A silly ID Plate trick

I've well documented little workabouts for various different things using the ID Plate. Usually things it was not intended for, like Print borders or Copyright symbols.. Well here's thing relating to the ID Plate that I've found this evening. Pardon me if it's common knowledge, but hey, I'm like the kid who added the extra note to the pentatonic scale and created a new rock guitar scale.
I was shooting a CD cover for someone today, and after I send off the selected image with a bit of retouching, I got to thinking about ways of adding text to an image in Lightroom. Of course this made me think immediately of the Identity Plate. I typed in the name of the artist and a title. Yes! Well except they're together on one line. It looks okay, but I'd like to have it with the name on the top and the title on the bottom. I'll need 2 ID plates, so it's not possible.

I click on the ID Plate editor and place my text cursor after the name and try a few modifier keys. Aha!

I find something that works. I used Option+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on PC-From Adler in the comments) and the title jumps to a new line. So I use the shortcut a few times until I have the gap I need. Finally I use the scale and hand tool to get the text where I want it. Now I'm not advocating a text tool for Lightroom, but it would be nice to have movable text in Print, not just at the bottom of the image!

Starting Young: Joey Lawrence

Eiffel Tower by Joey Lawrence (Used with permission)

A long time ago I came across a photoblog called G8. A lot of people thought it was just one photographer, but in fact it was a collective. The images varied quite a lot in theme, but one of the things that caught my eye were the superbly thought out and processed images of people. The key instigator of these images, as it turned out, was 16 year old Joey Lawrence. He's 17 now and doing a lot of commercial stuff, not to mention traveling about a lot. You can see all of his G8 images here and check out his website: http://www.joeyl.com. Recently he's been shooting a lot of promo stuff for bands. Along with his great eye and lighting skills, Joey is a fantastic post processor. He easily gives plenty of the old boys a run for their money. Well worth a look!

I believe Strobist.com will also be posting about him shortly.

The Quest for Better

One thing that applies to my photography is that I certainly don't feel like I've arrived. While I'm here giving out tips and passing out tips I've found, I'm certainly not 'at the top of my game'. Every day I learn new things. I love passing these on. Whether through this Blog, or any of the other groups I'm involved with. A big part of my yearn to learn is not to teach, but the quest for better. I want to be a better, more productive photographer. While I shot a lot of landscape work, the rotten summer has seen me do a lot more people work with off camera flash and studio strobes , along with on location portrait work, not to mention a wedding last weekend. For more on learning to use off camera flash, check out Strobist. Like with Lightroom, I've been onboard there from the beginning, and have gone on to teach this stuff to my friends.

How does this relate to Lightroom? Well since I've found Lightroom to be the tool that suits my workflow (trust me, if it wasn't, I wouldn't use it!), I want it to be the best tool it can be. So I push, I get involved and I look for features and fixes. I'm not sure how much say I have (if any), but when one voice mixes with others it can become a shout, which gets heard. I find the Lightroom team are very responsive bunch. You'll never guess what they want? Yep. Better Lightroom. And so they work hard to make it happen.
One example of this is the recent reversion to lower base noise with Zero noise reduction. A lot of people found it very painterly at ISO1600, myself included. As I shoot loads of concert stuff at high ISO's I was glad to see this changed to reflect the needs of the users.

As to the quest for better, you may find me starting to post links to inspirational photographers ala George Jardine and Matt Kloskowski. Let's face it Lightroom is about photography and doesn't exist in a vacuum, so this is my expanding the blog a little bit post.

The Goals of Lightroom

Lightroom creator Mark Hamburg has put pen to paper as it were, over at Lightroom Journal

"The Lightroom (née Shadowland) project had at its core the following goals. Some of them existed from the start. Others evolved as we went along. Interestingly, none of them are about photography. Photography proved, however, a good space in which to explore them."

The full article is well worth a read so, head on over to Lightroom Journal

Moving the Preview folder (Mac OSX)

Hi folks,
I've been thinking about the ability to move the Preview cache away from the catalog folder recently. It can be helpful for a number of reasons: Less skipping on the read head jumping between cache and library. Easier backup of images using an automatic backup, without needing to hog more space with a bloated Preview Folder. Of course being able to do this would just simply be a cool thing to do.

Warning This may eat all your files. Not really, but it is an unofficial tip and therefore you must do this AT YOUR OWN RISK. By trying this, you leave me, my provider and everyone I know free from all blame. If you lose your files and do not have an effective backup system in place the blame lies with you. Now, on with the tip.

If we try to do this by moving the file and creating an alias to the file, Lightroom ignores the alias and creates a new preview folder. Not much good to us I'm afraid. However, there is another way. The Symbolic Link. As part of it's Unix heart, Mac OSX allows us to do a system level redirect to another location. To all intents and purposes, the file system sees this link as if it were the actual folder. You can of course create a Symbolic Link in Terminal, but if you're afraid of command lines, never fear, help is at hand.
Symbolic Linker is a Contextual Menu Items plugin, that lets you right click on a file and create a symbolic link in the same folder.

To use this tool simply install the plugin in Library/Contextual Menu Items and then Force Quit/Relaunch Finder. Next we move the Preview Folder to its new location (if it's an external drive, you'll need to delete the original Preview Folder). Then we right click (or Ctrl click for one button Macs) on the folder and choose 'Make Symbolic Link. This creates a link with the same name, but with symlink appended. Finally we move the link to the original location of the Preview Folder and rename it to remove the 'symlink' part. In other words, it will have the same name as the Preview Folder. If you've left Lightroom running when doing this, make sure you restart it, or you'll get a whole host of errors.

Good Luck. I've done this with a number of catalogs and it's working fine. I've not done it on my 65K images catalog yet, because the Preview folder is so big, it would take more time than I've had to test, but I will soon. If you try this let me know how you get on. If you decide to go back to normal, simply drag the Preview Folder back to its original location and let it overwrite the link.

For what it's worth "ln -s /source_path /destination_path" in the Terminal command for creating a link by hand!

Updates of many natures.

As is common knowledge by now, Lightroom has been updated to 1.2. To keep compatibility with Photoshop, Camera RAW 4.2 has also been released. I would've made the announcement myself at release time, but I was away in London for a few reasons. One of them was to see Prince in concert. I'd love to show you some pictures processed in Lightroom but cameras were banned from the show!

There is an installer issues for those with non English regional settings, which can be solved with Andy Rahn's walkthrough on the official Lightroom blog: >Lightroom Journal.

1.2 for me has a great fix and small break: The base noise reduction at different ISO's has been reduced. This is great for concert images at ISO1600, which looked very painterly. Yes there was little noise, but unfortunately, there was also little detail. And no, I'm not confusing sharpened noise with actual detail. The break was with Import from Device, which no longer functions. If you auto import from card, you probably won't even notice it, but as I leave the card in and do multiple imports for different shoots, I do notice it. I have to eject and reinsert the card for each import set. Very annoying.
This actually reminds me of an old request I've made a few times. When we dealt with the Shoots concept in the Betas (where a mix of real and virtual folders), you could import different dates to different folders and apply different metadata, develop and keyword settings to each date. In the release versions you can only apply one set of each on import. I'd like to be able to apply the old way please!

My final update is to mention that I'm getting my nose to the grindstone in the writing of a Lightroom book. More details will follow as I find out how much I can say!

For the IPPA seminar attendees

Thanks to those who showed for yesterdays IPPA seminar. I said I'd post link here, so here they are:

The extra Lightroom galleries from Adobe are over at Lightroom Journal.

The Paypal galleries are over at Lightroom Galleries.

Finally The Turning Gate have a number of useful galleries also.

If you look to the sidebar on the right, you'll see a number of useful resources that will help with your Lightroom experience.