Focus On Imaging 2009

Hey folks,
I'm off to Focus tomorrow (well in about 5 hours after I go to bed!). I'll be bringing the book to show off to my mates, so if you see me about, come say hi.. Here's my ugly mug courtesy of David Hobby AKA Strobist from the London Strobist seminar last Dec. I will be wearing the same hat :)

Photo by David Hobby, Used with permission

I'm not doing any talks or signings, I'm just a punter and really going to see the Elichrom Ranger Quadra system, and look for the new Drew Gardner DVD. I'm not bringing a computer, but I will have the iPhone with me for basic net access and email in WiFi Areas (O2's roaming rates for data are ridiculous).

Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy

After rewriting from scratch between 1.41 and 2.0, along with a lot of work put into editing down the book, it's hard to believe that I'm finally seeing a printed copy of my book. And now I have it in my hand. It's a rather odd feeling. Anyone's first book is probably the hardest and I did learn a lot in the writing process. I was also very glad to be tech editing other books at the same time, because it gave me valuable insight into the process. Well, the book will be out there in the wild very soon. I can only hope it will do well!


Here's a quick flick through it:

Links and news.

I've posted again on Lightroom news, but you should check out Tim Armes new plugin for Lightroom: LR2/Blog. It's a photoblog plugin for Lightroom that lets you publish blog posts to blogger and Wordpress (or those that use the metaWebLog API) blogs. You can add text to the post, overwrite previous files, etc. It's a great idea for a plugin and works well.

On the 'please release V2 of LRB Portfolio' front, well maybe if people would take a break from mailing in feature requests, it might actually get out the door. As it is I have to rewrite some of the user guide before release! Soon, I promise. And quit asking for beta versions.... :)


One thing I have been doing is spending some time on Lynda.com. I have the bones of a book on writing web galleries done from 1.3, so I've been looking at InDesign course, and of course I'm doing Eric Meyer's CSS course. I've even applied one or 2 ideas to the gallery since (like the dropping image when the window is too narrow issue - now it just hides instead).
Even though I'm only there a week, I really recommend it. I'll take a peek at the Lightroom courses there and do a mini review in time.
Anyhow, back to the grindstone.

Wicked Print Tip from Matt K.

Matt Kloskowski sounds like an excited schoolboy in his latest tip over at Lightroom Killer Tips. And so he should. It's wicked.
As with some other tips, this is slightly more complex initially and requires a little tinkering, but the rewards are worth it.

And what does the tip do? Well it converts Picture Package from a single image to multi image format. Yes!

Adobe Community Expert

A few weeks ago the Administrator for Adobe Community Help for Lightroom, Anita Dennis, told me that she was nominating me as an Adobe Community Expert. Today I got the news that the nomination had been accepted and that I'm now an Adobe Community Expert. Wow! There's a change happening in how things are being handled, so my name isn't on the current list yet. I'm pretty happy about getting this!

Part of being chosen involves activity in the community, which I already do in many forms, here for example, and on Community Help. It all feels like new shoes.
Don points out that Ian Lyons is also an Adobe Community Expert in the comments. In fact I've already spoken to Ian today about it over the phone. Ian was the first person I ever knew as a Community Expert back in the Lightroom Beta days. He even send me to the page I've linked above to find out more. It's a bit like coming full circle since then!

Export Backup Plugin

Matt Dawson has updated his Export Backup post process action for Lightroom. A lot of Export Plugins use temporary loactions when exporting (excepting Files on Disk) and this post process action can be added to them to give a local copy of the exported images. New additions in this version include:
Most Recently Used List
Subfolder field
Show in Explorer/Finder checkbox
More information can be had from from the The Photo Geek

Welcoming Richard Earney to Lightroom News.

I did hint that there would be a small change with Lightroom News a short while ago. I was away at a family funeral on the big day, but Richard Earney from Inside Lightroom has joined the editorial team. His first article is called 'Geolocation and Lightroom'. Richard is also the author of Inside Lightroom 2: The serious photographer's guide to Lightroom efficiency.

I've known Richard for quite a while now in internet terms and he's the tall, skinny, quiet bloke who is the compliment to my short, tubby and loud ruffian. Glad to have you along Richard!

RGB conversion chart

Because Lightroom use a percentage scale rather than the older 0-255 scale, a lot of people ask for such a scale to be added to Lightroom.
While in theory it seems like you just convert the numbers and you're done, it's actually not that simple.
The 0-255 scale is a measure that comes from 8 bit files. There are only 256 levels in each of the channels, so such a number can accurately describe any 8 bit colour. 16 bit colour has 65536 levels per channel. Thats a huge jump in the number of colours and a larger margin of error is we use a 0-255 scale. In truth Raw files are 12 or 14 bit, and a 12 bit file would have 4096 levels of colour per channel. Even that is an unwieldy level to use.

Lightroom founding Engineer Mark Hamburg choose to use a 0.0 to 100.0 percentage scale, which with 0.1 accuracy gives use 1000 levels of colour. Finer than 0-255, but still not in the order of 12 bits per channel colour.
The other issue with a 0-255 scale in Lightroom, is that even if you had one, it is only accurate for the Lightroom working space. To use the words of Jeff Schewe: Admittedly, since Lightroom uses an unusual color space internally (ProPhoto RGB Chromaticities and a linear gamma for processing, but an sRGB gamma tone curve for histogram display), there are no traditional color readouts to be had. Insiders call the Lightroom color space Melissa RGB, named for one of the Lightroom team members. (We like it because as far as we know, it's the first color space named for a woman.) So this would be completely inaccurate if you were exporting to any other space. Still people would ask for such a thing.

One possible compromise would be to have an option to see the values as if it were exported to an 8bit sRGB space. I'm not optimistic that such a thing would be possible, and to be honest, we do need to start thinking in more accurate colours. Anyhow, here's a rough conversion guide for % in RGB numbers. Bear in mind that when you export, these will be subject to the rendering of the conversion engine in Lightroom, and so will be different on export. Try it and see the difference.

Rough conversion between % and RGB255 numbers

Update Jao Van De Lagemaat has posted a link to his blog on the comments with conversion number for the MacBeth colourchecker chart.