Lightroom Plug-ins make Life a Breeze.*

*Ok, maybe that title is a bit of an overstatement.

We all know Lightroom is powerful. Most of my editing is done and post processing these days, and no longer in Photoshop. In fact, I would say with the advent of Lightroom 2 and local adjustments (see my video HERE) 95% or more of my work is done in Lightroom now. But there are fun little secrets that make this application even more powerful useful for more than photo processing. How many of you use Flickr, Photoshelter, SmugMug? Did you know that Lightroom, with the added help of a few free (yes, free) plug-ins can make your life soooo much easier?

Here is how it works. I am going to show you with the Photoshelter plug-in, but it works the same with all the above and more. There are two ways to start. The easiest is to follow this link to Adobe's Lightroom Exchange HERE. This is a warehouse of Lightroom plug-ins. Here you will find plug-ins for exporting to the sites I listed above. But, you will also find all kinds of cool plug-ins for web templates, develop presets and more. Most are free! So poke around and enjoy. I said there was two ways to start. The other way is to open Lightroom and go under the new to Lightroom 2 "Plug-in Manager." This is a handy dialog box that will take you to the Adobe Exchange site by clicking the button on the bottom left of the window. But it is more useful than that, because it now is the simplest way to import your plug-ins. Once you download the plug-in you want to use, in this case the Photoshelter plug-in, then just hit the ad button and ad it to your list of plug-ins. Simple, no more searching for the folder where the plug-ins reside, it does it for you.

The new to lightroom 2 "Plug-in Manager."

So now you have the Photoshelter plugin loaded or the Flickr plug-in or whatever one you want. Now, you need to select the images you want to load. I chose the Arches of Delhi gallery I made last week. Make sure you have captions and key words already embedded in the image. This is the beauty of this method. Now export like you would do normally export a photo and bring up the export dialog box. Here you will see at the top of dialog box a small pane, click on it and choose which plug-in you want to use.

You must choose which plug-in to use.

You will see the list appear. Once you choose the plug-in you will need to log in to your account. Don't forget, you have to have an account with any of these services to use them. That may seem like a no-brainer, but... Anyway, then just work your way down the dialog box panes. Name the file, make your setting choice, your size choice, sharpening, etc... Finally choose an existing gallery or make a new one.

Just work your way down the dialog box panes.

Then upload.



Once uploaded, Lightroom will tale you to the site and you can make any changes to the photos in Photoshelter or whatever site you uploaded to.


Your captions and other IPTC data that was embedded from Lightroom 2 follows your image to Photoshelter.




These plug-ins will save you a ton of time and make uploading to your favorite site a breeze. I hope this helped. You can view this gallery in Photoshelter HERE.

Not Magic, Just CS3 Auto Align.

This afternoon, I did a photoshoot of a friend's two little girls. As often when photographing children, they were wiggly. So I have one ok shot of the two girls in the grass (fig 1) and one not so good (fig 2). But if I could combine them, I would have a winner. Enter, CS3's Auto Align. Using Auto Align, I opened the two images and dragged one of them onto the other. Then I highlighted both layers and ran CS3's auto align command (fig 3). Once it aligned them, I simply made a layer mask on the top image and erased the unwanted part of the upper image in by painting black on it's layer mask (fig 4) and then we have a great image that the parents can me proud of (See above, click for larger view). Better to shoot it right the first time, but when it just doesn't work out that way, auto align just might help.

fig 1

fig 2

fig 3

fig 4

A Leopard in My Nightmares

I just upgraded our family's two Macs to the Leopard OS. It started out smooth enough with my wife's little 12" G4. No problem, the upgrade went without a catch, slow but without any issues. My massive 17" MacBook Pro on the other hand was/is a nightmare. A word of advice that I know you will not heed, but I'll tell you anyway; Always backup! Why is it we can say it, write it, preach it but when push comes to shove we often ignore it? There has to be some deep lesson about the human condition in this somewhere. I digress, where was I?...O yeah, in the middle of my nightmare. So, I figured, "Well, since her computer went so smooth, why take the time to back up?" After all, I am low on fast storage space. I would have to back up to one of my 160GB USB WD Passport drives that I take with me to the field.Those things are as slow as "molasses in January", naw, I will "Nike" my way through it, you know, "just do it!" Well, about half way through the installation I get an error message telling me to restart the computer and begin the installation over again. Hmm, not good, but ok.

So I reboot and begin again only to get a message telling me that I can not install Leopard on this computer unless I reformat the hard drive! As you can imagine I was panicky! I quickly rebooted my computer in Target mode on my wife's G4 and found as I suspected all the files in tact ~ but the OS was gone. It had been ripped out and gutted by Leopard like a freshly caught trout. And so began the slow and painful process of manually pulling each file and folder to the Passport drive. It took most of the day and I got everything but the applications themselves, they had vanished with the OS. Now the question was, "Can I somehow continue the installation and not reformat the MacBook?" I called Apple help. I got a nice Apple savvy Filipino in Manila. She suggested I delete some of the files off the MacBook to make room for the new Leopard OS. Guess what? My wife's G4 did not have the permission to delete files in target mode, nice try. I called back, this time I get a thickly accented man from India, "You do one thing..." It did not work either. So finally after a few more calls, a few disconnects (and no call backs from Apple, by the way) I get a sweet Mac tech from Cupertino the home of Apple. She informs me the only way to go with this is to reformat the hard drive. Great. That I did not want to hear. Maybe I can get India again and get a better suggestion. No that will not work, I lived in India for 13 years and still could not understand the guy. Sigh. . . OK, So I reformatted the hard drive and erased everything, all 120 GB of stuff and installed OS 10.1. But I at least knew I had all my files stored securely on my Passport. So the next step was to get it back. It took many more hours pulling and copying the many gigs of information back to the MacBook but most everything now resides on my Mac's hard-drive again. The the next step is how to reinstall all the software and get back all my preferences especially Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom and a little shareware application I rely on called MindFortress, that holds all my serial numbers and passwords.

I found out that Mail, Lightroom and many other applications only need their Library folder to reboot as it was. The big issue now is Photoshop CS 3. This was an upgrade from CS 2 and in reinstalling it is asking for my old CS2 serial number which I no longer have. It is buried in a bunch of CDs (I think) in some boxes in Kashmir awaiting our move. So now I am working with a 30 day trial version till I can get Adobe on the line and plead for some mercy and understanding.
That is my life. In the meantime I continue to prepare for my trip to Sumatra in February.