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Thursday, April 26, 2007

LightroomExtra Competition Winners

Sid Jervis has announced the winner of the Lightroom Extra competition. Everyone that submitted to the site was in with a chance of winning prizes:

The prizes and the winners :

A signed copy of Martin Evening's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book = Christoph Lübbe.

One year subscriptions to EOS magazine = Victoria Bampton.

One year subscriptions to EOS magazine = Kenneth Bird.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who provided submissions.

posted by SeanMcC at 8:25 AM | 0 Comments

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Paypal in Lightroom Galleries

Chirs Shepherd has a new blog post on adding Paypal to you Lightroom galleries. I've only just glanced over it but it looks really good:
http://www.shepherdpics.com/Blog/2007/04/creating-ecommerce-site-using-adobe.html

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posted by SeanMcC at 7:50 PM | 1 Comments

Calling a CSS file: the XSLT way.

I said in my last post that I would show how to call CSS in our gallery. Normally when we call a CSS file we would use the standard call tag:

<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" type="text/css" href="mycss.css" />

As per my last post, note the trailing '/' which closes the link tag.

This seems to work fine as a call inside transformer.xslt on mac but causes issues on PC. Therefore we need a correct way to call our file that works on both. Here's some sample code from the 'RollOver' gallery I've working (not completed yet-I still can't get the first image preloaded!). This part shows the initial calls defining the Paths and the then head section, where I use <xsl:call-template name="addCSSLink"> to call the code to add the CSS link.


<!-- Generate an index page -->
<xsl:template name="index.html" >
<xsl:param name="pathToRoot" select="''"/>
<xsl:param name="pathToContent" select="'content/'"/>

<file name="index.html">
<html>
<head>
<title><xsl:value-of select="$siteTitle" /></title>
<style type="text/css">
</style>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript" src="rollover.js">
</script>
<xsl:call-template name="addCSSLink">
<xsl:with-param name="pathToRoot" select="$pathToRoot"/>
<xsl:with-param name="pathToContent" select="$pathToContent"/>
</xsl:call-template>

</head>
The <script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript" src="rollover.js"></script> is just there to call the javascript for this particular gallery and not needed for the CSS call. I've left it in for completeness in relation to the gallery I'm doing this call on.

The xsl:template that is being called to make this happen is below:

<xsl:template name="addCSSLink">
<xsl:param name="pathToRoot"/>
<xsl:param name="pathToContent"/>
<xsl:param name="size"/>
<xsl:param name="masterCSS" select="concat( $pathToRoot, 'scrollextra.css' )"/>
<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$masterCSS}"/>
</xsl:template>

You place this code below the </xsl:template> of the 'index.html' template call and above the </xsl:stylesheet> at the end of the file. The call to 'scrollextra.css' is simply the filename of the CSS I'm using in this gallery.
Again hope this helps.

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posted by SeanMcC at 5:34 PM | 0 Comments

Adding external files to your HTML gallery

If you've been trying to create your own galleries based on the Andy Rahn (Lightroom Web Module engineer) tutorial on John Nack's blog, I hope you've taken note of the new file locations that Andy mentions in his Lightroom Journal Post. You have a simple page that shows a thumbnail of all the images, but now you'd like to put a bit of shape on it.

You could simply add CSS inside the 'index.html' file call in your transformer.xslt, but this can be cumbersome once we scale to multiple pages. An external CSS file would be better. Obviously the Web Gallery needs to both see and copy the CSS file to the created gallery. So how do we do this?

It's all done using an additional file called gallery.xml. Create a blank txt file and save it as 'gallery.xml' and paste the following into it and save it beside 'galleryMaker.xml'.

<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>

</gallery>

That's our basic gallery.xml file. To call files from it we use the <filePath> tag. Please note one very important thing about XML/XSLT: You must close all tags. Even <br> must be written <br />. The '/' acts as a close tag.
UpdatePaddlefish has noted in the comments that IE 6 gets confused by this and details a workaround there.

To include our CSS file we call it like this:

<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>

In our file this looks like:

<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>
<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>

</gallery>


If we include background url's in our CSS file, we need to include them in the gallery folder and in gallery.xml, eg


<gallery>
<amgVersion>0.5</amgVersion>
<filePath>mycssfile.css</filePath>
<filePath>background.jpg</filePath>
</gallery>


You can also save the files in subfolders to keep it tidy and call them from subfolders. eg:


<filePath>images/background.jpg</filePath>

would call the jpg from the images subfolder. These subfolders are relative to the current folder. On Mac it is possible to call the CSS file directly in the transformer.xslt file, but John Beardsworth pointed out this does not work for him on PC. While related to how to call a file, It's merely a matter of pasting code, cookbook style, and I'll just make it a post on its own. Watch this space.
Hopefully this will be helpful to those building from scratch and thanks to Andy Rahn for the original tip when I was calling files that were already online.

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posted by SeanMcC at 4:57 PM | 2 Comments

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Quicktip: Navigating through views

One behaviour in Lightroom I find particularly annoying is that when you create a collection, Lightroom will jump to that collection. Usually I create a collection to start adding to it and need to remain in the folder I'm currently in. 2 ways I had been using to get back (which I now know I don't need to use, but I'm just pointing them out in case you didn't know) were, 1) Open the filmstrip and click the arrow beside the current item name and select the folder from the flyout list and 2) Select an image and look at the Metadata pane. In most views there is a folder item with an arrow to the right of it. Click the arrow to go to the folder.

All well and good, but marginally time consuming. I was going to request a way of getting back to the original folder, but decided to investigate a little further so I didn't look foolish (as does happen, I might add!). Whaddya know.. There is such an item and it has a shortcut. In Window we have the Go Back and Go Forward commands. These are Cmd-Option back arrow and Cmd-Option forward arrow on Mac. For PC use Ctrl Alt back arrow and Ctrl Alt forward arrow. It's much easier to use as a keyboard shortcut and saves loads of time. I'm glad I found it.

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posted by SeanMcC at 2:27 PM | 2 Comments

Menu links in Flash Gallery

I've added a post to Lightroom News on adding a series of links in the menu bar.
It's called Adding a navigation menu to Lightroom Flash Gallery. Go check it out.

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posted by SeanMcC at 2:23 PM | 5 Comments

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Scott Kelby is moving house.

Well his blog is. Jumping ship from the rather bland Blogspot location, he's back on his own turf, sprucing new duds and a very clean look over at http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/

posted by SeanMcC at 3:57 PM | 0 Comments

Monday, April 02, 2007

Some comments on Podcast #29

I quite enjoy the work George Jardine puts into his podcasts. I like both the Lightroom specific and more generic photographer podcasts. However, there is nothing quite like listening in on conversation between Mark, Thomas, Zalman, Jeff and (did he speak at all?) Michael.
Many things were covered and I'm just putting my thoughts down on some of them. No one has to listen, but hey, at least there out there.
RAW + JPEG: While I usually shoot RAW, I think there are quite a few things that I do that would benefit from doing a RAW+JPEG workflow. With Landscapes, it would great to have the camera jpeg set to the final look I prefer to go with the RAW for a target look for my processing. Not to mention that if the file is already or nearly perfect, then I can simply use it without needing to process the RAW any further. Other people use it different ways and I do feel that Adobe needs to address this with an Option.

Options: Mark mentions that they are trying to keep it simple and that in Photoshop they simply would add an option for different things. Well not adding options in Lightroom actually makes it complicated for the USER! It means that we get forced into find ways of working around limits provided in Lightroom. Whereas if there was an option we would merely set it the way we wanted and then forget all about the other ways until we need to use them. This is all about blending Lightroom to our workflow and not being forced into other workflows. (I'm not referring to the database v browser here, I need the database and am happy to forego any browser implementation for better DAM handling and folder watching).

Import: We need better previewing in Import to allow pre selection of imported files. This would forego the need to use Bridge to make importable selections. While we're discussing Import, I'd like to request the return of a feature that existed in Beta 4. I want to see the return of Metadata entry on a per folder basis in Lightroom. Each folder/date generally requires different metadata/keywords/ even development sometimes. In B4 you could enter these per Shoot. I know the shoots paradigm is gone, but you could still apply this to folders. Currently you must do multiple imports to get this. Being able to do it in one go saves a lot of time. An 'Apply to All' checkbox would return to current usage (on by default for those users not needing the more sophisticated options).

I'll probably listen to this again and maybe make further comments in it.

Update: Once comment I will make here is on 2 additions to the podcast style. I like the polish that George has added with the music. It just gives it a 'pro' edge IMHO. Also the longer introduction before the actual content begins is quite welcome in setting up the scene for us. Recently George has been leaving in the pre podcast banter, giving an insight into the people we are listening to that can come from no other source. Kudos to George for this.

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posted by SeanMcC at 3:56 PM | 12 Comments

Podcast #29: Raw team and Jeff Schewe

George Jardine has put podcast 29 up on his blog (soon to be up on iTunes). It's an interesting discussion covering many features of Lightroom along with how the team feels Lightroom is lacking. There is an intense debate on RAW+JPG workflows and the correspondence of ACR4.0 to Lightroom XMP. As it was recorded only 2 weeks ago, it provides a very "now" look into the minds of the people most influential in Lightroom development.

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posted by SeanMcC at 3:42 PM | 0 Comments