Don LaVange uses Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage, catalog, edit, and deliver photographs. He talks about using Lightroom here and offers tips, tricks, best practices, help, short tutorials, feature reviews and explanations and Lightroom presets.
Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Every Day
Matt Kloskowski passes along a great preset method for creating calendars in Lightroom 3.
We’re constantly trying to improve the usability of Lightroom not just in the creation of new features but also refining existing behaviors. One troubling Lightroom behavior that we evaluated during the Lightroom 2 cycle is the “stickiness” of the filters applied at the top of the grid view in the Library module. These filters are often used to show only the 3 star or above images or maybe just the flagged images in a folder or collection. In Lightroom 2, if you applied a filter and visited another folder or collection and returned to the previous folder, the filter would still be applied. This can be useful if you only want to see flagged images in a folder but don’t necessarily want to delete the unflagged images or create another collection or smart collection to cull only the flagged images. Unfortunately, a large percentage of Lightroom customers were returning to a folder days, weeks or even months after applying a filter and experiencing a great deal of panic or confusion because the folder did not show all of the images they believed to be in that folder.(We call this the “What happened to my images?!” scenario) In the end, the value of a sticky or persistent filter was outweighed by the ensuing confusion. In Lightroom 3 we changed the behavior so that upon return to a folder or collection after visiting another folder or collection, the filter is cleared. We also offered a global filter lock so that if you wanted a filter to stick, it would stick for any folder or collection visited. For instance, a global filter could be locked to show only five star images regardless of the folder or collection visited.
While we don’t want the application to be shackled to the past, there were enough complaints about the removal of “sticky” or persistent filters that the behavior has been reinstated.[Update August 10th. I was not clear in that it has been reinstated in Lightroom 3.2, release candidate is here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Lightroom_3.2]Choose the File -> Library Filters -> Lock Filters, menu item then choose File -> Library Filters -> Remember Each Source’s Filters Separately. Lightroom will now emulate the behavior offered in Lightroom 2. The behavior of clearing the filters upon return to a folder or collection will remain the default.
The engineers that work on Lightroom tried, in version 3, to combat the age old problem of "Dude, where're my images?" that happens (even to me) when you run a filter and forget to clear it. Suddenly there is only one image in my collection? But like good engineers that realized that they took away a feature from users who knew how it worked so they added it as an option again.
But, guys -- the real problem is that it's too easy to not know you have a filter applied. Fix that, and then we'll be solving the problem. Because even knowing, even taking advantage of the 2.0 and now 3.2 functionality, I still forget I have a filter on. I want it all ways!
I think I have figured out when the slowness problem happens for me. Previously, it seemed random, but I've now narrowed it down to certain actions that I take.
My workflow usually includes importing (usually jpgs at this time), keywording those imported photos (I have a long list of keywords), then exporting to various folders. Then, I either search for the photos using a Smart Collection, or I create or edit a Smart Collection to fit what I'm looking for. I also have an extensive Smart Collection.
It is *after* I work with the Smart Collections and go back to keywording that LR slows to a crawl. This is the point where keywording slows to be almost unuseable, and any subsequent exports take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. So as far as I can tell on my machine, it's working with Smart Collections that is bringing everything down.
I have tried optimizing the catalog immediately after I work with any collections, and that has seemed to help (have only done it a couple times so far) as a workaround in the meantime. I feel like I have to be really careful about what order I do anything in so that I don't make LR wig out.
Lightroom 3 to fix speed problem that impacts certain configurations.
One of the very useful Lightroom tools in the Develop panel is the Targeted Adjustment Tool. Improved in LR 3, it lets you easily click in the photo and drag to achieve the desired effect. Check it out in this short tutorial.
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In this video I introduce the adjustment brush and explain how it's used in Lightroom. Of particular interest to users new to lightroom is the difference between flow, or how much of the effect is applied for each pass of the brush and density, which is how much total effect is going to be allowed (up to 100 percent).
Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
You gotta love those plugin developers. Few are as prolific and accomplished at creating Lightroom plug-ins than Jeffrey Friedl. Jeffrey's been hard at work creating new plugins that work with the new publish services that I described yesterday. Today, despite his consumate warnings about backing up the catalog when working with beta plugins and attempts to educate on how the new publish services could lead to unexpected results I decided to try it out. The plugin is amazing... it not only allows the use of the publish service collections for flickr but it also will move your photos from the official plugin if you like and ... get this... deep scan your flickr photos to try and match up images already uploaded to flickr with photos in your Lightroom catalog! In my case I had only limited success making that match because I have two Flickr accounts and two Lightroom catalogs and some of the images that are eventually going to be in one catalog are still in another -- and that led to the plugin "finding" photos that actually didn't have a counterpart at Flickr (at least in the account I was signed into). This led to the odd behavior of having those photos unable to be found at flickr despite being stuck in the Publish collection. Easy enough to remedy.
The first complaint I had about the stock flickr plugin was the lack of control for ppi for images in that publish collection, the second the lack of support for video and third the inability to select a target collection. Friedl's version fixes all these things and much, much more.
Back up your catalog like Jeffrey suggests and then try installing this great plugin. And read the docs carefully.
One interesting change in Lightroom 3 is the addition of "Publish Services". Essentially, these are a sort of collection in Lightroom where the photos you add have a two-way relationship to some "published" location. The shipping version comes with two of these services, one for the hard drive and one for Flickr.
Don LaVange uses Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage, catalog, edit, and deliver photographs. He talks about using Lightroom here and offers tips, tricks, best practices, help, short tutorials, feature reviews and explanations and Lightroom presets.
Don LaVange uses Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage, catalog, edit, and deliver photographs. He talks about using Lightroom here and offers tips, tricks, best practices, help, short tutorials, feature reviews and explanations and Lightroom presets.
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