The release candidate for Adobe Lightroom 3.2 is out today and while I normally wait to post the updates until it the final version, the Facebook export is pretty cool. If you are a Facebook photographer or have one of the new cameras it supports grab it now. Here is what Adobe says about a release candidate, “The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing…”

The details from Adobe:

New Functionality

• Additional direct publish functionality to Facebook, the popular social networking site.

Newly supported camera models include:

• Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG*)
• Leica S2 (DNG*)
• Panasonic DMC-FZ100
• Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45)
• Panasonic DMC-LX5
• Pentax 645D
• Samsung NX10
• Samsung TL500 (EX1)
• Sony A290
• Sony A390
• Sony Alpha NEX-3
• Sony Alpha NEX-5

You can get the downloads from Adobe Labs….HERE.

If you still have not bought Adobe Lightroom shame on you and here is a link for the upgrade!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Upgrade

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

Round of applause and a huge thanks to Luc for putting the  “dossier de presse” plugin for Next-Gen Gallery together. Being able to upload images straight from Lightroom to my Next-Gen gallery on my website is a huge time saver. Did I mention it is dead easy and worked perfectly the first time and every time so far. It will even allow you to create the blog post with the export, WOW!

I used the plugin to upload this image to a gallery that already existed on my site, so that will work as well…

You can download the plugin…HERE.

And just because it is free does not mean that you should not donate! Don’t be cheap either your time is worth a lot and this plugin will save you time. If you use the Next-Gen Galleries on your website and you don’t use Lightroom this plugin is soo good you should go buy Lightroom!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3

Today Adobe released Lightroom 3 from its beta and it is now ready for prime time! Great new features like lens correction and noise reduction. For me the 2 things I like are the speed, Lightroom is really really fast now. I didn’t think it was slow before, but now it is noticeably zippier. The second is the image download section is all new and besides looking great it just easier to use.

The noise reduction is vastly improved, but will it unseat Define as my go to product? Check back next week and we’ll compare the two of them.

Read what Adobe says….HERE.

I have been really enjoying the beta of LR3 and cannot wait for the real deal. This new beta release makes me think a the final version is very close. Believe it or not this version is faster and has a bunch of kewl new features.

Things I’ve played with in LR3

I have been shooting with high and higher ISO lately and the Luminace Noise Reduction button now works…and it it works really well getting that “stained glass” noise out of a high ISO image.

LR3 now supports importing and managing video! How cool is that? No editing (YET!) and no built in player, but at least you can ingest the videos at the same time as your stills.

Here are the highlights:

• Improved performance throughout the application for faster importing and loading of images
• Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras
• Luminance noise reduction has been added to the previous color noise reduction improvements available in the first public beta for outstanding overall high ISO quality
• Support for importing and managing video files from DSLR cameras for better overall photographic workflow control
• Improvements to the import experience in the first beta to reflect public feedback
• Improved watermarking functionality from the first beta to reflect public feedback
• Support for a bunch of new cameras

Of course Adobe’s Lightroom Journal blog reveal all of the juicy details…HERE.

And you can download the beta and play with it yourself…HERE.

Lightroom on the MAC installs both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and by default activates the 32-bit version. Which is fine. (Under Windows you have to select which version to install, so you guys don’t need to read anymore.)

When I opened the More Info panel for Lightroom it showed that indeed that “Open in 32 bit mode” was not checked. However, the credits screen did not show that Lightroom was running in 64-bit mode! I am sure that you know how to get to the info screen via Finder>Applications>Adobe Lightroom. Here is another screen shot to help.

My solution was to select “Open in 32 Bit Mode” and then open and close Lightroom. Go back and then de-select the 32-bit mode and voila, when Lightroom opened, I’ve got 64-bit!

I have to say it is a gigantic difference, duh! Going from 3GB of RAM to 10 is going to make a difference. I just got the MAC and so when something isn’t right, I assume user error. After my discovery I was very excited and so I called several friends. To my shock it wasn’t me, they were not in 64-bit either and they knew what they were doing. I bet a lot of you are not in 64-bit mode either.

After the switch, Lightroom is now turbo-charged and changes made to images in the develop module are instantaneous. This is what I was expecting with the new MAC…WOW! So check your settings to make sure that you are also in WOW mode!

The more that I use Lightroom the more I like what they are doing. Even there are no big features in this release, it is still worth while for the update to ACR 5.2 (Adobe Camera Raw’s latest converter). They also have included the camera profiles that have been available from Adobe Labs for a while now. I still think that Nikon Capture NX2 does the best conversion of my Nikon NEF files, the gap is certainly narrowing.

Here is what Adobe says:

Lightroom 2 Bugs – Fixed

• Images rendered from the Slideshow export process produced a jagged effect on hard edges relative to the quality of normal JPEG export
• Increased the number of characters allowed in Web gallery labels beyond 150 characters
• Catalogs with hundreds of root (top level) folders caused very slow launch times
• Drag and drop to move a subfolder to a different folder showed the incorrect photos in the grid
• Print Sharpening produced edge artifacts in certain conditions
• Density defaulted to 100 percent for initial stroke regardless of position of slider
• The Adjustment brush created blocky, straight edges to brush strokes under certain conditions
• Lightroom could become unresponsive when using the graduated filter under certain conditions
• It was possible to lose the ability to edit an adjustment brush setting after applying a graduated filter with hidden pins
• Turning auto-mask on produced a lag in Lightroom performance in when applying the adjustment brush
• Print to JPEG functionality produced a low resolution image when printing photos with panorama aspect ratios
• Extended characters in a folder name caused Edit in Photoshop functionality to fail
• Smart collection did not respond to changes in custom metadata
• Enabling auto-mask produced a lag in performance in when applying the local adjustment brush

Lightroom 2 Enhancements

• Camera profiles are now available in the Calibration panel in the Develop module. These profiles are designed to provide different interpretations of raw capture.

Windows Download

MAC Download

As always if you have not already done so, you can follow this link and purchase Lightroom at Amazon. Your support is appreciated.

[amtap amazon:aisn=B0018VDJVW]

It is ironic that the first step in digital workflow is to actually delete most of the images that you have worked so hard to create. The images that were created with promise and passion must now be looked on without emotion or feeling and be culled, killed, deleted, zapped, smushed, axed! Such a cruel sounding words for your dear pictures Webster’s defines culled as, “Something picked out from others, especially something rejected because of inferior quality.” See, you are doing it because of ‘inferior quality,’ that should make you feel a little better.

Editing is the process of going to get rid of the inferior images now, not later. You don’t need them now and you’ll certainly never need them in the future, so why keep them on your hard drives? Yes, I know hard drives are cheap, but so what? Why keep inferior images when you have better ones? Software is always leaping forward and the things that we can do with images today are staggering to say the least. However, they are never going to create software that fixes focus, or composition, or subject or put chopped feet back on. Well, Ok you can sorta put feet back on, but ignore that for now, I’m on a mission. So lets get started.

Once your images are on your hard drive, use the browser of your choice to go through and get rid of the junk. I am currently using Lightroom and so this article is Lightroom centric, but the principles still apply. I use Lightroom because the process is so easy and simple and fast. Let’s start looking at the images and on this first pass our mission is to cull out the junk. We are not going to rate them or OOH and AHH, OK a little, but keep focused on getting rid of the bad stuff. When you see a stinker you simply hit the X key and that image is now marked for deletion. You have not deleted anything yet, but you have given notice that you intend to put that image in the trash can! Proceed through all of your images happily deleting the out of focus, legs cut off, bird flew out of the frame or otherwise obviously a waste of memory space images.

If you are an advanced user feel free to get rid of obvious dupes here as well. You neophytes, just get rid of the really bad ones. Now go to the grid view of the Library module and select the rejected flag. This will now show you all of the images that you just culled. Take a look at all of these images to make sure that you didn’t get falg happy and cull one too many images. If they are indeed all bad, select them all and then hit the delete key. Lightroom will ask if you want them out of the collection or deleted from the disk. You know what you have to do, deep breath…delete from disk! God job, Grasshopper. Don’t you feel better knowing those icky images are never going to show up to shame you on the internet?

This image shows a Lightroom screenshot.

Now this is why my editing process is called 5 star culling. Some people see that they have all of these stars and colors and other hoohaws to mark their images for something. We really only need 3 stars and one of those is special. Why in the world would you want to rank one of your images as a 1 star image? To me that says it is already marked for deletion so why not get rid of it now before your emotions over rule reason and you keep the stinker. If it is a 1 star it shouldn’t be in your library. Keep your best and then the best of your best. I’m a 5 star photographer and so I only want my best, 4 stars and the best of my best, my 5 star images. You should be doing the same thing.

So, in this pass of reviewing images we are going to go through the images and you now have 3 options (in my system) to deal with images, rank it 3 stars, 4 stars or delete it. We’ll get to the 5 star thing in a minute. So now is when we have to be critical of our work. The first cull was easy the second is much more emotional. So look at your images, the best get 4 stars and the ones that deserve a second look get 3 stars. If it doesn’t meet those categories then it gets the X and is deleted. This is where you get rid of all of the duplicate shots. You know that 8 frame burst that captured a stationary object…yes that one, keep 1 delete 7. Mark the keeper as a 4 and move on. Also, get rid of all semi-duplicates. These are the ones where the subject eyes are closed or the head is turned or something is off. There will be times when the image is good and you are not sure about it, give these a 3 star rating. You should still only keep the best of the series from these 3 star shots. As with the round one culls, use the flag to find and then select the rejects, delete them. Now, I select all of my 4 stars and move them to my working folder. I keep a folder that are my “to be edited” images. I like to do this step as it helps me with my filing system. That is another article, stay tuned. I now move the 3 stars to a further review folder. I usually wait a week or two or even more sometimes and then come back and look at these images with fresh eyes. I then repeat the culling process on these images.

Now the 5 star pay off. We have now edited the images from the photo shoot and we have only processed our best shots. We have deleted the junk and are really satisfied with life. Now is when you reward yourself with that last 5th star. The 5th star is reserved for the best images in your library. Your library should never have more than about 100 5 star images at any given time. These are the 100 shots that you use to brag with friends and family, to show publishers your chops and to just enjoy after the work that you put in to making those images. After you reach 100 then when you want to nominate a new 5 star shot move a lesser image to a 4 star image. Lightroom has something called smart collections and it will automatically keep track of all images that you have rated 5 stars and with the click of a mouse all of your best are right there ready to be proud of. Hey you are a 5 star photographer now too!

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The public Beta has been out for a while, but this is the official update. Basically it adds camera support, but I always install these official releases as they usually tweak some things under the hood.

From Adobe:

• Additional camera support for the Canon 50D, Canon 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F), Nikon D700, Nikon D90, Sony A900, and more
• Several corrections for issues introduced by the Lightroom 2 release

Link to Windows Download Link to MAC Download

And if you have not bought Lightroom 2 yet…why? Go directly to Amazon via this link and buy it!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Upgrade

Within a few days of the anniversary of the release of Adobe Lightroom comes the upgrade. There are a bunch of new features and performance tweaks. I am sure that everyine will have their favorites. At first glance mine is the second window. It is awesome to be able to see the browser and perhaps even better the loupe on full size images. I’ll write more as I use it a bit more.