Speech recognition seems to have been the coming technology since I don’t know when  – I seem to recall seeing DragonDictate in the late 90s – but it is one of those technologies that never seems to have arrived as a first-class way of entering information into a computer or getting it to do what you want. When I first booted up my new PC last year, I noticed that speech recognition was now built into Windows 7 and while it’s not at all bad, I probably don’t use it often enough to become really productive.

For an exercise, this morning I tried it with Lightroom and was quite surprised how well it allowed me to navigate around the program. For example I could move around the modules or select individual panels, but I kept hitting limitations – selecting one collection in the collection panel has been beyond me, as has activating the box in Keywording where you can type in words. On the other hand, once you are in the right context it’s possible to gain a little speed, especially if you know your keyboard shortcuts. So by preceding the shortcut with the instruction “Type” it’s possible to do things such as set ratings or pick flags, by saying “Type P”, “Type U” or “Type X” are the equivalent  of hitting P, U or X, and the same applies to stars and labels, while “Type G” or “Type E” allowed me to switch between Grid and Loupe views. Other tasks like entering keywords were possible, but once once I’d manually entered the correct area in a panel. And it still seems very slow though. Anyone out there using speech recognition with Lightroom? Is it just a matter of persevering until I’ve enough experience of the speech recognition tool’s foibles? Or is it a technology that still lies just beyond effective reach?

Here’s a quick summary of how to email files from Lightroom:

• The built-in way is to export files as JPEGs to your hard drive, then attach the to an email. Neat, eh? 1990s retro computing enthusiasts line right up!
• To email files directly from Lightroom, see Andréas Saudemon’s Mac-limited export plug-in Send By Mail Plug-in for Lightroom
• For Windows and using an email client like Outlook see Steve Sutherland’s MapiMailer Email Export Plugin for Lightroom
• For those using Gmail on Mac or Windows see Tim Armes’s LR/GMail

Wouldn’t it be easier to have File > Send as Email?

Last year PhaseOne finally acquired – “liberated” may be a better word -  Expression Media from Microsoft and gave it back its old name, MediaPro. I say “finally” because they had tried to add the original iView MediaPro cataloguing program to their CaptureOne raw conversion products back in 2006, and also because in those five years the post processing and cataloguing landscape has been transformed with the introduction of two major programs that combine those once-separate activities. To give an idea of how completely things have changed, I remember announcing Microsoft’s takeover to a trade show at Manchester United’s stadium, and since 2006 oil money has transformed City from a long-running joke into a pumped-up monster which might no longer need to call in Channel 4′s Time Team archaeologists to find any trophies (oh for the Arab spring to sweep away Abu Dhabi’s feudal rulers – that would be so City). Of course, some things stay the same and after Sunday’s demolition of Abramovitch’s expensive toy, United are on the verge of the 19th league title and another European Cup. But the change in how photographers now manage and process their pictures is “massive”, and first Apple’s Mac-limited Aperture and then the continuing and apparently-irresistible rise of Adobe’s Lightroom make me wonder if there’s any space left for the old favourite. Still, the €50 upgrade from Expression Media may not be an Hernandez-style bargain but is about the right price. At €160 new, MediaPro looks overpriced – more like an Edin Dzeko?

A lot of the work appears cosmetic – a modern, gloomy-grey interface – and almost all the familiar features remain untouched. But

• I spotted that the Virtual Earth geotagging feature has been dropped, very quietly, and while I imagine it was Microsoft’s code it’s still a shame to lose one of the few positive things that Redmond did with the program (apart from eventually selling it on). Instead of geotagging within the app, you now have a menu command Window > View Location on Map which displays the first selected image in a Google Maps browser window (it’s little better than a script I think I once wrote!).
• One very welcome improvement is the lifting of the 128,000 file and 2Gb catalogue size limits. This was probably top of my list – back in 2006 when I met with Microsoft.
• When you “sync” or save metadata back to the pictures, you can now write  it to sidecar files. Creating sidecars was one of many features that the iView guys had begun and making them work effectively should have been low hanging fruit for Microsoft. Removing the odd limitation to output sidecars to one folder at a time means it’s easier to exchange metadata with C1 and other programs that rely on sidecars (it was always possible with DNGs, of course!). Sadly though, you still have to invoke the sync operation manually, and it still overwrites any Adobe Camera Raw metadata.
• A second change isn’t mentioned, and I may be wrong in imagining it, but importing speed seems to be enormously improved. Almost instantly I could scroll through thousands of freshly-imported raw files – when you’re used to Lightroom, it’s quite remarkable.

If you’re unfamiliar with the program, take a look at series of tutorials by Peter Krogh who has also written some thoughts here. I’ll add other links as/if they appear, but already there’s Why Separate is Better Than Integrated, a curious defence from Capture Integration of the decision to keep P1 and MediaPro as separate programs (maybe they should call themselves Capture Separately?). Take the alleged problem attributed to Lightroom’s integration where:

“the photographer is tethered to a laptop for instant review of the images by an on-site Art Director. During the shoot cataloging features are completely useless”

Unfortunately this is not fundamentally a result of these two functions being incompatible in a single program but simply of it being Adobe’s first attempt at tethering, and not getting every detail right. Lightroom certainly could, probably should, have an option to switch tethering so it’s limited to the second screen, leaving the main screen to be used as normal. Another example of how it’s merely a design/implementation detail is how there isn’t yet the ability to add an overlay during tethering – a lot of tethered work requires shooting to a magazine cover or other layout (vote here). One could also see it as a result of Adobe’s failure to respond to small studios’ needs for Lightroom to have multi-user capability. So again, nothing to do with separate or integrated!

“take for instance the needs of a Wedding Photographer who is creating/updating his collection of his best marketing materials. In this case the ability to deeply refine/adjust the image is moot.”

Again, unfortunately not! Look at one very common way Aperture fans explain their preferences over Lightroom – they can be doing any task, such as creating a portfolio, and quickly make adjustments without needing to go into another of those nasty un-Maclike modules. Or think how often people demand Adobe merge the Library and Develop workspaces. The trouble is, a lot of photographers do have 5 second attention spans and no matter how much Lightroom’s modular design steers them in the direction of working methodically and efficiently, they don’t want to complete one task before moving onto another. “Creatives” do jump about.

I doubt we’ll ever get close to 2006/2007′s promise of “one ring to rule them all” where the whole photographic workflow would take place in one environment, but separating managing and post processing is like pulling apart the two supporting pillars of a modern, efficient workflow. If you do use CaptureOne, it makes sense.

As a final point, Aperture seems stuck in its niche and no longer the “Photoshop killer” that so spurred Adobe on, Lightroom increasingly appears to be growing organically and without the need for continuing major investment, and at the same time the excitement seems elsewhere – Adobe can’t take the risk of not putting enormous energy into creating solutions that either run on, or create content for iPads (other tablets exist). Now, more than any point in the past 5 years, I’d love there to be real competition to Lightroom.

Update: released here

It’s been bubbling away for a while, and some people saw it late last year, but in the next few days I’ll be releasing a new plug-in – List View.

It does exactly what the name suggests and provides a list view which some of us feel is sorely missed in Lightroom’s Library. After all, it’s a lot easier to review your metadata in a list than by scanning a grid of thumbnails.

The plug-in currently provides 3 different views. This is the standard view where each row has 2 lines per item for up to 30 pictures, while compact and expanded views show smaller or larger thumbnails. The thumbnails, incidentally, are drawn from the catalogue itself and therefore show each picture in its adjusted state.

Once List View is displayed, scrolling through thousands of items is blazing fast. Note all 10 columns can be changed in registered version - 8 disabled in trial.

Other things you can do with List View:

• Change the information in any column
• Save columns as presets
• Sort by any column
• Export metadata to a browser
• Export metadata directly to Excel
• Edit metadata in a File Info panel

As with my other main plug-ins, it’ll be available from Photographer’s Toolbox. Pricing will initially be £8/$12 which may rise as I add other features. What better way to celebrate the Windsor family wedding?

No matter how much the Lightroom ethos is about designing a program for photographers from the ground up, there are still those atavistic folk who want to do things just as they suppose they’ve always done them. So every so often you’ll get people wanting Undo to be Alt-Ctrl-Z because it’s how Photoshop has always worked, forgetting that the vast majority of programs use Ctrl-Z. Others will demand point curves, with RGB channels too, crop tools that behave just like Photoshop, or even the ability to work in Lab mode (eek). And I suspect that’s the underlying – and questionable – reason why onOne has released a preview of “Perfect Layers“:

Perfect Layers is the fast and easy way to create layered files in Lightroom. With Perfect Layers you can create and edit multi-layered Photoshop files directly within Lightroom

For an idea of what you might do with the program, as well as Scott and Matt’s video on OnOne’s site, see Sean McCormack’s Quick look at Perfect Layers.

onOne’s product range has always puzzled me – a jumble of filters they’ve developed and ex-Extensis tools “allowing [photographers] to create the images they want and [cliche alert] get back to what they really love to do: go shoot!” Even if I felt Perfect Layers filled an important gap, I’d question that $160 is “a very affordable and reasonable price” – for $100 the excellent Photoshop Elements 9 can do layers and a whole lot more. Apparently it makes financial sense as part of onOne’s $500 suite, but as I understand it anyone who has the suite would already own the full-blown Photoshop.

In my view a more serious mistake is presenting what is an external editing program as working “directly within Lightroom”, and the connection with Scott Kelby will draw even more attention to this innacuracy. As Jeffrey Friedl points out in his hilariously-caustic The Amazing Marketing Power of Scott Kelby:

But what really surprised me is that no one (but me) called him out for his bald-faced lie. [JB - I don't think Jeffrey uses Twitter]. Scott knows full well that it’s not “Layers in Lightroom”, of course, because he’s an expert in this stuff in general and he helped develop this specific product, but perhaps the marketing potential of the lie was just too tempting to pass up.

There are some interesting comments on that post, not least from Andrew Rodney which shines more light onto the NAPP (it’s always been far too much like US commercial TV for my English taste).  Scott Kelby’s own post then provides a good laugh as the initially-sycophantic “wow, what I’ve always wanted” posts quickly give way to cries of “King’s new clothes”.

To describe external image editing programs as “plug-ins” is hankers back to what Adobe called “Photoshop['s] rich history of supporting these image processing plug-ins”. But when you’re charging a princely $160, shouldn’t you be careful not to mislead the technically-unsophisticated photographer? When Apple pulled the same stunt with Aperture’s “plug-ins”, I proposed we should help out developers – let’s just label these dubiously-marketed “plug-ins” as “strap-ons”….

Update – also see Jeffrey’s follow-up Scott Kelby Responds, Dazzling With His Marketing Magic and the misleading Layers in (sorry WITH) Lightroom Follow Up . A simple “sorry” would have been more honest – it wasn’t just a  grammatical error that was so outrageous.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t even heard of Blurb’s Bookify and when I read their announcement of a Lightroom 3 to Bookify Plug-In I wasn’t particularly interested. Just another dumbed-down online service? Instead what I focussed on was the closing comment:

… very soon, we’ll be bringing you more exciting ways to use Lightroom and Blurb together – including integration with Blurb BookSmart®.

It’s a hint of the not-too-distant future – assuming books do survive, that is. As Lightroom becomes more and more dominant, so we’ll soon benefit from third parties like Blurb exploiting its extensibility, the SDK, to offer integrated book creation services. It’s taking some while to catch up with Aperture here, but do you really prefer a solution that depends on using software that forces you to buy one brand of computer and until recently only offered that same brand’s books? Or would you prefer the open market? It’s been a long time coming, but I look forward to what Blurb do next. My guess? A Publish service.

In the Export dialog you can define book types and various features such as front and back covers

Now, I did say what my first thoughts had been. But after having had a good play with the Bookify plug-in, I’m not at all sure that my “just another dumbed-down online service” is fair to it. Right now I have a pressing need to produce a simple book, and I may as well give this a try. This is what they say the plug-in can do:

• Flow edited Lightroom images into Bookify™ (our online tool for simple photo books).
• Choose your book’s layout and style from within Lightroom.
• Stream photo captions automatically into your book’s text boxes.
• Automatically capture file data for the images in your book.

The upload process went smoothly and I did like choosing some initial settings such as adding the IPTC title and description to each page. After a “Woohoo! We’ve finishing cooking up your book now” message (makes a nice change) you can then edit the book in Bookify’s Flash-driven site. You can easily change page layouts by typing into a box, or by choosing one layout style after another, but it did feel quite dumbed-down – design by trial and error – and when I decided I no longer wanted titles for each picture, I had to remove them one by one. While catering for the thicko, it’s a touch long-winded if you have more DTP experience.

The workflow also seemed unnecessarily awkward when I wanted to add extra images to the book. The plug-in only allows you to start new books, not update existing ones. This meant I then had to export the extra pictures to the desktop and upload them through Bookify’s web interface, and then add the titles and descriptions to each page. It wasn’t too big a problem though, but the Bookify plug-in really should support adding extra images to a book.

I was also a bit disappointed they hadn’t added an idiot proof way to make an image fit a double page spread. Currently I’m adding the same picture to both left and right pages, and then using the keyboard arrows to nudge each image – essentially doing the bleed by eye. The spread looks right on a large screen, but I’ll only really know when the book arrives and I keep thinking Bookify seems so well thought-out I’m surprised they haven’t made this as easy as the rest of the process. Overall, Bookify is never likely to give you anywhere near the level of control that you’d have with Blurb’s InDesign to PDF workflow, but it’s not really that much less functional than their BookSmart – which I can’t see myself using again. For simple Blurb books, I suspect Bookify is all you really need.

Some other Blurb links may be interesting:

• Series of videos by John Paul Caponigro here
• Lawyers may have made its title look faintly ®idiculous, but “Adobe® Lightroom® to Blurb BookSmart®” has a lot about profiling, X-Rite colour profiler, which some may find useful, and the Lightroom stuff only starts half way through

On a big screen, Bookify's great use of Flash makes it easy to change the order of pages or do other basic layout work. Now if only Lightroom's SDK allowed you to create a module with a browser....

I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has tried Dropbox and doesn’t like it – it solves an often-complex problem of sharing large files and yet presents itself to the user in such a readily-understandable way. It’s especially wonderful in not being limited to one operating system or brand, so you can happily keep certain files between Macs and PCs, and can even extend this to cellphones and tablets too.

Like anyone I use Dropbox for my own convenience and sharing material with others, but I’ve also been using it to test Lightroom plug-ins that I’m updating. Running them from Dropbox makes it that little bit easier to check something works on PC and Mac. But one thing I haven’t tried was mentioned by Adobe’s Terry White at the end of 5 Ways To Take Advantage of Dropbox:

In addition to the 5 ways above, I’m also using Dropbox to store my most frequently used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalogs. This way as long as the images themselves are on my file server or in the Dropbox as well, I can go to any computer and work in Lightroom on the same files/catalogs. Although I have a nice fast Mac Pro with a 30″ display I almost never used it for retouching in the past because everything was always on my MacBook Pro. With Dropbox that problem goes away as the files are on whichever computer I want to work on and automatically sync’d when I make changes or retouch them.

The viability of this idea will partly depend on your network speed, and on your internet connection speed and bandwidth. Here that wouldn’t be too big a problem as my cable connection is unlimited and runs at its headline 50Mb down/5Mb up (it’s Virgin cable and I have a promo code if you’re interested). It’s unlikely that I would want to open a catalogue on one machine immediately after closing it on another, I could probably wait for Dropbox to sync it. But what if you don’t like the idea of Terry’s fragmented catalogues and want Dropbox to make your main Lightroom catalogue available on multiple computers? And can the idea be taken further, to the cusp of a networked solution?

One promising approach is to use Mac aliases or Windows symbolic links (a bit like shortcuts). So for example, you would keep the catalogue itself in a Dropbox folder, but use aliases or symbolic links to store the catalogue’s previews separately in a folder that doesn’t get synchronised. When you move to the other computer, your catalogue will be available as soon as Dropbox’s sync operation has completed, just having to rebuild its previews which are stored locally. As always, the originals could be on a network address.

Dropbox and symbolic links or aliases let you make the catalogue and presets available to multiple computers, while no synchronising the bulky previews folder

But you can adopt the same idea for the “application support” folders containing presets, templates and plug-ins, so they become available on multiple computers. On Mac these are stored in USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom while in Windows 7 you’ll be looking at C:Users/USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom and again on each machine you would move the folders to Dropbox and set up aliases or symbolic links.

For the last week or so I’ve kept the “application support folders” on Dropbox, and my Mac and PC have each been able to access the same presets, templates and plug-ins. That’s pretty convenient! There are one or two glitches:

• I’ve noticed some slowdowns when using the local adjustment brush. I suspect something is being written to the preferences.
• On PC your preferences are stored in a Preferences folder, which would be great if I only ran PCs because my preferences would be synchronised
• On Mac preferences are stored in a plist file, so you can’t use the technique to share preferences between Macs (more knowledgeable Mac users may have a solution)

It’s not a true multi-user networked solution, but it’s a rather geeky step in the right direction!

continue reading…

A smoking gun?

Although mainly a PC user, I also have a Mac laptop and do like its AppleScript and Automator scripting/automation features. I’ve little doubt that if I only used Mac I would quickly find various ways of saving myself time – maybe enough to outweigh the time spent on the learning curve. Yet I’ve always been surprised that Lightroom users who are real Mac enthusiasts – you know the type, the wide-eyed evangelists – never seem remotely interested in these tools and rarely mention them. I’ve never been able to understood why not, but for Mac-using photographers Applescript and Automator remain well off the beaten track.

Now, in “the community of Lightroom talking heads” anyone can retread step-by-step Lightroom tutorials, and many will do them better than I. My style is to come up with far more than my fair share of ingenious workflows and original insights into the program. So a couple of weeks ago an interesting twist on the topic of AppleScript and Automator popped up in a forum, and I tweeted some thoughts beginning with this.

And now, coincidentally, there appears this post Automating Your (Mac-only) Workflow. Well-written, but come on…. I’ve no problem with people picking up on ideas I’ve aired, but at least acknowledge where the spark originated.

I’ve never been one who photographs in colour and occasionally dabbles with black and white. It’s very much the other way round, and I often look at pictures I’ve left in colour and think they’re rather monochrome anyway. But I’ve never seen doing a lot of b&w work as a reason why I would want to buy Nik’s Silver Efex Pro (SEP) or any of the other dedicated black and white plug-ins that it has now overshadowed. It’s not that I felt SEP1 deficient in any way – quite the contrary. SEP1 was a very polished piece of software, produced good results quickly (even if I doubted the film simulations), and I could certainly see why people liked it so much. I simply felt its price was steep, and I’ve not feel any real need for it.

Nonetheless, I was looking forward to seeing Silver Efex Pro 2 and these seem to be the new features:

• History Browser – good, session-only and like Photoshop except with more detail,
• Amplify Blacks and Amplify Whites – I remain neutral about this
• Visual Presets – thumbnails on each preset encouraged me to try them
• Soft Contrast – no opinion
• Fine Structure – no opinion
• Image Borders – nice to find this integrated
• Selective colorization – worked well once I got used to the U points
• GPU Processing – it was perfectly quick but on a quick machine, so “no comment”

As before, it’s a very easy program to use – installing as a Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture plug-in. You then launch SEP2 from the host program (though you can drag a TIF or JPEG onto the program icon or desktop shortcut) and it is converted to black and white with a default treatment.

On the left are the presets, both built-in and any user-created, and I liked how they are shown as thumbnails or “visual presets”. It uses a lot of space, but that isn’t a problem with a dedicated app like SEP2, and it is much better than listing presets in text-only form or than Lightroom’s combination of list and rollover image. You can have too much of a good thing though – after a day or two I realised that the preset panel was leading me to work by clicking one preset after another, before doing anything else to the image. It was a very grave case of “presetitis”, at least as severe as anything Lightroom could inflict! I wasn’t just exploring alternative treatments but felt I was working by trial and error. I felt so much happier once I had hidden the presets from view!

I’d also apply that argument to the film recipes, of course. I’ll restrict my rant to asking what’s the creative value of someone who never used a particular film stock being led to believe in a recipe that doesn’t include variations such as development methods, enlarger and paper types?

One thing I didn’t notice at first was how the edge burning could be varied on each side. It was a bit like having 4 ND grad filters around the image and was a nice touch.

The selective colour adjustment allows you to preserve the colour in parts of the image. I used to enjoy painting on b&w prints and have occasionally done it in Photoshop, if not for a while, and I’m sure this feature will be popular.  It seemed to work best for me when applying SEP2 to a Photoshop smart object – I could keep make multiple trips to SEP2 and the colour and the U-points remained editable. However, if I started from a regular layer or from Lightroom, the file would be saved as a simple TIF file, and any coloured patches would be lost if I re-opened that file in SEP2. The same happened if I added a tone and then re-edited. So smart objects would definitely be the way to go.

I did hit a big problem though – on Windows 7, SEP2 converts correctly-formatted keyword data to a garbled mess. I wasn’t the first to find it, but I’m glad to say it’s now fixed.

What’s happening is that SEP2 isn’t just preserving whatever metadata is already in the file – which is all one actually needs. Instead it rewrites it and then concatenates the keywords in an almost random fashion. At first I thought it only occurred with files sent from Lightroom, which might allow Nik to hide behind “it’s Adobe’s fault”, but I am told it had all worked properly in SEP1, and I could repeat the problem by adding keywords in other programs like Microsoft’s Expression Media 2. It’s not caused by anything radical such as hierarchical keywords (I don’t have a hierarchy), but seems to more of a generalised problem writing out IPTC-Core metadata and particularly the dc-subject field. I’m not sure if it gets any other metadata wrong – what it does to my keywords is bad enough!

So when the file comes back to Adobe Lightroom you have to correct its keywords. But what makes this bug so pernicious is how all the garbled permutations are added to Lightroom’s keyword lists. If you don’t want junk like “Barns Bracken Building” showing up as auto-suggestions, you have to go through purging your keywords of all the permutations SEP2 has created. Get the idea I’m unhappy?

Nik Support do acknowledge the bug and say they are working on it, though I’ve not enough experience of them to say if they will release an update. I presume so. Until it is fixed, would that stop me buying the program? Probably not. The bug is horrid and had already polluted my keywords pretty widely before I realised what was happening, so it took a while to sort everything out. But I would be more worried had I encountered lots of minor bugs and general instability rather than one major boo-boo like this. (Update Aug 14th – 4 months later and it’s still not fixed)

Have I changed my mind about Silver Efex? Again, no. It remains a very pleasant app to use, just one that costs more than I’m likely to pay for something I don’t really need (though that didn’t stop me ordering a Lee Big Stopper recently). No, overall, I liked Silver Efex Pro 2 and I would perhaps consider getting it – at least as part of the Nik suite. But I don’t do colour, do I?

Other reviews (by those who use SEP2) :

• Derrick Story, Derrick’s latest podcast,
• Joe Farace
• Rob Sheppard
• Bret Edge
• Ben Long
• Keith Cooper

Ever spend ages thinking up ways to convince someone a task is far from easy, and that they should just give up on the idea – and then the solution appears just as you were about to hit the Send button?

Well, the other night I had an interesting email from someone who has my Search and Replace plug-in for Lightroom:

… I need to remove text (“Scan_”) from the filename for images I scanned 4-5 years ago (and are now in my LR catalog). It appears [Search and Replace] does not work on filenames, only on metadata. Pre-LR catalog I used a utility to do bulk file name changes on folders of files, but that will be a problem with the LR catalog.

I could use the bulk filename changing tool, then delete the LR-cataloged-but-missing-image and then reimport the newly rename files. But it seems risky and I’d lose metadata for the images w/o XMP files.

It’s not at all unreasonable that users would want to replace certain text when doing a batch rename – I often used the feature in iView/Expression Media – and it’s a shame that Lightroom’s renaming seems to have fallen foul of  “you couldn’t do it in Bridge” thinking here. It is a bit underpowered in this respect, especially as changing file names outside Lightroom can easily do a lot more damage – you could lose a lot of your work.

So I began my reply saying I wouldn’t be adapting Search & Replace to handle file renaming, as it is indeed for metadata manipulation and its next steps are most likely to be into spell checking. I then wrote a couple of lengthy paragraphs explaining how a dedicated file renaming plug-in could certainly be written, but doing it well would be time-consuming and still risk scrambling the user’s file system and trashing a lot of Lightroom work. The user’s idea of reimporting the renamed files was workable if you weren’t worried about losing all the Lightroom work that isn’t stored in the XMP – flags, stacks, virtual copies, assignment to collections, and history steps. In a final flourish of negative thinking I began to think about how to explain running the external renaming utility and then updating the catalogue via SQL? Again it’s conceivable – but a lot of work. You might summarise my response as “Computer says No” (Little Britain, if the reference isn’t clear!).

Using Search and Replace on an IPTC field, it's possible to perform more complex renaming than Lightroom's Batch Rename permits

And then I realised how simple it would be:

1. Use Search & Replace’s Transfer command to copy the file name to any unused IPTC field that Lightroom’s Batch Rename dialog will be able to access. Let’s say it’s the Headline
2. Use Search & Replace to remove “Scan_” from the Headline
3. Use Search & Replace to remove the extension from the Headline
4. Finally use LR’s Rename Photos to rename using the Headline

Easy.

I’m beginning to add a spell checking feature to my Search and Replace plug-in. If you want to say what would be important for your needs, please add comments to this post and I’ll see if I can implement the features you request.

There are two ways I may go. One, which I have tested on Windows, is to automate Word’s spelling feature. That’s messier on Mac so for that platform I would probably automate the OS-level spellchecker. This two-track approach would allow me to exploit corrections that the user has already made in Word, Outlook, Mac Mail etc. But it does involve platform-specific coding and would be much more work. The other alternative is to use a cross-platform library and Aspell has been recommended. I’d never heard of it, and I’ve no idea how good it is, but it may permit a simpler implementation. So that’s the route I plan to try first.

I’m probably going to initiate spell checking from a menu item (rather than intercepting the Export command) and will allow the user to specify which fields to target. Changes will be automatically written back to the metadata fields.

No guarantees on when it’ll be done or what features I can include. But what would be most helpful?

Search Replace Transfer 1.30 fixes a bug, which 1.29 kindly introduced, but it also contains a new menu command – “Brute force” search which creates a regular or “dumb” collection and then adds images to it by performing a “brute force” search through the selected items or through the entire catalogue.

The intention is to fill in some gaps in Lightroom’s smart collection and searching capability. So it can search text fields like caption more precisely than Lightroom and it can also examine fields which Lightroom fails to search.

For example, let’s say you want to find all pictures in the catalogue which contain the exact phrase “red house” in the caption. Normally you might try a smart collection with a criterion such as “caption / contains all / red house” or “caption / contains words / red house”, but Lightroom would also identify pictures containing “girl in red dress in front of blue house” where “red” and “house” aren’t adjacent. So this command looks for “red house” as an exact phrase.

But it can also do the same on fields that LR won’t let smart collections examine. So it might look for the “∞” (infinity) or “20m” in the subject distance field, for example.

The result is a new collection created in a “Search Replace Transfer” collection set, and using the query as the collection’s name:

Recently I’ve seen a number of Lightroom users asking how they could find all images shot at a certain time of the year.

Now, if you have your head screwed on you would have included seasons in your keywords. For instance, an image of snow might include “winter” in the keywords (unless you live at the North or South Poles) while a picture of cherry blossom might include the keyword “spring”. I’m not too keen on the idea of including the month as a keyword, though a case might be made for doing so.

But let’s say you’ve not used such keywords, but still want Lightroom to find all the pictures you’ve shot in the winter months. The best answer has been that you need to create a smart collection along the lines of “Capture Date” / “Is in the range” / “December 1st 2010 to January 31st 2011″, for example. That’s OK for one year, and then for a second year you’d add a line with similar criteria and just type over the years. By the time you get to three years it’s getting a bit boring, and then you decide to change winter to include February…. And if you also want a smart collection of photographs shot during the spring months, it’s all becoming a bit too much effort. Life is short. The particularly annoying thing is that the data is available in Lightroom’s catalogue, but it’s too difficult to access.

So version 1.29 of my Search Replace Transfer plug-in adds a custom field called “Month” and writes to it with the existing Parse + audit menu command. You just select your pictures, run the Parse + audit menu from Library > Plug-in Extras. The plug-in then runs through the pictures and updates its custom fields which can you can then query in the Filter Panel or through Smart Collections.

And a little note – the Parse + audit command is in the free part of the plug-in so it isn’t limited to 10 items per time.

Get the plug-in from Photographer’s Toolbox.

I was just helping out a newcomer to Lightroom with how to use the pick flags and the P U X shortcuts. As a reminder, I came up with this little panel end mark. Memorable enough?

The file should go in the Panel End Marks folder which you can find by right clicking in the bottom of Lightroom’s right panel.

Also see seeing stars for a similar approach to making your star ratings consistent.

That’s exactly what you see here! It’s actually a Google maps gallery with images displayed as thumbnails on the map. They’re clickable and reveal larger images with captions, and you can also switch to StreetView inside Lightroom’s Web or in the browser .

This is just a working proof of concept, but by the end of the day….

On reflection, when Aperture 3 came out I wrote that essentially its most prominent features were the result of bolting-on a couple of cheap wins – one being Google Maps. This drew predictable criticism from McCreate, a Pravda-style site for Mac-limited apps, but unfortunately I had based my assessment of the scale of the work on my having worked with Google Maps and I had taken an educated assessment of how little work the feature needed. If a limited implementation of Google Maps can be done by someone like me – not a trained programmer – what can a team achieve? And it also makes one very sad the feature isn’t already in Lightroom, doesn’t it?

See this interesting article by Michael Frye on Setting the White Point in Lightroom: A Comparison:

Since I advocate using the Point Curve in Lightroom to set a white point and black point, I sometimes get asked about the difference between doing this with the point curve, and doing it with the Blacks and Exposure sliders. The first part of the answer is that there is no difference—at least none that I can see—between using the Blacks slider and moving the lower-left end of the Point Curve to the right.

But there is a difference between using the Exposure slider to set a white point and doing it with the Point Curve. When Lightroom first came out Adobe said that pushing the Exposure slider to the right was the same as setting a white point with Levels or Curves in Photoshop, and everyone seems to have taken this as gospel. Maybe Adobe said that to justify not including Levels or a real point curve in early versions of Lightroom. But it’s not the same, and it’s easy to dispel that myth, especially now that Lightroom has a real point curve:

In my view this is partly a case of wanting to work Photoshop-style with the same levels and curves tools that you’ve used for years. In terms of time effectiveness (never forget Lightroom is about workflow efficiency), I doubt there’s any difference in setting the white and black points with the sliders or dragging the curve, so I’ll take that out of the equation. But the real danger I see in this approach is of neglecting the adaptive tools – Recovery and Fill Light – which only target contiguous areas of the brightest highlights or contiguous areas of shadow tones. So these tools protect the spectral highlights and the points of purest black. By forcing the point curve to perform all your clipping recovery, you are altering all the brightest tones in the image – what makes it sparkle. Is it coincidental that Frye uses a low contrast image without much shadow? Use the point curve when it’s needed, but why work with one hand tied behind your back?

There’s an interesting comparison of doing black and white in Capture One 6, Silver Efex 1, and Lightroom 3 by Mike at The Intuitive Lens. It’s a two parter with Capture One vs Silver Efex and then both vs Lightroom. I’m not sure it proves much, if anything, other than one if one tries to do so one can produce similar results in different products! Leaving settings at default is a little odd, and there’s no real attempt to use the b&w conversion process to separate neighbouring colours into distinct tones – eg those in the left woman’s blouse or between the brown briefcase in the foreground and the middle person’s red sweater. Why didn’t he use Lightroom’s targeted adjustment tool, for example? I’d argue that it alone produces better b&w images because you’re keeping your eyes on the image. But it is an interesting exercise.

Update

See discussion here and here.

My view tends to be that there are no jacks of all trades and skilled hands can squeeze the same “objective quality” out of each app. So my emphasis is less on pixel-peeping and more on the process of getting to the best expression of the picture.

That’s why I put a lot of emphasis on the benefits of using the targeted adjustment tool – the little nipple in the top left corner of LR’s B&W panel or in Photoshop’s B&W adjustment layer – as I find that it your keeps your eyes completely on the picture and its changing appearance. By comparison, dragging sliders is inherently a very mechanical process, while presets usually trade on the blind faith that their authors have accurately calibrated the spectral response of film X (and factored in lens filters and developer agitation…).

Capture Time to Exif is essentially an in-Lightroom interface for Exiftool, Phil Harvey’s highly-respected “platform-independent Perl library plus command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files”.

With Capture Time to Exif you can:

• Update the Date Time Original EXIF field of scanned images. Lightroom’s filter panel and smart collections can then find the images by searching for when the pictures were originally taken rather than when they were digitised.



• Write other EXIF and IPTC information such as the camera model and maker. You can enter whatever Exiftool command line arguments you choose.
• Store frequently-used command line arguments as presets.
• Write directly to TIF, PSD, JPEG, and DNG file formats
  • Writing to proprietary raw formats is disabled.
• Generate a log file which can be run as a batch file in Shell/Terminal
  • Use this method if you really want to write to proprietary raw formats.

Capture Time to Exif is for Lightroom 3 on PC or Mac, and is available from Photographer’s Toolbox. The trial version is limited to 10 images at a time but is fully functional.

I’ve been asked – a little mischievously – why in yesterday’s 20 minute wow I don’t say more about Slideshow, Web and Print. A single word each? That good then?

Well, quite the contrary. I am not trying to pack every feature into a short presentation. The audience – existing Lightroom users and those questioning their current working practices – already know and take for granted that they can create impressive slideshows, web galleries, and prints. They don’t need showing exactly how you add keywords or adjust image brightness. Such features slip into the presentation “en passant”.

Instead it’s a 20 minute wow – bullet points to highlight great tools people may have overlooked or forgotten, and to distinguish Lightroom from Photoshop and other programs they may know.

So my emphasis on Lightroom for pictures in the plural, and a quick mention of Folder panel’s existence is all that’s needed to wake any Aperture users. AutoSync also touches those listeners, but it’s mainly there to show the huge productivity gains it offers and also because I’d also say most other Lightroom talking heads are too often inclined to dumb things down and advise against its use. I advocate it. It’s a great feature and to my mind it should have been the default behaviour. Similarly, people forget the targeted adjustment tool is that little grey spot in the panel corner, and so never appreciate how such an innovative tool lets you keep your eyes firmly on the image ‘s changing appearance, not on sliders, and how that inevitably results in a final image that better expresses its qualities. Split Screen view is almost unique to Lightroom, immediately notable, and History isn’t just the same glorified Undo that is familiar to Photoshop users but provides a way to benchmark your fine tuning by dragging and dropping steps to the Before side of the screen. In short, if you’re not given much time to convince, would you show off things they know Lightroom can do?

Someone, somewhere asked a good question about Lightroom. How would you wow a mixed group of existing users and other photographers when you’re allowed just 20 minutes? 20 minutes? At most? Without anyone asking you something? And let’s say we’re not dealing with thickos, but potential “power users”, or those who think they already are so. Well, and I bet someone* rips this off, it’s got to be bullet points :

• First I run through Library
  • Remind people the raison d’etre of this kind of program is to manage large numbers of pictures, not just post processing
  • But metadata and organisation quickly send most people to sleep, so
    • Straight down the left panel. Folders show you always know where your pictures are (any Aperture users watching?)
    • Slide briefly across the bottom filmstrip (F6, drop down list of recent sources)
    • Up the right panel in a couple of parkour leaps. Keywording is there, templates too.
    • That’s all they want to know, for now. Move on.
• Straight to Develop and straight to switching on Auto Sync mode
  • Drag a few sliders from Basic panel and (double click filmstrip’s top line) watch ‘em all change
  • Hold down the Alt/Opt key and blow those highlights
  • Double click a slider label to reset it, then Shift double click it
  • Stress again that Lightroom’s raison d’etre is handling pictures, plural, while Photoshop is for the singular.
  • Auto Sync is also the fastest way to work, and much faster than using Sync or (any Aperture users?) Aperture’s Sync-equivalent “lift and stamp”
• Dust spotting while in Auto Sync mode is next
  • 20 or 30 small aperture shots with nice blue skies
  • But – careless me – one picture shouldn’t have been selected and the spot correction goes wrong.
  • You’ve got to keep your head screwed on with Auto Sync (if you can’t, don’t use it)
  • Work in Auto Sync all the time, or never – don’t keep switching.

Multiple items selected in Auto Sync mode - all images corrected with one click

• Targeted adjustment tool
  • Lightroom’s subdued UI means many existing users forget it’s there
  • Show how your eyes stay on the image and how it is changing as you work. You’re not even looking at the sliders (hide the right panel)
  • We’re now talking quality, with an L (a cue to cycle through Lights Out)
  • V and into black and white, quick drag (on image area, not dress style)
• Hit Y to show Before / After split screen
  • Stress the fine tuning
  • Shift Y, Z, Z, Shift Y
  • Drag steps from History or Snapshots into the Before area
• Local adjustment brush
  • You don’t need to do that in Photoshop any more
  • Auto Mask
  • O – and remember to say keyboard shortcuts are shown in Help – shift O – O again
• Develop Presets
  • I bet that surprises some folk reading this!
  • Mine include one per profile (from the Calibration panel)
• Slideshow, Web, Print
  • Three words, three clicks
  • Show Print’s templates, contact sheets

In 20 minutes that’s about as much as I can pack in. And if that doesn’t leave their heads spinning….

Also see: update / rationale.

* no-one specifically in mind