Here’s another preview of my SiteMaker web gallery showing its huge flexibility.
May I, as the saying goes, draw your attention to:

1. Here it’s a single “contact sheet” gallery. SiteMaker can be either for a complete photo site or for a proofs gallery of a single set of images – or both
2. All the thumbnails and their descriptions are shown in this case, but you can choose between 1 and 9 columns and can also switch off the titles and descriptions
3. There’s only the Contact menu – you can change the text or hide it altogether with a single click
4. The font is set by choosing from a drop down box – no need to type in the exact name of a web-safe font family

CaptureTime to Exif is my latest Lightroom 3 plug-in. Essentially it’s an in-Lightroom interface for Exiftool:

1. Initially it was for Lightroom users whose catalogue contains scanned images and who wanted to make the scans’ Date Time Original EXIF field correspond to when the pictures were originally taken rather than when they were scanned. But people said they wanted to add the camera model, or the aperture details from their tatty old notebooks….
2. So the plug-in also lets you write other EXIF and IPTC information. One idea was to add extra boxes for specific fields, but I could never please everyone – not without a lot of work. I’m also hesitant to make writing EXIF so easy that it’ll attract people who should be kept away from it for their own good, and I reckon those who know about such stuff would appreciate a “bare back” style. So I’ve chosen to add a simple box for you to enter your own Exiftool arguments, whatever you want, at your own risk.
3. You can save complicated command line arguments as presets.
4. There’s a preview of the command line which can be copied to a batch file and tested in Shell/Terminal. Add the -k option and the Exiftool window will remain open, letting you track down any errors in the command line.
5. The plug-in will write directly to TIF, PSD, JPEG, and DNG file formats, but I have disabled the ability to write to proprietary raw formats.
6. If you really want to write to proprietary raw formats, the plug-in uses Lightroom’s log feature to generate a batch file which you can quickly edit and run in Shell/Terminal.
7. One little touch is the “incremental time stamp” which adds a second to each image in the batch – so later you can sort images by capture time even if the file names don’t help.

Capture Time to Exif will soon be on Photographers Toolbo. It’s important to begin by using Ctrl/CmdS to save any Lightroom metadata back to the files, and after running the plug-in Library > Read Metadata will update the catalogue.

Of course, if it all sounds like mumbo jumbo, then the plug-in won’t be for you and you can happily leave command lines well alone!

SiteMaker is the name of a new and very-soon-to-be-unleashed web gallery for Lightroom 3 which aims to create a complete web site within Lightroom.

The front page is designed so you can highlight three key groups of images – for example “Latest work”, “Landscape portfolio”, “Black and white portraits”. So the top part of the site has three full width images which change as the visitor moves the cursor over the related explanation panels.

Additionally, further galleries of pictures can be displayed in a grid that runs below this full width area. So the front page both highlights your latest and greatest work, and provides the visitor with immediate access to all your pictures.

Secondly, people often want to add extra pages to a site – an “About Me” or contact page, for instance. So this is requirement is also built into SiteMaker. You can define up to three such pages, adding text by simply typing into boxes in Lightroom’s Site Info panel. For even more flexibility you are also able to add raw HTML, if you know how.

As well as the key features of splitting a single Web Export into multiple galleries and adding custom content pages, SiteMaker provides a huge range of configuration options. For example:

• Full control over colours of text and sections of the site
• Add background images to the page, header and footer
• Control rollover and transparency effects
• Enter titles and descriptions for the galleries
• Change the number of columns in each gallery
• Position the identity plate anywhere
• Change the menu style and position
• Round the corners of the web site
• Show star ratings to point clients to your best pictures
• Google Analytics built-in
• Installed via Lightroom’s plug-in manager for easier updating

It’s going to come in a number of versions too. SiteMakerPublisher will let you change web site contents through Library’s Publish, while SiteMakerSSP will connect the site to the SlideShowPro Director content management system.

See it in action here. What do you think?

With kind permission, a letter of thanks:

Dear Mr Beardsworth

I write to advice that I shall be lodging a formal complaint with Adobe about Lightroom [gurus] in general and you in particular.  You are all a load of shysters.  With mal-intent you insert stealth bombs into Lightroom that no user could possibly detect, simply in order to gain cheap self-gratification by smugly pointing out what, with hindsight, are very obvious and simple resolutions to users’ issues.  Your only possible motivation in doing this can be to demonstrate what dorks Lightroom users are and how you lot are all clever-dicks!

Seriously, I got your message at lunchtime but all my hard drives were located at home.  I was pretty sure that your resolution would be a case of hope over reality and once I arrived home had a 30 minute window to eat before going to Kingston Camera Club (yes I did get a “10” since you ask!)  I forsook dinner to try your theory and b****r me it worked!!  I typed P:\ as you suggested and suddenly My Computer and all my external hard drives magically appeared!

You lot really are b*******s in humiliating me in this way but I very begrudgingly thank you very much for resolving an issue that had been bugging me for some considerable time!  It was good of you to keep persevering rather than just close the matter.  Thanks again.

Regards

Duncan

See Duncan’s work at www.duncangrove.com or blog www.duncangroveblog.com.

Update: It appears that Duncan has recently been awarded a Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society, the most august and longest established organisation of its kind in the world.  Fellowship (FRPS) is awarded for exceptional standards of excellence. It is the Society’s highest Distinction and recognises original work and outstanding ability in a specialised field. His Fellowship Panel of twenty Wimbledon tennis images can be seen at www.duncangrove.com/frps-panel.

I’ve just (finally) released Open Directly, my plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 that opens images directly in another program. The other program may be another raw converter, or it can be any program the user chooses. In either case, the plug-in simply sends the original file and invokes the other program.

Read more here

I’ve just released version 1.22 of my Lightroom plug-in Search Replace Transfer with two new menu commands:

• Smart collection from current item
• Smart collection from current item – again

These two menu commands are designed for quick filtering of the catalogue based on the image that is currently selected.

For example, imagine you want to find all the pictures in the catalogue with “Autumn leaves” in the title or “Ashness Gate” in the location. In the latter case, it may be that you’ve just visited the location again and want to copy keywords and other metadata from a previous visit. You could go to Library’s filter panel, choose the field, and type in the text, or alternatively you could set up a smart collection. These menu commands save you that typing.

The main command “Smart collection from current item” launches a dialog box listing the fields. You make your choice, click OK, and the plug-in creates a smart collection such as “location / contains all / Ashness Gate”. The second menu command “Smart collection from current item – again” simply runs the same code without prompting you for a different field. So you could quickly create a series of smart collections for Ashness Gate, Ashness Bridge, Watendlath… or wherever you happen to be (can you tell I’ve just spent a few days in the Lake District?).

It’s currently “quick and dirty”. Due to the weakness of Lightroom’s filtering, some important fields are not searchable. A follow-up release will cover these other fields, using dumb collections (and extra code).

The smart collection is currently only a single line. Again, a later release is planned to create multi-line smart collections.

A particularly well-rounded set of thoughts on keywording in Lightroom from Chuq Von Rospach here:

An important point  — when you design a structure like this, how well it’ll work for you depends on where your hassle factor hits. Are you more annoyed by looking through long lists of things? If so, design a hierarchy with more sub items and fewer items in each sub-area. If traversing the tree bothers you more, use longer lists and fewer sub-items. You can adjust this to your tastes as you work with it.

[...]

Define some standards and then stick to them. Capitalization, tense, punctuation and the like matters. If you aren’t consistent here, your work will come across as unprofessional and sloppy — even if people looking at your photos only notice it sub-consciously. In my keywords, I standardized on using the plural form (“Birds” instead of “Bird”) unless that was clearly inappropriate, and I lean towards a third person form, present tense and I always strive to use an active voice instead of passive. (Passive Voice writing is to be hated in all serious writing).

Getting all of the details right is — frankly — a pain. But once you get them right, they’ll stay that way with minimal work, and it gives a polish and professionalism to your work that leaves a better impression.

It’s worth reading Chuq’s thoughts in full because they are well-written and include some “theoretical” angles while not forgetting the practical, real world issues. The first paragraph I’ve quoted rings particularly true here – it’s why I use one long list.

Not sure who is behind Totally Sweet Photos but he (maybe Tom) or she describes a A Hyper-Organized, Smart Collection-based Lightroom Workflow:

This seems like an incredibly complicated workflow, however since the majority of the tools involved are self-updating smart collections I put forth virtually no effort in order to keep track of thousands of images. In fact, in the past I have managed lesser amounts of photos with fewer steps in what were much more complicated and time-consuming workflows. Thanks to automation, all I really do now is work on my photos and trust Lightroom to keep the books straight.

Good to see my workflow scribblings still hits a sweet spot and provokes people into doing their own thing.

Version 1.23 of my Lightroom plug-in Syncomatic is now available via Photographers Toolbox. The new feature is that now, as well as handling files with matching names, it can now synchronise metadata and adjustments within stacks

When you add metadata like the title or keywords to a stack, Lightroom only updates the picture on the top of the stack – items lower down the stack are not updated. So if you do want all members of the stack to share similar metadata, you first have to expand the stack and select all the items. Then after adding the metadata, you would collapse the stack again. For some users, that is OK because they will only keep the best image and don’t want to annotate the rejects. But for others it’s pretty inefficient, for instance stock photographers or those who use stacks to gather frames intended for panorama stitching. For them the stacks-metadata problem is often a reason for not using the stacking feature.

Sync Stacks is intended to overcome that problem. It adds a menu command and:

1. Loops through the selected pictures
2. Finds images that are at the top of their stacks
3. Copies their metadata to the rest of the stack

continue reading…

I’ve just released a new version of my Syncomatic plug-in.

Syncomatic’s original purpose was to tidy up metadata when you are faced with sets of pictures whose names match but whose metadata is out of sync. For instance you may have lots of TIFs or JPEGs which have been output from your raw files, but you then added keywords to the raw files. How do you then make 1234-edit.tif have the same keywords and other metadata as the original 1234.nef, make 1235-edit.tif the same as 1235.nef and so on? Syncomatic does that job.

It now does the same with adjustments (at least as many as it can).

Why would one want to do that? Well, for example, I was contacted by someone who had taken 15,000 pictures in a very short period, and sheer pressure of work had led him to switch his camera to Raw+JPEG and import only the JPEGs. He’d then added ratings, captioned and keyworded the JPEGs, done some quick adjustments, and submitted modified JPEGs to his clients. Now he was home and wanted to import his raw files and prepare stock and portfolio quality images from them. That was where he hit a wall. He could restore the raw files into the same folder as the JPEGs, and then synchronise the Lightroom folder – but Lightroom hides the JPEG and brings in the raw files without any IPTC metadata or adjustments. Even if one had saved the metadata back to the JPEGs, it wouldn’t really treat them like sidecars. The other approach for RAW+JPEG is to change the catalogue option so it imports separate files, but then there was the problem of copying the metadata and adjustments from each JPEG to its corresponding raw file. That’s why I updated Syncomatic.

Another possible application is when you have a new camera which has a raw file type which Lightroom doesn’t yet support. What you might do – after filing a complaint with the camera maker and demanding they offer a DNG option – is shoot Raw+JPEG, import the JPEG files, and add your metadata and adjustments. When Lightroom is updated, you can import the raw files and use Syncomatic to update them. I’m not sure if that will work in practice, but I suspect so.

Now, there are some limitations – but not many. Essentially I’m using the develop preset mechanism, so Syncomatic can only apply adjustments that you can save in a preset. Above all, that means cropping can’t be synchronised. But it does pretty well everything else, which isn’t too shabby.

I really wasn’t sure whether yesterday’s how to make the Intuos pen’s eraser erase Lightroom’s local adjustments was a discovery of the magnitude of Columbus reaching the New World or belonged in the same “so what?” league of interest as Britain’s red tops revealing that another highly-paid footballer can’t keep it in his pants and another Conservative MP is a closet gay.

Doubting the tip’s value so much, that was where my thought process stopped, and it was only this morning as I put my feet down on the bedroom floor (wood not a shagpile) that another idea clunked into view. Now the pen’s eraser end is the Alt/Option modifier, you can use it with all sorts of other Alt/Option functions in Lightroom

Musketeer on the ruins of Basing House, twice besieged by the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War and destroyed after it was stormed in 1645

The obvious use is here, where I’m dragging the Blacks slider. Holding down Alt/Option – or using the pen’s eraser – displays the clipping.

Another is in the Detail panel, where I’m dragging the Masking slider with the pen’s eraser. Just as if I had held the modifier key, Lightroom shows which image areas will be affected by my sharpening:

No doubt someone somewhere has an anally-exhaustive compilation of all the Alt/Option modifiers ( here are a few ), but in general it’s best to keep it simple. Just keep in your mind that the modifier key often does surprisingly useful things with Adobe products and simply get into the routine of holding down the Alt/Option key – or swivelling the pen to its eraser end – and discover them for yourself.

But there is one question I couldn’t readily answer. What should I do with the hand that should have been pressing the Alt/Option key?

A bit late, but see this year-old guest appearance on Scott Kelby’s blog by Wes Maggio, an Application Specialist for Wacom where he talks about the pen/tablet combo and its role with Photoshop and Lightroom.

Still, everyone’s workflow is a little bit unique. At the end of the day, if you find that your particular workflow relies entirely on Lightroom you have to ask yourself whether a tablet is a worthwhile investment.

If you find that part of your process involves making local adjustments, the case for a tablet begins to be made. If you ever take an image into Photoshop to composite, to clone out unwanted elements, or perform some other complex enhancements, then the argument becomes even stronger. When you consider all of the other benefits that a tablet affords (i.e. ExpressKeys), I believe that you have a most compelling case.

I have never really been a graphics tablet user. I’ve owned one for more years than I care to know, but somehow I’ve never become used to picking it up the instant I start Photoshop or Lightroom. Friends use them, and swear by them, but mine has remained stubbornly out of reach and gathering dust, while you can almost read the finest detail of my palm etched into the once-silvery grey skin of my lovely big trackball mouse.

While never shy of mocking herd instincts like the ludicrous “you’re a photographer so you must be a Mac user”, I’ve never been so dismissive of the idea that a pen tablet might be a better way to work with pictures. But for me it was like Guinness, which I used to try every other year, just to see if I’d changed my mind. I’d keep trying my tablet yet be unable to prevent myself switching back to the mouse and keyboard shortcuts before the job was done (though not with the same disgust with which I failed to finish my pint of the black stuff).

Then at a trade show earlier in the year we were provided with Wacom Intuos4 tablets. It was an ideal opportunity and so for 5 days I tried to force myself to work that way. Without really exploiting them, I could sense the possibilities of the express keys and the iPod-style touch ring, and didn’t find the pen totally alien. But from the number of times I was asked “do I need a pen tablet for Photoshop/Lightroom?”, it was obvious that I’m far from alone in remaining both doubtful and curious about the tablet’s value. No Damascene conversion occurred by the end of the show (you don’t get those in Birmingham anyway) but at least I’d given it a try.

Six months on, no doubt inspired by the minor miracle of my building a PC, I decided to have another go and last week on my birthday a shiny black Intuos4 turned up at my door. I hope I’m already brewing one or two Lightroom-related tips, particularly in the use of those express keys, but one thing was frustrating me – erasing Lightroom’s local adjustments. Surely you’re supposed to be able to reverse the pen, and use the eraser end to erase. Sounds reasonable?

I should say that I don’t know if this so obvious it merely shows my lack of experience with the tablet, but the solution seems to be to go into the Tablet Properties and customise the tablet’s behaviour. It’s only a couple of steps. First, add Lightroom as an application, meaning it will have custom behaviours. Then you go to the Erase tab and switch the pen’s default behaviour from “Erase”. Instead it should be “Modifier” and the Alt /Option key. In other words, that’s the same as when you use the adjustment brush with a mouse….

There’s an excellent couple of movies by Julianne Kost on using Lightroom and particularly Photoshop for timelapse movies .

Part 1 is the relatively obvious Lightroom work, but the much more interesting part 2 shows Photoshop (Extended) assembling the movie, adding lens blurs in a batch, and – the bit I didn’t know – including sound.

Maybe it’s not deliberate, but an odd detail is that she’s not using an Apple monitor but an HP instead. I wonder if Adobe no longer want to give  Apple free advertising? That would be welcome. The HP is pretty ugly though, so maybe they could have just covered up the illuminated Apple with their own, or just the Flash logo?

Via

Lightroom’s SDK forum, never the busiest or most informative place on the net, has become a bit of a no-go zone lately as one particularly pungent forum member (let’s call him Borat) seems to feel the need to advertise his opinion on every topic. A period of  silence followed by modesty would probably make everyone, me included, appreciate Borat’s contributions for whatever they may be worth….

Despite this vuvuzela noise drowning any signals from the forum, I’d noticed a John Ellis posting there. I was curious because he seemed to know his way round Lua but I hadn’t heard of anything that he’d released – until yesterday when he announced his Any File plug-in:

Any File lets you import any type of file into a Lightroom 3 catalog and manage it just like a photo — PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, audio, etc. Typical uses include managing releases, invoices, notes, scans of old documents, audio tracks for slide shows, and avoiding all of the LR 3 limitations on video formats and video metadata.

I’d been wondering if anyone would do something like this. Frankly, it shouldn’t be necessary – Lightroom itself should allow the photographer to decide what type of files to catalogue, shouldn’t it?

Syncomatic’s original idea was to sync the metadata of files where their names are the same but they have different file types – for example, from 123.cr2 to 123.tif.

However, by default Lightroom adds -edit to the file suffix when it sends a file to Photoshop and plenty of photographers identify different versions of a picture by adding other suffixes to the file name. For example:

• The original 100703_0123 Jones wedding.nef, 100703_0124 Jones wedding.nef, 100703_0125 Jones wedding.nef…
• A version with Photoshop layers 100703_0123 Jones wedding Layered.nef …
• A black and white version 100703_0123 Jones wedding BW.jpg …

Syncomatic 1.21 is released today at Photographer’s Toolbox and now handles these suffixes.

Tim Armes’s Lightroom plug-in site, Photographer’s Toolbox now has a blog to announce new plug-ins from Tim, me, and from Matt Dawson. There’s also a Twitter feed for quick announcements.

My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available. Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to copy the metadata between two groups of files and can use the filenames to match up pairs of images. So imagine you have lots of raw files with metadata, and TIFs or JPEGs whose metadata should match the raw files from which they were created. Syncomatic simply runs through the two groups of pictures and makes the metadata of 1234.jpg the same as 1234.raw, makes 6789.jpg match 6789.raw….

Dossier de Presse is a Lightroom-WordPres plug-in from Luc Renambot:

I’m using WordPress with the NextGEN gallery plugin and I used to export my images to disk and then create a gallery and upload the images. They are (better) plugins to upload to WordPress, but I couldn’t find one that supported NextGEN gallery plugin. So I wrote my first Lightroom plugin, “Dossier de Presse“.

It allows you to export pictures directly to your WordPress blog. It supports NextGEN gallery and WordPress Media library. You can optionally create a post including the exported photos (the post is left in draft mode, so you can edit it later).

Locktastic is now available through Photographer’s Toolbox. This simple plug-in for Lightroom 2 or 3 is designed for photographers who lock or tag files while shooting events, and once they’re in Lightroom it marks those thumbnails with the red label.

I’m pleased to announce that Search Replace Transfer is now available for sale at Tim Armes’s site Photographer’s Toolbox.

Search Replace Transfer is a Lightroom 2 and 3 plug-in designed for bulk changes to text in Metadata Panel fields:

1. Searches and replaces text like a word processor
2. Appends text before or after existing text
3. Transfers text between fields
4. Transfers metadata from iView/Expression Media to 18 custom fields
5. Audits title, caption and keyword entry

I’m already working on extending the plug-in:

• Include the IPTC Extension fields (LR3 users only)
• Presets and menus for frequently-used settings (eg filename to title)

Why Photographer’s Toolbox rather than here? Well, Tim is already using Photographer’s Toolbox to distribute his popular plug-ins LRTransporter, LRMogrify and LREnfuse, so we’re working alongside each other to make the site the obvious place to look for high quality plug-ins. Secondly, it means I can take advantage of his tried and tested licensing and distribution mechanism. That helps me offer trial versions of plug-ins, and provide the possibility for automatic updating of the plug-ins (based on code from Jeffrey Friedl). My other plug-ins will soon follow – probably Lockstatic, Syncomatic, and Open Directly in that order. And new ones too.

CNET’s Lightroom 3 review includes some interesting comments from Tom Hogarty, Adobe’s product manager

The time was not yet ripe for Adobe to add face recognition into Lightroom, Hogarty said. “There’s a lot of interest in that area, especially as more consumer-grade applications such as Photoshop Elements have added facial recognition. I think the bar is higher for pro-level applications,” where misidentified faces are more of a problem and where integration with a photographer’s work flow must be handled more carefully. “It’s obviously of interest to photographers and of great utility, we just want to make sure it’s going to be a professional-grade solution.”

Geotagging is “a heavily requested feature,” he added. “Each (Lightroom development) cycle is fraught with difficult tradeoff decisions. Performance and image quality needed to come first in this cycle, especially given that (GPS support) is still not native functionality in cameras at this point in terms of collecting information.”

Yes, I know the post’s title is well over the top, but the Lightroom team isn’t as big as it should be, and the noise reduction and lens corrections are huge steps forward. And one way you can read Adobe’s strategy is that Lightroom 3′s improvements – such as better image quality, higher ISO performance, and above all lens corrections – hold great value to all segments of photographers, not just a few.

Had LR3 introduced geotagging, some of us would have been delighted- but I can think of one friend who only photographs in about a dozen, well known indoor locations and has absolutely no need for such a feature. Face recognition would be similar – of interest to some segments, but utterly useless for the wildlife snapper – and bewildering for my friend with his quarter of a million pictures in Lightroom. And you know, I’d have no hesitation in extending the same argument to soft proofing too.