News Tips Tricks Workarounds
Lightroom Blog is my brainchild. My name is Sean McCormack. I'm an Adobe Community Professional, who moderates Lightroom Help and Lightroomforums.net.
I have a book called 'Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy, and I have written articles for various magazines. I'm available for more writing, of course. I also have done technical editing on 2 other books: Adobe Photoshop CS4 How to's: 100 Essential Tips and Adobe Lightroom 2 How To's: 100 Essential Tips, both by Chris Orwig.
I'm a semi-professional photographer, along with being a full time audio engineer. My small family is comprised of my wonderful wife Cynthia and our son Matthew. In my meagre spare time I write Lightroom Web Galleries and Plugins.
There's been a few feature requests in the few days since LRB Exhibition was launched. I'm glad to say it's getting good reaction. Anyhow, here's the list of stuff that have been added/fixed/changed since release based on user feature requests.
1.1 changelog
Added Top Gap
Added Numbers checkbox
Added body image check box.
Fixed repeat
Changed less for fewer
Change UI colours
Added a Switch to the galleries to hide the menu and force all images into Gallery 1, acting as a single gallery rather than a website.
Added Number Height slider
Added Menu Gap slider
Menu gallery swap
Menu and Identity Plate transparency choices
Added Flickr code and made icon.
I'm sure there will be quite a few more feature requests before 1.1 goes out, feel free to add them to the comments at the end of the LRB Exhibition post.
Written from the ground up with new internal code and ideas, LRB Exhibition is a new 'Website in a gallery' plugin for Lightroom's Web module. From the Portfolio family, it allows the user to create home, about, contact and general use pages, along with 6 galleries and 2 external links.
The main image area in the gallery is based around a single image preview in an enclosed space. Using jQuery, each slide can be navigated to either using the navigation arrows, or numbered links to the relevant slide. LRB Exhibition is far more mature that LRB Portfolio was at version 1.0, in fact it's almost par with LRB Portfolio 2.51, and probably equal to 2.4. It does however have features not available to LRB Portfolio, such as per page image and text placement and a floating text box.
Install.
Mac: Double click on LRB_Exhibition.lrwebengine to install. PC: In Lightroom Preferences (Edit>Preferences), click Presets. Click 'Show Lightroom Presets Folder'. Open the folder. Look for a folder called 'Web Galleries'. If it's not there, create it and drop LRB_Exhibition.lrwebengine inside it. Restart Lightroom
Intro Video.
Here's a quick look at using the gallery. Click through for the full size verion.
There will be more forthcoming.
Basics
A basic look at how this gallery works: Create a collection of images you want on the website. Decide how many galleries you will have and then sort them into order for each gallery. You might have 35 images for the first gallery, 20 for the next and maybe 26 for the 3rd of the 3 galleries you've decided you'd like. Next go to Web and select LRB Exhibition from the list. Make sure All Fimstrips Photos is selected in the Filmstrip, or that you've selected all the Photos. Go to the Gallery section and enter those numbers in each gallery section. Give the galleries names for the menu. Now go add details to the Home, About and Contact pages. Same for the Blank page, which can be used for pricing, or services etc. These page have individual text box sizes and locations, along with a choice of locations for the image on the page.
Once you've customised the gallery to your taste, be sure to save your settings as a Template. While Lightroom will remember the settings for the collection, if something bad happens, you're better off with a Template to get those settings back.
A lot of the internal stuff works in a similar way to LRB Portfolio, so you can access that User Guide for more details. Like I say, there will be more video tutorials to add usage.
Buy LRB Exhibition is €15 plus VAT. For the first week of sales, you can get a 20% discount using the sales code LRBEX20. Remember to update the Cart after you enter the code, or it will not be applied. Please note the download allows for 9 updates, after which you require a new purchase.
The Future Like any software, LRB Exhibition will take on a life of it's own in the wild. Feel free to ask questions or add suggestions in the comments.
My new web Plugin LRB Exhibition is almost ready for launch. Written from the ground up with new internal code and ideas, this is my second website in a gallery plugin for Lightroom. From the Porfolio family, it allows the user to create home, about, contact and general use pages, along with 6 galleries and 2 external links.
An earlier prototype of the plugin was used to create SkyWaterLand.com. It's been much improved since then though. Once I get the all clear, I'll upload and launch the product. This will be the same price as LRB Portfolio (15 euro), but I will have a 20% Discount for the first week. The code for this will be announced in the launch post.
The main image area in the gallery is based around a single image preview in an enclosed space. Using jQuery, each slide can be navigated to either using the navigation arrows, or numbered links to the relevant slide. LRB Exhibition is far more mature that LRB Portfolio was at version 1.0, in fact it's almost par with LRB Portfolio 2.51, and probably equal to 2.4. It does however have features not available to LRB Portfolio, such as per page image and text placement and a floating text box.
Launch should be very soon. And no this is not vapourware!
So my tenure as Lightroom Master for Phototraining4U.com has begun. The site has a whole series of training videos covering Wedding, Portraits, Fashion, Business, Wildlife and Photography Post Process, amongst others. It's owned and run by Mark Cleghorn, who has produced those great training videos for Lastolite. The site has a yearly fee of £199, but if you use the discount code SEAN with the link above, you'll get a whopping £50 discount as a new member. This yearly fee allows unlimited access to all the videos on the site.
There's also a FreeView section on the site to give you an idea of the videos that are on offer. There is a really broad range of training there, with new videos being added every month, increasing the value of your membership as time goes on.
The videos I'm producing for Phototraining4U.com are much longer than the ones I've done here on the blog and cover more ground.
This 2.6.1 update contains a single change compared to 2.6: a fix for the problem that would cause LR to crash when processing some M9 files, primarily observed by users under 64-bit, but occasionally under 32-bit as well. There are no other changes.
LRB Portfolio has now been updated to version 2.51. This update has substantial under the hood changes to overcome the way Lightroom generates CSS. Now when you export (or Preview in Browser), LRB Portfolio creates a new CSS file from internal settings, but based on a template CSS file. It's taken a while to get it right.
In addition there are some new features:
A Text Width slider that allows the user to set the width of the text in the Home, About, Contact and Blank pages. An ID Plate Offset Slider that allows the user to nudge the ID Plate for better alignment The non Gallery pages now use a separate header file to prevent an error in IE. The code is now W3C valid. For the record, it's possible to have useless valid code, but as some people are bothered by this, it's done. Fixed an IE bug where the ID plate could be hidden by the menu.
There are a few other bits and pieces changed, but mostly internal stuff. This was particularly hard work, with not a lot to show for it on the surface, but it was all still needed.
New customers can purchase the plugin from the LRB Portfolio Website. Current users can get the plugin from their download link, which they were encouraged to save on purchase. Support is available at the Lightroom Forums LRB Portfolio thread.
Update: Just pushed out 2.51 with layout fixes for the mail.html file page, which had orphaned CSS. I hate it when stuff like that happens.
This is a Lightroom post in the sense that it's talking about coding plugins for Lightroom. If you're not interested in coding, you can stop right here and keep 5 minutes of your life.
I've lost track of the number of versions of LRB Portfolio and other plugins I have on my drive, both as code, and compiled. I literally have folders of them. Why? Well, because I've lost my codebase before and had to redo an update from memory, way back in between version 1.1 and 1.2. I overwrote the code with complied versions by accident. That really sucked. I called myself obscene names, but I got over it.
Talking with other developers, I heard about different ways to manage code. One of them was Subversion, but it seemed too complex for the simple codebase I have. Coda, the software I use for coding plugins and websites, has subversion built it, but it seems really geared to websites, and not good for plugins. It may well be fine, but I couldn't get my head around it. My interest was purely academic, and I'd no reason to find a particular product.
Then something terrible happened. Somewhere between LRB Portfolio 2.3 and 2.4, an entire block of code, in the main file of the plugin, got overwritten by text. I literally have no idea how it happened. I just opened the file to edit and half of it was gone. I was able to replace the bad bits with the 2.3 code, but all the new stuff was gone. That sealed the deal for me, I had to find a way to keep my code safe always, not just when an update was launched.
After much seeking, I found a really cool piece of software called Cornerstone, from Zennaware. It does full Subversion, but I only need a tiny part of the functionality. Normally you would use a server, but I'm just using a folder on my drive. The 15 day trial seemed more like 15 days of having it open, than 15 successive days. Still they proved I needed the program, so I parted with my $60 happily.
Here's my workflow.
I have a repository on the drive and I have a working copy checked out. I do all my edits in Coda and Cornerstone keeps track, making new copies in the background as I save. I can always step back to a previous version at any time. When I get to a point where I want to test the plugin, I commit my changes. I can choose to add text to a log file, helping figure out which previous version I might need in the future. Next I select the working copy and click on the 'Export' button. I've set this up to create a copy in the Web Galleries folder of Lightroom. While the export is happening, I restart Lightroom. The export is fast, so when Lightroom reopens, I can immediately see the changes.
What's great about this is that the version in Web Galleries is no longer a precious commodity. I simply export the current working copy. Because Coda is working on a safe copy, with automatic backup, this working copy is used to make the compiled version of the file for beta testing. I have a script that copies the folder specified, and tags .lrwebengine to the name. It then opens this new folder and compiles the 2 .lrweb files, leaving the plugin ready for distribution. At this point, there's a compiled version, the working copy, the copy in Web Galleries, and of course all the versions in the repository. Because of this I can then continue working on the plugin, knowing that finally, the code is safe.
Presets are great for a number of reasons. Easy to get a look, Easy to preview using the Navigator, and repeatable would be high on the list. It's wonderful to get a look and save it as a preset. But sometimes, you apply that to another image and.. Ugh.. it's terrible. Why? Well if you did a lot of work to get to that point, the base settings may be too much for an ordinary image.
For presets to be universally good, there are some basic things we need to understand. First off, presets for Raw and JPEG/TIFF that use all the settings need to be different. Lightroom applies +50 Brightness and +25 Contrast to Raw files by default, while JPEG/TIFF is left at 0. This makes a big difference in the look, requiring different presets. There is another option of course, and one that I think is the universal way to approach preset creation.
For every look you want to create repeatably, start work on an image with the exposure and colour corrected. When you want to save the preset, only save the the settings that create the look, but not the settings that fix the exposure and colour. For example, let's say I add +0.5 stops to my exposure and then take 500 degress off my temperature to correct an image. I then do some split toning and add a tone curve to create a cross processed look. If I then save this as a preset with all settings on, and then apply it to an image that is corrected take, then the look will be brighter and cooler than wanted. So instead I save the preset with Split Toning and Tone Curve only selected. This means the look can be created independently of the original images exposure issues.
For ease in finding the correct exposure, make a folder of presets that have different exposure levels in 1/3 stop increments. When you save these presets, make sure only Exposure is ticked in the New Develop Preset box. This way you can simply hover over the exposure presets in the left panel and see which one looks correct for the image via the preview in the Navigator.
Only choose the necessary setting when creating the preset
This can also be done for White Balance Temperature, allowing you to get a rough White Balance visually (assuming you haven't used a colour chart or gray card).
A final option is to have a series of contrast curves saved with only Tone Curve selected when saving. This method of building up looks means you can quickly find a combination of presets to give you a final look for your image in Lightroom.
Everyone seems to be doing top posts lists. Normally I wouldn't, but it was interesting looking at the most popular posts this year. In no particular order:
