I’ve recently created a Snapshotter plugin for Lightroom 3 that allows you to bulk create Lightroom snapshots while within the Library module. Lightroom’s interface will only let you create snapshots from within the Develop module, one image at a time.  This is fine if you are using snapshots only for recording creative interpretations of an image but is too restrictive when considering other uses for snapshots such as:

• Creating snapshots to identify the exact develop settings used when printing, exporting or publishing a group of images (e.g. creating a FlickrUpload-20100610 snapshot for all images uploaded to Flickr on that date)
• Converting virtual copies back to snapshots so all interpretations of the master image are stored in a way accessible from Photoshop.

Personally I create virtual copies (VCs) to experiment with different image develop settings and then compare the results side by side.  Once I’ve chosen the best I’ll create snapshots for each of the VCs worth keeping, then delete the VCs, because all of those snapshots are actually stored against the master image so will not be deleted.  This is also a great approach for dealing with multiple crop sizes for the same image.  My family have three different sized digital photo frames in use and converting VCs to snapshots is a great way to ensure this doesn’t clog my catalog with more thumbnails than truly necessary.

The Snapshotter plugin assists the snapshot creation process by adding a new Create Snapshot(s) from Images menu item to the File –> Plug-in Extras menu.  Selecting this opens a dialog allowing configuration of the snapshot name to be used, and the option to restrict snapshot creation to virtual copies only, when creating snapshots for all selected photos.  The snapshot naming function currently supports one substitution variable:

{CopyName}    Virtual Copy name

that will be replaced with the relevant metadata from each image.  Information about how this and the other elements of the dialog operate are described in the online help accessible using the button labelled with a question mark (?).

Please leave a comment below to let us know how you use Lightroom’s snapshot feature, and how the Snapshotter plugin helps this or could be improved to help it more.

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

The Easy Way to Create Snapshots in Lightroom 3

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 (LR3) is finally out of beta!

The Lightroom team’s official blog announced earlier this week that Lightroom 3 is Now Available.  They also shared a list of Lightroom 3 Resources to get people started with the release and the Lightroom 3 Help is also available online including the downloadable PDF version for offline use.

To discover what the new release has to offer I’d suggest checking out:

• Ian’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 Feature Review over at the Computer Darkroom
• What’s new in Lightroom 3 from Victoria Bampton

Needless to say I found the release compelling enough to have already upgraded from Lightroom 2!

Victoria will also be releasing her Adobe Lightroom 3 – The Missing FAQ book and eBook soon so its worthwhile keeping an eye out for that.  Some excerpts from the book are available on her site now.

A few others have shared Lightroom 3 resource lists as well:

• Lightroomblog’s resource list
• Heninger’s The Mother of all Lightroom Tuesdays!

There are others but most include limited content beyond that mentioned in these lists.

Lightroom 3 Educational Resources

A number of the Lightroom educators have been working overtime to prepare material to coincide with the product launch: 

• Lightroom Blog
• The Lightroom Lab
• Lightroom 3 Learning Center from the CameraDojo

Of course there is plenty of (semi) official content available as well:

• NAPP’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Learning Centre
• Julianne Kost over at AdobeTV

Lightroom 3 Plugins

The new Lightroom release has also attracted the attention of the plugin development community:

• Jeffrey Friedl, the king of Lightroom plugin development, has shared the status of his plugin development activities in his Lightroom 3 Plug-in Information post.  This includes details of his new Flickr Publish Service.
• I’ve release Snapshotter plugin – my first Lightroom 3 specific plugin
• The Lightroom 3 SDK is now publicly available to developers.

The SDK has added many new capabilities that will keep developers busy for months to come.  More on that in a later post.

Getting Lightroom 3

If you are interested in giving the product a try a fully functional 30 day trial is available for download here.  Some tips if you want to continue to use the product after the trial period is over:

• If you qualify for the educational version of Lightroom 3 there are significant savings to be had – as much as 80% off the full price
• Non-US residents should compare prices with other online stores before purchasing at the Adobe online store.  Some regions have been reporting that Adobe’s online store pricing is inflated compared to that readily available elsewhere.  Australia used to be one of those locations but a quick check confirmed the Adobe store pricing is on par with or slightly cheaper than that available elsewhere online.
• If you have a decent broadband connection and don’t need the physical packaging consider using Adobe’s download delivery method to save a little extra off the asking price.  If you used the trial version mentioned above you don’t even need to redownload the software.  The registration key will convert it from a trial to full version.
• Support the Lightroom community!  If you make use of Lightroom blogs, vodcasts, podcasts or plugins then please consider purchasing via their affiliates.  The net cost to you might only be a few extra minutes during the purchase process but it will help support those that produce the content you value!  I have included my links below but if these aren’t suitable consider heading over to the Lightroom Blog, The Lightroom Lab or CameraDojo and supporting them instead.

I hope you found these resources useful and enjoy using the latest release of Lightroom as much as I do!

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

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 has been Released!

Related Posts:

• The Easy Way to Create Snapshots in Lightroom 3 (0)
• Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom (7)
• Import Improvements in the Lightroom 3 Beta (6)

It immediately shows the impact of code changes as you make them.  This might not sound like a big deal at first, but when hunting tenacious bugs the repeated interruption of reloading a plugin and restarting its test scenario is disruptive.  You can now test code by making a change in your favourite text editor, saving the file, and hitting the Run button.  Contrast that with the additional steps of opening the Plugin Manager, reloading your plugin, closing the Plugin Manager, and invoking the plugin to start the test again and you will get a sense of how much simpler your coding sessions can become.

The Test Harness provides a framework for managing and running individual LUA scripts.  This makes it possible to write small, single purpose scripts to focus in on a new feature you are experimenting with or a bug you are trying to squash.  Without the Test Harness you either need to experiment directly within the plugin under development, trying not to get distracted by or trip over code extraneous to the task at hand, or write your own test plugin to host the code  Either way you end up losing time that would be better spent adding features to your latest masterpiece.

Need help with a particularly thorny coding issue?  One click and the Test Harness will turn your script into a plugin you can zip up and post to one of the online communities for developers.  This makes it easier to give Lightroom SDK forum members, Lightroom Forums Plugin Discussion members, or even Adobe’s supporter staff a simple and self-contained demonstration of the issue you are working on.  When asking someone to lend you a hand make it easy for them to give you what you want.

Those are just some of the reasons I invested the time to write the Test Harness plugin.  It has already paid me back for the development time I’ve put into it, and with a new version of Lightroom (and an updated SDK) just around the corner I’m confident it will end up paying for itself many times over.  I’m sharing it with other Lightroom developers in the hope it will help you spend less time fighting bugs and more time extending the functionality of a great product!

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

Spend More Time Writing and Less Time Debugging Lightroom Plugins

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The Lightroom 3 beta is taking a step in the right direction with its new Publish Services.  The included Flickr plugin will synchronise ratings and comments back to your catalog but only time will tell if this capability will support retrieval of individual client selections from Publish Services.  In the meantime Lightroom 2 users can make use of web galleries to achieve a similar outcome.

Matt at The Turning Gate has developed a number of web galleries, including TTG Client Response Gallery, TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, that can help Lightroom publish self-contained web sites that automatically email a client’s selects.  Articles and tutorials regarding web gallery usage are available on Matt’s site so I won’t repeat that information here.  These galleries cover part of the workflow gap – allowing clients to inform you of selects – and my TTG Client script addresses the remainder by converting the response emails into Smart Collections ready for import into Lightroom.

New TTG Client Script features

I first published this script as part of my Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2 post last year.  This revision provides the following functionality improvements over the original version.  Usage of the script remains unchanged and is described on the TTG Client script homepage.

Support for TTG Highslide Galleries

Over the past year Matt has released new Highslide galleries that can email client selects to the photographer.  The TTG Client script now supports client select emails from these galleries.

Workaround for Lightroom 2 (LR2) bug when hyphens (-) are used in filenames

LR2 has a minor bug that means it quietly renames files to replace hyphens (-) with underscores (_) when producing web galleries.  While the gallery itself will work fine it makes it difficult to match the client selects back to the original file names in your Lightroom catalog.  The Turning Gate recommends file naming conventions to avoid this issue but this could require renaming of files imported before you started using these galleries.  This new release of TTG Client script allows you to continue with your current file naming scheme and instead treats every underscore as a search wild card so the Smart Collections can locate the selects.

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

Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom

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A little over a week ago Tom Hogarty – Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – announced the Lightroom 3 public beta (download here).  Its been more than a year since the last version of Lightroom was released so I was keen to see what improvements had been m2de to my favourite photography program.  So keen in fact that I didn’t wait till I got home from my holidays and started using it immediately to import and organise photos taken on the trip!

For those of you new to Lightroom the Import feature is how you load photos into your catalog so the program can find and work with them.  The Import feature has obviously received a lot of attention from the Lightroom team this time around.  There are three major changes that have been made, and a number of usability improvements.  Major changes:

1. “Import from Disk” and “Import from Device” dialogs have been merged into a single Import dialog
2. UI has been completely overhauled aesthetically
3. UI now has Compact and Expanded modes that give you control over all aspects of the import task on a single screen

There have also been a number of usability improvements including:

• Import presets have been added to store and access your common import settings
• Expanded mode has added Grid and Loupe views for selecting photos to import
• Import’s backup will now store files using your renamed rather than camera created file names
• If you shoot using your camera’s RAW + JPEG  mode, both photos are now imported even though the RAW (or DNG) will be the only photo to show in the Library
• New “Shoot Name” field available for file renaming templates
• Additional folder naming presets

This is a beta so don’t expect perfection just yet.  The dialog can get a little sluggish under certain circumstances and I’ve logged a bug report about one specific case (Copy as DNG when source and destination are on the same drive) that can stall the import entirely.  But all in all I found it was reliable enough for my import workflow and I’m liking the new UI more and more every day. 

One of the great things about this being a beta is it will only get better over time.  I’m personally crossing my finders and hoping these three usability improvements make it into the final release:

1. Extending folder renaming to use a template-based mechanism similar to to file renaming, including access to the new “Shoot Name” field
2. Backups to be stored using the same folder structure, not just file names, as the imported files
3. Allow resizing of the dialog and the side bars within it.

I will get to the other new and improved Lightroom 3 beta features over time but wanted to share my observations after working with one of the first features most users will be encounter.  If there are any other features you are keen to hear about now  Tom has posted links to other beta related articles and resources.  And if you plan to test LR3 yourself then I’d recommend reviewing Victoria Bampton’s LR3 Beta – Popular Bugs and Forum Threads post to find out its most frequently noted limitations.

Detailed Look at Import UI

Compact Import dialog

When you first try to Import Lightroom defaults to the Compact dialog and launches over the dimmed main UI. 

Key elements of the Compact dialog:

• Source: In addition to displaying the currently selected source, clicking it allows you to change the source and access and manage the Recent Paths list.
• Import Type: Select between Copy as DNG, Copy, Move and Add import types.  All types other than Add allow renaming of files and folders during import.  Copy as DNG converts RAW files to Adobe’s DNG file format during import, but leaves the image’s backup copy (if enabled) in the original file format.
• Destination: In addition to displaying the destination folder, clicking it allows you to change the destination and access and manage the Recent Paths list.  The Folder settings provided below will be used to create folders within this location.
• Mode: Switch between the “Quick Settings” (default depicted here) and “Summary” modes (displays a summary of all Import settings in the Import Settings area) using these buttons.   The “Summary” mode is depicted in the screenshot below.
• Import Settings: Select a Metadata preset and Keywords to be applied to all imported files.  When required by the file naming scheme, “Shoot Name” and other fields also display in this area.
• Folder: Choose between “By original folders”, “By date” and “Into one folder” folder naming schemes.  “By date” allows you to choose between 13 predefined folder naming templates.  All options also allow a subfolder to be included within this folder naming scheme.
• Source Status: Upon selecting a source Lightroom immediately scans the folder (and subfolders, if configured) for images and displays the status of that scan in this area.  The arrow here toggles between the Compact and Expanded dialogs.
• Presets: Displays the active Import preset, and allows you to choose or create presets using the arrow to the right.  Presets store most detailed settings that can be configured in the Compact and Expanded dialogs.
• Buttons: Initiate or cancel the import.

If you are familiar with Lightroom 2 you will have noticed that the file renaming, Develop Presets and Preview size features are not available via the Compact dialog.  To configure these you must use the Expanded dialog, though once set you can always create a new Import preset that captures these details and can be chosen from the Compact dialog.

Additional screenshots of the Compact dialog’s “Quick Setting” and “Summary” modes (respectively) can be found below.

Expanded Import dialog

Clicking the arrow button at the bottom left corner of the Compact dialog opens the Expanded dialog.  The description below refers only to elements that differ from the Compact dialog.  

Key elements of the Expanded dialog:

• Source panel: In addition to the source section available in the Compact dialog, you also have access to detailed device and folder information via the left hand side of the Expanded dialog.  Devices and Drives are listed separately.  Drives allow you to drill down through the folder hierarchy, while Devices do not give you this option.
• Display area: Displays either thumbnails or a single photo depending upon whether Grid or Loupe view has been selected (respectively).  Import status for a photo can be changed using its checkbox, right clicking on it the change the Import Photo state, or using the P (Pick) or U (Unpick) keys to modify the currently selected photo.  At this point in time there is no way to change the import status for multiple (but not all) photos at once, so arrow keys and the keyboard shortcuts are the quickest way to work around this limitation.
• Toolbar: Controls the display area view, sort order, and allows bulk modification of import state.  Thumbnail size is also configured here but is not depicted as it was not visible on my netbook’s small screen.
• Import settings: Fine grained import settings are managed to the right hand side of the Expanded dialog.  These are controlled through four panels, only two of which are available in the Add import type:
  • File Handling: Sets the preview size, whether duplicates will be imported, and whether a second (aka backup) copy of the files is created during import.  The second copy option copies the original files directly into the nominated directory using the naming scheme assigned in the “File Renaming” panel.  This option is disabled when using the Add import type.
  • File Renaming*: Sets whether files will be renamed and which (if any) template will be used to configure that process.  Renaming uses the same custom and EXIF field formatting approach available in Lightroom 2, with the addition of the “Shoot Name” field mentioned earlier.  If included in the file naming template you will be able to specify the values of the “Custom Text”, “Shoot Name” and/or “Starting Number” fields here.
  • Apply During Import: Sets the Develop preset, Metadata preset and multiple Keywords that will be add to your files.
  • Destination*: Provides the same folder creation options available in the Compact dialog.  In addition you can browse the destination folder structure to locate and set the import destination.

* Not available for Add import type

All four import types (Add, Copy, Copy as DNG and Move, respectively) are depicted below, including at least one example of each of the Import settings panels.

I hope you’ve found this trip through the improved Import UI useful, and good luck with your Lightroom beta testing!

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

Import Improvements in the Lightroom 3 Beta

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A recent tweet pointed me to the latest in a series of great Digital Photography School tutorials on photographing babies.  They cover the full gamut from preparing for the arrival, to maternity shots of the expectant mum, the birth itself, then the ongoing opportunities presented as the little one grows up.  Reading though them proved to be just the refresher I needed to prepare myself and remind me of the possibilities.  Below are brief introductions to each of the articles to help you decide which ones you might be interested in.

Personally I found the posts from Darren Rowse (the editor of Digital Photography School), Natalie Norton and Candace Lindemann most useful.  I enjoyed their differing perspectives and amateurs and professionals alike should find these enlightening.

Preparing for a Baby Photographically

Darren Rowse talks briefly about mentally preparing for your baby’s arrival, and capturing images of clothing and other accessories prior to your baby’s arrival.

Tummy Time – 7 Tips for Taking Great Maternity Shots

Natalie Norton’s tips on taking maternity shots of the expectant mother.  Includes some great examples of her work.

5 Keys to Taking Beautiful Maternity Portraits

Annie Tao’s also provides tips on photographing the expectant mother.  While there is overlap with the advice from Natalie it is still useful in its own right..

Photographing Birth Scenes

Darren Rowse talks about the practicalities of taking photos during the birth and the post-processing they may require.  Not a topic I have seen discussed elsewhere.

3 Quick Newborn Photography Tips

Loraine McCall provides advice on how to prepare for photographing newborns, including posing and the practicalities of dealing with babies.  While geared towards professionals it provides a few tidbits for amateurs as well.

Baby Time: Photographing Babies Without Losing your Mind

Natalie Horton’s tips on photographing a newborn.  Her advice is applicable to amateurs and professionals alike and include some tips (bring a hat!) that I haven’t seen before and are great suggestions for common issues.

Baby Photography 101

Chas Elliott’s post is geared towards professional photographers but has some interesting tips on timing and use of props that amateurs will find helpful as well.  He previously posted an article on taking photos of expectant mums which I haven’t included in this list because it was for professionals only.

10 Tips for Photographing Babies

Darren Rowse shares tips from his experience as a new dad.  The practical experience is evident and this is a great read for anyone who will be spending a lot of time around a newborn.

5 Tips for Gorgeous Infant Photographs

Christina Dickson’s tips are a quick summary of the fundamentals to keep in mind when photographing babies.

More Baby Photography Tips

Candace Lindemann shares a great article using her experience as a photographer mum.  She discusses working with older babies and channeling that boundless energy they seem to have!

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

Refresher on Photographing Babies and their Journey into the World

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Unless you are a full time photographer the answer is likely no.  I’m an amateur photographer and find that Photoshop’s cutdown version – Photoshop Elements – meets all of my needs and there is no compelling reason to move to the full version.  But there is one compelling reason to choose Photoshop Elements over Photoshop.  The price.

Its large enough in the US, but internationally the price difference between Photoshop Elements and Photoshop is remarkable. At the Adobe Store Photoshop CS4 costs* $699 USD or $1415 AUD ($1180 USD) and Photoshop CS4 Extended $999 USD or $2019 AUD ($1690 USD). Photoshop Elements costs $99.99 USD or $165 AUD ($140 USD).  This means Photoshop Elements costs Australian consumers a little more than 1/10th of the price of the most basic Photoshop CS4 version. Its no wondering the Photoshop Elements community is growing so quickly outside of the US!

Photoshop vs Photoshop Elements

A recent post at Lightroom Secrets compared the features of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements to help users understand the incremental benefit of buying the full version.  The essence of that comparison (and my own research) is Photoshop provides:

• Customisation – Photoshop allows customisation of the UI via keyboard shortcuts, menus, workspaces, presets, actions, and (official) support for scripting
• Enhanced 16-bit – Additional Photoshop fliters supports 16-bit images
• Enhanced Colour – Photoshop supports CMYK and Lab colour modes, and custom curves
• Enhanced Layers – Photoshop includes layer masks, additional adjustment layers, and full support for smart objects
• Enhanced Selection – Photoshop includes paths, pen tools and quick masks
• Additional Tools – Photoshop includes additional features such as HDR and content aware scaling
• Enhanced Tools – Photoshop includes more advanced versions of some tools such as Camera Raw and Camera Distortion

The importance of many of these features diminishes when you are using Lightroom as your primary editor and only dipping into Photoshop every now and then.  Other features (e.g. Content Aware Scaling) would be nice to have, but as an amateur photographer I don’t think they are worth the additional $1250 AUD I’d have to spend to “upsize” from Photoshop Elements 7 to Photoshop CS4.

Bottom line?  Most photographers using Lightroom won’t miss the features they lose by choosing Photoshop Elements over Photoshop.  But the money they save could go a long way towards a new lens or flash that could make a significant difference to their photography.

Improved Photoshop Elements Integration With Lightroom

Another benefit of Photoshop is the level of integration it enjoys with Lightroom.  Photoshop Elements is added as an external editor, while Photoshop has a number of menu items dedicated to improving workflow when it is combined with Lightroom.  To close this functionality gap I’ve created an Elemental plugin for Lightroom which provides Photoshop Elements users roughly the same level of integration Photoshop users get "out of the box".

The Elemental plugin adds 5 new menu items to the File –> Plug-in Extras and Library –> Plug-In Extras menus, emulating the integration available to Photoshop users.  This includes letting the user select photos and launch them directly into the Photomerge dialog, or open them as Smart Objects (a feature Adobe doesn’t advertise as available in Photoshop Elements).  It even adds some new options for good measure, namely Remove Lens Distortion and the ability to directly Open in PSE.  And it does this all while avoiding the Camera Raw dialog which should be redundant as Lightroom’s Develop module contains a superset of the options available in PSE’s version of Camera Raw.  The only feature that can’t be reproduced is Merge to HDR in Photoshop because Photoshop Elements does not include this feature.  As many Photoshop users utilise an external HDR tool rather than the one supplied with Photoshop this hopefully won’t prove too much of an issue.

Where Do I Sign?

If you are ready to take the plunge and add Photoshop Elements to your workflow, Adobe sells the products online and may have specials running so please try the Special Offers page before using one of the direct purchase links has a number of specials running at any given time that can (North America only) specials running till August 10.  Links are included below for your convenience and by purchasing through these you will be helping support the ongoing development of my Elemental plugin.

Find all current special offers on Adobe products.
Photoshop Elements 7. Extraordinary photos. Amazing stories.
Photoshop Elements 7 + Premiere Elements 7 – Complete photo and video editing made easy.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macs

UK readers can use the following links to support my plugin development while purchasing the products but unfortunately no discounts or coupons are currently available: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 & Adobe Premiere Elements 7 – Full, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 – Full and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh – Full.

If you aren’t quite convinced why not download a trial copy of either the Windows or Mac version and find out firsthand whether it suits your workflow?  I’m sure you’ll find, like me, that Photoshop Elements covers all of your main “pixel pushing” requirements without doing too much damage to your bank account!

* Note: All prices were converted using Google’s current exchange rates on August 3, 2009.

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

Why Lightroom Users Should Seriously Consider Adding Photoshop Elements To Their Workflow

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Update: Newer version(s) of this plugin are now available. 
Please visit the Elemental plugin page to download the latest version.

Lightroom’s non-destructive editing capabilities support most of my digital photography workflow needs.  I rarely need to resort to external tools to edit my photos, but rarely is not quite the same as never.  There will always be some situations where Lightroom needs a little help.  For me stitching together panoramas, correcting lens distortion and correcting perspective issues are the main culprits.

Before Lightroom I was a Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6 user.  I had been hoping to completely migrate away from it and remove it from my system, but I still keep it around as an external editor to pair with Lightroom.  I’d love to be able to splash out and use Photoshop instead but as I’m only a hobbyist I simply can’t afford it.  An upsell version (from PSE) of Photoshop CS4 would cost me over $1200 AUD at the Adobe store.  That’s a lot of money for a piece of software I would rarely need to use, especially when my couple year old version of PSE does everything I really need at a fraction of the price.  My photography would benefit more from me investing that cash in a brand new Nikon DSLR camera body, lens or flash than a software upgrade.

One of the things I’m missing by not using Photoshop is tighter integration between my external editor and Lightroom itself.  The Lightroom Photo->Edit In menu contains a number of entries (see above) that allow you to work with files in Photoshop CS3 (or later), launching directly into the desired feature without having to render those files first.  This would not only speed up my editing process but also reduce the need to waste CPU cycles rendering files that will only be discarded later anyway.  With Photoshop Elements my only option is to use the standard external editor feature which doesn’t allow me to launch directly into the PSE feature I’m planning to use.

My new Elemental plugin resolves these issues.  It adds 5 new menu items to the File –> Plug-in Extras and Library –> Plug-In Extras menus, emulating the integration available to users of the full Photoshop product.  This includes letting the user select photos and launch them directly into the Photomerge dialog, or open them as Smart Objects (a feature Adobe doesn’t advertise is available in PSE).  It even adds some new options for good measure, namely Remove Lens Distortion and the ability to directly Open in PSE.  And it does this all while avoiding the Camera Raw dialog which should be redundant given your Develop module edits in Lightroom.  The only feature I couldn’t reproduce was Merge to HDR in Photoshop because PSE does not have a matching feature.  By all reports the HDR generated by Photoshop was of limited usefulness so I doubt many would miss it anyway.

Usage

When you first try to use one of these menu options the plugin will attempt to locate your installation of Photoshop Elements.  If you have used the default install location the plugin shouldn’t require any configuration.  If it can’t find PSE then it will open a dialog asking you to locate the PSE editor before you continue.

There are also a few other dialogs you may see during regular operation.

First is a reminder to save your files before opening in PSE.  Saving your metadata (Ctrl + S, or Cmd + S) writes the Lightroom edits to the photo or XMP sidecar making them available to other applications.  If you don’t save your files first PSE will show the initial, unedited image which is unlikely to be what you intended.  Once you’ve gotten into the habit of saving before opening you can configure the warning to not show again.

Next is a warning that displays if one of the selected photos is a virtual copy.  Virtual copies do not have a dedicated, matching image file so you can’t save the metadata to the file or sidecar and they can’t be opened in PSE.  For virtual copies you will be given the option of opening the master file instead, or ignoring the virtual copies entirely.  Once again the dialog can be set to not show again if you have a preferred option you will always use whenever virtual copies are selected.

The last dialog is one you will only see if you use the plugin for more than 3 weeks and it will only show once.  Its a “buy me a beer” donation request.  I’ve put a fair amount of work into this plugin (including learning a new programming language) to make Photoshop Elements do things its not supposed to be able to do, and to work not only on Windows but also the Mac platform.  I’m hoping you will find my plugin useful enough that you would consider saying thanks in a liquid fashion.  If you are extra keen you don’t even have to wait for the 3 week reminder.  You can donate (and update the configuration) at any time by opening the Elemental entry in File –> Plugin Manager dialog.

I hope you find this plugin useful and as always please leave comments below if you have any feedback you would like to offer.  I’d also like to send out a big thank you to Mark over at Rusticolus Images who quite patiently tested the plugin on OSX and helped me iron out a number of rather large kinks on that platform!

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

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1. Customisable Configuration Backups – Allows you to customise and manually trigger the backup and compression processes
2. 1-Click Configuration Backup – Immediately backs up the Lightroom configuration files and Catalog backups using your previously configured settings, and optionally displays the results of the backup process.

Due to the vagaries of my own personal experience, namely recent Blue Screens Of Death that corrupted my Lightroom preferences file, I focused on backing up that file and forgot to include presets, plugins and other important pieces of the Lightroom configuration information.  The latest release will now backup all of these and more.

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

Config Backup Plugin Updated… To Backup More Configuration Settings (Version 20090606.002)

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Accelerator Usage

If you look closely at the screenshot above you will notice an underlined character in each menu item.  Specifically the s character in Plug-in Extras, the B character in Customisable Configuration Backups, and the 1 character in 1-Click Configuration Backup.  These are known as accelerators and are a standard Windows feature to allow the use of your keyboard to navigate menus.  For Mac users I’ve been receiving mixed messages as to whether this feature can be directly applied on your platform.  An alternate approach compatible with your operating system is listed at the end of the post.

To use the accelerators provided above you would press:

1. Alt + F to open the File menu
2. S to open the Plug-in Extras sub menu
3. 1 to execute the 1-Click Configuration Backup

And so on. This might seem convoluted but your average keyboard shortcut junkie can slam those keypresses into the machine pretty quickly  If the menu item is something you need to call pretty regularly (say a Photomatix HDR menu item) this time can start to add up.

Setting Up Accelerators

Adding the accelerators to Lightroom takes advantage of Lightroom’s existing localisation capabilities. 

1) Locate your resources directory

You will need to create or update your TranslatedStrings.txt configuration file.  This is found in the resources directory found at the following location:

<Program Installation Directory>\Resources\<language code>

For example on my English localised Windows XP system this translates to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2\Resources\en

Other language codes are fr and de for French and German respectively.

2) Create or update your TranslatedStrings.txt file

If you are using the English version of Lightroom your resources directory is unlikely to contain a TranslatedStrings.txt file.  In this case you can simply copy this file into the directory. 

If your directory does contain a TranslatedStrings.txt file:

1. Open TranslatedStrings.txt in a text file editor
2. Search for the string “AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras”
3. If the string does exist, add an ampersand (&) into the text following the equals (=) sign.  This should be placed immediately before the character you want to be the accelerator.  e.g.
   "$$$/AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras=Plug-in Extras" would become "$$$/AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras=Plug-in Extra&s" to make s the accelerator character
4. If the string does not exist, add the following line to the file:
   "$$$/AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras=Plug-in Extra&s" 

French and German speakers should translate the value after the equals (=) sign so it makes sense to you. Just be sure to include an ampersand (&) to mark the character to become the accelerator key.

3) Accelerator enable the plugin

Plugin developers can accelerator enable their menu items using code similar to the following in their Info.lua file:

LrExportMenuItems = {
    {
        title = "Customisable Configuration &Backups",
        file = "ManageBackup.lua",
    },

Please note the only difference between this and your average menu item definition is the single ampersand character. 

If you are trying to accelerator enable a third party plugin things get a little trickier.  If the plugin is open sourced you can directly modify the Info.lua file in the manner mentioned above.  Reload the plugin after the change and the accelerator will be enabled.  If the plugin is compiled you can’t modify the file directly.  If the plugin is localised (i.e. you will see $$$ strings in the Info.lua file after opening it in a text editor) then you can add a new line to the TranslatedStrings.txt file to override that value and add the accelerator.  Unfortunately the Photomatix Pro plugin is not localised otherwise I would add that as an example here.

Mac OS X Alternative

Mac OS X includes a facility to create keyboard shortcuts for any menu item in any program.  Details are available here.  Once you enable the keyboard shortcut capabilities you can try using Ctrl-F2 (Focus on Menu Bar), arrow keys and the accelerator keys above to access your plugin menu items. 

If you still can’t take advantage of the accelerators then consider adding a shortcut directly to the feature in question. 

1. As mentioned in the article above you control these settings in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts. 
2. Once there press the "+" button to add a new keyboard shortcut. 
3. Choose which application it applies to (Lightroom) then enter the exact name of the menu item. 
4. Enter the keyboard shortcut you want to use and you should now have direct keyboard access to the menu item!

Closing Remarks

I hope you find this useful and please leave a comment if you wish to share your experiences.  I’m particularly interested to hear if any Mac users can access the accelerators via the Ctrl-F2 key combination, and if any other developers choose to accelerator enable their plugins.

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

Accelerate Access to Lightroom Plugin Extras

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