Gallery Book

I've been busy over the last 10 days reediting older material to form a book on writing HTML galleries for Lightroom. I'd written quite a lot of it before, but the code base was out of date, so essentially I'm rewriting the code and adding on a lot more to it. I'll be presenting it to my publisher when complete, and if they don't want to take it, I'll look at the e-book route.
The book includes the plugins being created at various stages, so you can look at what's happening and form a reference for future plugins. It's not meant to replace the SDK, but to compliment it. I've written it to work by example, rather than hard core API material. Along the way I'm adding in tips and workarounds for things. For now this is one of 2 or 3 core projects I'm working on, so if things are slow here, you know why!

Digital SLR Photography review

Digital SLR Photography have a review of Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy in this months issue. They give it 4 out of 5 stars!

Book out finally

I guess it helps when the publisher tells you, but my Lightroom book is finally out!
It's not listed as available on Amazon.com, but is on Amazom.co.uk for a measly £7.49 (50% off list).
It's so cheap you should buy 2 :)

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:

Photoshop Lightroom 2 Made Easy

I've just been sent the signed off cover for for my book:



I think we're nearly there with it now!


Update
I suspected this might be on Amazon....

Book Fest

It's a bit of a book festival in the last few days at my house. While I'm finishing my 2nd pass layouts today, my editor Louise Campagnone is leaving GMC. It's a bit sad, as I'd have love to have my book 'Photoshop Lightroom Made Easy' finished with her. We're so close, but not close enough so I guess I start with a new editor next week. We're nearly done on the project, with a bit of editing and layout rearranging to be done, so it won't be long. Thanks for all your work Louise. I'll be glad to be done as I feel like 'Paddy Last'.

My editing was interrupted by the postman showing up the other day with 'Inside Lightroom 2' by Richard Earney. Richard is a friend and compadre from as far back as the original Lightoom Beta program, so I was delighted to see this come in the door. It looks great. I've only had a quick perusal, but enough to see my name mentioned a few times. Thanks Richard!

This morning another book arrived in the door: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2: A digital photographers guide by Dave Huss and David Plotkin. Dave had been popping back and forth with questions, and was kind enough to give me a mention in the Acknowledgements. Thanks Dave!

BTW folks, those are straight links, no commission on them.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, Free Chapter

Peachpit have a free chapter from Chris Orwigs book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques. It's a tutorial on using the Adjustment Brush. I'm happy to see this out there now, as I was tech editor on this book. Chris is an excellent writer, with an easy to read style. He manages to make difficult things easy to understand and provides solid examples with his tips. I've said before that I learned a bit from the process myself, but equally so a whole bunch of my own tips were written in also. I know there's going to be an overflow of Lightroom 2 books out there (my own included), but if you're looking beyond the big 2, this is well worth a read. I may as well mention the Elephant in the room. Any book that comes out now will be compared to both the Martin Evening and Scott Kelby Lightroom 2 books. Both are available to order right now, with Martin's already published. I think Chris's book is a different focus but very useful.

Update: My copy arrived in the post yesterday... Nice to see my name inside! And Chris made a nice comment in the acknowledgments

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!