Why do you need this update? If you have used the latest Lightroom 4 Develop controls on an image and then open it in Photoshop Elements, it is likely Photoshop Elements won’t show all of the Develop edits made in Lightroom. Update Camera Raw and this problem should go away. It also adds new camera support and other improvements.

TPG-Elemental Lightroom plugin users: you need this update to take full advantage of the plugin when using these product versions.

Currently these Camera Raw 6.7 download links aren’t showing on the main Photoshop Elements update pages (Macintosh and Windows so users might not be aware of the release. Hence the PSA.

Unfortunately users of Photoshop Elements 9 and older are out of luck as the latest Camera Raw version only supports the latest Photoshop Elements version.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Public Service Announcement for users of Lightroom 4 and Photoshop Elements 10

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Stuart’s 57 page eBook aims to help you determine the right photo sharing plan for you. It discusses the reasons why you need a sharing plan, and guides you through the major dimensions of your plan:

• Why you want to share photos;
• Who you want to share them with;
• How and where you should share them; and
• What photos you wish to share.

It includes exercises to help you work through these issues and develop the answers that best suit your personal needs. Stuart explains his personal sharing plan and uses his decision making process to illustrate the topics being discussed. By the time you finish the eBook you should have a high level sharing plan ready and you will be in a position to spend time working through the details of the plan, such as reviewing where you want to share photos.

This is not a recipe or workflow book. It doesn’t attempt to give you the correct answer that everyone should try to mimic. This is a book that teaches you how to think about your photo sharing needs. While this isn’t necessarily what I expected when I first open the book, I think its what I needed. I’m an analytical person (read: geek) who would have loved to get down into the nuts and bolts of which sharing site or social network is best and pour over the stats and feature sets. But as Stuart said the features sets and players can change rapidly in this space so any comparisons of products will date quickly. Instead he looked at the main classes of online sharing sites available and looked at the reasons you might want to use each. This should allow the eBook to age well as new classes of photo sharing technology don’t come along that often.

It also reminded me that a sharing plan is not just for online sharing. Prints, photo books and public display are great ways to share your work and for certain audiences (e.g. my grandmother) these might be the only viable way to share with some segments of our audience. Stuart goes even further discussing ideas for sharing not just your work, but also your passion for photography through classes, photo walks and teaching. These are items I wouldn’t even have considered as part of my plan without his advice.

The concept of a sharing plan isn’t new. In the corporate world I normally see this referred to as a Communications Management Plan, with some Stakeholder Analysis on the side. But Stuart has captured the essence of this concept, adapted it to a photographer’s needs, and presented it in an easily digestible and beautifully laid out manner that shows he understands his audience. And I’m must fit squarely within that audience given my favourite quote from the book:

Remember, identifying your audience is important even if you aren’t planning on making a living through photography. If you don’t take the time to figure out who they are the only audience you’ll reach is yourself.

(Guilty as charged.)

There were some unexpected points made in this eBook, namely:

• The importance of editing your work (“what” you are sharing) so only the strongest work is presented to your target audience. Stuart also suggests some ways to get assistance if you are having trouble judging your own work.
• Reminder for all users to view the Terms of Service (ToS) before publishing photos to a service. ToS can vary wildly from site to site and if you are not careful you might end up signing away your intellectual property without even realising it.
• Understanding your audience doesn’t necessarily mean you will be republishing your work in multiple locations. Stuart found that he had been over segregating his work and was finding it difficult to publish to his many online services. Now he publishes centrally and links back to that site from the other locations.

While I’d personally have liked to see some more geeky talk about sharing photos I think Stuart probably made right call leaving that detail out. People like me would have been distracted and potentially would have missed the main lessons of the book!

This is another quality Craft & Vision title that I’m happy to recommend. Stuart has done a great job capturing the essentials on how to create and maintain a photography sharing plan and I’m currently following his advice to create my own plan. Thanks Stuart for sharing your experience with us and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work in the future!

If you are interested in picking up a copy of “Shoot + Share: Getting Your Photographs Out Into the World”, do so before 11:59pm PST April 28, 2012 and the promotional code SHARE4 will get you a 20% discount at the checkout. Or if you want to pickup 5 or more PDF eBooks from the Craft & Vision collection use the code SHARE20 to get 20% off the lot.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Review: Shoot +Share eBook

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Still some users choose to go to the effort of rolling their own Lightroom catalog backup solution instead. Why? There are many potential reasons but two that stood out for me were the amount of disk space the uncompressed backups consumed, and the awkward steps required to trigger a backup outside of your regular schedule.

My TPG LR Backup plugin was created to help resolve these backup limitations. It reduces the disk space consumed by Lightroom’s catalog backups. And now it can also help trigger those catalog backups whenever Lightroom 4 users need them!

With the introduction of Lightroom 4 my plugin can now schedule a catalog backup at the next shutdown, regardless of your regular backup schedule. In fact you don’t even need a backup schedule to use this new feature. Once the TPG LR Backup plugin is installed you simply open up the File –> Plug-in Extras menu and select the new Offer to Backup Catalog at Next Shutdown menu item. Once you OK the resultant dialog Lightroom will now show you the standard catalog backup dialog when you next exit Lightroom. Simple!

Currently the only other ways I know of to backup a Lightroom catalog on demand are to:

• temporarily change Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every time”, and then reset it to the normal schedule after you next restart Lightroom
• set Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every day” or “Every time” and cancel the backup dialog when you don’t need to run a backup
• copy the catalog file to a new location while Lightroom isn’t running

I know which approach I’d rather use to keep my Lightroom catalog safe!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Easily backup your Lightroom 4 catalog on demand

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Overview

This latest version adds a number of significant features to the product:

• A Map module for managing location information
• A Book module for creating photo books
• Advances in image processing via a new Process Version (PV 2012) and controls
• Soft Proofing for a better colour management workflow
• Emailing images directly from within Lightroom
• Enhanced Video capabilities and format support
• Enhanced DNG capabilities and workflows
• New Adobe Revel (formerly Adobe Carousel – see here for details) export workflow

More details about these and other features later.

With the latest beta the minimum system requirements have been changed with support being dropped for some older operating systems. The new minimum requirements are:

Mac:

• Multicore Intel® processor with 64-bit support
• Mac OS X v10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or v10.7 (Lion)
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024×768 display

Windows:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
• Microsoft® Windows Vista® with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
• 2GB of RAM
• 1GB of available hard-disk space
• 1024×768 display

If your system is up to specification why not start the download while we dive deeper into what is included in the beta?

My Five Favourite Features

Rather than provide an exhaustive overview of the beta I’ll be talking though some of my favourite features instead. At the end of the post I’ve include links to other Lightroom 4 beta resources that will help fill in the gaps for those interested in the features not covered here.

Enhanced Video Capabilities and Format Support

While Lightroom 3 already includes some support for video files this beta has significantly expanded those:

• Lightroom is now able to directly playback video within the Library module
• Videos can be trimmed using the new controls visible within the Library module’s Loupe view
• Most Quick Develop tools can be used for processing a video, including the application of presets. See screen shot below for further details.
• Publish and Export services now fully support video and can optionally convert to H.264 or DPX formats during export.
  

   

   

   

   

• Most popular DSLR, compact camera and smart phone video formats can now being imported, including 3GP and AVCHD.
• The video frame (“Poster Frame”) used for the Library module’s thumbnail can be chosen by the user. 
• Individual frames can be extracted from a video as standalone images.
• A new Video Metadata Tagset has been added to the Library module’s Metadata panel, containing a variety of new video specific metadata fields. For the metadata geeks these fields appear to be a subset of those defined by the XMP Dynamic Media namespace.

These additions make Lightroom a much more useful part of a photographer’s video workflow. It is now capable of importing, playing, trimming, processing and publishing videos so could become the main video digital asset management tool for many photographers.

Lightroom’s video editing capabilities are no match for a full Non Linear Editor (NLE) but even larger projects requiring more full featured video editing tools could benefit from Lightroom’s video management and publishing capabilities. Smaller video processing tasks (e.g. cleaning up and publishing a video from your smartphone) can be quickly completed in Lightroom’s Library module.

TIP: When attempting multiple edits to a video at once it can be useful to capture a “Poster Frame”, use the Develop module to adjust the captured frame to the desired look, create a preset from the edits then use the Library module’s Quick Develop to apply the preset to the whole video.

Map Module

The beta adds a new Map module for working with location information in a visual and engaging way:

• View recorded locations for images directly within Lightroom, using satellite, street, or terrain maps
• Add location information to photos by dragging and dropping them only the map
• Save favourite map locations for use when searching for or tagging image locations (see screen shot below).
• Manage publication of location information selectively, through checking the private flag on a saved location, or broadly by checking the Remove Location Info option in your Publish or Export service.
• Load GPX tracklogs and use them to tag images with matching date/time stamps (see screen shot below).

The Lightroom Map module is fun to play with, but strangely enough it is the location information privacy features that are making GPS location capture a more regular part of my photography. I try not to attach location information to photos taken at the homes of my friends and family for privacy reasons but I frequently forget to turn tracklogs on or off and it made this a fairly frustrating experience. Now I can save these locations in Lightroom, and enable the privacy setting to hide their location information, and always capture location information safe in the knowledge this will never be published outside of my personal catalog.

Advances in Image Processing (Process Version 2012)

Lightroom 3 introduced some major improvements to the product’s image processing capabilities (officially known as “Process Version 2010”), and Lightroom 4 has taken this even further with the new Process Version 2012 and associated controls:

• Controls in the Basic Panel have been simplified (no more Fill Light or Brightness adjustments) (see screen shot below)
• Content aware Shadow and Highlight controls extract greater dynamic range from a single image
• Improvements to the operation of the Clarity and Chromatic Aberration controls
• Additional settings can be applied as Local Adjustments, including Noise Reduction, Temperature and Tint (White Balance), Shadows, Highlights and Moire (see screen shot below)
• Curve adjustments can now be applied per channel
• Soft proofing is now available in the Develop module (a separate headline feature)

The new controls may require some time to get used to but the results that can be achieved make this well worth the effort!

Book Module

Lightroom 4 adds the oft requested photo book creation feature via its new Book module:

• New Book module helps users create Blurb and PDF photo books directly within Lightroom
• Auto layout feature quickly creates initial book layouts using your preferred presets
• Easily adjust page and photo locations via drag and drop
• ~180 page layouts have been built-in for use in your creations
• A Favourites feature is available for easy access to your preferred page layouts
• Advanced layout, formatting and type features are included to give you the flexibility to customise your photo book’s appearance
• Easily add photo metadata (e.g. captions) to your pages
• Tight integration is provided to the Blurb book printing service allowing you to prepare, cost and upload your book directly within Lightroom

Initially the Book module will provide deep integration with the Blurb book printing service only, but I suspect this will expand over time just as Lightroom 3’s tethering feature started with a restricted set of camera makes and models and slowly expanded from there.

Personally I’m looking forward to spending more time with PDF photo book creation, to produce electronic photo books to share online with family and friends or view on my tablet.

JDI (“Just Do It”) UI Refinements

In addition to all of the major features added by the beta, there are a number of small refinements that help make the product more usable and deserve calling out. Some that I personally appreciate:

• Develop preset lists displayed by the Import dialog and Quick Develop panel are now hierarchical, making large sets of Develop presets (e.g. collections bought from third parties) much more usable.
• Metadata Status can now be used in Smart Collections and the Library module’s Filter bar. Very handy for those who don’t use the “Automatically save to XMP” preference but still want their Develop settings saved to their images once they have finished with a set of images.
• Additional options for restricting metadata Published or Exported with your images (e.g. “All except Camera & Camera Raw Info”). 

Lightroom Beta Learning Resources

To help get you started with the Lightroom 4 beta Adobe has provided a number of resources:

• Beta download site on Adobe Labs
• Forums for discussing the beta
• Official post announcing the beta and the features it offers. There is also a list of resources available regarding the beta, including a number of non-English resources for our international friends.
• Lightroom video channel on YouTube

Lightroom regulars have also been preparing learning resources so if you are looking for additional information I’d recommend checking out the following:

• Victoria Bampton’s Lightroom Queen site will have an exhaustive “What’s New” post and an updated keyboard shortcuts sheet.
• John Beardsworth has launched his new Lightroom Solutions site and will be covering the beta. I’m particularly looking forward to his thoughts on the new Book module.
• Laura Shoe will be covering the beta on her blog and has a knack for being able to explain product features and usage in an easy to understand fashion.
• Usual suspects Rob Sylvan (Lightroomers), Gene McCullagh (Lightroom Secrets), and Sean McCormack (Pixiq) will be providing What’s New posts and more content over the next few weeks.
• Andrew Rodney (Digital Dog) provides a  colour geek’s view of Lightroom’s new Softproofing feature
• If you prefer your beta information in video form then check out David Marx’s contributions at The Lightroom Lab and Terry White’s walkthru of the beta.

I’m sure lots more great content will be coming from these Lightroom legends over the coming weeks!

Hopefully this post has piqued your interest and you will try out the Lightroom 4 public beta. Have fun experimenting with the latest and greatest imaging tool from Adobe, and please let us know either in the comments or official forums about your personal experiences with the beta!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

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The free Craft & Vision ebook is an anthology of eleven articles written by authors publishing eBooks under the Craft & Vision banner. The theme is “things I wish I had learned sooner”, with each author contributing an article or two on topics they are passionate about and would have helped them progress quicker if they had been given this same advice earlier. 

In practical terms this means the content is targeted towards beginning to intermediate photographers who still have enough of the journey ahead of them to need this advice. While the eBook is a decent size (69 pages) and each article is complete in its own right, it can’t provide in-depth coverage of each topic as their simply isn’t the space to do so. What you do get is some sound advice and a great (and did I mention free?) opportunity to get to know the Craft & Vision authors, their passions and their writing styles. So if any topic discussed in the eBook grabs your attention and you want to know more, it is easier to make an informed decision about whether one of the author’s other eBooks would suit your learning style.

As with other Craft & Vision titles the eBook is available in PDF format and is designed to be read in landscape orientation. The layout is attractive and well chosen images drive home the points being made. I read my copy on a 10.1 inch Android tablet and found the text and images quite legible on that sized screen.

With an eBook containing eleven separate articles it would be tempting to produce a quite lengthy review of each and every item included in the eBook. Instead I’ll try to focus on the highlights then give you a sense of the remaining content.

My personal top three articles from the anthology were “Understanding the Stages” (Alexandre Buisse),  “Create Projects and Collaborate” (Andrew S. Gibson), and “Slow Down and Learn to See” (Stuart Sipahigil). They each tackled topics that help us understand the photographic journey itself, not just skills and techniques we need to pick up along the way.

“Understanding the Stages” was the article that resonated most with me. It describes the stages one goes through as a photographer, what most of us focus on at each stage (gear, technique, etc) and how much we are willing to share and accept advice/criticism at each stage. I’ve been grappling with these concepts recently when trying to understand my own position along the photographic skills continuum and I found the discussion helped advance my self-awareness. It has encouraged me to take a look at how and why I share my images and I expect to be making some changes soon (and sharing more) as a result.

“Create Projects and Collaborate” provides a different perspective on the same topic, understanding the photographic journey and how to progress along it, with an emphasis on collaboration. My day job (and geek tendencies) mean I’m more comfortable with the “maturity model” approach used by Alexandre, but others might find Andrew’s coverage of the topic suits their learning style better. Either way I’d suggest reading both to get a better understanding of that long journey we still have ahead of us, and help remind us that we shouldn’t expect to travel it alone!

“Slow Down and Learn to See” discusses conceptual versus perceptual seeing and the skills we need to develop to help us see the photographic opportunities that surround us every day. I sometimes find myself with “photographer’s block” – an inability to think of anything worth photographing – and tried one of the suggested exercises while sitting in a waiting room the other day. It was amazing the different perspective it gave me and the possible images I came up with in a fairly mundane setting. Admittedly I will find it difficult to put aside the suggested time to practice learning to see (young children and standing still are not concepts that fit well together) but I will definitely be trying these exercises again.

Most of the remaining articles contain solid advice for beginning to intermediate photographers, either as an introduction to a topic or a refresher regarding techniques we’ve seen previously but may forget to practice.  Some tackle technical issues (”Tame Your Digital Exposures”) but most cover various aspects of composing or strengthening the content of your images. Special mention goes to Piet Van den Eynde for “Forget Lens Stereotypes” which covers breaking the rules by using the “wrong lens” to capture a scene. I must admit I’ve been finding myself falling into the “must use a portrait lens for a better portrait” trap myself so it was a timely reminder.

Some of the articles were for more advanced practioners, namely Michael Frye’s “Learn to Direct the Eye”. and Eli Reinholdtsen’s “The Power of the Moment”.  “Learn to Direct the Eye” was an interesting read about how to direct the viewer’s eye within an image. Unfortunately it’s difficult to do justice to this topic in such a small space, but Michael obviously knows his subject and when I’m a little further along my photographic journey I will review his work on the topic. “The Power of the Moment” discusses Eli’s approach to Street Photography. I have immense respect for those practising Street Photography as I don’t feel confident enough in myself and my craft to take this on yet. My personal circumstances mean I’m unlikely to be able to slow down and dedicate the time required to do this justice for many years. Hopefully one day.

Out of all the articles there is only one I would classify as a teaser. Martin Bailey’s “The Power of the Print” is a short introduction to some of the concepts important when printing. It will be interesting to see his “The Passionate Printer” eBook when it is released early next year but I felt this article was too short to provide any useful advice about printing .

I enjoyed reading the complete eBook and found some timely insights, many useful refreshers and some glimpses of techniques I hope to use when I’ve made it a little further along my journey as a photographer. And the fact that it is free is just the icing on the cake! I’d recommend that any beginning to intermediate photographers download a copy to read. You are sure to pickup a tip or two and gain a better understanding of the photographic road ahead in the process.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

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New Plugins at the Photographer’s Toolbox

Since my last update two more of my plugins have been migrated across to the Photographer’s Toolbox and relaunched with updated names. They are TPG LR Backup, formerly known as Config Backup, and TPG Metadata Panels, formerly known as Metadata Panels . These naming changes mean existing users will need to manually remove the old version of the plugin when they first upgrade to the latest release of the rebranded plugin. Hopefully the new automatic upgrading feature users gain will make up for this inconvenience. 

In addition to the new automatic updating feature TPG LR Backup includes the following improvements:

• Ability to automatically run backup and compression tasks at Lightroom startup.
• Improved support for Lightroom 3 users, especially on the Mac OS/X platform
• Numerous UI improvements.
• Integrated help that displays at first run, can be accessed from dialogs, and also from Lightroom’s Help menu
• Improved robustness and checks for invalid configuration attempts.

and TPG Metadata Panels now includes:

• Added or improved tagsets to be task focussed and only display relevant metadata for that task.
• Lightroom version awareness so newer IPTC Extension fields are available to Lightroom 3 users, and version specific tagsets only display on compatible systems.
• Removal of SDK documentation tagsets that were useful only to developers. Lightroom 3 SDK documentation improvements have made these redundant.

Updated Plugin at the Photographer’s Toolbox

The TPG Elemental plugin has received a few updates, and since the last post here has received the following improvements:

• [Lightroom 3 only] Each photo is now automatically saved before opening in Photoshop Elements (PSE), removing this previously manual step.
• Now supports PSE 10, and the Mac App Store (MAS) variants of PSE 9 and 10.
• Updated Lightroom and PSE version awareness better detects PSE versions installed at default locations.
• Plug-In Manager and configuration dialogs now indicate compatibility and potential limitations of the selected PSE editor, and suggests actions to resolve these limitations. User is able to override these checks if desired.
• A new configuration setting allows control over the channel bit depth used for an image, and a dialog explains the implications of this setting when first used.
• Help is now available via Lightroom’s Help menu.
• Various error handling and robustness improvements.

If any of these updates sound relevant to you then please head over to the Photographer’s Toolbox and download a copy to try out now!  More features are currently under development so be sure to keep the automatic update feature active to receive new functionality as soon as it is available.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

My Recent Lightroom Plugin Activity over at the Photographer’s Toolbox

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Personally I used to find it daunting to sit down to edit a largish photo shoot. Confidence in your critical judgement and editing process is something that doesn’t come easy to everyone and as with most things it takes practice to develop. When you shoot irregularly it can be difficult to build up that experience and a repeatable process you can be confident in. That is why I found this post on Chase Jarvis’s blog so intriguing.

I’m a mere mortal. I don’t have to deal with 15000 photo shoots, and it is rare I have any larger than 500. And the post isn’t the first article or book I’ve seen discussing volume photo rating and culling. But it did resonate with me for a number of reasons:

• it requires multiple passes over a shoot. Initially this felt inefficient but I’m seeing the wisdom of it now. It really helps develop a sense of the whole shoot while cutting down on the temptation to double back and second guess myself I experience when trying to use a single pass approach. Multiple passes help you gain confidence you are making the right choices and can be quicker in the long run.
• each pass through the shoot indicates a speed it should be performed at, not just the type of photo you are trying to eliminate during the pass. It helps remind me to spend less time agonising over the photos that never had a chance of making it anyway.
• the way Scott presented the process made it feel real and achievable. Sometimes a clinically described process makes sense but you trip over the details when trying to implement it. No such issues encountered here.

Scott uses Aperture when describing his photo editing process but I found it quite easy to implement using Lightroom. Some suggestions for those interested in trying it out:

• you might already (like me) be using stars as a permanent rating system for your photos. This isn’t a problem – you can use both rating schemes together! Pick a label colour and keep it just for your bulk photo editing process and use this new star rating system with that colour label only. When you have finished editing the shoot change the label applied to the photos and reset the star ratings to align with your permanent rating system. I recommend using the purple label colour, as it is the only label without a keyboard shortcut so is a perfect choice for setting as your initial, unprocessed colour label via an import preset.
• you might be tempted to use pick flags (pick, unflagged, rejected) and the Refine Photos command instead of stars. While this could work I’d suggest only trying it after you are thoroughly versed with the process and confident you can edit a complete shoot in a single session. If nothing else it would be difficult to remember which pass you were working on when you next open this shoot, and thus what the pick flag signifies in this pass.
• create a set of Library module filter presets to help you step through the process by hiding photos eliminated by previous passes. You can download mine to use as a starting point and update the criteria to match your environment. Install them by opening your Lightroom presets (preferences) folder and extracting the zip file’s contents into the Filter Presets sub-folder. These new filter presets will be visible after the next Lightroom restart.
• while you are still familiarising yourself with the process why not repurpose the panel end marker as a reminder? I first saw this technique applied by John Beardsworth (here and here) and figured this bulk editing process would be a perfect candidate for its own panel end mark. You can download mine here. Install it by right clicking on the current panel end mark, select Panel End Marks –> Go to Panel End Marks Folder, and extracting the zip file’s contents into the folder. You can then activate the panel end mark by right clicking on the current one, and selecting Panel End Marks –> FlourishCJBulkRate.png.

Photo editing your own work is not only a practical necessity, it is also a great learning tool. It helps you better understand what works for you,  and just as importantly what doesn’t, so you can hone your photographic awareness and take better photos. Critically thinking about your own work isn’t easy but I found this post on Chase Jarvis’s blog helped make the whole process much more approachable. Hopefully you will find my suggestions for adapting the process to Lightroom helpful and like me you’ll be able to tackle that backlog of photos building up on your computer!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Photo Editing For Mere Mortals

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Those who do backup their systems might not be capturing everything they want to restore in the event of a failure.  Most Lightroom users who do backup would backup their photo files but not all will remember to backup their Lightroom catalogs, which contain all of the develop adjustments they have spent hours making while turning snapshots into masterpieces. Fewer still will remember to backup those templates and presets they have spent time collecting and creating, and the other program settings they have tweaked to their liking and help them efficiently execute their digital workflow.

The recent major update of my TPG LR Backup plugin (formerly Config Backup) can help make the backup of your catalog and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom configuration files painless, so you can work safe in the knowledge that your data is being safeguarded in case disaster strikes.

How I backup Lightroom

To backup my photos and Lightroom I use the following approach.  Your needs and environment may be a little different from mine so please treat this as a guide only and adjust the processes to suit your individual needs.

Pre-requisites

Before backing up Lightroom I use SyncBackSE to copy all image files to a separate system.  I’m not going to detail this aspect of my configuration because you can easily fill a book on this topic (and Peter Krogh already has – the highly recommended The DAM Book).  If you want to learn more about this I’d suggest starting with the Backup section of the dpBestflow.org site Peter contributed to. It not only explains the topic clearly (including videos) but also includes a number of example Backup System Configurations  to get you started.

Lightroom 2 and above includes a catalog backup feature.  I switch this on using the Edit –> Catalog Settings menu item and set it to backup my catalog weekly.  This ensures every time I start up (Lightroom 2) or shutdown (Lightroom 3) Lightroom checks whether it should create a new backup of the current catalog.

Plugin Configuration

Once I’ve enabled Lightroom catalog backups I then use features from my TPG LR Backup plugin to build upon this base level of protection. Installation instructions for the plugin are linked from the plugin’s home page so I won’t repeat them here. Please note the remainder of this post assumes you have registered the plugin to enable the automatic backup functionality.

Open the File –> Plug-In Extras –> Configure Automatic Backups menu item to show the following dialog:

The From folder needs to match the folder where you configured Lightroom to write its catalog backups.  The To folders indicate where you want the configuration and compressed catalog backups to be written. These can point to different locations but I prefer to write both types of backups to a single Lightroom backup folder.

TIP: If you use more than one Lightroom catalog consider using the Edit –> Catalog Settings menu item to configure all of your catalogs to write their backups to the same folder. This will allow the plugin to compress all of your catalog backups regardless of which catalog you have open when you start Lightroom.

I set the configuration to be backed up once per week, and the catalog backups (created by Lightroom’s inbuilt backup feature) to be compressed whenever they are found. The latter is particularly important because catalog backup files can be quite large and can quickly overrun your disk space. Compressing the backup files typically results in an ~90% size reduction so you can afford to keep more backups than you would otherwise.

It is recommended that your configuration and compressed catalog backups be stored on a separate hard drive from your Lightroom catalog and configuration files. Doing so will help increase your chances of recovering from a disaster. If your hard drive fails, backups will do you no good if both they and your Lightroom catalogs are stored on the failed drive.

Once you have configured your automatic backups press OK to save the settings, and it is best to restart Lightroom as soon as possible to test that everything works as expected. If this is the first time you have enabled automatic backups they will also run at next startup (regardless of the selected backup timing) to confirm you have configured your backups correctly.

Plugin Operation

If you are a Lightroom 3 user and have just setup catalog backups then you should see the following dialog when you exit Lightroom.  Make sure the backup folder matches the folder configured for your automatic backups then select the Backup button.  Lightroom will then take a few moments to copy your catalog and add it to the selected folder.

If you’ve used the settings suggested in the previous section then next time Lightroom starts you should see the following appear at the top of your Lightroom workspace. You may need to open the top panel of the Library module to see it.  This progress bar lets you know that TPG LR Backup plugin is executing your backups in the background while you continue working on your images.  Once this step has completed you will have a new zip file in your backup folder for each type of backup that was scheduled to run.

If you ever want to know when your last backup occurred just open up either of the plugin’s menu items and you will be able to see the most recent backup events at the bottom of the dialog.

Feedback

I hope this post has given you some ideas on how to setup your own Lightroom backups. Please let me know via the comments if there is anything other part of my backup regime you would like me to expand upon.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Quick and easy way to back up Lightroom

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Earlier this week Adobe announced to the world the existence of version 5.5 of its Creative Suite product line.  Until now Creative Suite has been released on a 24 month cycle and Adobe has only recently revised this strategy to include a significant mid cycle release.  This will help the product line keep abreast of the latest trends and emerging opportunities in between major releases. For CS 5.5 those three focus areas were:

• Create, deliver and monetize rich content and applications for virtually any screen. The suite now supports Mobile Development for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS using technologies such as Flash, AIR and HTML5. It also includes advances in Digital Publishing to produce rich interactive publications, especially for tablet devices. This is intended to complement the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
• Integrating tablets into creative workflows. Adobe released the Adobe Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to create tablets and phone based applications to interact with Photoshop. Adobe also announced three new iPad applications that demonstrate the creative possibilities of using tablets to drive common Photoshop workflows – Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop, Adobe Eazel for Photoshop and Adobe Nav for Photoshop.
• Adding powerful new video capabilities. The revised Production Premium suite delivers breakthrough performance, workflow improvements, creative innovations and powerful new audio editing capabilities.

This has resulted in changes worth of a version update being made to the following products:

• Adobe InDesign CS5.5
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5
• Adobe Photoshop CS5.1
• Adobe Acrobat X Pro^*
• Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5.5
• Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5^*
• Adobe Flash Builder Premium 4.5^*
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5
• Adobe After Effects CS5.5
• Adobe Audition CS5.5^*
• Adobe Device Central 5.5
• Adobe Media Encoder 5.5

* New product or significant product upgrade introduced by Creative Suite 5.5.

Demonstrations of some of these added or changed features can be found on Adobe TV.

Other applications in the Creative Suite may have received updates (for example, Adobe Photoshop) but these were not explicitly tied to the CS 5.5 release. These updates should also be made available to existing CS 5 customers through the standard Adobe Updates feature. And other products might not have received an update at all. Suites and individual products that are tied to the CS 5.5 release will be chargeable upgrades even for existing CS 5 users, though there are some exceptions.

Adobe also introduced a subscription plan as part of this mid-cycle release, something they have been trialling in Australia over the past year and are now rolling out to the rest of their user base.  To give an idea of how this works I’ve taken pricing information from the Australian Adobe Store and calculated the financial outlay required to keep current with the Master Collection suite, or the individual Photoshop Extended product, over an arbitrary 5 year period. These calculations assume the costs on the Adobe store stay relatively consistent over the period and the products of interest receive updates twice per cycle (i.e. both mid cycle and major version updates).

As can be seen below users that intend to stay current with the latest release can really benefit from subscription plans, particularly when they are using individual products rather than the whole suite. Please keep in mind that not every individual product will receive a significant mid-cycle release (more on that later) so depending on the product chosen the subscription versus outright purchase expenditure crossover point may be earlier than indicated below.

**All prices in Australian Dollars, from Adobe Store – Australia, as at 15 April 2011

*** Upgrading from the last released equivalent version. e.g. from Master Collection CS5 to Master Collection CS5.5

**** Subscriptions types refer to the length of commitment to the subscription. All subscriptions are charged monthly.

To further illustrate this point we’ll consider two scenarios to see how regular upgrades might play out in future.

Creative Suite 5.5 and the traditional photographer

The traditional photographer, and by that I mean a photographer who is solely interested in creating and publishing still images, may require only the Adobe Photoshop product from the Creative Suite. They would make limited use of other products included in the suite offerings so the individual product should prove sufficient for their purposes.

If they aren’t currently a Photoshop user, or are using an earlier version of Photoshop (e.g. CS4), then the tablet features, subscription plan or even the many headline features included in the previous CS5 release might be sufficient to encourage them to purchase or upgrade now   If they are already using Photoshop CS5 it is highly unlikely they will upgrade at this point in time.

The Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 version supplied with CS 5.5 is effectively the same as the upcoming 12.0.4 Photoshop version, except for the addition of the subscription plan facility. Both will support the new Adobe Photoshop Touch SDK and iPad applications being released in May.  Both will support the Camera Raw 6 plugin updates that will be made available through the remainder of the CS 5 release cycle. As such there is no real reason for an Adobe Photoshop CS5 user to upgrade to CS 5.5 unless they wish to do so as part of a cross-grade to one of the suite offerings.

This skews the version cost comparison chart above and dilutes the financial component of the business case for using a subscription plan on an individual product purchase.  It also demonstrates an ongoing challenge Adobe will have – managing the pressure to keep subscription plan users happy by releasing new major or mid-cycle versions of every product, every year.

Creative Suite 5.5 and the contemporary photographer

By contrast a contemporary photographer, and by that I mean a photographer who is interested not only in still images but video and/or publishing as well, is much more likely to be interested in purchasing one of the suite offerings instead of individual Adobe Creative Suite products.

A number of well known photographers such as Chase Jarvis and David duChemin have chosen to expand beyond the traditional photographer paradigm to build their brands and business. Whether they are writing books, producing mobile apps, self publishing ebooks, or using video to provide educational offerings, the contemporary photographer is finding it necessary to cross skill into design and/or video production areas they wouldn’t have thought necessary even 5 years ago.  This makes the Design Premium, Production Premium or even Master Collection suites more attractive as they only need to buy one box to get all of the tools they need to take on these opportunities.

While the Photoshop application itself did not receive a CS5.5 level update this time around, some products in each of the suites did and can be expected to be updated during every Creative Suite release. Design Premium received updates to Acrobat, InDesign, Dreamweaver and Flash products.  Production Premium received updates to Flash, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Audition products. These updates make significant improvements to the ability to target multiple output devices with published content, and the performance and results when processing video. These should make CS5.5 a worthy upgrade for anyone who spends significant time in these products even it they are already using CS5.

Should you subscribe or purchase outright?

So once you have decided to invest in Creative Suite should you subscribe or purchase outright?

On paper the financial cutover point where a subscription plan becomes more expensive than an outright purchase is typically between 3 and 4 years. Whether you are willing to invest up front and continually upgrade for that long to save money in the long term is a question only you can answer.

What that calculation ignores is subscriptions make access to the more sophisticated Creative Suite offerings approachable and justifiable for those who can’t afford the hefty outlay required to purchase a suite outright.

Those who work with Creative Suite for a living might find a subscription plan preferable for tax reasons, so you might want to check with your accountant before making your next upgrade. If nothing else we now have a valuation of the cost of maintaining our tools and this can be factored into our thinking when developing our standard price lists or quoting for the next assignment.

A more subjective reason for considering a subscription is it will remove the “do I upgrade or not” decision when the next major or mid-cycle release comes along. Instead of debating whether the features of the latest version provide sufficient value or whether you should skip an update, your ongoing subscription will entitle you to the  upgrade and in fact you should immediately upgrade to get maximum value from your investment.

While subscriptions for individual products look more attractive than those for suites at the outset, their value can be diluted by those skipped mid-cycle releases that we have seen during the release of CS5.5. The pricing of the subscription plans for the suites may have an earlier cutover point but you can pretty much guarantee that a number of products in the suite will be upgraded every year so they may prove a better deal in the long run.

Subscription plans look pretty tempting for those who are preparing to buy into the Creative Suite products now. If you already have made an investment in a previous version their business case begins to dilute because you already have the sunken cost of the original version and you would probably be better off paying for upgrades rather than a subscription. 

Regardless of whether you choose to take advantage of a subscription plan I think their introduction will ultimately benefit all users. They have encouraged the adoption of a mid-cycle release, removing some of the shackles that impacted Adobe’s time to market with new features in the past. This will help spur on competition in the market and that surely must be a good thing!

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, subscription plans and the contemporary photographer

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Refresher: Importing photos and video into Lightroom 3

We’ve previously discussed Lightroom 3’s revamped Import feature so we’ll be jumping straight to the facets most relevant for Android users.  If you are using Lightroom 2 the first part of the series describes how to import photos from your phone but you will need to upgrade to Lightroom 3 if you want to manage video in Lightroom as well.

A reminder before we begin.  If your Import dialog doesn’t look like the one shown below you will be using the compact version of the dialog, so please click the arrow button (depicted) in its bottom left hand corner to reveal the full dialog.

The first part of this series described three main approaches for importing content from your phone:

1. Synchronisation software (e.g. HTC Sync)
2. Mass Storage Device, accessed directly from Lightroom
3. Mass Storage Device, accessed via third party import application

When importing content directly into Lightroom (option 2) you need to select either the Copy or Move import type at the top of the dialog depending upon whether you wish to leave a copy of the files on your phone or not. Add is not advisable as Lightroom’s Develop module could only work with these files when the phone was physically attached to your computer.

Synchronisation (option 1) and third party import application (option 3) allow a little more flexibility because the content is already on the computer before Lightroom is asked to import it.  An Add import type is acceptable in this case if you would prefer the images to remain in their current location.

If you use a third party import application (option 3) to load the images and videos then chances are you have already setup the file naming and folder structure you prefer.  If not you may wish to use the File Renaming and Destination sections of the right hand Import dialog panel to adjust these details on the way into Lightroom.

Why some video won’t import into Lightroom

Lightroom’s Import dialog doesn’t always detect videos in the source.  In this example another video (MSD_20110106_0050.3gp) exists in the same directory but the dialog gives no indication any files are missing. An Adobe knowledge base article explains that only a few formats are supported:

• AVI
• MOV
• MP4

In practice this means that files using other file extensions will be ignored even if their content should technically be supported by Lightroom.  Videos with other types or file extensions will simply not appear in the grid for selection during import.

Shooting Lightroom compatible video

Knowing this limitation we can take steps to ensure our videos will be compatible with Lightroom 3.  On the HTC Desire this means opening the included Camcorder application,  using the menu to access the Settings tab (the gears icon in the bottom left corner of the screen) and verifying the Encoding Type is compatible with the MP4 file type.  While MPEG4 is the most capable of the encoding types shown here technically they all are suitable, and your choice can be guided by the encoding quality you require.  e.g. use MPEG4 if you wish to capture 720P video.  Unfortunately there is no matching option to change the video’s file extension so all videos are created as 3GP files not visible to Lightroom.

Preparing your video for Lightroom 3

Now that we know the video content is compatible with a Lightroom supported file format (MP4) we only need to perform one more step before Lightroom will let us import the files. 

In the first part of the series we mentioned that Samsung Galaxy S video is supported “out of the box” by Lightroom.  Using Phil Harvey’s versatile exiftool application we can get a better understanding of how these Lightroom acceptable videos are structured.  Executing the following command (split over two lines due to space restrictions) indicates a supported file is structured like this:

exiftool -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP -ext MP4 -s -FileType -MIMEType –MajorBrand
-MinorVersion -CompatibleBrands -CompressorID -AudioFormat .

======== ./SamsungGalaxySVideo.mp4
FileType                        : 3GP
MIMEType                        : video/3gpp
MajorBrand                      : 3GPP Media (.3GP) Release 4
MinorVersion                    : 0.3.0
CompatibleBrands                : 3gp4, 3gp6
CompressorID                    : avc1
AudioFormat                     : mp4a

Executing the same command on a HTC Desire video returns a rather similar looking result:

======== ./HTCDesireVideo.3gp
FileType                        : 3GP
MIMEType                        : video/3gpp
MajorBrand                      : 3GPP Media (.3GP) Release 4
MinorVersion                    : 0.3.0
CompatibleBrands                : 3gp4, mp41, 3gp6
CompressorID                    : mp4v
AudioFormat                     : samr

The video compressor and audio format are different across the two videos but fundamentally they both use the same 3GP format and brand (release).  The only significant difference is the filename extension.  To confirm this I manually renamed the 3GP video file from my earlier test to use the MP4 file extension and re-ran the import on the directory.  This time the video was detected, and upon importing all of the usual Lightroom 3 video features were available.

The reason this works is the 3GPP and MP4 file formats are related, as described on the MP4 Registration and Wikipedia sites. 3GPP is a part of the “MP4 family” and is structurally based upon MPEG4 so it is valid to rename a 3GP or 3GPP file to use the MP4 extension.  Some phones already take the step to store 3GP files as MP4 without user intervention. 

In the interests of simplifying my digital workflow I created a one line command script called Rename3GP.cmd to automate renaming my Android videos for me.  It uses exiftool to check all 3GP and 3GPP files in this or child directories, and rename the file extension if we are sure this is a suitable 3GP file.  The command (split over two lines due to space restrictions):

exiftool -P -r -m -overwrite_original_in_place -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP
"-FileName=%%d/%%f.mp4" -if "$MIMEType eq 'video/3gpp'" .

If you want to run this at the Windows command line or on a Mac instead you would modify this slightly by removing the extra percent (%) signs. 

exiftool -P -r -m -overwrite_original_in_place -ext 3GP -ext 3GPP
"-FileName=%d/%f.mp4" -if "$MIMEType eq 'video/3gpp'" .

Running this script or command prepares your Android’s video files for Lightroom and from here on in the import process is the same as for any other Lightroom supported file.

I hope you have found this series useful and please feel free to share your experiences with us in the comments section below.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Finding the best approach for importing photos and video from your Android phone into Lightroom (Part 2)

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