Focus In Imaging 2008

Well, it's been a busy few days. After working til 3am on Sunday night, I was picked up just after 5am for the first flight of the day. That was a Galway-Dublin flght. With a small amount of time to spare, we made comfortably time on our next flight. Into Birmingham for Focus On Imaging 2008. I was there for a number of reasons: meeting people, buying things and making new contacts.

I spent the day walking around getting a feel for the show. My intentions were to make a list of places to visit and things to get done. There was no Adobe stand per se, but Rapid (a reseller) had an Adobe Theatre. Mike Wong from On One software was giving a talk on Lightroom. I introduced myself before the show and MIke kept pointing at me and referring to me during the show.. Funny MIke ;) Good to meet you in person!


I spoke at length to Phil Jones from the SWPP about competition judging. They've recently changed the way images are scored to an Award system, rather than a points system. It was refreshing to hear the thought that went into it.

Today, I got to meet Andy Rouse finally and have a chat with him. I'm an avid Canon user, with a fair amount of money invested in glass, but it was still great to hear him sing the praise of the Nikon D3 for noise and autofocus. As I shoot a ot of gigs, it was a very convincing argument, but despite the show price of £2999, I still didn't bite.

I also met Mike McNamee from Professional Imagemaker magazine. I''ve done an article as an introduction to Lightroom for them in the past. I promised a further one on Develop, so I'll be doing that shortly.

I didn't intend buying anything, but the bargains were to be had, so I'm currently sitting beside my Compudaypack, with a 10'X20' Muslin stuck in the Laptop compartment. It fits.... kinda! I got it from Viewfinder Photography, along with some hotshoe umbrella clips.



One bit of fun was getting to jump in on the Bowens stand with Jon Grey shooting model Jade Cartwright, After each session there was a free for all where people watching the talk could shoot. I happened to be passing by a few times and got a go. I spoke to Jade a lunchtime. She's a good bunch of fun and a cracking model. There's nothing like working with an experienced model.

So good fun, nice purchases and great networking! Well worth the trip. 2 fellow photographers, Mike and Trevor, were along for the first time. Trevor got a 5D and Mike got an 85 f1.2, so I think it was worth their while! I'll be back again next year and maybe it'll be with a Press pass for Lightroom-News.com!..

Horizontal Scroll Lua V1.0

Well, with the introduction of the new VScroll in the past few days, I've knuckled down into getting my original Horizontal Scroll gallery into Lua and with more control. While Lua Galleries are a whole new learning curve after busting through XSLT, they're very powerful. An understanding of CSS can lead to have a great deal of control in the gallery settings. Building the galleries is not overly difficult. It's very logical, but time consuming as you've no true debugger and it's a game of "will Lightroom ignore the gallery", because there's a missing comma somewhere. Enough of the gallery building talk.

HScrollLua 1.0 is a horizontal scrolling gallery. It's a single page gallery with all the image appearing on one page. No thumbnails, just the preview sized photos.
Features:

Single Page Scrolling Gallery

6 Menu items, one for contact info, the others are customisable from the Right Panel

All important colours are changeable

ID Plate can be positioned anywhere in the header (side to side control)

A border can be applied to a photo, with selectable size and colour

Free

Download

View a Sample Gallery

To install the gallery, you need to go to User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom, (On XP got o C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom -Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, on Vista C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\ ) where User is the name you log in with. Look for a folder called Web Galleries within. If it's not there, create it yourself. Unzip the file into this folder and restart Lightroom.
The new Gallery will apppear in the Right Hand Panel, in the Galleries Pane.

I recommend that you create an alias/shortcut to this Lightroom folder for future use.

Vertical Scroll Gallery: Update to v0.1.2

I've been thinking that with my 3rd Party Developer badge at Lightroom Forums, I should really do some updates on the Galleries I created ages ago. So I have. It's not like I've received much in the way of support requests or anything, but I have added the most requested: separate width and height. I'm also doing it directly rather than the non.CSS way Matthew Campanga uses. I did in the past, but for some reason I got it working fine using agmSizes. As to why it worked this time, I have no clue. Matthew is a far superior gallery coder, though, but my method uses similar ideas, i.e. mapping to intermediate variables. If you want to discuss more about coding galleries, mention it in the comments. We might persuade Ian Farlow of Lightroom Forums to open a forum for us.



Gallery features:

5 editable menu links, with internal commenting to allow more,
Vertical scrolling,
Photo Border with Colour,
ID Plate support, with sizing,
Copyright Watermark support,
Almost every colour editable,
Free..

Did I say Free?

I did this as a Lightroom Birthday present. I'm running out the door right now to work, but I'll add a sample gallery and more detail later! back in and adding more information!

To install the gallery, you need to go to User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom, (On XP got o C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Lightroom -Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, on Vista C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\ ) where User is the name you log in with. Look for a folder called Web Galleries within. If it's not there, create it yourself. Unzip the file into this folder and restart Lightroom.
The new Gallery will apppear in the Right Hand Panel, in the Galleries Pane.

I recommend that you create an alias/shortcut to this Lightroom folder for future use.



Download the UPDATED 0.1.2 gallery
View a sample Gallery
Download the template for the sample gallery (and photo at the top!). To install, unzip the file. In Lightroom, in the Web module, Right click on a Preset and choose 'Import.." from the menu. Choose the unzipped file.


Notes: The ID plate should be 300px wide for best results, but there is a logo height and width control to help if it's bigger.
While I have dotted borders around the menu and the scroll area, you can hide these by making the border colour the same as the background.
You can add a photo border with selectable size and colour.
Most of the colours can be changed.
The Add Copyright Watermark tickbox does work, but you''ll need to click the Quality control to force a refresh. This is the same in the Lightroom HTML gallery.
The Scroll CSS uses a code that is not supported in all browsers. It does tend to break gracefully, by ignoring the code and allowing you to scroll the page instead.

Happy Birthday Lightroom

Well it's the 19th February here now. I guess that means that Lightroom is one year old today!

Happy Birthday to Lightroom. And as Spock might say, 'Live Long and Prosper'!

Catalog Backup in Lightroom

I have spoken about ideas for easier backup in the past, but I'm just going to give some detail on the automatic backup feature within Lightroom. To set up Backup in Lightroom, we need to open the Catalog Settings. This is located in the File Menu and can be accessed by using the shortcut Command-Option-, (Ctrl-Alt-, On PC).

Fig 1. The Catalog Settings command.

Once this has opened, go to the Backup section of the General Tab. Clicking on the drop down menu reveals the frequency of which you can backup: Never, Monthly, Weekly, Daily, every restart or just the next restart.

Figure 2. The Catalog Settings Dialog.

Figure 3. The Backup Options in Catalog Settings.

For this part of our example I selected 'Next time Lightroom starts only'. The Dialog in Fig. 4 appears when I restart Lightroom. A little trick to make the restart easier is to go to File>Open Recent and then click on the name of the CURRENT catalog. This will restart Lightroom with the same catalog we're working on.

Figure 4. The Back Up Catalog Dialog.

Looking at Fig 4., we can see 3 buttons and a check box. We can either Skip Now or Backup. We can also check the box to test catalog integrity before backup, which is wise, as a broken backup file is useless. The last button is the Choose button (See Fig 5). This allows us to select the location to which the backup Catalog is written. I recommend an external drive at minimum. If you do select an external drive and it is unavailable at backup time, Lightroom will write to the default Backups folder inside the folder where the Catalog resides.

Figure 5. The Choose button allows you to select the backup location.

If you choose a repeated option, then a fourth button appears, allowing you to skip this backup, but allow further backups to continue as normal. See the images below for a screen capture of the other available options in Backup.

Figure 6. The Weekly Back Up Catalog Dialog

Figure 7. The Monthly Back Up Catalog Dialog

Figure 8. The Daily Backup Dialog

Figure 9. The Everytime Option Dialog

When you've allowed a few backups to happen, you'll start to notice something about catalog files, especially if you have a large photo library. They can get quite big. My main Catalog file is 1.1 Gb for 70,000 photos. When you've a few backups done, I recommend you delete older ones that are no longer necessary. Also you can use either the system archiver on Mac, or Winzip on PC to compress the file down in size. The file is full of text and compresses down significantly. For example my 1.1Gb file compresses to 140Mb. Quite a difference!

Personally I have the automatic backup set to Weekly, but I do backups after major imports/edit sessions, just to be safe.

TTG XML Album Index 1.0 released

Matthew Campagna has announced a replacement for the TTG Gallery Index over at Lightroom Galleries.

"TTG XML Album Index is a new album indexing template for the Lightroom Web module, and replaces the newly discontinued TTG Gallery Index.

Through a combination of PHP and XML, the album index is easier than ever to update with new web galleries. It’s no longer necessary to regenerate and re-upload the entire index for every update, as was the case with TTG Gallery Index. TTG XML Album Index gathers album information from a simple XML file. To add a gallery to your index, you need only provide a thumbnail image and four pieces of information — thumbnail path, gallery path, gallery title and description — to the XML file.

TTG XML Album Index is written in Lua. It requires Lightroom 1.3 or higher, and a web server running PHP. Updates require an FTP client and a text-editor. Coding experience is not necessary.

TTG XML Album Index outputs valid XHTML and CSS."

Adobe Lightroom FREE Presets

Heather Green has complied a list of Adobe Lightroom FREE Presets

It's quite comprehensive and includes Inside Lightroom and of course, Matt's presets from Lightroom Killer Tips. Also included are presets from users, as well as the free WOW! collection from onOne software.

Well worth a look.

On the Back Burner

Well now,
I'm sure I've lost some regular readers with my lack of updates, but it's been super hectic around here recently with things.
I've so much on that's it hard to keep control over it sometimes. I've started to pour my brain into a cool little Mac app called Task Paper. It's keeping and lid on my todo list and helping get things done. I will now add a Lightroom Blog project and keep my links ready for blogging.

I've done a little video on some workflow for Landscapes in Lightroom. The video is done, but I need to script the audio and redo it. It's acceptable as is, but I want better. It'll be early next week I suspect before that happens.

There's been a few interesting things come up in the Lightroom world since I last posted.

Matt Kloskowski from Lightroom Killer Tips sent out a reader request for Preset ideas and came back with a rather long list! I suggested Creative Sharpening, while someone made mention of my Infrared preset on Inside Lightroom.

I mentioned Scott Kelbys V2.0 Wishlist over at Lightroom-News.com , but here I'll make mention of his followup post. I really want to highlight something he says, because it's worth expanding on.
As Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty mentioned in his blog post on Monday, to get all the things included on my 2.0 wishlist (now known as “our mutual wishlist” because your ideas are more important than mine) would take literally years (and after meeting with them, I have a much better understanding of why).

The Lightroom team is pretty small. And Scott's list is pretty big. And that list is probably more akin to the feature list of a version 10 product like Photoshop! So along with all the normal things like work, vacations, meetings, Summits, there is only so much coding that can get done in the time alloted to create a new version. And adding people mid project doesn't make it faster, because bringing them up to speed takes time too.
I'm sure there will be lots of new features in Lightroom v2.0 whenever it appears, and I'm sure we all be surprised to find that Adobe was listening. Look at the forums: Not just Adobe's User to User forums, Adobe people have responded to posts in Lightroom Forums.Net and even in the Adobe Lightroom Group on Flickr. They care. And that can only be good for us users at the end of the day.

Anyhow, enough rambling from me, have a great weekend. I'll be watching Ireland beat Italy (Well I hope after out poor Rubgy World cup performance that we will!) in the first game of Six Nations league tomorrow. Hopefully all those Stateside will have a good Superbowl also!