For the past few months I have been working on a book project ( Explore Lightroom 4: A Roadmap for Photographers) and am finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The writing is finally completed and we are now at the slash and burn–uh…I mean…editing–phase. So what better way to celebrate that write an article?

This article, however, will be a little off topic for Lightroom Secrets. I’d like to tell you about some of the tools I found indispensable while writing a book. Writing longer pieces, such as magazine articles or a book, is a much different thing than writing articles for a website like this. Most of the articles for Lightroom Secrets begin life in MarsEdit which is an adequate tool for blogging. However, a book is a much different animal.

For a long time I have been a user and fan of Scrivener. Until this adventure I had used it to plan and write magazine articles. But when tackling a project as large as a book Scrivener really shines! Everything you need is there. Outlining, index cards, research, snapshots, and on and on. If you do any writing and are tired of Word or Pages, go and take a look. It’s available for both Mac and Windows.

For years I had used Microsoft Word for longer writing tasks. The problem with Word is that you either have to keep multiple files for different sections or put everything into one eventually unwieldy file. While cut and paste can move things around it can be difficult when the source and destination are several pages apart. Any research clips or notes had to reside in their own files. After a while you have a folder of “things” for your article that is a somewhat unorganized mess. Scrivener changes all that.

Scrivener is a unique and powerful writing tool. You can keep everything about your project together in one easy to manage place. Research notes and web clips can reside in your research folder. You can use the built in outliner to organize your article. If you prefer the index card approach, Scrivener has that as well.

If you do any kind of longer form writing run right out now and grab a copy of this software. (There is a trial available if you’re not sure.)

Any book on Lightroom will have plenty of screenshots and mine is no exception. My favorite utility for grabbing and annotating screenshots is Snagit from TechSmith.

It is available for both Mac and Windows and I have used it on both platforms extensively. I’ve tried many other applications for screenshots and still come back to Snagit. Because of the way my publisher’s graphics department works I had to take a screenshot as a baseline then make a second copy with cropping indicators and any annotations. Snagit was well up to the task!

Have you ever needed to look at something you are writing about? For example, you are writing about choices on a menu but you can’t keep the menu open and still access your writing application. You could take a screenshot with Snagit and keep the editor open but that can get to be a problem especially if you are working on a small screen. I found a small utility that solves this problem brilliantly. It’s called ScreenFloat and is available in the Mac App Store. (I don’t know if there is an equivalent application on the Windows side.)

ScreenFloat lets you quickly grab a section of your screen and it floats that above all windows. So if you grab a menu while it is open you can have it floating there while you write about it. I can’t tell you how much work that saved me. It also organizes all of the floats so you can call them up again later or export them so files to be used as screenshots. But just the ability to float a piece of the screen while writing about it was well worth the price.

Writing a book is quite an adventure! I thought you might enjoy hearing about some of the tools that made my experience easier. I’ll let all of you know when I have an official release date. It should be soon if all goes well.

I’ll return to topics more directly related to Lightroom next time. Meanwhile, let us know in the comments about any great tools you’ve discovered that make your electronic life a bit easier!

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I had the pleasure of writing an article on the new adjustment brush features for the April 2012 issue of Photoshop User Magazine. Photoshop User Magazine is from the good folks over at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and is included as one of the many benefits of membership. It’s also available at most major bookstores.

If you aren’t already a NAPP member you should consider it. If you regularly purchase the magazine you’ve more than paid for a year of membership! And there’s much more…discounts, free downloads, excellent training articles and videos, help desk features for members, personal portfolio pages, and a great forum to name a few. It’s worth a look!

Click Here to download my article on the new brush features and enjoy!

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1. 2012 Is Here! Are You Ready?
2. Tone and Texture: Exploring Black & White Photography in Lightroom
3. Drop In Anytime… We’re Family!

What’s a DNG?

For those of you not familiar with Adobe’s DNG image format (short for Digital Negative), it was introduced back during the Photoshop CS era, as a means of standardizing and simplifying the process of editing raw picture data. The need for this format stems from the fact that -to this day- camera manufacturers have eschewed a standardized raw file format, in favor of proprietary formats like NEF and CR2.

The problem with these formats is that over time, as the camera makers’ software evolves, they sometimes “orphan” support for files created by older cameras. Unlike a real film negative which can be scanned at any time, a proprietary raw file, absent some 3rd party solution like Lightroom or ACR, can be made obsolete at the whim of the company. You might stand to lose a large segment of your photo library in that case, were you to rely solely on the manufacturer’s format. DNG helps to ensure that if you convert your raw files from today’s cameras, those same files will be accessible and editable for you, years down the road. There are of course other dynamics involved in this equation, but this is the core of the matter — making sure your raw picture data lasts as long as you need it to.

Lightroom has always supported DNG, and with the release of Lightroom 4, its status as a first-class DNG citizen has been reinforced.

New DNG Options in Lightroom 4

Typically there are two ways to convert your raw files to DNG format. You can either use a special, freely downloadable utility from Adobe called the DNG Converter, and follow its instructions for batch-conversion. Or within Lightroom, you can export raw files as DNG files. If you choose a series of files in your Library module and click the Export button (bottom-left portion of the window), you’ll be greeted with the Export dialog. Within that there is a “File Settings” group that looks like this:

Within these settings you have an Image Format menu, and the DNG format is included as one of the options. What’s new in Lightroom 4 is that while DNG is traditionally a lossless format (and therefore tends to generate larger file sizes for the same reason raw files do), you now have the option to create a “Lossy DNG” file on export. This will significantly reduce the size of the DNG files, while having only a slight impact on quality in most cases, as compared to the original raw file. You can expect that a Lossy DNG will typically produce file quality on par with a max quality JPEG, but which stands up to further post-export editing better than a JPEG file. (Thank you to Lightroom Queen Victoria Bampton for her expertise on file conversions and quality settings in this area… she helped yours truly -a “raw purist”- to see the light, if you’ll pardon the pun.)

You also have the option to embed the original raw file into the DNG, in case you need to extract it later. This will greatly increase the file size for obvious reasons, but it’s worth discussing. There are a number of reasons why you might do this, but one of the more common reasons is that some photographers prefer to have a single archival file for each shot, that they can then back up in multiple places. Rather than throw the original raw file away, some find it useful to keep a copy of the raw data inside the DNG file, which can later be extracted with the DNG converter, if necessary (for example if you wanted to try new conversion settings with the original data). The DNG Converter window is shown below, along with the Raw File Extractor dialog. As you can see this process looks and works a lot like the Photoshop Image Processor; it’s very simple to set up.

(Just click the “Extract” button to get the dialog box below and choose your target and destination folders. Simple!)

Managing DNGs with Smart Collections

Another new DNG feature in Lightroom 4 is that you can use Smart Collections to keep track of which of your DNGs were created using the Lossy compression scheme, and which are Lossless. This can be very important over time, as it’s not always easy to remember how different batches of files were converted. And depending on how you converted them, you will want to optimize (and possibly limit the extent of) your edits, based on that information. To create a Smart Collection that tracks the DNG files in your Catalog, click the pop-out menu on the Collections panel and choose Create Smart Collection.

Next give your collection a name and then choose File Type, Is, “Digital Negative / Lossy Compressed”. Add other criteria if necessary and then click “Create”. When you’re done you should have a collection in the panel that automatically detects the Lossy DNG file type, so that you can make your edits in a targeted way when the time comes. Hopefully you’ll find that it’s worth experimenting with the DNG format, as a way of protecting your archives for future use! To learn more about the new features available in Lightroom 4, you can visit Colortrails.com.

Related posts:

1. Lightroom 4.0 Is Available NOW!
2. An Ingenious Approach to Video in Lightroom 4 Beta
3. A Scoop of DNG With Your PIE

Adobe reports that over 300,000 of you downloaded the Lightroom 4.0 Beta and showered them with tons of useful feedback. That’s great! All of us in the Lightroom community contribute to making Lightroom a super application and the team at Adobe appreciate, and listen to, all of your comments, bug reports, and feature suggestions. With your help Adobe was able to identify and fix over 800 bugs for this release. Thanks for a fantastic beta!

The biggest news here (get the trumpets ready…) is that Lightroom is now available at the ridiculously low price of $149 for new users! If you are upgrading from ANY previous version of Lightroom or you are a student or teacher then your price is only $79! If you’ve been reluctant to get started with Lightroom because of the cost then your wait is over.

Just a few changes have been made since the Beta release:

• Reverse geocoding is now available in the Map Module
• Improved auto tone in the Develop Module
• Temperature and Tint have increased ranges
• Develop presets have been update
• New presets for video
• The maximum Blurb book size is now 240 pages

Here are some great resources to check out…

• Laura Shoe has a post and short video available at http://laurashoe.com/2012/03/05/adobe-releases-lightroom-4-whats-new/. Be sure to check out her newest training DVD. It’s fantastic!
• Victoria Bampton (a.k.a. The Lightroom Queen) talks about Lightroom 4.0 at http://www.lightroomqueen.com/2012/03/06/whats-new-in-lightroom-4/
• Matt Kloskowski answers your Lightroom 4.0 questions at http://lightroomkillertips.com/2012/lightroom-4-is-here-and-a-quick-qa/

Dan Moughamian tells me he is putting the final touches on some tutorials so keep an eye on colortrails.com. And, of course, don’t forget to touch base with the Lightroom team itself over at Lightroom Journal.

In related news I am currently hard at work on a Lightroom 4.0 book. I don’t have a hard release date from the publisher yet (probably because I’m still working on it LOL) but stay tuned for additional information.

Now get out there and put Lightroom 4.0 through its paces!

Related posts:

1. An Ingenious Approach to Video in Lightroom 4 Beta
2. Lightroom 3.6 Now Available!
3. Lightroom 3.3 and Camera Raw 6.3 Now Available

Rather than retell Laura’s story, here it is in her own words from the About Us page on Pretty Presets…

My love for Lightroom began when I started my own photography business. My sessions started piling up, along with hundreds of images to edit. Somewhere between being overwhelmed and exhausted by the time spent editing; I wanted to find a way to save time. I knew I needed to speed up my workflow and wanted to be more proficient. This is where the journey began! I love my job and my goal is to save others time so that they can balance their time with their families and their long term goals.

I know your time is valuable and that’s why I’m here to help! Being the wife and a mother to two young children means my time is valuable too. When my husband is home, I don’t want to be sitting at the computer editing when time together is sometimes scarce. When my kids are awake, I want to spend quality time with them and leave the editing for naps and bed time. I have managed to use these presets to cut my workflow dramatically. This gives me the opportunity to stay at home with my children, have plenty of time with my husband and still run a business from home.

It’s exciting to know that photographers are cutting their editing time in half and having the freedom to do what they enjoy. I have been blessed to be able to work from home, in a field that I enjoy, and still have time to raise a family. I wish this for every photographer I meet. I look forward to working with you!

You can also find me over at Rock The Shot Forum! We have lots of awesome posts to encourage photographers each week and fun giveaways too. Come visit!

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It’s been some time since those lyrics came out of speakers everywhere. Yet, mail, in its many forms, is still an important means of communication. Today, of course, we use email. In previous versions of Lightroom there was an email export preset that helped to gather images that we could attach to our emails. We soon discovered that some email clients would accept the output of the export preset and we added them as the Post-processing action and that smoothed the workflow a bit.

Lightroom 4 Beta has added an email feature which promises to develop into a nice workflow solution. At first glance it is still very much in the beginning phase. That is it is marginally useful. However, the fact that the Lightroom team has added the feature is encouraging. So let’s take a look at how it works.

Suppose we have done some headshots for an up and coming actor. We’ve talked about the shots and he has asked to see the final image, a soft proof, and a black & white version for a poster. We select the images in preparation for emailing smaller versions in order to get some feedback.

Once selected we get to the new Email Photos… feature by right clicking on one of the images and choosing it from the contextual menu.

You can also reach it from the File menu.

Lastly, you could use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Command+M (Shift+CTRL+M in Windows). This will open the email dialog.

At the top you can add a Cc field, Bcc field, or access your address list (1). You can set up multiple email accounts to send from and choose them from the dropdown (2). There are full formatting features available as well as an optional ruler (3). The images you have chosen appear below the message body. If you have captioned your images you can elect to include those captions as descriptive labels (4). And, finally, you can decide what size and quality the images should be when attached.

All this is pretty neat. One of the things at the moment that makes this a bit less useful than it could be is the address list. Right now it is a totally independent list that does not read from your address book, doesn’t automatically remember addresses you send emails to, and has no provision for synching to any other address list. Disappointing. But as I said, this is a first step.

Back to our example. Here is our finished email to the client.

On the receiving end we can see the email, the 500px medium quality images, complete with descriptive labels! (I’ve cut off the image but trust me, all three were attached. )

If the attachment presets provided don’t meet your needs you can define your own. When you are in the email dialog pull down the Preset menu and choose Create new Preset option.

This will bring you to the familiar Export preset dialog.

Here we’ve created a preset that adds our watermark to the images. Save your preset. Now when you are in the email dialog that preset is available.

Now our images have a watermark!

I mentioned that you could set up multiple email accounts. If you click the From dropdown you will see an option to go to the Email Account Manager.

Once there you can define a new email account by pressing the Add button.

Lightroom can fill in the server details for you for AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. If you are setting up an account on your own server choose Other and provide the details. Put in your address and password then press Validate.

If everything is in order your should see the green light and Validated will appear below the account name. Now that account is available from the dropdown in the email dialog.

One more thing to note. If you choose a native email client (such as Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) then the message body field will not be presented. Instead, once you fill out the remaining options Lightroom will hand off the email to your email client for you to enter a message and send.

It’s a start! I hope this feature gets some attention from the team and grows in its functionality. In any event, give it a try and let me know what you think.

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1. An Ingenious Approach to Video in Lightroom 4 Beta

I mentioned that this wasn’t a solution for the multi-photographer studio but it could be useful if your images are housed on an external drive and you like to work from multiple computers. The cloud based catalog has the advantage that all of the changes you make reside there and are accessible to your various computers. If you are using a free Dropbox account (you get 2GB free when you sign up!) you will run out of room quickly as your previews file grows. The .lrdata file gets big if you use 1:1 previews and like to keep them.

Since I wrote that article, Dropbox has added a feature called Selective Sync. A Lightroom Secrets reader, David Balder, sent me an email pointing out that this new feature removes the preview bloat issue and can give you more room to store your catalog. Thanks, David! That’s a brilliant suggestion!

David suggests that you use Selective Sync to exclude the .lrdata file from the Dropbox sync. The downside here is that you will lose your previews. However, Lightroom will happily build them as needed when you start to work in your catalog. So there’s the tradeoff: a little more time to build a preview in exchange for more room in your free account to store a catalog.

Here is how to implement David’s suggestion. Start by clicking the Dropbox icon in your menu bar to access Preferences…

In the preferences dialog go to the Advanced tab and choose Change Settings for Selective Sync.

If you aren’t already there, choose Switch to Advance View at the bottom of the resulting dialog.

Once you are in Advanced View you can navigate to your .lrdata folder and uncheck the box.

This will remove it from your Dropbox sync going forward. Press the update button and you will be reminded of that.

Press update again and you’re all set.

Thanks again, David!

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2. Lightroom Performance

One of the exciting new features in Lightroom 4 Beta is its enhanced video capabilities! If you’ve had a chance to play with this feature you have already discovered that a few of the adjustments for video are only contained in the Develop module. This presents a problem since video itself is not supported directly in the Develop module. The current solution to this mentioned on the many sites covering Lightroom is to take a still from the video, bring that into the Develop module, and apply the additional adjustments to that still image. Once you are satisfied with the result you can create a preset. Back in the Library module you can now apply that preset to your video. Then, those settings only available in Develop will be applied to your video.

This is a great workaround. However, Sean McCormack has come up with an even better solution. It is quicker and more elegant. In fact, it’s rather ingenious! Well, I won’t spoil the surprise. Head on over to Sean’s article at pixiq.com and watch the video. I think you’ll be impressed too!

Thanks Sean!

On another note – Sean has been hard at work updating his excellent plugins for Lightroom 4 Beta. Check them out at http://lrbplugins.com/.

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1. Lightroom 4 Tip: New DNG Options
2. Lightroom 4.0 Is Available NOW!
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Happy Birthday Lightroom! How nice of you to give us a gift on your special day!

That’s right, Lightroom 4 Beta is ready for you to play with. You can download your copy at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/. As you discover new things and want to get involved in the conversation then head over to http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/lightroom4/. The Lightroom team is eager to hear what you have to say, good or bad, so don’t be shy!

As a reminder THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE!!!!! So please do not use this against any of your original images. Make separate copies of some images you want to experiment with so that your originals are protected. I can’t stress this enough. Whenever a new Beta is released I hear from a handful of readers who didn’t heed this warning. It’s not always a happy ending. So, one more time, THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE!!!!! OK. Now that that’s out of the way let’s do the quick tour of what’s new in Lightroom 4 Beta!

The broad categories are:

• Better Video Support
• Geolocation capabilities
• Simplified Basic Adjustments
• New Shadow & Highlight controls
• New local adjustments
• Soft Proofing!!!
• Photo Book creation
• Email capabilities

Two new modules!

The new Map module brings elegant geolocation capabilities to Lightroom! Now you can easily:

• Tag images with a location using drag and drop or saved location assignment
• Search for locations
• Create Saved Locations
• Managed privacy settings for saved locations
• Load GPX tracklogs and auto tag images based on date/time stamps

Locations can be defined for a certain radius (1) and images placed on the map are highlighted in the filmstrip (2) when the marker is selected. A preview window is available right on the map (3) and positions and groups are easily identified at a glance (4). This should be loads of fun!

Another highly requested feature makes its appearance with the Book module! Now you can create books right inside Lightroom! And these are state of the art layouts!

• Flexible auto-layout tool with the ability to save and use customized layout presets
• Over 180 professionally designed page layouts
• Intuitive drag and drop behaviors for reordering pages or swapping image locations
• Helpful layout guides and page bleed information
• Incredible flexibility for text and photo cells
• Dynamically located photo captions based on existing metadata or manual text entry
• Powerful type tools
• Customizable background color
• Elegant background graphics to enhance the style of your books
• Tight integration with Blurb book printing service
  • Set size, cover, paper quality directly within Lightroom
  • Price estimate dynamically provided during book creation
• PDF Export options include size, resolution, color profile and output sharpening

And let’s not forget Video! With the proliferation of onboard video in today’s cameras (from point and shoot to professional DSLR) Lightroom is the natural place to store them all.

• Video can now be played within Lightroom
• You can trim the start and end of the video
• Set Video poster frame
• Extract single frames as JPEG files
• Most popular DSLR, compact camera and smart phone video formats supported including AVCHD
• Videos can be adjusted with a subset of the image controls
  • White Balance (JPEG Equivalent)
  • Basic Tone
    • Exposure
    • Contrast
    • White Clipping
    • Black Clipping
    • Saturation
    • Vibrance
  • Tone Curve
  • Color Treatment (HSL)
  • Black and White
  • Split Toning
  • Process Version and Calibration

You won’t have to leave Lightroom to do basic video operations anymore!

It just keeps getting better and better! Remember all those round trips to Photoshop so you could get an accurate soft proof before wasting all that expensive paper? Those days are OVER! Soft proofing has come to Lightroom! I have been waiting for this for soooo long!

• Paper and ink simulation
• Choose between perceptual and relative intent
• Intuitive virtual copy creation for profile-specific adjustments
• Profile and Monitor gamut warnings
• Print module brightness/contrast option to address differences between monitor and paper characteristics

Whew! We’re nowhere near done!

Another of the enhancements that caught my eye is the new direct email capability. Yes, we could export for email before. And we could direct the output to email programs. But now you can set up your native email client as well as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, AOL and go direct!

So easy and quick!

Remember that long scrolling unending list of presets you had to deal with? No longer. Hierarchical presets come to Lightroom.

Much more manageable.

A new Process Version debuts in Lightroom 4 Beta and with it come new features. New local adjustments.

Curves for each channel! Get at your R-G-B channels directly in Lightroom!

There are even more new things to talk about. Here’s a list of the other enhancements in Lightroom 4 Beta:

Develop Module Enhancements

• Simplified controls in the Basic panel
  • Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks
• Powerful, content aware, shadow and highlight controls
• Updated Clarity adjustment for superior results without the artifacts
• Updated Chromatic Aberration correction

Enhanced DNG options

• Embed Fast Load Data options dramatically improves image loading performance in the Develop module
• Lossy compression option provides significant file savings with minimal quality impact. (Ideal for archiving outtakes or reducing the size of time lapse projects without losing the flexibility of raw)
• Resolution reduction via export provides the ability to share lower resolution versions of the original raw file without losing the capabilities offered by raw.
• Metadata and filter options available for DNG file types

Publish Collections can now include video publishing

Export to Adobe Revel (aka Carousel) functionality

Enhanced output model for saving and storing settings used in the Web, Slideshow, Print, and Book modules.

Additional new features:

• New Zoom ratios (1:8 and 1:16)
• Mac version now includes a language selection option via preferences
• Move multiple folders from volume to volume
• White balance sample grid is now zoom-level sensitive
• Noise reduction adjustment is always displayed
• Collapse the tether toolbar down to the shutter button by Option or Alt clicking the close button
• Module picker can be customized
• Saved or unsaved metadata property for filtering
• Hierarchical Develop Preset display in Quick Develop
• Layout overlay for tethered shooting workflow
• Photos in publish collections that have been modified can be set to not republish
• Additional Metadata controls on export
• Disk burning now available on Windows 64-bit systems
• Flag status is now ‘global’ (One setting per image regardless of location in folder or collection)
• Stacking is now possible in collections
• Flash galleries are now color managed
• Per module walkthrough tips

We are going to have a lot of fun exploring all the new features in Lightroom 4 Beta of the next few weeks and months. So what are you waiting for… Download your copy now!

Related posts:

1. Lightroom 4.0 Is Available NOW!
2. Tone and Texture: Exploring Black & White Photography in Lightroom