John Beardsworth

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.

One of the less obvious changes between the beta and Lightroom 3 is the inclusion of the “IPTC Extensions“,the extra metadata fields agreed last year (specification here – PDF). Great to see Adobe’s keeping up with publicly-agreed standards rather than doing what the competitor does and pretending they don’t exist!

Some of the fields could prove immediately useful, so for instance the Person Shown (which is where Aperture should have written some of its Faces data) can be used right away. You won’t need to pollute your keywords with the names of your nearest and dearest. However, the new panel does highlight a problem of the standard creating duplicate fields – in this case the British newsreader Katie Derham is a well known person, so her name would also belong as a keyword. In the case of the location fields, these will often be the same as the traditional IPTC locations. Given that it’ll take years for search engines and other programs to start using the Extensions, you may decide that putting much effort into them is overkill.

It may help if some of this duplicate data entry can be automated, and I’m on the verge of making my Search Replace Transfer plug-in available for purchase. The licensing code is finally integrated and it should be just a matter of days. Initially, the plug-in will not write to the IPTC Extension fields, but that shouldn’t take long to add. It’s a firm plan.

The trouble with prolonged public betas like Lightroom 3′s is that it’s harder to make a big splash when the time comes to announce the real thing. People become used to a big leap in image quality and take it for granted. They know they can now manage the videos their camera takes, and start asking why they can’t manage any file types they want. They know that when they go back to a folder, they’ll see all the images that should be there and start moaning about the bizarre ways they used to hide their images and forget they’re there. And even if the public beta doesn’t contain lens distortion correction – a feature as revolutionary in raw converters as dust spotting once was – they hear announcements that it’s on its way and have seen the elegance of the implementation in Photoshop. Is anyone going on about the point tone curve now? When it finally hits the shelves, there’s a bit of “apart from x, y, z… what have the Romans ever done for us?”

There are alternatives. You could always try to leave your customers in such dispiriting darkness that the next release’s real impact is to prevent any but the blindly-loyal from jumping ship. Another strategy is for a drunken developer to leave the new product in a bar, then call the local police to kick down doors in the middle of the night. By comparison, and in these tough times, isn’t a low key launch a touch more dignified?

I’m not a big user of stacking features in any software – it’s a good way to hide pictures and never see them again – and in Lightroom there’s a further reasons I avoid them: applying metadata.

If images are stacked and the stack in closed, when you add some metadata it only applies to the image that’s on the top of the stack. That’s both right and wrong – right in the sense that you might not want all the frames to share the same star rating, but wrong in that iterations of the same scene or subject should normally have identical descriptive metadata. The result is that to make sure they all have the same keywords, for instance, you have to expand the stack, select all the items, apply the metadata, then close the stack. If that’s the price, I’d rather not bother with stacking.

Lightroom 3 Beta introduces a nice little trick though. You know the little stacking badge at the top left of the stack thumbnail which reads 3 if there are 3 items in the stack? Well, if you double click this badge the stack expands  and all its component images are selected. Nice, huh?

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When I set up my Mac laptop, I remember they tried to get me to set up a .Mac account, what’s now called MobileMe. My first reaction – you’ve just taken my money and you’re trying to tie me up even more – certainly wasn’t meant as positively as Max Mosley might have uttered it, and my disinclination to lock myself into one company’s products and services has not grown any stronger with time – despite the laptop having been a good buy. So when an Aperture preference asks me to set up a MobileMe account, I’m immediately looking for the Cancel button. Not remotely interested.

Which is a long way of saying – I’ve not tried “Export to MobileMe Gallery” myself. But one Lightroom user I mentioned it to did try it and told me it was great, so it might interest you if you use Lightroom and are one of the millions (?) who do have MobileMe accounts. It’s by Vladimir Vinogradsky, one of the quieter or semi-detached members of the Lightroom plug-in developing community, and it apparently allows you to send images from Lightroom directly to MobileMe from your Mac – or Windows PC.

Some of the thinking behind Lightroom 3's grain effect is revealed in this 2008 article by Eric Chan, one of the top guys in Adobe's Camera Raw team Ten Tips for Better Prints

The digital printing process requires resampling an image from its original resolution to a printer's own resolution. This resampling process can produce visible artifacts such as blocky edges and areas that appear unnaturally smooth and flat. These artifacts become more noticeable as the image is enlarged, especially with really big blowups. Adding noise breaks up these artifacts and provides the illusion of a more natural, detailed appearance, even though no real detail has been added.

In other words, don't just think of grain as a way to simulate HP5 or TMax. Speaking of which - and you know how much I love my presets - look out towards of next week for some b&w presets I'll be unleashing on an unsuspecting world. Code name Gekko.

After a spurt of premature announcements from dpReview (not their fault) and Adobe's own TV, there is indeed a Lightroom 3 Beta 2. See Tom Hogarty for the official announcement.

The product's appeal has been broadened by including support for tethering and for the management of video files. But for me the beef of this release is image quality, where the new demosaicing and luminance noise reduction really come together. In some ways that's a difficult strategy. After all, some demand shiny bells and whistles for their upgrade cash, don't they? Significantly better image quality is much less quantifiable, a percentage improvement, and a lot less tangible. Yet it should hold huge enormous appeal for photographers….

So I'd particularly urge you to take some high ISO images through the now-enabled luminance noise reduction. I've put some ISO 12500 images through it (a friend's Nikon D3s) and the days of needing the excellent NoiseWare must be numbered. Hogarty says:

Lightroom 3 beta 2 introduces a much more complete solution that includes an outstanding luminance noise reduction control and we're excited to hear your thoughts on the improvements. Open the metadata filter in the Library module to filter down to your high ISO shots and let us know if the combination of Luminance and Color noise reduction provide you with the quality you want. In general the new processing technology should really bring out the best in your raw files. The details and textures will be crisper and somewhat more naturally rendered. We are now applying minimal noise suppression in the new demosaic method compared to earlier versions like Lightroom 2.6.

The new luminance noise sliders are disabled if you are using Process Version 2003, the old Adobe Camera Raw treatment. To use them, you need to switch to Process Version 2010 - click the warning triangle. In my view, the improvement is so dependable that I am simply updating all photographs in my test catalogue. In fact, it's so dependable that I'm not really convinced users needed the option to retain the old settings - if that's a need, they could just keep LR2 installed and go back to their LR2 catalogue. But that's a small quibble.

I'll be posting some of my own thoughts on Aperture 3 soon, maybe tomorrow. But I just noticed David Riecks has some issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata and I recommend you read his article very carefully indeed:

Apple has made some significant changes to how Aperture handles metadata with this latest release. However, the ways in which this has been done should be of great concern to professional photographers that work with other programs, or hand off their metadata-rich files to others who need to be able to access the full range of that information.

You shouldn't be concerned if you use Aperture 3 on your own Mac, don't typically use embedded metadata, and don't share your images with others, or work with other programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Even if you do use metadata to describe your images, and only need to find them on your local computer, you should be fine.

You should be concerned if you use Aperture to write metadata to files you use with other programs, share with others or share on the Internet. For example if you do additional work in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then archive your images using other programs, you need to understand what is happening, or risk having some or all of your metadata disappear.

Good DAM practices aren't just about only ever using any one program, or placing all your trust in one company, even Apple.

Mark Wilson has just released a Lightroom plug-in Nature Data LR which, at first glance, is about adding to your Library a group of nature-related custom fields:

The fields provide a formal and structured approach to organising your images of natural subjects such as birds and mammals.
The plug-in adds a new metadata panel to the library module, a new dialog to manage the additonal data and an export action to add the data to keywords on exported images.
The plug-in also allows you to create dynamic collections of your photos based on families of species.

I wonder if there's a parallel with geotagging software. What I mean is that I usually can't be bothered to attach my GPS device to my camera, but I'm happy enough dragging the images onto a map when I get home. Equally, if I did get into shooting wildlife, I'd need some help recognising species, something like a dialog displaying whatever characteristics might distinguish a bit-titted wotsit from a striped wotsit, or a male from a female. Maybe that could be pulled from some online reference source, or each creature's record might have hyperlinks?

But wait, there's something else worth noticing:

Naturdata LR makes use of Phil Harvey's excellent ExifTool.

In other words, it's a plug-in with custom metadata and an export feature. This is the aspect of this plug-in that I find particularly intriguing. For one thing it's reassuring that someone other than Jeffrey Friedl has got Exiftool and Lightroom working together - and I hope it shames me into playing with this. But more interesting is what he's doing with it - taking his custom fields and writing them as keywords through the export dialog. As I've written before, just because a program provides hierarchical keywords, it doesn't mean you have to use them, even for something as hierarchical as species..

I've just uploaded version 1.0.6.7 of my Lightroom plug-in Search & replace, Append, Transfer which includes some big changes:

1. It should work in the LR3 beta (but remember, the beta is not meant for real work)
2. Instead of the long drop down lists for choosing fields, there are now dialog boxes
3. The new menu item “Library>Plug-in extras>Parse and audit” reviews your metadata entry
4. 16 custom fields, plus fields for Event and People like in iView/Expression Media
5. An optional module converts certain iView/Expression Media metadata fields to LR
6. Documentation is both beefier and prettier

Parse and audit runs through your pictures, checking whether you've completed the title, caption, how many keywords each image has.

Terry White shows how to shoot tethered into Lightroom. It's not perfect, not by a long means, but far from difficult. Wish I could think of a better pun though - vince cable?

I've not been in a great rush to update my plug-ins for the Lightroom 3 beta - the beta's not for real work, and changes to the SDK coding environment don't appear until much closer to the final release date. But in the past few days I have updated three plug-ins which didn't work in the beta because they used SDK features which Adobe are changing in LR3:

• Open DIrectly
• Psuedo Ratings
• Folder Size

Big Note works in LR3, while I'll soon be making an announcement about how to buy Search Replace Transfer.

If you've ever used iView or Extensis Portfolio, or countless other non-Adobe programs, you will have learnt long ago that Photoshop's Maximize Compatibility dialog box did what it said on the tin - it maximised the PSD or TIF file's compatibility with other programs. Or rather, what you would probably have learnt is that if you unticked this setting, you would be saving disc space at the cost of making other programs struggle to display the PSD or TIF file. Short term gain, long term pain?

This is as true of Lightroom as it is of third party programs - after all, Adobe engineers have far better things to do than cater for self-inflicted pain. The remedy is to resave those files compatibly - see Laura Shoe's post for an efficient way to do this.

Over at Lightroom forums someone asked what people think are the 10 strongest points of Lightroom? While my initial reaction was a Keanesque “you've got eyes, haven't you, what do you think?”, it's actually not a bad question and nicely follows up my post from the other day. After all, for all the moaning about things I don't think are right, I do use Lightroom for positive reasons.

So in descending order, my ten favourites:

1. Adjusting and managing raw files in a single program - we easily forget how radical Aperture was….
2. Bringing together in one place pictures from multiple drives, whether they're online or offline
3. Auto Sync mode for adjusting multiple images simultaneously
4. Targeted adjustment tool for black and white, and for colour correction - elegant
5. Local adjustment brush and gradient tool - beautifully done
6. Smart Collections - could do much better though
7. How collections quietly store the last Print, Web or Slideshow settings applied to them
8. Print - though not Web, not Slideshow
9. Use of templates for saving frequently-used settings
10. Keyboard shortcuts