge amounts of gratitude for producing this awesome piece of software. Mark Hamburg whose brainchild it was is primus inter pares in this; he will be much missed by the whole team and Microsoft are very, very lucky to have him! Tom Hogarty, John Nack, Melissa and Troy Gaul, Thomas Knoll and of course the recently departed (from Adobe) George Jardine have all been extremely helpful throughout the whole process. George’s Podcasts have been a source of inspiration for his many listeners. Then there are the Lightroom buddies, Sean McCormack, Don Ricklin, Jeffrey Friedl, Lee Jay Fingersh, John Beardsworth, Mick Seymour, Mark Sirota, Roy Nuzzo, Victoria Bampton and Andreas Norén who have explored and discovered like no others! Special thanks to Don who has offered advice and corrected my bad ‘ttypping’ throughout the writing process! My editors, Ben Denne, Haley Salter and David Albon who were encouraging and patient throughout the process and their predecessors Emma Baxter and Stephanie Barrett, who set me on the path. To my late father who handed me his Minolta SRT-101 in a field in France when I was 11 years old and sent me off for a few hours to stave of holiday boredom with the aim of coming back with something interesting! I hope I finally managed it!!! To my wife, Janette and my children Charlotte and Harry, who are forever waiting for me to catch them up as I take yet another photograph. I am sorry for being a perpetual 100 meters behind! Janette has been my rock and the most important person in my life, I can only thank her for putting up with me!

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CHAPTER 1

Lightroom Basics

A

dobe Photoshop Lightroom (Lightroom from here on) is now in its second full release, having been through a long and protracted birth, two Public Beta releases and the gaining of a devoted and vociferous community. Yet there is still a bit of an air of mystery about the application. Many users are still puzzled what it is for; others wonder why ‘obvious’ features are missing and more ask whether it should just become part of Photoshop or Bridge! This book is aimed at users who want answers to these questions as well as explaining new features, the tools at their disposal, and offering workflow scenarios. It isn’t trying to be a comprehensive manual, (there are other authors who have written books that take care of that segment of the market!) rather it is a look at the way Lightroom works and behaves and how best to make it work for you. Lightroom is an exciting tool that offers a different methodology from previous tools in this area and we will be exploring how this methodology affects how you work.

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Splash Screens Lightroom has an alternative splash screen as well as the one seen below, which reflects its codename during development, Silvertone. Press the R key when the main Splash Screen is in view to see it.

It is not as interesting or amusing as the version 1.0 screens, which were ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ themed.

In this chapter we will look at the history of Lightroom, what it is for and who it is aimed at, run through the basic interface and discuss Lightroom’s color management capabilities. Other chapters will look at the new features in Lightroom 2, a way of structuring your files to ensure a smooth workflow, import strategies, and how to work in the develop module The vital topic of backup, archiving and management of offline media will be looked at, with some practical solutions offered to ensure that users will feel their valuable assets are being looked after. There is a major section on the use of Presets in all aspects of Lightroom. Develop Presets, especially, have proved to be a highly popular part of Lightroom, as they are easy to create and share. There is a thriving community of preset creators who share their work for free or ask for some recompense. We will look at these resources as well as the wider Lightroom community who offer help, debate and thoughtful comment on the application.

Conventions Throughout this book I will use screenshots and shortcut descriptions to guide you through the areas of the application. As I am a Mac user, I will show Mac screenshots and refer to Mac shortcuts. This isn’t meant to be an insult to Windows users, it is just more convenient for me! The application is cross-platform, the serial number works for Mac and Windows, so where I mention Cmd, Windows users should read Ctrl, and where I mention Option, Windows users should read Alt. I will, however, use the term Right-Click to bring up the contextual menu. This is generally thought to be a Windowsonly action, but has been part of the Mac operating system for

Fig. 1.1 The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 splash screen.

Some useful information is kept here; the Build Number and the version of Camera Raw used by Lightroom.

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

many years. Apple sell a multi-button mouse (the ‘seemingly’ one-buttoned Mighty Mouse) so I think the convention is well established. However for those who are still using a onebuttoned mouse, to bring up the contextual menu just Ctrl-Click!

What is Lightroom? Lightroom is an end-to-end photography workflow tool, primarily aimed at digital photographers, but can also be used by analog photographers who have digitized their collections. It is for professionals and serious amateur photographers. This is not to say that it can’t be used by any photographer with a digital camera, but to get the best out of the application you will ideally be shooting with a camera capable of producing Raw files; this caters for almost all Digital SLRs, Digital backs and a growing number of compact digital cameras.

Non-Destructive Workflow Non-destructive workflow is a great marketing term, that can be easily abused. In terms of Lightroom it refers to the software’s method of applying edits to an image. Rather than editing pixels as previous generations of software have, it treats your original file as sacrosanct and stores the edits you make in a separate file or in a dedicated space within the image file. You are able to transverse the full history of your edits, return to the original state, make virtual copies or export with a variety of settings and the original image will still be as intact just as when you took it. The other term for this, which you will hear mentioned is Parametric Editing.

Fig. 1.2 The Nikon D700, a modern high quality DSLR camera capable of shooting in Nikon’s Raw format (NEF) and JPEG.

The other file formats supported by Lightroom are DNG (Adobe’s Digital Negative format), TIFF, JPEG and PSDs (Photoshop’s native file format) with maximize compatibility selected. These are all the main formats that digital cameras have shot, since there invention apart from the Photoshop file format, which is included for compatibility with Photoshop.

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How Lightroom came to be Lightroom was essentially a research project into conceptualizing new types of digital imaging software carried out by Mark Hamburg. Mark had been one of the lead engineers on Photoshop, but wanted to explore ways of interacting with photographic imagery. Working with a small team, he produced several protoype interfaces for working with imagery in a nondestructive way. The project, known as Shadowland, eventually became Lightroom. The Shadowland Development story can be read at the following address. http://tinyurl.com/p8a6e Mark Hamburg left Adobe before the release of version 2.0, to work at Microsoft on their User Experience

Lightroom extends its parametric editing capabilities to these other formats, which means that even a JPEG is treated as a ‘master ’ image, not to be touched. Lightroom is also designed to answer one of the most commonly asked questions that photographers have when they start shooting digitally, which is ‘How do I manage the vast numbers of images I am now shooting?’. With today’s digital cameras it is very easy to shoot hundreds or even thousands of images in a day. The ability to manage and ‘process’ a huge number of images is of paramount importance to the modern day photographer. The way Lightroom deals with this workflow conundrum is to divide the application into modules which separate the common processes into coherent sections. For some, this is the main attraction of Lightroom, others can find this modularization slightly awkward. Hopefully some of the workflow scenarios presented in this book will show ways of working that break down these barriers. The modules offered (in their natural workflow order) are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Web and Print. But there are more ‘hidden’ modules that are just as important, Import and Export. Library takes care of the selection, storage, file management, and metadata. The Import and Export modules are encompassed by the Library, but both work across the application.

Lua Lua is a powerful, lightweight embedded scripting language that Lightroom incorporates. While conventional programming languages are used to create the program, Lua has been integrated in order to assist with scripting and output. More information about Lua can be found at http://www.lua.org/. There is a two part interview with Mark Hamburg which explains some of the uses of Lua in Lightroom. http://tinyurl.com/6pjv7o http://tinyurl.com/2 ⫻ 8aaa

6

Develop offers powerful features to enable you to extract the maximum quality and detail out of your images as well as allow you to retain creative control for artistic interpretation. Slideshow allows on screen presentations of your images, offering the ability to export your slideshows to a PDF file and to a collection of JPEG files (useful for creating an auto run CD). Web is, naturally, the module you use to create web galleries. There are several galleries provided with Lightroom, but one of the thriving areas of community development is the creation of new galleries. Some are commercial products and others are free or donationware. A technical user can also dive into the code and create their own, but you need a solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT and potentially the Lua scripting language.

LIGHTROOM BASICS

Finally, the Print module controls output to printed media. Lightroom offers a large amount of print control compared with other applications, using presets to save printer settings and profiles for repeated use and attempting to control manufacturers’ printer drivers to a greater extent than before.

Why choose Lightroom? Lightroom is not the only application out there that offers some of these features, Apple’s Aperture and even Adobe’s Photoshop offer some or all of the functionality of Lightroom. So, in part, the choice will be down to you and what you feel comfortable with. For those users who have Photoshop CS3 and above, Lightroom may seem to replicate a lot of functionality, and you would be correct to think that, but Lightroom’s advantage is its packaging of the photographic functionality of Photoshop, Bridge and Camera Raw into one application with some added benefits. If you are currently a Photoshop CS3 user, you possess applications that offer similar features to Lightroom’s modules. Bridge is, in passing, and equivalent to the Library and Slideshow modules, the Camera Raw Plug-in is equivalent to the Develop module and Photoshop offers Web, Print (although at a slightly lesser level) and Export functionality compared with the Slideshow, Web and Print modules.

Fig. 1.3 The Lightroom Workflow. Import from card; files are stored and a database is created or utilized. The Library is the visual representation of your files. The Develop module is used to refine your images for output to Slideshow, Web, Print and Export.

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Fig. 1.4 The Adobe Bridge interface.

However, Lightroom’s selling points are that it is an all-inone package, it is solely aimed at photographers, and it uses a database to offer metadata, cataloging and searching capabilities way beyond those of Bridge. All the editing takes place parametrically, whereas once you have brought an image into Photoshop, you are editing at the pixel level. (This can be mitigated by using Adjustment Layers and Smart Filters, but most image editing in Photoshop will have a measure of destructiveness. Photoshop is a massive and wonderful application, but photographers are a small part of its user base, so there are many features in Photoshop that will never be needed. Since Photoshop is a part of the Creative Suite there is an expectation that it is part of a suite aimed at Illustrators, Designers, and Art Directors, as well as Photographers. Over the years the code-base has become enormous and complex, whereas Lightroom is programmed to be agile and easily extensible. A good example of this is that Adobe was

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

relatively easily able to make Lightroom run in 64 bit mode, but has found the job much harder in Photoshop. The Mac version of Photoshop won’t be 64 bit until version CS5, whereas the Windows version will be in CS4. Bridge is also designed to be more than a photographic application. Its aim is to be a media cataloging and management tool for the whole of Adobe’s Creative Suite, so it is capable of managing PDFs, EPS, InDesign, Flash files, Web graphics and more. It was originally a simple file browser and while it has grown up to be a more useful application than that, it is still aimed at a different purpose than Lightroom. If you had to compare it with another application iView Media Pro (or as it now is Microsoft Expression Media) would be the nearest equivalent. iView certainly used to be the darling of the Digital Asset Management world, but the impression is that is has suffered under the ownership of Microsoft.

Adobe and 64 bit applications For more information on Adobe and 64 bit Photoshop, see John Nack’s blog entry: http://tinyurl.com/ 2owbpy and for more on 64 bit computing and the advantages and disadvantages in Photoshop see ‘Living Photoshop’:http://tinyurl.com/yusmq9

Lightroom’s original goal was to aim for ‘unreasonable simplicity’ in its approach. Version 2 has, of course, gone a bit further than that, but the engineers still use this as their mantra when adding new features. Sometimes this can lead to puzzling omissions from the feature set; version 1 came without dual monitor support which led to some users complaining that the software was ‘unusable’ because it lacked it. But the reasoning was that the application was perfectly usable without it and because it had been designed to work with one monitor there was no ‘absolute need’ to include it. So if a feature was deemed a nice-to-have rather than a ‘must have’, it might not make it into the feature set. Version 2 has relaxed this strict attitude somewhat but there are still features that some users consider ‘essential’ that are missing. Partly this is due to the aforementioned unreasonable simplicity rule and partly because the Lightroom team is relatively small compared with others in Adobe. This coupled with release date time constraints tends to lead to some ‘interesting’ exchanges between users on the various forums dedicated to Lightroom! Lighroom is a stand-alone application, but is also beholden to simultaneous releases with Adobe Camera Raw, and Lightroom releases generally can’t get in the way of Photoshop releases. Lightroom tends to be on a more frequent release schedule than Photoshop, which tends to be updated every 18 months. So there are extra pressures on the Lightroom team to release in a timely fashion.

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Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, that much of the same functionality that exists in Lightroom also exists in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The reason for this is that Lightroom uses the Camera Raw processing pipeline, so in effect it is Camera Raw with extra features and a natty user interface! There are some differences. In their current incarnations (Lightroom 2 and ACR 4.5) Camera Raw lacks the new Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter correction tools. Lightroom’s Develop module lacks one thing from Camera Raw which is Point Curve editing tools. Apart from feature parity (or near parity) Camera Raw and Lightroom are also released simultaneously because they both have to support the same models of camera. Fig. 1.5 Adobe Camera Raw 4.5. Point Curve Editing.

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

Camera Support Camera support is one of those areas where third party software developers generally have to play catch up. This is not only frustrating for the developers, but also for the users of that piece of software who might rush out to buy the latest and greatest camera, only to find that their favorite software doesn’t support it yet. How does this come about? When a new camera is released the camera manufacturer updates their Raw file format and their software to support this Raw file. What they rarely do is give out any of this information to anyone. As far as they are concerned the Raw file is their intellectual property and their software will get the most out of that file. If only that was true! Most software provided by the manufacturers can be charitably described as average! They are often slow, and the user interface is normally clunky and sometimes the software doesn’t provide the best rendition of the Raw file. Various third party software companies have produced their own Raw Converters, and they have to go to a lot of trouble to decode the behavior of the Raw files. They are not allowed by law to reverse engineer the file formats, so they have to find other ways to do the decoding. ACR came about because the author, Thomas Knoll (who also created Photoshop with his brother John) was on holiday with his new camera and ended up so frustrated with the Canon Raw Converter software, that he wrote his own, as you do!

dcraw Dave Coffin writes dcraw which is a UNIX based application for converting Raw files. As he says, when it is ‘used skillfully, [it] produces better quality output than the tools provided by the camera vendor.’ Lightroom uses elements of dcraw for decoding Raw file formats. http://tinyurl.com/6yaf

You can read about the creation of Camera Raw on the Photoshop Widow’s website: http://tinyurl.com/6k7tsk. This piece of software matured into the very first release of ACR. Thomas’s method of ‘cracking ‘ the Raw code was to create two profiles for the camera; one created under D65 lighting, the other under 3200K tungsten. He then used a Color Temperature slider to interpolate between these two profiles. This has proven to be a really good way to get the right results for several years. But it isn’t perfect, so there was an allowance built into subsequent versions for adjusting calibration sliders, so that you could compensate for unit to unit variations. With the release of ACR 4.5 and the DNG Profiler, there is now the capability to create and update your own profiles, for ultimate color rendition and fidelity. See Chapter 3, What’s New in 2?

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Every time a new model, or models, comes out the basic profiling has to be done for these new cameras, and updated versions of Camera Raw and Lightroom are released. On average these releases happen 3–4 times a year. This nicely coincides with the major photographic shows, so each release should manage to cater for the newest cameras.

Camera Support in ACR 4.5/Lightroom 2.0 Since it is an often asked question, here is a list of the cameras supported in ACR 4.5 and Lightroom 2.0. By the time you read this Photokina 2008 will have taken place, so there will be a whole new set of cameras released and they will be supported by ACR and Lightroom within a short period of time. So in effect this list will be out of date soon, but as a snapshot it will help put into perspective the wide range of support that exists in Camera Raw.

Supported Cameras in ACR 4.5/Lightroom 2.0 Canon EOS-1D EOS-1Ds EOS-1D Mark II EOS 1D Mark II N EOS-1Ds Mark II EOS-1D Mark III EOS-1Ds Mark III EOS 10D EOS 20D EOS 20Da EOS 30D EOS 40D EOS 5D EOS D30 EOS D60 EOS 300D (Digital Rebel/Kiss Digital) EOS Rebel XT (EOS 350D/EOS Kiss Digital N) EOS 400D (Rebel XTi/EOS Kiss Digital X) EOS 450D (Digital Rebel XSi/EOS Kiss X2) PowerShot 600 PowerShot A5 PowerShot A50 PowerShot Pro 1 PowerShot S30 PowerShot S40 PowerShot S45 PowerShot S50

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PowerShot S60 PowerShot S70 PowerShot G1 PowerShot G2 PowerShot G3 PowerShot G5 PowerShot G6 PowerShot G9 PowerShot Pro70 PowerShot Pro90 IS Contax N Digital Epson R-D1 R-D1s Fujifilm FinePix E900 FinePix F700 FinePix IS-1 FinePix S100 FS FinePix S2 Pro FinePix S5 Pro FinePix S3 Pro FinePix S20 Pro FinePix S5000 Z

FinePix S5200/5600 FinePix S6000fd/S6500fd FinePix S7000 Z FinePix S9000/9500 FinePix S9100/9600 Kodak DCS 14n DCS Pro 14nx DCS720x DCS760 DCS Pro SLR/n EasyShare P712 EasyShare P850 EasyShare P880 Konica Minolta Alpha Sweet Digital (Japan) Alpha-5 Digital (China) DiMAGE A1 DiMAGE A2 DiMAGE A200 DiMAGE 5 DiMAGE 7 DiMAGE 7i DiMAGE 7Hi Maxxum Dynax 5D (Europe) Maxxum 5D (USA) Maxxum 7D/Dynax 7D

LIGHTROOM BASICS

Leaf Aptus 17 Aptus 22 Aptus 54s Aptus 65 Aptus 75 Aptus 75s Valeo 6 Valeo 11 Valeo 17 Valeo 22 Leica D-Lux 2 D-Lux 3 Digilux 2 Digilux 3 V-LUX 1 Mamiya ZD Nikon D1 D1H D1X D100 D200 D2H D2Hs D2X D2Xs D3 D300 D40 D40x D50 D60 D70 D70s D80 Coolpix 5000 Coolpix 5400 Coolpix 5700 Coolpix 8400 Coolpix 8700 Coolpix 8800 Olympus E-1 E-3 E-10

E-20 E-420 E-520 EVOLT E-300 EVOLT E 330 EVOLT E-400 EVOLT E-500 EVOLT E-510 C-5050 Zoom C-5060 Zoom C-7070 Wide Zoom C-8080 Wide Zoom SP-310 SP-320 SP-350 SP-570 UZ E-410 SP-500UZ SP-510 UZ SP-550 UZ SP-560 UZ Panasonic DMC-FZ30 DMC-FZ50 DMC-L1 DMC-LC1 DMC-L10 DMC-LX1 DMC-LX2 Lumix DMC-FZ8 Pentax *ist D *ist DL *ist DL2 *ist DS *ist DS2s K10D (PEF) K100D K100D Super K110D K20D (PEF) K200D (PEF) Phase One H 20 H 25 P 20 P 20 ⫹ P 21

P 21 ⫹ P 25 P25 ⫹ P 30 P 30 ⫹ P 45 P 45 ⫹ Samsung GX 1S GX-1L Sigma SD9 SD10 SD14 Sony DSC-F828 DSC-V3 DSC-R1 A100 A700 Native DNG Support Hasselblad H2D Leica Digital-Modul-R M8 Pentax K10D K20D K200D Ricoh GR Digital GR Digital II GX200 Samsung GX-10 GX-20 Pro 815 Provisional Support in ACR 4.5 Canon EOS 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/Kiss F) Nikon D700

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Digital Negative format Adobe’s website, contains documentation and white, papers relating to DNG, including the SDK. http://tinyurl.com/rw8sx A comprehensive commentary on matters relating to DNG is provided on Barry Pearson’s website, including perspectives on the failed OpenRAW initiative. http://tinyurl.com/otrb4

Every full release of Camera Raw, apart from v1.0, is released with a new release of Photoshop. The older Plug-ins will not work in the newer version. This leads to howls of protest from users who have just bought a new camera, but don’t want to upgrade their version of Photoshop as well, but fortunately Adobe has a solution and that is DNG.

DNG DNG, or Digital Negative, is a wrapper format for Raw files and is aimed at being a universal camera file format. When you have files from your new camera, but don’t have the latest version of Camera Raw, you can download the latest DNG Converter, convert your Raw files to DNG, and continue to use them in older versions of Camera Raw. You can also use Lightroom to batch convert Raw files to DNG. DNG was created in 2004 by Adobe, to try to find a common file format that everyone in the community can use, from manufacturers to users. A few years on from its introduction, some manufacturer’s cameras write to DNG natively and others, notably Canon and Nikon, refuse to support it.

Fig. 1.6 The Adobe DNG Converter.

DNG was also created so that Raw file formats can be supported long after the manufacturers have ceased to support the files. Now it may seem incredible that they wouldn’t, but Kodak files are not supported by any software from Kodak and Canon even dropped support for one of their models. They had to add support again as there were many protests! The DNG specification is currently up to version 1.2.0. This version incorporates the new color profile abilities seen in ACR, http://tinyurl. com/4cv89e. As digital photography is still in its infancy issues of longevity and protectionism are still being discussed. DNG aims to make such issues less of a worry. Adobe have offered the format to the community for free and have offered to donate it to a standards body.

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

The Lightroom Interface The Lightroom interface is a modular one, as mentioned earlier, and in this book we will be referring to the various sections, so it seems appropriate to explain which bits I will be referring to!

Library Module Below is the Library Module, with the various sections shown and some of the basic shortcuts.

Identity Plate and Progress Bar

Module Picker Library Filter [\]

Left Panel

Grid View [G]

Right Panel

Toolbar [T] Filmstrip

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Loupe View Pressing the E key, the Return key or the Spacebar, takes you into Loupe mode. The size you view the image can be changed from 1:4 to 11:1 (a subtle homage to the movie Spinal Tap).

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

Compare View Press the C key and you can compare two images side by side for evaluation. You have the option of zooming in in synch or not, swapping the images, rating, picking and rejecting.

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Survey View Press the N key to move into Survey View. This allows you to compare several images with the active photo. The active photo is displayed with a white border surrounding it.

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

Develop Module Reached by pressing the D key or Cmd Option 2, this takes you to the main area for adjusting your images. You can also use other keyboard shortcuts to enter specific sections of the Develop module from the Library Module, such as R to enter the Crop Tool.

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Slideshow Module Reached with the press of Cmd Option 3, this is the area for creating Slideshow presentations for clients.

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Print Module Pressing Cmd Option 4 leads you to the Print Module to set up printing to media.

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Web Module Finally, the Web Module is reached by pressing Cmd Option 5, allowing you to create Web Galleries for posting to your website.

A complete list of keyboard shortcuts is available from the Lightroom Queen website, Mac: http://tinyurl.com/65xfdv and Windows: http://tinyurl.com/4tztwu. Pressing Cmd/ in a module will give you shortcuts for that specific module.

The Import and Export Modules Although not strictly separate modules as the other five are, the Import and Export Modules are a vital part of Lightroom’s

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

capabilities. To invoke the Import process you can either press Cmd Shift I, press the Import button, selecting from the various options in the File menu or, if set up to do so, it will automatically appear if a memory card is inserted to an attached card reader. Imports can be of files from a card, already on disk or from an Exported Catalog.

The Export Module is invoked when pressing Cmd Shift E, pressing the Export button, or selecting from the various options in the File menu. Exports can be setup from scratch, performed exactly as the previous export, or performed using an existing Preset. These Presets are set in the Export dialog box and more information is found in Chapter 6, Lightroom Presets.

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Lightroom and Color Management One of the issues that befuddles newcomers to Lightroom is the supposed lack of color management. Whereas Photoshop will warn you about missing or different profiles, Lightroom stays silent.

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LIGHTROOM BASICS

The reason for this is that Lightroom handles color management for you, allowing you to just get on with managing and developing your files. Raw files, of course have no color space embedded in them, whatever you set on your camera. Lightroom takes advantage of this and imports any Raw file in its own color space. This is a very large color space, known as Melissa RGB which is a modified version of ProPhoto RGB. It uses the same chromaticies (the color coordinates) but not the gamma. LR’s gamma internally is gamma 1.0 (as opposed to the usual for ProPhoto RGB which is gamma 1.8. The histogram display is a tuned sRGB tone curve. One reason for using this space is so that all the color information contained in your Raw files can be handled by Lightroom with plenty of headroom for adjustments and the general high-bit processing that can be performed. The other advantage of using a space as large as that of ProPhoto is about maintaining the distinctions between all of the out of gamma colors, so that you can map them into printable space as gradations rather than blobs. If a file is imported that is not color managed and is not a Raw file then Lightroom will assume it has an sRGB profile. So Lightroom just manages your color spaces for you and you only have to think about them on export. The (very) general rule of thumb then is: if you are editing further in Photoshop then choose ProPhoto RGB; if you are exporting to the web then choose sRGB and if you are supplying for print you might want to choose Adobe RGB (1998). But that very loose recommendation probably doesn’t cater for much beyond the basics! Color Management is a huge topic outside the scope of this book and much more information can be found in a companion volume from Focal Press, Color Management for Photographers by Andrew Rodney.

Fig. 1.7 Color spaces compared: ProPhoto RGB vs Adobe RGB; Adobe RGB vs sRGB; ProPhoto RGB vs sRGB.

This concludes the basic tour of Lightroom’s methods and capabilities. The next chapter looks at setting up the ideal system to utilize the power of Lightroom.

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CHAPTER 2

The Ideal System

A

s with most applications the minimum specs for hardware to run Lightroom are fairly optimistic. It is, of course, perfectly possible to run Lightroom on a lower end computer, but you really won’t be getting the best out of it, you will probably end up waiting a lot and drinking too many cups of coffee! This chapter will look at setting up a computer to run Lightroom from scratch, as well as for those who have systems and are looking for ideas of how to get the best performance gains. If you have decided that Lightroom is your Digital Photography management tool of choice and are looking to create the ideal system, what should you be looking to buy? I have always taken the view that when looking to purchase computer hardware, you have to aim for as much power as you can that is only just out of your budget. What does this mean for you and your pocket? Well, unless you have unlimited spending power, and therefore can afford the best, most powerful and expensive setup, you are likely to have to make compromises, but the way I approach it is that if your compromise budget is, say, £2000 but you know that spending

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Lightroom Minimum Specs Macintosh PowerPC® G4, G5, or Intel-based Mac Mac OS X v.10.4, 10.5 1 GB of RAM 1 GB of available hard-disk space 1024 ⫻ 768 screen resolution CD-ROM drive

Windows Intel® Pentium® 4 processor Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista™ (Vista 64 bit edition support) 1 GB of RAM 1 GB of available hard-disk space 1024 ⫻ 768 screen resolution CD-ROM drive

another £250 will get you something extra that will improve speed or allow you greater storage or expansion capabilities, it is probably worth doing. The amount you invest at the beginning of the process may well be rewarded down the line with more expansion capabilities and most importantly greater longevity. Whether you are a professional photographer or an advanced amateur, the ideal is to be able to use your computer setup for 3 years at least, after which migrate the computer down for other uses or to other family members. If you have to swap more frequently, you have either under specified at that beginning or some major unforeseen advance in technology has occurred that made the change impossible to avoid. I assume that over time you might upgrade RAM, cards or storage as needs change. So with that in mind, purchasing a system for Lightroom needs to look at what Lightroom most benefits from. Lightroom loves RAM, it loves multi-core processors and it will need a large amount of disk space; not to run the application, but for image storage. The monitor card is important but slightly less of a concern. As long as you have a good enough card to run a dual monitor setup you should be fine. Lightroom doesn’t make as much use of graphics acceleration as its rival Aperture does, for example. It is also necessary to factor into the equation storage and archival capability, because these are vital to any digital photographer. Having one unbacked up copy of your digital images is a disaster waiting to happen!

Computers I won’t make strong recommendation as to computing platform or specific computers to buy. Both are matters of personal choice, I prefer the Apple Macintosh platform and would recommend them for a number of reasons, but Lightroom is a cross platform application so running it on a Windows PC is quite acceptable. In fact you can even mix and match; the Adobe license allows you to run a desktop and a laptop copy of the application on one serial number and one can be a Mac and one a PC. Many photographers will have a laptop for in the field work and a desktop back at base, one of these might be a Mac and the other a PC.

64 bit Fig. 2.1 Apple MacPro. Image courtesy of Apple.

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Lightroom is also a 64 bit application, so it is worth considering whether you will benefit from choosing to use Mac OS X 10.5⫹

THE IDEAL SYSTEM

(If you buy a new machine, you won’t have a choice, as it will come with it preloaded!) or Windows Vista 64 bit (XP 64 bit is not recommended). The Windows installer detects if you are running a 32 bit or 64 bit system, it is possible to override its choice, although I am not sure why you would want to! You will have probably guessed already, but if you can utilize or buy a computer and operating system that can do 64 bit computing you really should for Lightroom work. There are noticeable speed gains and you will also be able to address more RAM. To ensure you are using the 64 bit version of Lightroom on the Mac, firstly you will need to be running an Intel based Mac with Mac OS X 10.5x (the latest being 10.5.5 at the time of writing) also known as Leopard. Find your copy of Lightroom (normally in the /Applications/ folder. Click once on the icon and select Command I or right-click and select Get Info. The default in the General section of the Get Info window is to ‘Open in 32 Bit Mode’. Uncheck the box and either start or restart Lightroom and you will be in 64 bit mode. If you don’t see this option, then your Macintosh isn’t capable of running 64 bit applications.

Fig. 2.2 Dell Precision™ T7400. Image courtesy of

Dell Inc. Fig. 2.3 Running Lightroom in 64 bit mode on the Mac. Select the Application in the Finder. Press Command 1. Uncheck Open in 32 Bit Mode. Start or Restart Lightroom. The Splash Screen will show you running in 64 Bit Mode.

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RAM

Fig. 2.4 RAM cips in a motherboard.

RAM is always crucial. Bearing in mind that you need at least 1–2 GB of RAM just to run an operating system with comfortable overhead, you are really looking at a minimum of 2 GB with no real maximum other than the limits of your motherboard and the amount your OS can use. On different Macs I have found that performance really is affected by RAM. So a 2.4 GHz MacBook with 2 GB RAM performance is fast, but upgrading to 4 GB really helps. If nothing else you can also run other applications at the same time! PCs obviously address memory slightly differently, but the principles remain similar; 1–2 GB for the Operating System and anything else for applications. RAM is relatively cheap so stinting on it makes little sense when the benefits are so obvious. On my main desktop computer which is a MacPro with 10 GB RAM again performance is excellent – but then it is also a 3 GHZ 8-core computer, so one should expect great performance! Other heavy Lightroom users such as Jeff Schewe (photographer and advisor to Adobe) have gone the whole hog and stacked their computers with 32 GB RAM! Which should be enough to run the most demanding of applications!!

Processors

Fig. 2.5 Intel Xeon Processor. Image courtesy of Intel ®.

So more RAM is really helpful and, as alluded to in a previous paragraph, a fast processor helps, but what really helps is the modern trend to multi-core processors. Lightroom is multithreaded, multitasking and programmed to take full advantage of modern processor technology. You can fire off multiple processes in Lightroom; exporting, creating a web gallery, rendering previews and Lightroom will handle it, but with a 4-core or 8-core processor setup this will be handled with great ease. The general recommendation is to go with an Intel dual- or quad- core plus processor. AMD processors have a good reputation for ‘bang per buck’, but there have been odd reports of problems, which may be due more to home built systems or some other problem, but I just offer it as an observation.

Storage So RAM and fast, multi-core processors are great, a fast subsystem will also help, but storage is equally important. I recommend big, fast hard drives. Preferably using SATA or even SAS (Serial Attatched Storage). If you have internal drive bays you

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THE IDEAL SYSTEM

can fill them with fast 1 TB drives for a very low price. Ideally you will also want to be looking at drives that spin at 7200 rpm or more. Many laptops come with 5400 rpm drives and while they tend to have larger capacities Lightroom is again happier with a faster speed drive. The disadvantage of faster speed drives in a laptop is that they have a detrimental effect on battery life, but that may be a price worth paying, especially if you use your laptop powered from the mains. The important things to think about with storage is that you need a lot of space for images – bear in mind that files produced by DSLRs/Medium format backs range these days between 10 MB and 50 MB, you will soon eat into even a 1 TB drive if you are photographer who shoots a lot. Lightroom also uses a database (.lrcat) and stores preview data in a separate file (.lrdata), so this has to be factored into storage considerations as well. You will set how large the Previews should be and how you want to manage them before you start using Lightroom and we will deal with this later. A Lightroom database can grow in size quite quickly, and ideally you need enough space on the drive for continued expansion of the folder containing these files. It is also recommended to keep this folder on the fastest drive in your collection, as it speeds up access to the Previews.

Fig. 2.6 Internal Hard Drive. Image courtesty of Hitachi.

In Figure 2.7, you see the space taken by a small-sized catalog, a medium-sized Catalog and a larger-sized Catalog. The second one contains fewer Previews but is larger, it has not been optimized recently. The largest one contains a 1:1 preview of every image, so is nearly 27 GB in size! This Catalog also contains only 12 000 images. Some Lightroomers have Catalogs that contain over 10 000 images Regular Database backups mean that you will always have a close duplicate of the .lrcat. But it is also worth adding this folder to your regular backup regime onto a different drive as mentioned below.

Fig. 2.7 Three Lightroom Catalogs and the associated Preview files.

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Depending on your shooting patterns, I recommend that you set Lightroom to backup this .lrcat file every time Lightroom opens, you may choose to skip that step, but once a week is probably a sensible timeframe. This is achieved by going to Catalog Settings (Command Option ,) and choosing from the options. As you use Lightroom more and more, you will assemble a fair number of backup catalogs, these can be deleted over time, but it is worth keeping one or two of the most recent ones. Fig. 2.8 The Catalog Setting dialog box. Here you find basic catalog information as well as choosing how often to back up the Catalog. The final option is to Relaunch and Optimize.

Fig. 2.9 Over time Catalog Backups will accumulate. It is safe to assume that most of the ones shown can be deleted. The whole folder takes up nearly 2.5 GB of disk space.

I also take the precaution of creating a Catalog backup before a large import or before a big Metadata update, just in case anything should go wrong. I have only had one Catalog issue throughout using betas, public betas and releases and that was

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related to upgrading a catalog that was created with an old public beta, but it is always worth being cautious. Your images are your livelihood, so why risk anything! If you perform a large amount of editing or deletion to your Catalog the occasional Catalog optimization is worth doing as well. I tend to perform a Catalog backup before an Optimization, again just in case! Optimization is Lightroom’s equivalent of a ‘vacuum’

Fig. 2.10 Catalog Optimization.

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RAID RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive/ Independent Disks. It is a method of utilizing two or more hard disk drives to achieve either greater speed, reliability or larger volume size. There are several levels of RAID, each of which has its uses, but some are better for archival and some are better for speed. RAID 0: Striped set, without parity. The disks appear as one volume. Fast, but if one of the disks fail all the data is lost. Capacity is virtually the sum of the disk sizes used. RAID 1: Mirrored set, without parity. One disk mirrors the other. Good for archival, but if a disk fails, some data loss may occur. Capacity is equivalent to one of the disks. RAID 5: Striped set, with parity. Needs a minimum of 3 disks, one is used as a parity controller for the others. If one disk is lost the parity disk can rebuild the RAID set. Capacity is the sum of the two other disks. For more information visit: http://tinyurl.com/686ck

of the SQLite database. If you have performed a large number of deletions you will probably see the database size shrink by a bit. If you haven’t done any, then the process will be less effective. Testing your Catalog’s integrity is also worth doing, any problems will be reported, for example you may find images that have become corrupted; testing the integrity can warn you of problems.

Backup Also important, but easily overlooked in the heat of editing your images is the need to keep backup copies of your image library and your Lightroom Catalogs on other hard drives, as well as in an archive. For that you either need extra internal drives or external storage. There is a good range of internal storage available from Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi for external storage, I recommend using fast, capacious drives (7200 rpm at a minimum and preferably drives with a 16 MB cache, or larger). For good performance, I prefer to use Firewire 800 or eSATA connections for external Hard Drives, these will offer excellent speed. Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 are acceptable (Firewire 400 being slightly faster, as it is an asynchronous connection unlike the serial connection of USB 2.0) but they are not so fast when you are dealing with large quantities of images.

Archiving For archival purposes, I recommend single unit hard drives, such as the LaCie d2, WesternDigital MyBook or Seagate FreeAgent brands, rather than some of the other LaCie drives (such as the Big Disk Extreme) which are multiple disk packages setup to be a RAID 0 (i.e.: they appear as one striped volume). They are fast and capacious, but if one of the disks goes then all your data will be lost.

Fig. 2.11 A LaCie Quadra d2, a Western Digital MyBook

and a Seagate Free Agent. All images courtesy of the respective companies.

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For archival purposes, single disks or RAID 1 setups are safer. RAID 5 is safer still as it uses at a minimum 3 disks with one used for ‘parity ’. A RAID 1 is safer than RAID 0, but if one disk goes you can still lose all your images. However, my preference is still for single disks with automated backups, as I will explain later.

Fig. 2.12 A LaCie Ethernet Disk. Image courtesy of

LaCie Inc. Network Disks are a good idea for archival backup, but less so for day to day use as they will be a bit slower. Also it is not recommended to use the main Lightroom Catalog on a network storage device. For archival purposes they will be fine. Another sort of disk setup to think about is the relatively new Drobo from Data Robotics. It is a fully automated ‘robot’ backup solution and has gained a good following in recent months.

Fig. 2.13 A Buffalo TeraStation Pro™ II Network Attached Storage device. Image courtesy of Buffalo Inc.

Fig. 2.14 A Drobo. Image courtesy of Data Robotics.

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Synchronization Chronosync for the Macintosh is available from Econ Technologies and allows you to schedule synchronization, which can be in the form or backups or bi-directional synchronizations. http://tinyurl. com/36yy9 There are other applications that can do a similar job, such as SuperDuper, RsyncX, Deja Vu. For Windows, Microsoft offers SyncToy, but a closer equivalent to Chronosync is Vice Versa. http://tinyurl.com/rcow2

Fig. 2.15 ChronoSync and its scheduler.

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Again it is great for an archive system. The latest version, a recent upgrade, now supports Firewire 800 which makes it a more interesting prospect as a main drive system. The first time you do a backup it will be a slow process, but after that the automated backup routines will probably not get in the way.

A possible Disk Setup The system I prefer, until something like a network disk gets improved connectivity, is multiple single disks. On my main production box, a MacPro, I have 4 internal hard drives and several external disks. My Library resides on one internal hard drive (a 1 TB SATA-300 drive), my catalog on another (a 750 GB SATA-300 drive). Both of these are backed up every night onto one of the internal drives and one of the external drives. This multiple backup solution is achieved on the Mac using ChronoSync from Econ Technologies. This allows for scheduled backups and synchronizations to take place. I tend to synchronize in the early hours of the morning, every day, so at the most I would lose 24 hours worth of images. However, I would fire off manual backups after a big shoot. ChronoSync allows a scheduled backup to be started at any time without messing up the schedule. If any of the disks fail, there will be a replica somewhere in the chain, which will allow for a speedy rebuild.

THE IDEAL SYSTEM

External Disk A Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat Image Library

External Disk B Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat Image Library

Internal Hard Drive 1 Contains : Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat

Internal Hard Drive 2 Contains : Image Library

Backup Regime Nightly External Disk A: at 00:30 External Disk B: at 01:00 or Manually at any point

Fig. 2.16 My back up regime. Images courtesy Apple

and LaCie Inc. I also have the option of taking one of the disks offline and replacing it with another. The offline volume could be rotated on a weekly basis and stored in another location. Beyond that, regular backups onto Archival Media such as DVD and now Blu-ray are sensible. However, I recommend regular checking of the media and again, more than one DVD/Blu-ray Disc written of each session. So hopefully you are now filled with terror and paranoia and are immediately thinking of a comprehensive backup strategy. If so, I have done a good job!

Monitors The final aspect of your ideal system for Lightroom is the viewing device. There is a huge range of monitors to choose from that make ideal companions to Lightroom. Generally these days CRT monitors are unlikely to be purchased, instead flat screen monitors have become the norm. Newer technologies being used such as LED, which allows a brighter monitor to run on less power. The gamut of some of the monitors is larger than ever, with some being able to display close to the full gamut of AdobeRGB.

Fig. 2.17 A Blu-ray Disc.

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Makes such as Eizo, NEC, Apple all produce high quality monitors which are ideal for use with Lightroom. And now with the new dual window feature in Lightroom 2, it makes even more sense to use 2 monitors. I would recommend getting two of the same; with most average monitors they might not produce the same results when viewing the same image. The tolerances on higher end monitors are much finer, but then the price is also much higher!

Fig. 2.18 Eizo ColorEdge monitors with Calibration

device.

Calibration One thing that is essential is to calibrate your monitor. This process matches the monitor to a known set of color values, allowing a range of monitors to produce consistent results. Both Macintosh and Windows operating systems offer an in-built facility to produce a ‘calibration’ of your monitor but they are best avoided, as they rely entirely on the human eye to provide a calibration. Very few human eyes are that accurate and it is almost impossible to be sure that what you think is right really is! Various companies produce color matching devices. Some are aimed at displays, other more advanced solutions can calibrate printers, projectors, scanners and digital cameras.

Fig. 2.19 The Pantone Huey Pro and the ColorMunki. Images courtesy of Pantone, Inc and X-Rite, Inc.

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Some basic tools can be bought at a reasonable price and they will all do a pretty good job of accurately profiling your monitor. At the lower end of the scale come products such as the Pantone Huey Pro and the new ColorMunki. The ColorMunki promises more than just display calibration as it can create printer profiles as well. They will certainly both produce an acceptable profile. The generally accepted standard products in this field are the Spyder3 from Datacolor and the i1Display from X-Rite. They are very well established products that produce an excellent profile. Once your monitor is profiled, and you will need to perform the calibration on a regular basis, you can have confidence that your monitor is producing accurate color in your images, so when it comes to making adjustments to images in Lightroom you are at least seeing what you should, rather than making judgements by guesswork. This chapter will hopefully have given you an overview of a computer system that will be both powerful enough and stable enough to run Lightroom, with a view to making the most of your investment. You can, of course, use lower powered computers, and Lightroom will run well, but as your digital image library grows and grows and you begin to do more and more in Lightroom, the extra power of the systems and components I have described will pay dividends in time saved.

Fig. 2.20 The i1Display and the Spyder3. Images

courtesy of X-Rite, Inc and Datacolor, AG.

The aim of Lightroom is to enable the photographer to manage huge numbers of photos, this capability has to be matched with a system that enables you to do just that. Newer features such as Local Corrections will begin to tax a more basic system. Now you have the best system, how do you deal with all that data. The next chapter, File Management and Workflow will look at the ways to do it.

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CHAPTER 3

What’s New in 2?

T

he recently released Lightroom 2 is the first major upgrade to the application since 1.1. If you remember back that far, while Lightroom 1.0 was the first full release and 1.1 was a very major upgrade. Since then there have been more minor, but essential, upgrades including the odd new feature, bug fixes and support for new cameras to keep in line with Adobe Camera Raw releases. The final release of version 1 was 1.4.1. Important to upgraders as well as new users is what are the new features. In this chapter we will go through these, sometimes explaining in detail and at other times there will be pointers to more explanation in context found in other chapters. We will also have a look at some of the more requested features that haven’t made it to 2.0 as they will have made their way higher up the priority list for future versions; be that a 2.1 or a 3. Most of the new features in version 2 are to be found in the Library and Develop modules, however there are many global changes that affect all the modules, and there are some important features to be found in the Print module.

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64 bit support and performance improvements The first thing to note about Lightroom is that it is now a 64 bit application. This has major benefits for memory handling and throughput; Lightroom also has improvements in its ability to better use multiple processors and multi-core processors. Since multiple multi-core processors seem to be the way the main processor and computer manufacturers have decided is best for getting the most ‘bang per buck’, the improvements are very welcome. In the chapter The Ideal System, we look at the ways to get or enable Lightroom for 64 bit. For Windows the installer will make an intelligent guess as to what you want, for the Mac you need to enable 64 bit support. Naturally you need to be running a 64 bit capable Operating System. That means either Windows Vista 64 bit, or Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Note Windows XP 64 bit support is unofficial and not recommended! If you run a 32 bit Operating System, provided you meet the minimum requirements, you will still be able to run Lightroom 2.

Fig. 3.1 Lightroom 2’s splash screen showing it running

in 64 bit mode.

Multiple-monitor Support A feature that was hugely requested in version 1.0 was multiple monitor support. For many the lack of it was considered a ‘deal breaker’, especially when compared with Aperture or Photoshop. The main reasons for its non-appearance were that because of the design of the application it was slightly less essential than with other applications. I get the feeling that a lot of the developers and alpha testers of version 1 were laptop users so the need for dual monitors seemed less important to them.

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The Lightroom developers provided ways to mitigate this deficit by allowing the hiding panels when they weren’t needed, but for some that was not enough. Lightroom 2 introduces multiple-monitor support and indeed multiple window support, as you are able to use the second window on your sole monitor if you wish. Multiple-monitor support is enabled in the bottom left of the Lightroom screen, via the Window > Secondary Display menu or by pressing Cmd F11. If you hold down the Monitor icons you are given options of how you want to configure the setup.

Fig. 3.2 Activating Multiple-monitors via the icons. Holding down on the icons offers options.

The two displays can be setup in a variety of ways. In the Figure above we see the Loupe on the left and the Grid on the right. Some of the other combinations are shown below, they are mostly combinations of the different views available in the Library Module; Grid, Loupe, Compare and Survey. You can only have one Grid view showing at a time on one of the Monitors. The default is to show a Grid view on one monitor and a Loupe in the other.

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In the Loupe view on the second monitor, you have the three options, Normal, Live and Locked. Normal shows the image that you have selected either in the Grid or the Filmstrip, it can be resized as the behavior works on the main window. In Live Loupe mode, as you roll over images in the Grid view, the image that your mouse is under is shown. This can be really useful for quickly cycling through a large batch of images, for rating, checking focus, or rejecting. Locked Loupe keeps the image selected on the second monitor regardless of your selections on the primary monitor. Most useful for comparing one image with another. Fig. 3.3 Some examples of the dual monitor setup in

the Library Module. 1) Grid and Loupe 2) Grid and Compare 3) Grid and Survey 4) Loupe and Grid.

(1)

(2)

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The second window is visible in all the other modules. In version 1 you could only activate it in the Slideshow, but this is now application wide. Productivity is certainly improved with this feature. It is not quite as flexible as the support found in Apple’s Aperture, but it is certainly a step forward, should you have dual monitor setup.

WHAT’S NEW IN 2?

(3)

(4) One way to use it in the Develop Module, is shown below. Here I have hidden the left panel and the Filmstrip in the main window, and in the secondary window, I have set it to be in the Loupe view. I have then set Before and After view [\], applied some Saturation and negative Vibrance. This way I can get a larger view of both states. As you might imagine, this really comes into its own on a setup with dual 30� monitors!

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Adobe Camera Raw

File Size

ACR was first created as a stand-alone Plug-in for Photoshop, but was incorporated into the next release of Photoshop. It was Thomas Knoll’s response to his frustration with existing Raw conversion software. Each version has added more and more features. The basic pipeline is used as the processing engine for Lightroom as well, so versions of the two tend to be released in sync and for optimum compatibility ACR should be updated at the same time as a Lightroom update comes out.

Another criticism of Lightroom 1 was that the maximum file dimension was only 10 000 pixels on the longest length. This proved very restrictive for those who shoot panoramas or want to combine images to make panoramas. It was originally a restriction imposed by Adobe Camera Raw, but has now been lifted.

More information and the down-load page can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/640q

Lightroom 1 included some Photoshop support, for roundtripping images that needed Photoshop exclusive features. Lightroom 2 adds a range of extra functionality.

Lightroom 2 boosts this to 65 000 pixels, although some file formats may not support files that large.

Integration with Photoshop

As before images that you send to Photoshop, will be added to the Lightroom Catalog, then sent to Photoshop for you to continue working. When you have finished and saved changes, the image will be updated in the Lightroom Library. You now have extra options. Select several images in Lightroom and you can open them as a single multi-layer image in Photoshop, merge them to an HDR file or a Panorama. As well as all that you can now open a file as a Smart Object in Photoshop. To accomplish this you will need to have upgraded your version of Adobe Camera Raw to 4.5, which is the compatible version with Lightroom 2. Fig. 3.4 Three images selected in Lightroom, ready

for Merging to an HDR image.

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Fig. 3.5 Right-click to select Edit In ⬎ Merge to HDR

Here we have selected 3 images to Merge to HDR. Right-click to bring up the Edit In ⬎ Merge to HDR in Photoshop contextual menu. You will then receive a warning to check you have version 4.5 or greater of Adobe Camera Raw in place.

in Photoshop… .

Fig. 3.6 In Photoshop you can select the sources of the HDR image, the method of conversion into a 16 bit image and then on saving it will appear in Lightroom.

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Then go through the process for making an HDR image in Photoshop, and after you have saved your file it reappears in the Catalog as a Photoshop edited file.

Fig. 3.7 Stepping through the Merge to Panorama in

Photoshop…option.

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Similarly, the Merge to Panorama is very useful for the creation of panoramas using Photoshop’s increasingly sophisticated tool. The example shown below wouldn’t have been possible in Lightroom 1 as at 12 573 pixels wide it was too large to be supported.

WHAT’S NEW IN 2?

Collections in Lightroom 2 These allow you to create collections with settings for the three output modules, Slideshow, Print and Web. Because your settings are retained, any images you add to this Collection will automatically take on those settings. This is highly useful for photographers who need to create repeatable output packages, such as Wedding and Portrait photographers.

Collections Collections in Lightroom 1 were useful but were a bit underpowered, now in version 2 they have a real purpose. Collection Sets are the containers for collections, they are like a box to put them in and don’t really do much more. You can’t put images into them, only other Collections. In the example below, We have created a Collection Set called Black and White which contains a Collection of Black and White images as well as a separate Collection of Split-toned images.

Fig. 3.8 Collections and Collection Sets.

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We could also add a Smart Collection, which is the third new form of Collection. Smart Collections allow you to create Collections based on seach and Metadata criteria. The basic ones supplied with Lightroom demonstrate some of their capabilities. We can find all images shot in the last month or those without Keywords. The advantage of Smart Collections is that they are dynamic, so as you add images without Keywords the Smart Collection will get updated on the fly. In the example, we can see the number of images without Keywords is 61. If I now select that Collection and add some Keywords to the images, this number will begin to fall.

Fig. 3.9 Above: Smart Collections. Below:

The criteria for a Smart Collection.

To create a Smart Collection, go to the Collections pane, click the ⍚ button and select Create Smart Collection. ‌ You will then get a dialog box which allows you to add your criteria. In the example, I have created a Smart Collection called Possible Noise. My criteria includes looking for images with an ISO Rating of over 400 and a Shutter Speed slower than 1/60th sec. When we are satisfied with the terms, press Create. As shown, the number of images in this Catalog that meet the criteria is 28. Any newly imported images with similar criteria will be added to the collection. As you can see from the figures below there is a large number of possible criteria and boolean options.

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