Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Lightroom
Adobe has released another set of updates to Lightroom. Both feature performance and bug fixes and the CC version has some new features. It's actually a little confusing as to which feature is in which version, but anyway. The big news is the new "Guided Upright" feature, and the re-design of the Lens correction panel into two separate panels.
One of the things that I often find frustrating when working in Lightroom on both a laptop and a desktop, is keeping my presets in sync. I often have presets on my desktop, which I will use quite often, and then when I switch to my Laptop and I try to find them, I realise I don't have them. I've been thinking for a while about ways to help alleviate this problems, and I've come up with a solution. This won't be for everyone and I'm sure there are lots of other ways to do this, but it should you an idea of at least one way to go about keeping your presets in sync.
One of the things that I really don't like about Lightroom is the interface for captioning and titling your images. I don't like the metadata ui in general, but in particular, in my opinion, the captioning interface is a pain to use. The entry fields are small, and the text is small, and the section is stuck down in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. It's difficult to read and it's cramped. While there is a "Large caption" option, it still suffers from some of the same problems. I've always wished there was a better way to enter captions and titles. Well, it turns out there is. Sort of.
Adobe has issued a series of updates to Lightroom and camera raw. The updates are mainly bug fixes, as well as adding support two new cameras. It's available now from the Adobe update panel.
Here's a very quick Lightroom tip for you. I often use the quick collection in Lightroom as a sort of temporary clip board or place to collect some images that I'm either collecting for a blog post, or for a comparison and so on. Sometimes I will be in the processing of going through images , and I may have set some search filters in the library or something similar, when I decide that I may want to add some images to the quick collection. However, I already have images in it that I no longer want, but I don't want to leave the current view to go to the quick collection.
I briefly covered Affinity Photo in a previous post, and it is an excellent Photoshop alternative. I've been using it more and more lately, and that includes using it in conjunction with Lightroom as an external editor. This is pretty easy to set up but there are a few limitations unfortunately. However, there are significant advantages to using the software in lieu of Photoshop. In this post I'll show you how to set up Affinity Photo to work as an external editor, and I'll discuss some of the limitations and advantages of using Affinity Photo with Lightroom.
I’ve been covering different ways to get Lightroom and photos to work together on the blog for a little while. In one of my previous posts I showed a way to sort of sync between the two applications. A simpler method is to create an export preset to send images straight to Photos from Lightroom. There are two ways to do this and I’ll discuss them both in the following post.
Here's a very quick Lightroom tip for you. One of the frustrating things about the way Lightroom's preview system works is that it only generates previews when you tell it to, usually upon import. As soon as you make any changes to an image, the preview for that image is lost. In order to make sure you can keep browsing through your library speedily, it's important to periodically re-build previews.
I've written a few posts lately about ways to speed up Lightroom, and there's one more that may seem counterintuitive at first. If you have a lot of develop module presets installed, it can slow down Lightroom. It doesn't just slow down Lightroom in the Develop Module either, it slows it down the whole application. Even if you're just in the Library. I had written about this before, and I had thought that this "bug" was fixed ages ago. On an official forum, an Adobe rep said that this was to be fixed in Lightroom 6, but it still seems to be an issue.
Having released quite a few premium Lightroom presets over the last few years, I thought I'd take some time to give you an insight into my process for creating them. It's not as straightforward as it might seem. When I stopped to think about it the other day, I realised that it's actually quite an interesting process, so I decided to write it all down. So what follows is a rough guide to the way I create presets for Lightroom, and the various steps involved.
A while ago I made a set of presets for Fuji users which are based on the Fuji film simulation colour profiles as provided by Adobe. these presets are basically just a quick way to set the colour profile by selecting a preset rather than having to go to the camera calibration panel and select the profile there. They also have the advantage of allowing you to set the profiles on import, or allowing you to quickly apply a profile to multiple images at once.
Adobe has just released the latest version of Lightroom. Version 2015.1 for CC users, or 6.5 for standalone users brings bug fixes and new camera support. Unfortunately there is still no mention of the improved Fuji X-Trans rendering promised by Adobe last June.
I’m happy to announce that my next set of Lightroom Presets, QuickLUX 2 is now available. QuickLUX 2 is a sequel to the popular QuickLUX set of presets that started out on Aperture, and became one of my first, and most popular Lightroom sets.
I’ve been busy working on my March set of Lightroom Presets, and they’re nearly ready. I’m really happy with how these are turning out, so I wanted to share some of the testing with you. Basically, the next set will be a sequel to QuickLux. Unimaginatively called QuickLux 2, it will, like the first set of QuickLux presets, include some of my personal artists interpretation of negative, and transparency films.
A while ago I wrote a blog post about my issues with A6000 images in Lightroom not being calibrated particularly well. I included some calibration settings in the form of a pair of Lightroom presets. Since then, I’ve been doing some more work on trying to get a starting point that I’m happy with. With that in mind, here is my latest version of my Sony A6000 calibration preset that I’m ow using on my A6000 images in Lightroom.
I've been having some issues with Lightroom's performance on my mac for a while now. Coupled with some recent crashing, my frustration levels were beginning to rise. However, after a little research and some trial and error, I've managed to stop the crashing, and speed the application up a bit. While these techniques may well be familiar to you, I'm writing about them anyway should someone be having a similar problem and not be aware of what to do.
If you've purchased any of my presets packs, you've found that most of them come with a set of "Setup Presets" and may have been wondering just what exactly they are and how to use them. While there are instructions in the read me files included with most of the presets, some users are still finding them a bit confusing, so here is a more detailed description and short explanation on how to use the setup presets.
I had stated when I launched Coffee Tones for Lightroom last month, that it was my intent to launch a new set of Lightroom presets every month this year. Well, it was getting close, but it looks like I made it with a few days to spare! I’m happy to announce today, that my newest set, MonoLux for Lightroom is now available.
