LRB Graduated Filter Presets for Lightroom 2

While I provide a lot of free tips, tutorials, and even galleries to users, sometimes I do a little that requires some return on my time.
To aid users in selecting the right look for their landscape images, I've created a set of over 70 Graduated Filter presets to get you started with making creative choices for your images. Covering both landscape and portrait orienations, as well as hard and soft line filters, these filters come in 3 standard colours: ND (Grey), Blue and Tobacco. As is also standard, they come in strengths of 1 stop (0.3), 2 stops (0.6) and 3 stops (0.9). It was a bit of work to create this, but I'm not charging a whole lot for them, just €5.00 (about $7.75). Obviously you can tweak the settings once applied. In fact I positively encourage it!

Why should you pay for these, when you could create them yourself? Well the fact that it takes a bunch of time to put them together is the best reason. Probably more than €5 of your time. Also by running down through the Presets panel on the left of Develop, you can preview them quickly to see how they look with your image. Much quicker than mucking around with sliders.

You can see some of the presets in sample form here: Download Sample Grads

To install these presets, drop the Sample Grads folder into:

User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets on OS X,
C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on XP-Note that Application Data is a hidden folder,
C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on Vista,
where User is your login name.
Or you can click on Preferences>Presets>Show Lightroom Presets Folders to open this folder in Finder/Explorer. Then open the Develop Presets folder from there.

The full version folder contains 4 Sub folders, place these folders in the Develop Preset location mentioned above.
You can also Right click on a preset or folder and import them from within Develop, which is fine for a small amount of presets, but for folders, manually placing them and restarting Lightroom is quicker.

The 4 folders are:
Grads: Hard-Landscape
Grads: Hard-Portrait
Grads: Soft-Landscape
Grads: Soft-Portrait
Hard Grads have a tight transition, which Soft Grads user a wider transition. Landscape and Portrait Grads need to be separate as they don't rotate. The 3 colours (ND, Blue and Tobacco) come in 1, 2, and 3 stops varieties, equivalent to 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 in standard filter terminology. Also as most Landscape photographers use the Rule of Thirds to compose, each type is set on the bottom and top third, allowing you to choose the nearest one quickly. To change the filter, click on the pin to select it (Press M to activate Grad Filter in Develop, if it's not open). Drag the pin to move the centre of the grad, and the outside lines to make it softer or harder. Finally click the colour chip to change the tint. The Blue and Tobacco colours I've chosen are simply ones I like. You may prefer a redder Tobacco, or different blue. Actually then ones I have look similar to the Cokin set I own, so I was trying to get close to them.




To Download, add them to the cart. Payment is Paypal via E-junkie, but can also take Credit Card. Once Paypal sends notification, an email will be sent with a download code.
Windows user that experience security issues related to downloaded Zip files should try an alternate decompressor such as 7-Zip.
Update: On the advice of Richard Earney, I've rezipped with BetterZip to remove Mac related components. Please let me know it you're still experiencing trouble after redownloading. Also rather than clicking on the link in the email, copy and paste it into your web browser. This works fine for me using XP under boot camp.

Update #2: I've found one of the presets had an incorrect value which has been fixed and the packages reloaded. Please download again. Apologies. I did check them before I posted, but somehow missed one.

Update #3: A few people commented the Portrait grads were upside down. Well, they're not.. They just shoot upside down! Seriously though you should turn the camera so you shoot with the shutter button up. It makes the camera more stable. Anyway for those that shoot upside-down, I added another 36 presets, duplicating the normal ones, but upside down. In fact they probably got more love!

A look at the sets:



Here's roughly how they look, first the hard set, then the soft.

Please note that VAT is charged in the EU

LRB HScroll Web for Lightroom 2.0

Stemming from the original Hscroll gallery that I published on Lightroom-Blog, I sat down and pondered about how one would go about the creation of an entire website from within Lightroom. In truth it’s not easy to do, but with a simple amount of preplanning and a fixed number of images per gallery, I’ve implemented a way to do it. Obviously this is a version 1.0 gallery, and I’ve already started to consider how to improve it further, but as Lightroom 2 has just been released, it’s time to get this out there. (Just to clarify I mean this is version 1 of this gallery, but it's for Lightroom 2 as it uses new features only available in LIghtroom 2-if there is enough interest, I could remove these and rewrite the photoSizes code).
Obviously doing this takes time, so if you find this useful, please use the Donate button on Lightroom-Blog.com. Being on the net and using bandwidth isn’t free, so anything that comes back will help offset this cost!(I'll also send on a version of the gallery minus the LRB link!)

HSW needs some basic preparation. First decide the number of images you want in a gallery to show your work. In portfolio terms 20 is huge, so it makes a good number to start with. Set the Images per Gallery slider in Appearance to 20. Next decide on the number of galleries and use the tick boxes to select that number. If you select 6 with 20 imags each, you then need 120 images in a collection to create the website. Use the collection to sort the images into the order you want them in on the website. Remember to work each set in the Images per gallery number.

If you see this, it's because you didn't read the section above and don't have enough images selected. Images per gallery X Number of galleries= The required number of images.

Use the Site info section to name the galleries, and set the text on each page. You can also change the names that appear in the menu itself. I recommend leaving the .html files as is, unless you want to specifically rename them yourself.
HSW assumes you will use a minimum of 3 galleries. If you use less it will break currently (due to the way images are assigned to the Home, About and Contact pages). I'm considering a random script that will show a random photo on the home, about and contact pages.
This is also the first time I've created a basic Readme, so go easy on me. As well as leaving comments, I've started at thread over at Lightroom Forums.

Download | Sample | Install Instructions | Readme PDF

LR 2 Resources

While it's early days yet, there are still a bunch of new things for version 2 of Lightroom.

Victoria Bampton, the Lightroom Queen, has a list of updated features, highlighting changes from both V1.41 and the Beta. Also she's created a new shortcut list for V2, which will be a handy resource for users.

The king of Plugins, Jeffrey Friedl, has also updated his plugins for version 2. After a little hinting, he also put his Lightroom stuff on one page! Check out his Lightoom Goodies page for more details.

NAPP have the Lightroom 2 Learning Center, with Matt K and Scott Kelby doing the presentations.

There are loads of new additions to the Adobe Design Center for Lightroom. You can also access Community Help from there.

The Help files are also online, with commenting so you can ask for, or give help, suggest changes or simply leave a message. This is a moderated service, but comments will always go live immediatley, to be moderated after. Disclosure: As per the V1 Wiki, I'm a moderator. It's a voluntary position.

The Help is also available as a downloadable PDF.

Creating Web Galleries

As part of the newly launched Lightroom 2, there is also a new SDK. In addition to the new features compared to the original SDK, this one contains a wealth of details on creating your own galleries using Lua. While I learned the hard way, from other galleries and sites, I found this explained things well. It provides a solid basis in coding, along with sample galleries.

For user help and interaction, there's the new SDK U2U forum. You can also upload your product to Adobe Lightgroom Exchange.

Lightroom 2 Available

Tom Hogarty has announced the availability of Lightroom Version 2. It's priced at $299 or $99 on upgrade. You can get the program from http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/. There is also a trial version available.

Tom has an extensive list of the new features in V2 over at the Lightroom Journal blog. There's little point in repeating it here, so jump over there for a look!

One thing I will highlight though is the release of the DNG Profile Editor and the associated profiles. These profiles provide you with a way to emulate the Picture Styles and Modes, etc from camera makers. This has been a major pain point for users, so now you can finally have Lightroom and Camera Raw emulate these looks. Not only that, but you can cheat a bit and emulate the looks from other cameras using the DPE, by copying the settings from one camera profile, to that of a different camera. The actual information is based on the sensor, so it won't be an exact match, but it is tweakable. Expect to see 3rd parties with film emulation profiles!

Quiet on the Western Front

It's been quiet around here for a few weeks, not just because it's quiet on the Lightroom front, but also because it's the busiest time of year here in Galway. 2 weeks of the Galway Arts Festival finished yesterday and now we're into Race Week. The Galway Races are one of the longest race meets in Europe and certainly the most lucrative for the city. As you can imagine, it's been hectic, with little spare time. What time I had was being put into finishing writing my Lightroom book for PIP (GMC publications book arm). While the text is done and ready for edit, I've a few screen caps to do still.

I also finished my tech edit on Chris Orwig's Lightroom book which is called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques. It's a good book packed with tips and ideas from Chris, with a bunch of stuff I threw in also. There was a great team on the book and I eagerly await the final product. So yes, I am available for tech edit work. Actually, I quite enjoy it!

Anyhow, I'll be posting more shortly, once the 50-60 GB of images from the last 2 weeks are edited down a bit!

Phil Clevenger - Lightroom Interface Designer

John Nack points out a 12 minute interview with Lightroom UI designer Phil Clevenger. It's done by Frederick Johnson and I have to say it's fascinating. From discussing his design history to building UI from scratch, not to mention the 'Makeup Brush presets' he's working on, this is a must watch video.

PTLens

PTLens is now advertising itself as an external editor for Lightroom. While not in the same form a plugin would take, it's still quite similar to some Aperture plugins, i.e. convert the file and process it then.
For those not familiar with PTLens, it provides lens distortion corrections not currently available in Lightroom. To be precise it fixes pincushion/barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective distortion. The corrections are automatic based on a database of lenses.

There is a trial version available, which can be converted to a full version for a paltry $15. Note that the external editor requires V2 of Lightroom.

Creating Web galleries: Calling a colour directly in a gallery

I'm in the middle of a standalone flash slideshow/gallery (different than the LRB XML Flash gallery!) and came across an issue which corresponds to both galleries.
Basically to make the Flash more effective I needed to be able to change the background colour of the flash. This is defined in the flash call in the HTML normally. The OBJECT code uses param name="bgcolor" value="#000000", with EMBED using bgcolor="#000000". So I just drop in a nonCSS variable to call the Web colour? Wrong.. Or so I found out.

If I define my variable in the galleryInfo.lrweb file
["nonCSS.flashBG"] = "#000000",

And then call it in my HTML using either
$model.nonCSS.flashBG
or
<%= model.nonCSS.flashBG %>

I don't get the colour appearing. I get AgColor(0,0,0,1). Now 99% of my learning coding came from looking at other galleries, but I hadn't seen a way to do the conversion from Lightroom to Web colour (or at least noticed it!). Fortunately Andy Rahn suggested using AgColorToWebColor( nonCSS.flashBG ). Now it was a bit cryptic, because it didn't tell me how to call it. Was it a string? or a quote? Eventually between digging and trying everything (literally), I came up with the answer.

There is probably a shorter way, but here's what I did:
galleryInfo.lrweb: In the model section I define 2 variables:
["nonCSS.flashBG"] = "#000000",
["nonCSS.flash.bg"] = function() return string.format( "%s", AgColorToWebColor( nonCSS.flashBG ) ) end,

In my HTML I call nonCSS.flash.bg
OBJECT
param name="bgcolor" value="<%= model.nonCSS.flash.bg %>"
EMBED
bgcolor="<%= model.nonCSS.flash.bg %>"

To give me control over colour in the Gallery itself, I define a colour chip in the colorPalette section of views:

WPGPanelUI.label_and_color_row {
bindingValue = "nonCSS.flashBG",
title = "Flash Background Colour",
},

Hopefully this will help some of you with getting on with creating your own galleries. I intend doing a series of posts creating galleries from scratch for Lightroom News soon. I did eventually find examples of where this is used inside the default HTML gallery, but didn't understand what was happening with it until Andy sent me in the right direction.

Spaces, sorts and masks.

I'm taking a little time out from my writing cram to point out a few recent posts from other sites.

Matt Kloskowski has a great video tutorial on colour spaces with Lightroom and Photoshop, including Photoshop colour settings over at Lightroom Killer Tips.

Speaking of Matt, he also has 2 Edge Lightening presets for download.

Ken Milburn has a cool tip on using Auto Mask in brush mode of Lightroom 2 beta to extract a person off a background. The final output can be used to create a layer mask in Photoshop. Check out his tip over at the O'Reilly Inside Lightroom blog.

David M. Knoble has updated his sorting tip for Lightroom 2 Beta over at Outdoor Images blog.

George Jardine says Farewell to Adobe.

I sent George Jardine some nice comments after his recent video from Martin Evenings Lightroom 2 book shoots. He surprised me by telling me it would be his last. He's leaving Adobe. After 4 1/2 years there, he's moving on. George's enthusiasm for Lightroom is what really got me hooked way back in early Beta 1 of version 1 of Lightroom. I think that was Jan '06 (time flies!). I've always looked forward to his posts and now they are at an end. at least from the Adobe perspective.

George, I wish you the best in future endeavours. Enjoy the break, and don't be afraid to come back to doing more podcasts!