On the surface the Adobe Bridge, particularly Bridge CS4, looks a lot like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Beneath the surface though there are two fundamental differences. First and foremost, the Bridge is a “browser” which means that you have to tell it where to go when you want to look for your digital media files. Lightroom, on the other hand, is a database. I go to Lightroom and use its search box when I want to find files whose location–the exact sub-folder where the file lives–has slipped out of my memory.

For photographer’s the difference between Bridge, the file browser, and Lightroom, the catalog maker, is most noticeable when you are searching for one particular image. For this example, let’s pretend that you have twenty-thousand images spread across three hard drives and countless sub-folders. Let’s also pretend that every one of these files has been already been connected with your Lightroom database (ie. that we have imported everything) and that all of our files have meaningful metadata.

If we were to use Bridge to search for the one image out of our twenty-thousand that has both the keyword “landscape” and a five-star rating, our search would take the Bridge a very long-time. With enough time the Bridge would eventually discover the appropriate file, but this search is going to take a while. If you were to then decide that you want to see both your four-star and your five-star quality landscapes then the Bridge’s search engine has to start the entire hunt all again. Again the results will be painfully slow.

Bridge’s searches never get any faster because it is simply a browser. As a browser, the Adobe Bridge keeps no records about the metadata that it finds inside of each and every file. With Lightroom though either of these searches would produce almost instantaneous results.

Lightroom would find the appropriate files even if the hard drive where they actually live is not turned on or connected. [Not that this would help you much but Lightroom can index files even if they are "offline.] Lightroom’s search results are blazing fast because its database makes a copy of each and every file’s metadata. Since Lightroom builds its own index, it’s own database, the program does not need to repeatedly crawl through each and every folder on each and every hard drive to fulfill a metadata search query so search results are blazing fast.

Although the Bridge is not an efficient tool for digital image management it is a wonderful tool when you need to connect multiple types of media together. Bridge is the tool of choice for multimedia projects where you need to mix photographs, logos / vector art, audio tracks, and movie clips all into a polished project. Here the Bridge lives up to its name; literally it bridges Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, and InDesign together.

Lightroom, sadly, can only help me find my photographs. All of these other files types are beyond its scope but for folks who do this kind of work the Bridge is critical when we want to connect all these parts together.

Blackberry Farm goes out of it way to make this an incredible field photography experience. Along with their superb cuisine and hospitality, the resort opens the doors to their gourmet kitchen, their incredible wine cellar, and their heirloom farmstead for us to photograph!

“Do I need to buy both Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS4?” Digital photographers ask me this question whenever I give lectures or lead workshops on either program. It’s a good question and one that deserves more than just a simple yes or no answer.

Each program has it’s own strengths, and although the two programs share some common features, they are not competitors. By design, each program fills it’s own unique niche.

Photoshop is the world’s leading pixel manipulator. There is no other program like it for complete control over the look and feel of your digital image. No other program offers the same level of local image repair or allows such artistic creativity. If you can dream it Photoshop can make it happen!

Photoshop rocks, but it is not an organizer of digital images. Photoshop is useless when you need to find your favorite images. Searching, sorting, and organizing are not part of its capabilities. These are Lightroom’s strengths.

Not only can Lightroom help you organize all of your files but it can also help you manage the whole digital imaging workflow. Lightroom is designed to help you from start to finish. You get the most bang for your buck once you learn to use Lightroom to empty your memory card, to sort through your files, to set your initial raw file conversion, and to push the finished product over out to the web or to your printer. Lightroom handles the whole chain of events with speed and grace whereas Photoshop really only functions as an image enhancer.

See the Adobe engineers never meant for one program to replace the other. For someone like me, who needs help both finding and enhancing my files, both program are essential. Knowing how to use them together is even better!

For more on what Lightroom does and how it interacts with Photoshop please click here.

A VC exists only in the Lightroom catalog; it’s simply another instance of the original photo within the database. When you make a VC, there’s no file actually saved on the hard disk unless you Export the VC as a “real” image file. The key benefit of VCs is that you can make multiple variations of an image without taking up any additional disk space.

In general, once you have “finished” a master photo and applied all the adjustments to make it look the way you want, any further modifications for specific purposes (such as printing) should be done using VCs.

For example: many printer/paper combinations produce printed output that is darker and less saturated that what you see on screen. You can make a VC with adjustments to compensate.

To make a VC, right-click or control-click on the photo, and from the popup menu, select Create Virtual Copy. Or press cmd’/ctrl’ (apostrophe). Or choose the command from the Photo menu. The VC will be created in the same Folder and/or Collection as the original with the same adjustment settings as the original. And you can make a copy of a copy with no loss of quality.

In the Library Grid, a Virtual Copy is indicated by a “page turn” icon on the thumbnail.

Once you’ve created your VC, you can adjust it for the print job. Using the previous example, you might increase Brightness, Fill Light and Saturation to improve the printed output.

TIP: Use Quick Develop in the Library module to apply adjustments for print. Quick Develop adjustments are relative, meaning they are applied on top of the values of any existing adjustments.

You can also use VCs for alternate crops/aspect ratios, making triptychs and multi-image layouts, etc. … all without affecting your original master photo.

Lake Alva Montana Star Trail Time-Lapse Photography from David Marx on Vimeo.

So this year I made two gifts lists. The first set are all useful gadgets for time-lapse and night photography. The second set of gift ideas are just general items related to my love for digital photography. I hope these list help you find the perfect gift for your loved ones this holiday season.

Time-Lapse Photography Related Gifts

Black Diamond Gizmo Headlamp

Stumbling around in the dark is dangerous. Put one of these tiny lightweight flashlights on your head instead! A good simple headlamp is a wonderful gift for anyone, but its mandatory equipment for anyone who wants to photograph at night.

Kaiser Hot Shoe Bubble Level

I have been needing a bubble level that attaches to my camera for a long time. These little gizmos are super handy when you are photographing landscape images where the horizon needs to be straight. For star trails and night photography, when its too dark to see the actual horizon, these things are absolutely essential.

Canon TC80N3 Timer Remote Control

A programmable remote timer, and a sturdy tripod, are the essential tools for any type of time-lapse imagery. I picked this intervoltameter since I am a Canon user, but there are equivalent products for all the major camera brands. Basically, you teach the timer to shoot frame after frame for you. One of these gizmos sure beats staying up all night just to click the camera’s shutter button every thirty-seconds.

Other Photography Related Gifts

B&H Gift Card

B&H has everything a photographer could ever want. Their online store is incredibly huge. I know that gift cards are not super personal, but this is a guaranteed winner for any photographer on your list. Gift cards are available in denominations ranging from $20 to $1000.

Botanical Dreaming: Using Photoshop, Your Camera, and Your Heart to Create Inspiring Images

Mark S. Johnson’s images always inspire me. We often promote Mark’s Photoshop e-books on this site. Scott and I agree that his books and classes are a fantastic way to learn Adobe Photoshop, but an e-book is hard to gift wrap and put under a tree. This physical book, though, is a gorgeous gift for anyone with an interest in macro photography and the creative side of Photoshop. Everyone I have ever shown this book to loved it.

The Blackberry Farm Cookbook: Four Seasons of Great Food and the Good Life

Yes, a cookbook is on my gift list for photographers this year. The pictures of farm, garden, kitchen, and table in this book are the work of my good friend Heather Anne Thomas and they are spectacular! Eating and relaxing at the Blackberry Farm resort is truly a unique luxury experience. Flipping through the pages, and the recipes, in this book brings back warm memories of my amazing visits to this one of a kind resort. If you love photography, food, wine, and the beauty of the Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains please check this book out. By the way, Heather Anne and I will be teaching a Behind the Lens: Photography Weekend at Blackberry in early March 2010. Space is limited. Come experience the good life with us!

Rocky Mountain School of Photography Workshop Gift Certificates

Is someone on your list interested in mastering Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or interested in learning some advanced Photoshop techniques? Gift certificates for my workshops at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula, Montana are now available online. I’ll be leading weeklong workshops on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom v3 in April, August and October. I am also leading an Advanced Photoshop for Photographers workshop in April where we will cover sophisticated techniques like time-lapse photography, creating three-dimensional imagery, and some of the amazing uses for smart objects. Visit RMSP.com for more details.

So far this list has been pretty self-centered. It’s been all about my material wishes, but this year it seems more important than ever to think of others. Personally, I feel good when I give to community improvement charities like The United Way, The American Red Cross, and to environmental groups like The Nature Conservancy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. There are lots of good causes out there though. In closing, I encourage you to visit CharityNavigator.org, to do your own research, and to give what you can to those who need it most this holiday season.

Best Wishes,

David Marx

Here’s a link for the upgrade from Lightroom v1 to v2 only.

Answer: You cannot install Lightroom v2. on a Mac running the Snow Leopard Operating System (OS X 10.6) from the original CD but don’t panic! To solve this problem, you just need to download the latest version of Lightroom from Adobe and then everything should work fine.

This link should take you right to Adobe’s download page where you can find the most recent version of Lightroom.

If you need more help please check out this installation support doc from Adobe.

Amazon

Apple

Looking for a new Mac? Have you read our Fall 2009 computer recommendations for photographers yet?

B&H

Shopping for camera gear? Follow this banner ad for holiday deals and specials from B&H.

Acronis

For a limited time Acronis is offering a 20% discount on Acronis True Image Home 2010 which is my favorite backup software for the PC. Click here to learn more about my backup system.

Coupon code is: BFATIH10

Happy Holidays from all of us at the Lightroom Lab!

Most Lightroom users already know that adding metadata adds value to your photographs and that keywords are one of the cornerstones of an efficient searchable image organization system. Not to toot my own horn, but I can find any image in my catalog, any image out of the twenty-five thousand on my hard drive, in milliseconds thanks to keywords.

Everybody loves what keywords do, but most folks dread the data-entry time required to add them into each and every image. I think that most Lightroom users dread the data-entry time required to keyword their images for two reasons; a, because they lack an efficient keywording strategy and b, because they are unaware of the huge speed-boost that is hidden inside of the keyword sets feature.

Ready to see what keyword sets do?

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Keyword Sets from David Marx on Vimeo.

Now, would you like some advice on an effective keywording strategy?

I believe that every image needs at least two keywords.  The more words we add the better but at a minimum we must have two.  In my system, every image needs at least one keyword that places it into a broad category and at least one keyword that is a specific descriptive term.

If I could talk to you before you start using Lightroom, I would urge you to take out a piece of scrap paper and to write down a brief description of your photographic work. I would urge you to write just one simple paragraph about what you do with your camera because you can’t design an efficient strategy until you can describe your work in terms of the essential questions: who, what, why, and how do you photograph? The idea here is to come up with a short vocabulary list that describes all of your images; simple words that describe your style or specialties.

I use words like “landscape,” “portrait,” “architecture,” and “macro” for my categories.  Everything that I have ever photographed fits into at least one of these broad categories.  If an image crosses the lines between categories then by all means use more than one word.  For pictures of people working or playing in the outdoors, both the words “portrait” and “landscape” are descriptive terms that make sense. A close-up of an animal is a “wildlife” shot but the same animal with lots of its surroundings deserves the keywords “wildlife” and “landscape.”

On my first pass, I would add just these simple categorical keywords into every image, but wait….  These broad category terms make for easy searches, but adding them to every image would be a very tedious chore if I had to type each word in over and over again. Yes, it is true that Lightroom has lots of features that speed up keywording–smart typing and the painter tool–but none of these tools are as powerful as a keyword set.

I made my life easy by building and saving my “Styles of Photography” keyword set before I attempted to add meaningful keywords to thousands of images. I suggest that you do the same. Our categories may differ, but once your “categories keyword set” is built adding any of these keywords to an image is push-button simple.

Literally, all I had to do to add these terms to thousands of photographs was to select the appropriate files and then push the right button. Lightroom did all of the typing!

Yes, clicking on one of these words / buttons in the Keywords Panel is fast but there’s another secret. Using keyword sets becomes incredibly efficient, faster even than a mouse click, once you learn the ALT + a NUMBER trick.  Combo this trick with block selection skills and you can fly through thousands of images in no time!

ALT + the appropriate NUMBER = the keyboard shortcut for any keyword in the set

Remember when I said that every image needs a minimum of two keywords? Well, the “Styles of Photography” set only covers my broadest terms. The real beauty of keyword sets only becomes apparent when you build additional sets for your more detailed image specific keywords.

Think about the two terms needed to describe, and thus to instantly find, a picture of someone in your family. The broad categorical keyword would obviously be something like “portrait,” but the specific descriptor would have to be the persons name. With portraits, what could be more specific than the person’s full legal name?

In keeping with this logic, I suggest building a keyword set for the members of your family / your closest friends / all of the really specific things that you photograph repeatedly. Typing my father’s name; “Marx Alan,” or my sisters name “Marx Julia,” into the “Add Keywords Here Box” in Lightroom is a waste of time. Entering family members names by-hand is a total waste of time because; a, I will need to use them again and again and b, because they all start with the same word so the smart typing feature is of little use.

Rather than wasting time typing these words in again and again, I built a keyword set for “the members of my family.” Yes, I have thousands of family photos and each one is keyworded with the persons name, but thanks to keyword sets I only had to type the full legal name into the computer once. Again, keyword sets and the ALT + a number trick to the rescue!

Do you see the logic to this system yet? When I do a search for images with the keyword “portrait,” I’m looking for all my people pictures. On the other hand, when I do a keyword search for a person by “last name [space] first name” Lightroom will instantly show me only the images that feature this one particular person!

At this point, I need to let you in on one more secret. You can switch from one keyword set to another without taking your hands off the keyboard! Alt + 0 (the zero key) moves you from one keyword set to the next in alphabetical order. ALT + SHIFT + 0 moves you from set to set in reverse alphabetical order.

Now if you are clever, and you remember Lightroom’s obsession with alphabetizing, you could easily line your keyword sets up so that they follow a loose logical order just by putting numbers in front of the set’s name. If you add numbers to the front of the set names then the ALT + 0 trick will move you through your keyword sets in the right order!

Before you get carried away though please let me caution you about creating too many sets. My worry here is that some folks are going to waste a lot of time creating buttons for keywords that they rarely use.  If it’s not a term that you use often– hundreds or thousands of times–then please don’t bother storing it in a keyword set.

The members of my family, or the varieties of skiing that I photograph everyday, are worth the time it takes to make a keyword set because I will use thse words again and again.  People, even models, that I only photograph once are not. I certainly keyword people that I photograph only once with “portrait” and with the person’s full legal name; I need to know who they are both for my own sanity and for legal model release purposes, but there is no reason to make their names into keyword set buttons.  Making buttons for words that you don’t use repeatedly is just wasting time.

Once you have the ground floor (the category of imagery) and the top floor (the persons name, etc.) on every image then you can go back and spend more time adding in additional keywords.  Again, the more keywords the better but adding lots of words takes time so on your first pass add in only the most essential information.  Thanks to keyword sets, and a little planning, this couldn’t be easier!

If you need written instructions on how to build and save keyword sets I recommend reading these posts:

• Keyword Sets from Sean McCormack
• Adding Keywords Sets from Erik Bernskiold

John Beardsworth post is designed for the “slightly less new” Lightroom user, but like Mr. Kelby’s I believe that this article is also well worth your time.

On a personal note, I am delighted to see that John Beardsworth agrees with me about the potential headaches that multiple catalogs can create for both novice and experienced Lightroom users.

I am also delighted with Mr. Beardsworth second point: “Unless you really know what you’re doing, never use Explorer or Finder for moving or renaming files that are catalogued in Lightroom” since I recorded a tutorial on this very topic just a few months ago. You can see my tutorial on Moving Folders within Adobe Photoshop Lightroom here.

Adobe has posted the release candidate versions of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6 and Camera Raw 5.6 on the Adobe Labs website. The direct links to information and download are http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Lightroom_2.6 and http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.6.

The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that these updates are well-tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

If you do experience an issue with this release candidate please report it here: Bug Report Form

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6 Release Candidate

Installing the Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate

• Mac: The Mac Lightroom 2.6 release candidate can be installed alongside Lightroom 2.5.
• Windows: By default, this Lightroom 2.6 release candidate will remove or overwrite your existing Lightroom 2.5 installation. If you wish to return to Lightroom 2.5 after installing Lightroom 2.6, simply reinstall Lightroom 2.5 from your original download after uninstalling Lightroom 2.6 using the Windows add/remove program utility.

Both versions of the application share the same catalog format allowing your catalogs to be opened by either version without complications.

Release Notes

Here are the release notes from Adobe:

Bugs – Fixed

• Lightroom 2.6 also provides a a fix for an issue affecting PowerPC customers using the final Lightroom 2.5 update on the Mac. The issue, introduced in the demosaic change to address sensors with unequal green response, has the potential to create artifacts in highlight areas when processing raw files from Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and various medium format digital camera backs.

Camera Support

Newly supported camera models include:

• Canon EOS 7D
• Canon PowerShot G11
• Canon PowerShot S90
• Leaf Aptus II 5
• Mamiya DM22, DM28, DM33, DM56, M18, M22, M31
• Nikon D3s
• Olympus E-P2
• Pentax K-x
• Panasonic FZ38
• Sigma DP1s
• Sony A500
• Sony A550
• Sony A850

Download

Lightroom 2.6 Release Candidate for Macintosh and Windows.

Adobe Camera Raw 5.6 Release Candidate

New camera support and bug fixes for the Camera Raw 5.6 Release Candidate are the same as those for the Lightroom 2.6 release listed above.

Download

• Camera Raw 5.6 plug-in for Mac and Windows.
• DNG Converter 5.6 for Mac and Windows.

Installation

Windows® and Mac:

1. Exit Photoshop CS4 and Adobe Bridge.
2. Open the download file and follow the on-screen instructions

Your Thoughts?

If you install these release candidates, please let us know in the comments if you see any improvements or issues. Thanks.

Here’s a link to the new Adobe Lightroom 3 beta help site.

Here’s a video tour for their website.

StartHere from ASMP dpBestflow on Vimeo.

This project comes from some of the best minds in the industry and it was created with the support of the Library of Congress. I urge all of our readers to spend a little time exploring this amazing new site. Thanks to the ASMP for sharing this incredible resource.

On a personal note, I had chance to meet Mr. Jay Kinghorn, one of the projects creators yesterday, and he is awesome. Check out his book on Perfect Digital Photography.

I hope that you will take a minute to enjoy these landscape and whitewater rafting photographs from my river trips through Grand Canyon National Park.

Grand Canyon National Park – Images by David Marx

For fine-art prints, or stock photography licensing rights, please visit www.davidmarx.com.  Thanks for watching.

I should add that I agree with all of Scott Kelby’s points, except where he suggests using multiple catalogs. On this, we must respectfully disagree.

In my opinion, most photographers, especially folks new to the Lightroom Catalog paradigm, need to create one single catalog for all of their digital images. My experience teaching thousands has convinced me that using multiple catalogs is counter-productive, and that it only creates unnecessary confusion. Despite this minor disagreement, I sure am grateful to Scott Kelby, and to the NAPP, for all of their educational efforts.