Lightroomers!

I was sad to learn that George Jardine is leaving Adobe, but I am very grateful for what he has left behind.

I’ve been hooked on George Jardine’s Lightroom Podcasts from the start. I know I’ve mentioned them everywhere. His 53 podcasts span the arc of Lightroom 1 and include insightful interviews and conversations with incredibly talented photographers and many of the great minds behind Lightroom itself. If you really want to understand the thinking that went into Lightroom’s development you’ll find it in these podcasts. Peppered among the conversations are a collection of some of the best Lightroom tutorials I have encountered. Podcast #45 on the Lightroom Catalog should be required viewing for all Lightroom users. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve directed to that tutorial alone!

I don’t know what will happen to his collection of podcasts in the near future, so I strongly urge everyone to download them now, while you still can. The easiest way to do that is to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, but you can also download them from his iDisk (but don’t wait!).

So, thanks George, and best wishes for continued success where ever life takes you next!

I came across an interesting alternative for sharing slideshows exported from Lightroom called slideshare. I blogged about it over at peachpit.com, but I couldn’t embed the slideshow in their blogging software, so I put it here to demo:

| View | Upload your own

I’ve seen a couple of folks report this problem lately, so I thought I’d put out a general warning against performing this operation in Lightroom 1+. Here’s the scenario … You imported some JPGs. You brought them into Develop and made some adjustments. So far so good. You then think, “I don’t just want these changes to exist in Lightroom, and I don’t want to create duplicates by exporting copies, so I’ll export these right back to the source folder and overwrite the originals.” This is the bad part. You click the Export button on the export dialog and see this:

[click to view larger]

So, since you intended to overwrite the originals you are thinking, “Great, just what I wanted”, so you click Overwrite. The next thing you see is a popup that says “An error occurred while exporting”:

Uh oh. You weren’t expecting that, so you click Show in Library and Lightroom shows you a special collection of “Error Images” which contains all the photos you just exported and they are all sporting new question mark icons. Now you are really concerned so you open a file browser and check the actual folder and find all the photos are gone.  Yep, gone as in deleted.

If you are used to working in a pixel-editor like Photoshop it is normal to save your edits back to the original file, so on the surface it sounds like it might just work in Lightroom too. But it doesn’t. The difference between Lightroom and Photoshop in this scenario is that your original photo is not actually open in Lightroom. What you see is a preview of your original. When you export copies Lightroom grabs the original, makes a copy and then applies the Develop adjustments you made. This produces a brand new file.

So, in our scenario we are asking Lightroom to replace the original with this new copy, but Lightroom needs that original to make the copy! The end result is that Lightroom removes the original to make room for the new version, but then has no file to use for creating the copy with your adjustments. Ouch!

Thankfully in Lightroom 2 beta the option to overwrite originals is turned off. If you attempt the same operation you will see this instead:

[click to view larger]

The text now reads “Do you wish to skip the existing files or rename the exported files to avoid collision? You can not choose to overwrite the existing files since some of them are the source files.” I’d love to see the same functionality added into the next Lightroom 1 dot release.

If you are reading this because you just learned this the hard way let me first express my condolences, then direct you to a third-party application that has the ability to export JPGs from your preview cache:

LRViewer

The quality of the copy you can get from the preview cache will be determined by your File Handling choices on the Catalog Settings dialog, but they quality is sure to be 100% better than nothing.  Here’s hoping you never need it.

Adobe has just released Lightroom 1.4.1. I’ve been testing it and so far so good!

I’m excited about the opportunity to be a part of the Peachpit Commons where I’ll be blogging about Lightroom and related fare 2-3 times per week. This is part of my role as host of the Lightroom Reference Guide. There’s a lot of great content being posted on the Commons so be sure to add the RSS feed to your reader.

Adobe temporarily removed 1.4 and recommends rolling back to 1.3.1. For more information see the explanation on Lightroom Journal.

I strongly recommend that Windows users refrain from updating to 1.4. A few issues that have been discovered:

• The time code of exported files is set to midnight (both Win and Mac).
• Conversion to DNG or updating existing DNG previews is broken (Win only).
• Modification Date altered in non-DNG raw files when writing metadata to file (Win and Mac).

If needed you can still download 1.3.1.If 1.4 provides support for your camera that is not found in 1.3.1 you could use the standalone DNG converter to convert them to DNG and then import.If you want to convert to greyscale with control over color noise then use the method demonstrated by Martin Evening.

Although some issues do affect the Mac version as well, the improvements in printer support may outweigh the time stamp on export and Modification Date issues.  There is not a similar significant gain for Windows users to make the upgrade compelling at this time. If you are a Mac user who does not need the latest camera support nor improved printer support on Leopard then you may want to pass on this update as well.

There is a great run down of issues and solutions over at LightroomForums.

You can read the details over at Lightroom Journal. This is a relatively minor update compared to those in the past, but it could prove significant for people on Leopard who have been experiencing problems printing to some Epson models: 

• “Compatibility with legacy printer drivers on OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has been updated. I’d like to thank everyone who commented on my earlier postregarding this topic.  Some valuable feedback was provided and by working directly with Apple and Epson we are able to provide a resolution through this Lightroom update.”

One new issue that seems to be popping up in 1.4 is related to DNG conversion on XP. Converted DNGs taken into Develop will display “An unknown error occurred” even though the image can still be adjusted. I believe the issue is being investigated, so you may want to hold off on converting to DNG on XP for the time being.

External drives and Lightroom go hand-in-hand.  I have a USB powered (so no extra power cord of its own) 250 GB drive (that is just a little larger than a deck of cards) and it travels with me everywhere. Back home I have several larger capacity external drives that are always connected to my desktop workstation. I use the external drives for backup, but also for transferring files to work on while traveling.  Having an internal drive with some folders on it, and multiple external drives with other folders each of them, and perhaps you have folders on various network drives as well, it can be hard to look at Lightroom’s Folders panel and determine which folder is on which drive unless you plan ahead. So here’s the tip, instead of having the folder on my local internal drive simply called “Photos” I named it “LocalPhotos”. Then all my subfolders are named by year, then by YYYY-MM-DD. The result is this:

On each external drive my folders live inside a parent folder that is named the same as the drive. My portable 250GB drive is named “Sparta” (yes, I had been watching the movie 300). Every time I connect the drive a little voice says “This is Sparta!” (just kidding). So on that drive the top level folder is called SpartaPhotos, so with the two drives my Folders panel looks like this:

If you only have a single drive that you work with, then this tip isn’t going to do much for you, but I can’t tell you how many issues I see on the Help Desk related to missing/lost folder and photos. Hope this helps the rest of you!  

Wow, it’s been one year since v 1.0 shipped! Lightroom has come along way in that time, and its future looks bright. Here’s to all that the next year will bring!

Here are some ways you can mark the occasion:

• Where Were You on 02-19-1990?
• Download some new Lightroom web galleries from The Turning Gate: TTG Shadowbox Gallery and TTG XML Auto Index
• Leave a workflow comment over at Lightroom Killer Tips