Lightroom 1.3 Update Feature/Problem Summary

I was glad to get the Lightroom 1.3 update just for the fixes it had to Leopard on the Mac platform. However, the Lightroom 1.3 update had a good deal more than just fixes so it would behave well on Leopard. Martin Evening over at Light Room News has a couple of posts in the last week that explain some of the new features in 1.3:

1. The new export dialog – There are fairly extensive improvements here as well as the release of an export developers SDK so developers can build custom export applications.
2. More Airtight galleries added to the Web module – I’ve talked about the Airtight galleries for Lightroom in previous posts. Now Adobe has included the Simpleviewer, Postcardviewer and Autoviewer in the 1.3 distribution.

Lightroom 1.3 Now Available – Fixes Mac Leopard Problems

Adobe has released Lightroom 1.3 which is supposed to fix the problems that Mac users that upgraded to Leopard were having with Lightroom. As of the time of this post there must be a crowd of people downloading this update because the Adobe Update server appear to be running VERY slow… I think I’ll come back a try the download later today.

I’ve been waiting for this update to install my copy of Leopard since I use Lightroom too much to want to deal with Lightroom problems.

Sharpening in Real Estate Photography Workflow

Recently a reader asked me if every image needed sharpening. The answer is yes when you are downsizing images for web use like real estate photographers do all the time, sharpening is necessary for every image.

About the same time I was reading an excellent article in Photoshop User Magazine called Pro Sharpening Workflow in Lightroom 1.1, by Chris Orwig. Chris went into all the great sharpening features that Lightroom 1.1 has. At the the end of the article it dawned on me that since I’d started using Lightroom heavily and and carefully keeping all my images in Lightroom that I’d quit using the Photoshop Smart Sharpen filter like I always use to do. Lightroom sharpening has always looked a little weak to me compared to PS smart sharpen.

At first, I thought that Lightroom was downsizing after the sharpening but after more consideration I don’t think that’s the case. As with all output from Lightroom fixing the image data as a pixel image is the last step. I think the sharpening algorithms in Lightroom are not quite as aggressive as Photoshop Smart Sharpen.

So what I’m going to start doing is doing my sharpening as a last step in Photoshop Smart Sharpen.

In summary,

• When you downsize an image always sharpen AFTER the downsizing as a last step in the workflow.
• Sharpening and then downsizing is NOT the same and downsizing and then sharpening.
• If you have Photoshop CS3 you might check out the Smart Sharpen filter… it is the best sharpening filter I’ve seen.

Update note: on 11/2/07 I updated this post. When I first made the post I jumped to the conclusion that because Lightroom sharpening was a little weak that it was downsizing before applying sharpening. Matt Stec pointed out this is unlikely.

Adobe Confirms Lightroom 1.2 Incompatibilities With Leopard

Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty  announced that there be an update to Lightroom in mid-November. This will bring Lightroom to full Leopard compatibility. The problems are:

• The Print module may not load
• The Import dialog and other dialogs can “disappear” below Lightroom’s main window.  The dialog can be retrieved by switching to another application and then returning to Lightroom.
• Lightroom’s web module may not provide a visual update after a setting is changed
• The left-side panels in the Develop module may not display properly.  Resizing or closing/opening the panels will correct the issue.
• The interaction between Leopard’s Time Machine and Lightroom’s catalog files is unknown at this time. Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Lightroom is in use is not recommended until more information can be obtained.

Via lightroom-news.com

Some People Are Experiencing Problems With Lightroom Running Under Leopard

Note there are two flickr threads discussing possible problems with Lightroom running under the new Leopard:

Look Here and here

So if you are a Lightroom user and are thinking of installing the new Leopard update you may want to follow these discussions before you install Leopard.

Professional Photographers Prefer Lightroom Over Aperture

John Nack reports that a recent study done by InfoTrends shows that group of 1026 Professional Photographers in North America were asked which software they use for RAW processing. They reported:

•  65.5% were using Photoshop Camera Raw Plug-in
• 23.6% were using Lightroom
• 5.5% were using Aperture

Even among Mac based pros Lightroom is almost 2 to 1 over Aperture.

How to Brand Monoslideshow or Other Lightroom Galleries

Cherie Irwin raised an important issue with my last post on creating Monoslideshows with Lightroom. That is, in the real estate context you’d really like to brand the slide-show either with your own contact information if you are a Realtor or your client’s logo and contact information if you are a real estate photographer building slide-shows for clients.

After thinking about it a bit and branding my example tour. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most straight forward way to add the branding information is after Lightroom generates the HTML and FTPs it to your site. To add the branding on my example I just used Dreamweaver to opened the index.html file in the directory that Lightroom generated and added some text and a link. If you always use the same size and spacing for the gallery that Lightroom generates and that spacing is designed for branding info to be added it should work pretty smoothly. You don’t necessarily need to use Dreamweaver. You could also use FTP and a text editor. I just added a line of text with a link but you could add broker logos, Realtor portraits and get as fancy as you want. This all works like this because only the slide-show is Flash and the Flash slide-show is encapsulated in HTML so you can add anything you want to the HTML and it will show above or below or along side the slide-show.

The problem with adding to the branding to the gallery template in Lightroom is that the branding will be the same for all galleries you generate which is OK if that’s what you want but I like to add the property address or something unique to each slide-show. If you are doing this for clients each slide-show will likely be unique.

DxO Optics Pro Version 4.5 Has Lightroom Integration

Yesterday I got notice that DxO Optics Pro has a new version (4.5) out that has some level of integration with Lightroom. Their claim is that you can send images from within Lightroom to DxO for processing and the corrected images will be integrated back in the Lightroom catalog with metadata preserved. The other alternative is to batch process images with DxO and the corrected images will be imported to Lightroom.

This seems like a great match up to me! I haven’t tried the demo of the new version yet because I’m in the process of moving from PC to the Mac and want to try the Mac version. As soon as I get my new MacBook Pro setup I want to try this combination. Apparently, for existing DxO Optics Pro users this is a free upgrade.

I know there are a bunch of readers out there that are using DxO Optics Pro… has anyone out there tried this combination yet?

Lightroom 1.1 Moves Closer to Being The Only Photo Editor You Need

If you already own Lightroom and have used it in the last few days it will have automatically asked to be updated to version 1.1. Version 1.1 is free and has some pretty nice features. The two I like the best are sharpening, noise removal and clarity. Uwe Steinmueller over at outbackphoto.com has one of the best summaries of the new features I’ve run across.

Sharpening now works much like Photoshop CS3 in the area of sharpening. Clarity is a awesome new feature in Camera RAW 4.1 that Lightroom and PS CS3 now use, that allows you to improve the local contrast and detail in an image. On the images that I’ve used it on the effects are quite striking. I like it!

The significance for RE photography work flow is that there are now only two features missing from Lightroom that prevent it from being the only software a real estate photographer will need. Those features are perspective and lens distortion correction. It seems very likely that these are features that will be added to Lightroom in the future. But to it wouldn’t hurt to let Adobe developers know what you think by giving them input on the Lightroom User Forum.

Customize Lightroom Flash Slide Shows

Thew, busy weekend. Just got back from a ski trip in Whistler, BC with great snow AND I had a new grandchild (Avery Lohrman) this morning. Can’t wait to get down to Salem, OR to meet him!

To continue the discussion from the previous post about Flash slide-shows. The Blue Fire blog has some tips on how to customize the look of the Flash slide-shows that Lightroom creates.

I think that Flash slide-shows are significant in real estate photography for several reasons:

1. They look good and typically have nice smooth transitions between photos.
2. People can’t steal your photos by right clicking and saving the photo.
3. The slide-show format with thumbnails and a “play” button is a very intuitive way to display a series of photos.
4. They make a nice virtual tour of for real estate listings.
5. You can easily burn CDs with Photoshop Elements 5 or from Lightroom created tours.

All in all I think they are the preferred form of real estate virtual tour. You can either create your own customized tour with Lightroom if you have web space some place to host them or

Lightroom 1.0 New Features

From Ohs Remodel

Yesterday downloaded the Lightroom 1.0 trial version to use until the distribution CD I ordered gets here. I was pleased to find so many new features have been added since the last beta version.

I particularly like the straighten feature that allows you to rotate an image. There’s still no way to distort an image to fix converging verticals but maybe in a later version. I don’t know if the lens correction controls are new or I’d just not noticed them before.

The shots above are of an neighbor’s remodel project that we looked at yesterday. I’d never noticed before that my Canon 16-35 zoom has so much light fall-off (vignetting) at the edges when zoomed out to the widest angles but seeing images in the “before and after” viewing mode it’s immediately obvious. It was easy to quickly fix the problem with the lens correction slider.

I also like the way Adobe has improved the format of the Flash web slideshows in the Web module. Much nicer than the beta.

Lightroom 1.0 is shipping – 30 day trial available

As of today Lightroom 1.0 is shipping. John Nack’s blog has a a good summary of links and info on the release. There is a free 30 day trial version for download.