Lightroomers!

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!

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

With the release of Lightroom 1.3 came the first SDK. While it only extends Export functionality it is a very powerful and welcome addition to the application.

As an example, I used the Mogrify plugin to export the photo below directly to my web server, and in the process add 2 borders, a graphical watermark, and pull the title from the IPTC and display it in the lower left corner. Cool!

A couple of plugin developers got together and extended this functionality even further by creating a plugin structure that allows multiple export plugins to work together in a single export. This plugin for a plugin was dubbed a “piglet” by developer Jeffrey Friedl. A great example is being able to use Tim Armes’ Mogrify piglet with Jeffrey’s Flickr plugin to export that same photo directly to my Flickr account while adding the same borders and watermark in the process.

So, aside from these examples Export plugins allow you to:

• export directly to a web server
• export directly to a photo-sharing site
• export information pulled from your Lightroom database in the form of a text file
• perform additional pixel manipulations
  • add text and/or graphical watermarks
  • add borders
  • apply sharpening
  • resize
  • convert to profile
  • and more!
• harness the muscle of other applications on export (such as Exiftool or ImageMagick)

Below you will find links to all export plugins that I am aware of (will update as new ones arrive on the scene):

• Adobe’s Export SDK home - download the SDK itself, and join the SDK discussion
• Flickr - export directly to your Flickr account
  
• iStockphoto - export to your iStock portfolio
  
• Picasa Web - export right to Picasa
  
• Smugmug - export to your Smugmug gallery
  
• Transporter - export a companion text file full of your photo’s metadata
  
• Zenfolio - export to your Zenfolio gallery

Did I miss any? Let me know!

My “Under the Loupe” tutorial on using an export action to create a custom watermark for the web galleries is finally out in Photoshop User magazine (Sept 07, pg 84). Here’s the nutshell version:

1. Create watermark action in Photoshop
2. Turn action into a droplet and save in Lightroom’s Export Actions folder
3. Configure Lightroom’s Auto Import function so that images saved from the droplet are automatically imported
4. Select images in Lightroom that you want to watermark, click Export and select your droplet as the “After Export” action
5. Bring all the auto imported watermarked images into the web gallery
6. Upload to your web space

Pick up the September 2007 issue of Photoshop User magazine for the detailed steps!