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
It’s been a while since I last released a set of Lightroom presets, despite my plan to release one set a month this year. I’ve actually been working on a new set for a while now though, and I’m excited about the results. Called “Film Lux” it’s a continuation of my “Lux” series,and this time it’s about some more realistic film styles.
I’ve been plagued by a nasty bug in the latest version of Lightroom on the Mac. It’s affected me several times now, and the same action triggers it, so it’s not a a random one off. On top of that I’ve read similar stories online from people with similar issues. Basically, every so often, when you open the import window, the memory usage of Lightroom goes through the roof and the application becomes frozen. If you don’t force quit the application quickly after this happens, the entire system hangs.
Yesterday Adobe released a big update to Lightroom Mobile for iOS which adds a number of features including local adjustment tools, and more importantly RAW importing and editing.
There are times that it feels like I’m playing a constant battle with hard drive space. I’m sure that many photographers feel like this at one time or another (or all the time). My Lightroom Library is a giant mess. I’m the first to admit that, and it’s not particularly well organised. I have images littered across multiple drives and I’ve lots of older projects which I don’t really need access to the raw files, but are still online. So, once again, I’ve started trying to tame the beast, and I’ve a few new strategies for dealing with it that I thought you might find interesting.
There are lots of ways to get images into and out of Lightroom. For importing, you can import from the import dialog box, or by setting up the auto import., or by synchronising an existing folder. For outputting, you can export via a variety of settings, or use one of the publishing plugins in the Library module. But what happens when you drag and drop images into or out of Lightroom?
A while ago I was publishing another blog for Lightroom, called "The Lightroom Diary" and at the time it had become too much trouble for me to post to both that and this, my regular blog. So I shut it down and consolidated all the Lightroom posts here. I said at the time that I might start it back up again, and so now I have.
An interesting topic came up for discussion recently between some colleagues. We were talking about how nice it would be if Lightroom let you sync projects between a laptop and a desktop, and someone suggested that you could just put your catalogue on dropbox and sync it that way. If you google this there are lots of tutorials for various ways to set this up, but in my opinion, while that might sound like a good idea or a simple solution, it's something that I personally would avoid doing, and here's why.
There are a lot of hidden and not so obvious features littered throughout Lightroom. I've previously expressed my dislike of the interface for dealing with metadata in the software, but it does have a few tricks up its sleeve. For example, if you start typing in any of the fields, it will auto fill in the entries based on previous results.
If you're a Lightroom user and you have a lot of images, the chances are that there will come a time when you need to move some of your photos. Whether it's to another location on the same drive, to an entirely different drive, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about moving your files.
The headline feature in the latest version of Lightroom CC is the new guided upright feature. This new tool lets you set guidelines when using the "Upright" automatic correction feature. Rather than spend a long time talking about it, I made a quick video to show you the feature in action.
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.
