Fri Jul 03, 2009
Dragging from History
Well, I could tart this up as a Lightroom tip, which it is, but I should confess that no matter how well you know something, there's a lot that passes you by. Credit for this is due to Rob Sylvan of Lightroomers.
I frequently use the Develop workspace's Before/After view, usually via the shortcuts Y and Shift Y, and often switch the Before view to whatever helps me judge further edits. It's a very powerful feature when you're fine tuning a picture. Mostly, I'll right click in the After pane and then choose Copy After's Settings to Before, or I might click the corresponding button at the bottom of the screen. But I'll also want to benchmark further work against earlier steps, in which case I'll right click in History and select Copy History Step's Settings to Before.
What Rob pointed out was this - you can actually drag and drop from the History panel to the Before pane. I'm a big fan of drag and drop in interfaces and it's something that seems conspicuously absent in Lightroom, but don't you think this is handy to know?
As for the picture I'm using here, it is a recent one and unusually for me is named with something other than a simply descriptive "Great Barford 2009" or "Musketeers". Even as I set it up I was thinking "17th Century Gothic". It couldn't be called anything else, could it?
Thu Jul 02, 2009
Don't ask, don't tell
I really enjoyed reading David Ward's The Landscape Beyond during my recent trip to the Lake District. Apart from enjoying the photographs by this "t-shirt winning professional landscape photographer working on large format", what stuck with me most was his comment about landscape photographers being inordinately concerned with the location where a picture was made.
I couldn't find the quote just now and will add it later (the book's worth another read) but this picture which isn't in the book really illustrates the point. Can you guess where it was taken? Does it remotely matter?
Permalink - Photo links - 1 comments
Wed Jul 01, 2009
Oh wonderful law of unintended consequences!
Well, the original motivation behind my 5th (released) Lightroom plug-in Open Directly was that it was for the rare times when I want to use Nikon Capture. Clunk clunk went the thought processes and it readily morphed into sending files to any raw converter, then predictably into something that let you choose from up to 6 converters. That seam of ideas seeming exhausted, I turned to polishing up the details like new version warnings and removing unwanted editors.
When - wham. Why just raw converters? The plug-in is sending one command line per image, and while programs like Excel might be a bit flummoxed to receive a batch of DNG files, other applications might react a bit more favourably.
So here one editor is Mac's Mail application. In this case it generates one email per file and attaches the original. So, assuming you do want to send originals such as Photoshop-finished large JPEGs, there's now no need to create export versions. While the subject and recipient are missing, that could easily be handled by a spin-off plug-in.... HoudahGeo or Expression Media work equally well with this plug-in.
Shortcuts
Matt, the PhotoGeek, shows how to accelerate access to Lightroom Plugin Extras:
If your directory does contain a TranslatedStrings.txt file:
1. Open TranslatedStrings.txt in a text file editor
2. Search for the string "AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras"
3. If the string does exist, add an ampersand (&) into the text following the equals (=) sign. This should be placed immediately before the character you want to be the accelerator. e.g.
"$$$/AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras=Plug-in Extras" would become "$$$/AgSdkMenus/Menu/PluginExtras=Plug-in Extra&s" to make s the accelerator character
I'd also wondered why Adobe didn't give Plug-in Extras their own an accelerator key, so from now all my plug-ins will be written with this tip in mind. In the medium term though, surely we'll be able to add menus exactly where we think is appropriate.
Here is my own TranslatedStrings.txt file. I've used "u" as the shortcut because Matt's choice of "s" works for File>Plug-in Extras but not for the Library>Plug-in Extras menu (because it's already assigned to Synchronize). My file also corrects the Ansel-Adams-corpse-spinning use of "grayscale". Apologies for the language, "g***scale", I mean.
Mon Jun 29, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #5 - Open Directly
I rarely feel the need to edit a raw file in Nikon Capture, and I don't find much advantage from doing so. In my case, it's an admission of defeat while in others' I suspect it's a dubious faith in the camera makers' secret sauce.
But whatever the reason for wanting to open a raw file in another converter, it's still somewhat irritating that Lightroom's Edit With command doesn't simply send the raw file to Nikon Capture, DPP, PhaseOne or whatever. Instead it sends a TIF file. So you're forced to go to the raw file(s) in Explorer/Finder, and then launch the other program. Alternatively, you can use Export to copy the file and specify the converter as the post processing step.
So, Open Directly is a Lightroom plug-in that opens raw files directly in another raw converter. This version expires on 7th July, after which it'll be a paid version. Any thoughts?
Update June 30th
Thanks to the feedback, I've just uploaded a revised version:
- no longer restricted to raw files
- can also be launched from File > Plug-in Extras
- up to 6 raw converters (or any other program) can be specified
Permalink - Lightroom plug-ins - 39 comments
Sun Jun 28, 2009
Rock of ages
Not been to Stonehenge for a few years but my friend Jeff is in town (playing with the Dave Matthews Band) so we've been "hanging out". Yesterday his girlfriend and Tim the guitarist squeezed into the back of the Beardymobile and off we headed to the stone age to see some real rock stars. Funniest thing all day was the pub landlady making small talk and asking if we were on the way down to Glastonbury - the guys were much too modest to tell her they were actually supporting Springsteen in Hyde Park this evening.
A couple of things really struck me as having changed since my last visit. One was the number of eastern European languages I overheard, rather than the old mix of western Europeans and Japanese, but the big one was the introduction of audio headsets and the obligation that many visitors seemed to feel for letting them set the pace of their Stonehenge experience. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised though - I often wonder how mankind succeeded in walking before we learnt to hold mobile phones to our ears.
No doubt I'll have other, more morose reflections tonight. We're seeing Jeff play this evening, and it's almost 30 years since the last time I saw Springsteen.... Hell, it was in another millennium too.
Permalink - My photography - 3 comments
Wed Jun 24, 2009
Blurb now take PDFs
The Secret's Out: PDF to Book is Here:
Here's how this works: we provide you with our pre-made templates for Adobe InDesign, or you can use our pre-determined guidelines and specs for all our book sizes and cover types. Design your book from cover to cover in CMYK and use any native file formats (TIFF, EPS, PNG, etc) for stunning text and image quality. With PDF to Book you can also wrap your cover image, or add an image, to the spine of your book. Did we mention this is complete creative control? Rich colors, sharp text, full flexibility - PDF to Book is unlike anything Blurb has offered before.
I haven't got many more excuses for delaying now, have I?
Tue Jun 23, 2009
Where's the beef?
Ars Technica reports Expression Media ripped out of Microsoft Expression Studio:
Expression Media, Microsoft's digital asset management software for cataloging photos, video and music, will continue to be available as a standalone product but will no longer ship with Expression Studio, effective with the upcoming Expression Studio 3 release. Microsoft will continue to market Expression Media to digital photographers, who make up the largest customer base for this product, and will continue to invest in digital photography. Expression Studio and Expression Media will be sold separately.
Despite the headline, that's not necessarily bad news. Equally, it's not good either - it's simply impossible to know whether Expression Media has much of a future. It's now 3 years since Microsoft bought iView, and the longer they fail to drive the product forward and deliver an exciting new version, the less relevant it will inevitably become.
For instance, only yesterday Jeffrey Friedl released a Lightroom plug-in which allows you to catalogue video files in Lightroom, so how much longer will it be until he or someone else includes all file types?
Or here is a screenshot of my own plug-in which adds user-definable custom fields to Lightroom and includes read/write from XML. Those two features mean I'm just a short step for DAMkind away from reading iView/xMedia data exports and writing to Lightroom custom fields. Could do it now, in fact. Even if I never release that plug-in, I could use it for my own final move away from xMedia and that would be another advocate gone. Disinterring my old analogy of DAM and serial monogamy, how often do lost loves ever come back?
Mon Jun 22, 2009
New or lazy?
Black Star suggests Five Reasons War Photographers Are an Endangered Species and at number 2 is:
"New" journalism. "New" journalists much prefer to set up Google alerts, check Twitter and log into Facebook than to lift their asses from their chairs and report on a story themselves. Twitter's success is at least partly a result of how broadly the media are using it. You have a greater chance to be published these days if you have a Twitter account than if you send a video to CNN iReport. Why should these journalists bother leaving the comfort of their cubicles if everything is delivered in their desktop?
Don McCullin knows a thing or two about the issue and puts the blame on governments preventing journalists seeing what they're up to in Gaza, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan - or in his case, the Falklands back in 1982.
In some way, it all seems a bit "things ain't what the used to be". Maybe technology is letting those actually involved in events capture, and report, the bleeding edge of the story with an unmatchable immediacy. Just think back to 7/11, Abu Ghraib, the City of London, or Tehran right now. Yet even under tight government control, aren't pros still able to add a distinctive voice - see this post or this.
McCullin has done his shift and no longer goes to war, but his non war work is every bit as wonderful. If you're able to get to the National Media Museum in Bradford, there's currently an exhibition of McCullin's English pictures. Somehow I thought it hadn't yet opened, so didn't break my recent journey up to the Lakes, but it's on till late September. For now I'll content myself with this podcast accompanying the show.
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
DPi and an announcement
Last week's DPI show was fun. Only doing one platform session a day, it was a lot less arduous than the three daily sessions I did at Focus, and it meant I spent my time doing Q&A on Lightroom and Photoshop. Working one to one, or with small groups, you're able to establish their needs and explain in real detail, and you feel they go away knowing exactly what they're going to do next. In many cases, that was to buy Lightroom or to use my favourite features - Auto Sync above all.
Anyway, I didn't get much time to go round the other stands, but I did have a closer look at Blurb's books than I'd managed at Focus. I've still not got round to finishing the Civil War book, other things getting in the way, but I was again very impressed with the quality and have got to get mine done. But most of all, I learnt something that really delighted me - this week Blurb are going to..... Oops, I'd better point you to Blurb's blog:
We’ll be celebrating a HUGE announcement happening the 24th from Blurb Headquarters that we think you’ll flip over.
Now what can that be?
Sun Jun 21, 2009
Flash and Google
For anyone with Flash on their website, or those of us endlessly putting off the day of launching our Flash sites, last week there was an interesting post on Google's webmaster blog. The title Flash indexing with external resource loading may not be too catchy, but the post quickly gets to the point :
We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file - whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc. - we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
On the horizon for a while,this is enabled by default, but if you don't want it you can block it with robots.txt. What's more Google don't mention any caveats such as the version of Flash - on the contrary, they say it'll work regardless of Actionscript version.
Via SlideShowPro.
Mon Jun 15, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #4 updated again
Version 1.0.4 of my search and replace plug-in adds copying data between fields. So if you want to copy the filename to the title field, or as shown here add the contents of two fields, this tool can handle many of the basic tasks.
One thing worth knowing is that Lightroom's SDK has a very clever feature that most other scripting environments ignore - code-driven changes to field values can be undone by the user. So f you put incorrect data into a field, it doesn't matter if you did it the usual way or via a plugin. On the other hand, it's also worth adding that I may have found a bug where undo fails to restore previous data in the title field. Other fields appear to be OK, but I'll update this once I know more.
Fri Jun 12, 2009
Zipping Lightroom backup files
While Lightroom's backup files are self-standing catalogues, and can be run without any further fuss, they do take up a lot of disc space - until you realise how much they shrink when zipped. I've always zipped them because of this space issue, but another reason requires me to break a little confidence.... A while ago I met someone who had double clicked his backup catalogue files and had managed to get new pictures into the backups and into his master catalogue, insofar as it was possible to identify one in the hundred or so he had accumulated.
Anyway, The Photo Geek (Matt Dawson) has developed a handy plugin for zipping Lightroom's backup files:
One obvious downside of backing up is the increased consumption of disk. For example my backups for a ~10000 photo catalog are around 220Mb each. Multiply that by 52 backups a year and 11Gb of my laptop’s limited disk capacity is spent on something I’ll hopefully never need to use. Compressing each backup is an effective way to combat this, and in my experience catalogs zip to approximately 10% of their original size, but it is yet another task you need to undertake to keep disk space under control.
[So] I’ve developed a Config Backup plugin to help speed up and simplify backing up and compressing Lightroom files.
Automatically zipping the backups would have saved his proverbial bacon (though I'm confident he would have found another way to choke on his breakfast).
Thu Jun 11, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #4 - search and replace
Updated the search and replace plug-in so it now previews the results of what you're doing:
I suspect I've worked out any bugs and glitches, so this plugin is out of its funky orange jump suit and "released".
Tue Jun 02, 2009
SlideShowPro 1.96
SlideShowPro's latest update is a bit more significant than most - it introduces a "Ken Burns" pan and zoom effect - so I'm downloading it right now. A Lightroom version of this is here now.
Mon Jun 01, 2009
The camera or the photographer?
Wouldn't normally comment about Saturday's FA Cup Final (I couldn't be bothered watching it), let alone show a picture of Chelsea winning an egg cup, but noticed a Times sports photographer had had a surprise :
The FA Cup Final lap of honour had descended into the usual chaos. After the presentation in the royal box and then posing for the official team picture with the trophy, the winning side always run to their fans to show off the famous old trophy. I was among a mass of photographers in front of the Chelsea supporters taking pictures of the team when I noticed Michael Essien doing the same on a camera that looked familiar.
I realised it was the camera I use to take pictures from behind the goal with remote transmission. My first thought was horror. "S***. God, please don’t drop it."
Would any press snapper have got these pics?
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
The Life of Buddha?
Oh dear - Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhist order:
As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation - and some embarrassment - for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.
Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha. Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls.
Lightroom Plug-in #4 - search and replace
The term Release Candidate reminds me as much of Ronnie Biggs' impending release from jail, but here is a Release Candidate of BeardyReplace, a Lightroom 2.3 plug-in designed for changing text in Metadata Panel fields. It does two things:
1. Searches and replaces metadata text
2. Appends text to metadata
"Search and replace" hunts through the chosen field for a word or phrase, and replaces all its occurrences with alternative text. So for instance, you may have some images captioned with "Close-up of columns at Paestum" and others with "Frontal view of columns at the Capitol, Washington DC". How do you insert the word "Doric"? You could select the first group, then add it, and then do the same to the second group. Well, this command lets you search for the word "columns" and replace it with "Doric columns".
"Append" adds extra text to the chosen field, either before or after the text. For example, imagine some of images’ captions are "Close-up of columns at Paestum" and others have "Overview of temple at Paestum", how do you add the text ", Campania, Italy” to all images? Instead, you can use this command to add the text ", Campania, Italy" to both groups at the same time.
The plug-in targets images in the same way as Lightroom. If you have selected some items, then it will only update them. If you have no images selected, it assumes all visible images should be targeted.
It is a demo version, and I'll probably make the unlimited version available through e-junkie. $10? Any thoughts?
Note for coders or Mac users wondering why nothing's happening
One little oddity / annoyance is that after you enter some text, on Mac you have to tab out of the text box to make the button active (on PC, it's normal - you just click the button). It all comes down to how the text entry boxes "lose focus" and therefore make the button available, and the answer is on p71 of the SDK manual:
There is a platform difference in the focus behavior:
➤ In Windows, the control loses focus when the user clicks outside it.
➤ In Mac OS, it loses focus when the user uses TAB to shift the focus, not when the
user clicks outside the control.
Are you going to Appleby Fair?
This picture reminds me of a Cartier Bresson image - which of course I can't find when I want it - but it's actually from Dave Thomas' fine 1969-70 series on the Appleby Horse Fair, an annual event up in the Lake District:
The Romany horse fair at Appleby is the largest and most important in the history of travellers' gatherings in England, dating back to 1685, when James II granted a charter granting the right to hold one there, on a site "near to the River Eden". Since that time, in the month of June, travellers have converged on Appleby, not just from England, but from Scotland, Wales and Ireland too. They gather in caravans and vardos on Fair Hill, to celebrate their history, music, folklore and family relationships, but most importantly to trade and barter in livestock.
The relationship with the townspeople of Appleby has always been ambiguous. On the one hand the travellers are welcomed for the commercial revenue they bring, on the other they are regarded as some sort of alien invasion. The meeting grounds between settled and nomadic cultures have often provided points of friction, but contemporary materialism seems to heighten the sense of dislocation. The love of hunting, the closeness to nature, the breeding of horses and dogs also form part of a rich tradition that seems increasingly alienated from mainstream culture.
The horse fair still happens every June (official site) and is just a short drive from where I stay. In fact, it starts later this week....
Permalink - Lake District - 4 comments
Fri May 29, 2009
Silence is golden
Mike Kobal has a lovely example of what you can do with a video DSLR and a bit of imagination:
Got the idea after stumbling across Buster Keaton clips. Arri lights, black backdrop, Lensbabies with plastic lens, single glass and double glass. I really like the plastic lens effect, gives a nice glow. Of course this can be done in post, just does not look the same and takes a lot longer. This session was a lot of fun, this is Lee at her best! Nikon D90.
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
Mon May 25, 2009
Tim Rudman
Tim Rudman's name is probably familiar to anyone interested in b&w darkroom technique, especially toning. While I've liked his work for longer than I remember, I always assumed he didn't have his own web site. Well, he's got a new-looking one here that's well-worth visiting.
I chose this shot from his Iceland page (makes me want to get back there) but also love some of the Montana winter series here.
Permalink - Photo links - 4 comments
Fri May 22, 2009
The blog's left hand column...
... now includes the latest images that I've uploaded to the site.
While one thinks of SlideShowPro as a Flash component, their SlideShowPro Director manages your web site's content and serves up different sizes of images to both Flash and regular HTML pages. Here I'm using a few features in conjunction:
- The Lightroom-Director export plug-in makes it easy to upload 2000-pixel JPEGs directly from Lightroom
- I've a smart album in Director which automatically displays new pictures in the New Photos page's Flash movie
- My Flash site also shows the pictures at the size it needs, so it'll be easy to maintain both Flash and more Google-friendly HTML content
- Here on the blog page I'm using the Director API to show images at 150 pixels wide (follow the more link for my commented code) - Director generates all these different sizes as required
While the long-fabled Flash site is moving forward again, its continually being almost-ready has had a pretty-constipating effect on the old-style photo galleries. So I've now begun replacing them with Director-driven galleries which means a load of newer images are now in the American Civil War, the Napoleonic era, the 20th century, and some such as this one of Hastings 1066 in the Medieval gallery. Time travel beckons....
Thu May 21, 2009
Nikon matters
Thom Hogan reviews the new Nikon 50mm f/1.4G AF-S as a "solid portrait lens for DX users, solid fast normal lens for FX users." Faint praise indeed, but what really rang true was this paragraph:
On a big D3-type of body, the lens almost disappears. I kept finding that I wanted to reach further forward than the lens extended in order to grab the focus ring. Nevertheless, you'll adjust. But my point is that 10 ounces and a couple of inches just doesn't feel like it adds to the bulk and weight of the big pro bodies; it almost feels like you're shooting without a lens.
I had actually been wondering about replacing my old 35-70mm zoom, and this 50mm would fit very snugly between the 17-35mm and 70-200mm f2.8 G series lenses in my usual bag. But since getting the D700, the 1.4x converter's reach hasn't seemed long enough, and this weekend's trip back to the 17th century made a 2x teleconverter the more pressing "need". Picking one up at Grays last weekend (already I'm wondering about putting it on the D200 and having the equivalent of 560mm...), I did get a good look at the 50mm and I had exactly the same feeling as Hogan. I was good, and resisted the temptation, but how inevitable is it
that those either "either/or" decisions end up as "both"?The other Nikon snippet is a quick plug for View NX, Nikon's freebie browser. I've had it installed since I got the D200, but used it rarely and didn't bother updating it after getting the D700. So I had no idea that View NX 1.3 includes simple geotagging.
It won't merge a GPX track log, but does allow you to mark locations through a Google Maps window and update EXIF data. I'll still prefer Geosetter or HoudahGeo - they also include reverse geocoding - but I've never trusted them sufficiently to update Nikon's mystery meat raw files and always preferred to use them on DNGs. But it's (yet) another option.
Mon May 18, 2009
Does size matter?
Lens is the new photojournalism blog of The New York Times which draws not just on current work but also on a particularly rich archive. The latter, with material such as this study of Bob Marley in 1976 or Dealing With Foreclosure (1933) should be particularly worthwhile.
Accompanying some lovely b&w work, Fred Conrad writes:
One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.
When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It’s very liberating.
You know, I think that's pretty true of any sort of camera.
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
Sun May 17, 2009
Blur with Clarity
Maybe I'm unable to appreciate the subtleties he's trying to express, but I was somewhat underwhelmed with both of Alain Briot's essays on in-camera blurred landscapes (part 1 and part 2). Such images "need to rely both on color, placement of elements and use of shapes and lines to be successful", "the type of light you use is very important", "good processing is crucial", and "setting the black, white and the grey points precisely is crucial to the success, or failure, of these images". Well, I never. But then at last there is something specific to camera-blurred images:
I found that using a [Photoshop] high pass contrast filter on top of the image, after all the adjustment layers are completed, helps a lot in defining the detail level of the image.
Because these images are by nature less detailed, sometimes increasing the level of detail is necessary. This helps bring up the interest level in the image as well as make the image more engaging visually for the viewer. Of course adding details is not possible. All we can do is increase what is there. We cannot add anything new. And again increasing what is there through sharpening only takes us so far since there is little detail to start with.
This is where High Pass Contrast processing comes in. This approach basically increases the local contrast between objects, or more appropriately here between the different areas of color and contrast. In effect, to my eyes, it increases the contrast of the lines in the image, the black level of these lines I think.
I do something very similar - but in Lightroom. Its Clarity setting has pretty well the same effect.
Here it is set to 100, which is unusually high for me, and in this case I've also given it a second dose using a gradient filter over the whole image (the same technique as in my Ultra Clarity preset, only with a single gradient). Normally I wouldn't go anywhere near that far, and a much more moderate Clarity setting is usually all that one of these blurred image needs (or can stand).
The picture, if you're interested, shows the Kingston Lacy beech avenue which runs for over 2 miles along the busy main road between Blandford and Wimborne in Dorset, and it's a well known location (see one example) that couldn't be much more perfect for the exercise-averse photographer. You park right by the trees, prise your backside from your Recaro bucket seats and you're all set to go....
Sat May 16, 2009
Thoughts on learning Lua
No, I'm not going to write any tutorials, but Sean suggested writing some thoughts on learning Lua for Lightroom....
Getting this far with Lua has been a real struggle. I am not a trained programmer like Jeffrey Friedl. I know no C, C++, Cocoa etc, so I don't know if Lua is easy for people with such a background (though it heartened me when he described Lua as "horrid"). But I do have a lot of experience of the various flavours of Microsoft VB and VBA, and of JavaScript, PHP, AppleScript, ActionScript 2 and 3, and other useful technologies like XML, SQL etc, all self taught. That brings a confidence that things should be possible, which just about overcomes the why the bloody hell should I add features that should have been there in the first place? So over the last year the effort has been pretty sporadic, learning bits and having something interesting, and then I found something much better to do with my time.
I've always liked Microsoft's approach to scripting professional applications - the Office suite being the prime example. There's an assumption that you've got to enable the end users to do it themselves. In Cubicleland you don't want to wait for the IT guys to write that code to automate your budgeting spreadsheet or interface with the MRP system. Bringing in a programmer means jumping through authorisation hoops, and inevitably you'll find yourself left with something you can't tweak as you perceive the task has nuances you hadn't anticipated. Rely on self-interest and provide a user-friendly language and tools, and the end user should be able to do the job. That's how I began going off the rails.
In InDesign and Photoshop, Adobe provide the perfect triangle of scripting languages, VB+JS+AS, so you can automate and streamline your work. Integration with the non-Adobe world is enabled with two platform specific languages, while cross-platform functionality is there for an Adobe-centric workflow. Imagine how great that would be for Lightroom. Someone somewhere would make Photoshop do something like apply NoiseWare or other noise reduction to a batch of images with different settings for differing ISOs. Or say you wanted to bring into Lightroom all that metadata originally entered in Aperture or that is now in the Excel data exported by some other DAM. Again, one VB or JS or AS script could do the job, and if the coding hits a problem there would be a world of experience and existing code and examples that even an ex-accountant could adapt.
Lua by comparison is a niche language, and what documentation exists is written for programmers. You have to write the code in glorified text editors rather than helpful development environments such as Microsoft's VB IDE, and when there's a syntax error it's in gobbledegook that's only intelligible once you have enough experience not to have made the mistake in the first place. Lightroom's SDK is also mainly targeted at the developer, provides just half a dozen examples, while you can't learn by taking apart other plug-ins because everyone's encrypting them.
But Lua is not going away, and after a load of grumbling I usually snap (and funnily enough, as I added that link I realised that I'm wearing my Mt St Helens t shirt).
So what I've been doing over the last year is attacking Lua every so often. You also need to approach from a number of directions until the penny drops. Once you've got the SDK, I would suggest customizing a copy of the web template. As it's in Lua, it will get you familiar with the syntax and structure. It also has HTML and CSS elements, so you're not totally on foreign territory, and you can focus your efforts on producing something you can use. In my case I just adapted the built-in web template so my online contact sheets have star ratings to help draw attention to the best images (as if they won't do so themselves!).
Second, look at customizing the FTP client that's provided in the SDK. That exposes you to how export plug-ins work, and also to the way the Plug-In Manager works.
The third area of the SDK is custom metadata, and again there's an example which you need to tear apart and put back together again. Here you can add new fields to the catalogue, new metadata panels, Library Filter columns, and Smart Collection criteria. This area is where I've spent most of my real effort, and it typifies something I dislike about Lua - that you need to proceed by trial and error. Change a line, reload the plug-in, see if you've broken anything, hope the error message is remotely decipherable, and then see if it still does what it's supposed to do. Only then is the SDK documentation and attempt to marry up its descriptions to what you think you've just done.
That's not the only reason I keep both the SDK PDF and the API html open all the time - it's also so you can see what else is in the toolbox. For example, while writing the last few days' plughini I noticed that you can code the progress bar. While that's off the critical path for now, sometimes the really hard bit is realising that something can be done. So look at others' plugins, and note what is possible.
So a lot of of the learning process is about taking apart a series of substantially-discrete components. Adding custom fields, reading and writing fields, calling dialog boxes, accessing operating system properties.... All in a language that glories in making itself doubly obscure by calling arrays "tables" and forcing you to define that each line of code as a "row". It's a bit like building your own car - put the effort into learning to make the bodywork, tyres, leather seats etc, and eventually the experience coalesces and you can bolt together something that's roadworthy. For those who know Trainspotting, and perhaps another volcanic analogy lurks here, it's all a bit like Renton getting his fix.
Fri May 15, 2009
Trust action
Action on Copyright is a delightfully bolshy blog looking at copyright and photographers' rights from a UK perspective:
Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get us. Anyone who has any lurking rational doubts about the ambitions of corporates to pervert copyright toward their own ends needs to look toward the bigger picture as a reality check. Copyright law is under intensive revision to deal with the internet age around the world, and the US is determined to establish lebensraum.
Special mention is given to the snotty National Trust, a publicly-owned organisation which is doing its best to live up to one connotation of its name. In a way I can accept limitations on use of tripods, or taking pictures inside properties, but just see this nasty attempt to stop its owners, us, from using our own photographs as we please.
Also see the spoiler image competition.
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Lightroom teleconverter plug-in
Canadian or Quebecois photographer André Messier has written a plug-in for adding metadata about teleconverters / extender. It also allows you to manually add metadata for effective focal length and aperture if the body doesn't detect the extender.
The way things are going, I may as well name the affliction for writing plug-ins - how about "pluginitis"?
Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters
I'm sorry to say I'd never actually heard of the Dutch photographer Hubert van Es who has just died, but on the other hand I had always known his 1975 photograph of American citizens escaping a Saigon rooftop by helicopter.
For some reason it didn't come to mind when I listed a few iconic war photographs yesterday, and while it does seem to belong there, I don't think I've ever really thought of it as a war photograph. I can't say that was because Harold Wilson refused to let us be dragged into Vietnam. But nowadays the Prime Minister during much of my childhood seems remembered - if at all - for little else, and we do have a less-visceral connection with that war. I was a teenager at the time, with wonderful history teachers who were inspiring what has turned out to be a lifelong fascination with the subject, and I was already getting into the early modern era (my first serious history book was JH Elliott's Imperial Spain 1469-1716) and beginning to see things like the fall of Saigon in the longer term. I've no doubt I didn't know my own mind, and one day I was probably seeing it as ending a horrible post-colonial mistake, and the next day as yet another domino falling to evil Communism. But that photograph really made you think, and while Van Es tells its story in "Thirty Years at 300 Millimeters", I'm not at all sure the article's wonderful title is zoomed-out enough. After all, how many photographs make you think in terms of centuries?
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Thu May 14, 2009
War photography, 2009
War photography has a long and distinguished history - Roger Fenton and the valley of death, Matthew Brady at Gettysburg, Robert Capa in Spain and Normandy, Dmitri Baltermans on the eastern front, Nick Ut and many others in Vietnam, Don McCullin everywhere.
To all those memorable images of cannon balls, republican soldiers, grieving mothers, shellshocked marines, must now be added David Guttenfelder's US soldiers in defensive positions in the Korengal Valley, the Wall Street Journal's picture of the day.
Remember Good Morning Vietnam? Where is Robin Williams' fashion correspondent?
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Wed May 13, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #3 - Online or Offline?
Find Missing Files is the third of my "plughini" or little plug-ins (spot who's cooking pasta for dinner) and loops through your pictures checking if they are available or not.
Of course, Lightroom does this all the time and warns you when you try to do something with a missing file. But what makes this different is:
- Whenever you want, you run a menu command "Library > Find missing files" which reviews just the selected images or, if no items are selected, all the thumbnails currently listed, even the whole catalogue
- It then records in a custom field whether each file is online or offline/missing
- You can include this field in smart collections or via the filter panel
Tue May 12, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #2
For a long time I've stored image files on my hard drive in daily subfolders, which are themselves inside DNG-sized folders - "buckets" in Kroghspeak. In this system, when a bucket's contents exceed 4 Gb, it's time to burn it to a DVD and start a new bucket. Sometimes you've too many pictures for one disc and you have to move one or more daily subfolders into the new bucket, and there are other permutations. The problem is, Lightroom doesn't show how many megabytes you're wrestling with, and you have to flip over to Explorer/Finder.
That's not the only reason why I sometimes want to know the size of a group of files, but it's frequent enough to irritate me (doesn't take much, eh?). And as I'm now looking for opportunities to flex my Lua muscles, I wrote a little Lua plug-in BeardyFolderSize (zip file) which does the job. Select some images in Grid, choose Library > Plug In Extras > Size and count, and this little dialog box appears.
It is very basic, I know, rough too, and perhaps it belongs in the same plug-in as Jeffrey's "Megapixel Sort", but I've much more sophisticated plug-ins that are fast approaching....
Update:
Since doing the screenshot, I have updated the plug-in after finding how to round to x decimal places in Lua:
function round(what, precision)
return math.floor(what*math.pow(10,precision)+0.5) / math.pow(10,precision)
end
For those who don't quite appreciate the elegance of that beautiful expression, here's how you'd do the same thing in ugly, functional Microsoft's VB:
=round (what,2)
(And thanks Claude)
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Sat May 09, 2009
The DAM Show
The DAM Show is a new blog by Peter Krogh to accompany the release of the DAM Book's second edition. Let's hope he becomes an enthusiastic blogger!
The latest post is on validating what's happened when you move or copy files around. Don't know if he's tried it, but my recommendation for PC is Microsoft's SyncToy.
Thu May 07, 2009
Lightroom Plug-in #1 - PseudoRatings
Imagine you want Lightroom to print contact sheets with the rating under each thumbnail, but you want them to be shown as stars.
Well, as far as I know Lightroom won't do it. You can only print the ratings as numbers, which isn't much good when you want to send the contact sheets to someone for review, and is a shame considering that the ratings are displayed as stars in Lightroom's Library Grid (and can be printed as such in plenty of other apps including Aperture, iView/xMedia, Portfolio).
So a while ago a client got me to write a Bridge JavaScript which converts the ratings into asterisks and places them in the barely-used IPTC Subject Code. You select the thumbnails in LR, save their metadata, find the files in Bridge, run the script, return to Lightroom and then read in metadata. At the end of all this, Print can then reference the pseudo ratings in the IPTC Subject Code field. It works, but it's hardly "it just works", is it?
PseudoRatings is a little plug-in for Lightroom 2 that completely eliminates this roundtrip to Bridge. The plugin comes with an explanatory PDF, a print template that uses the Subject Code, and a thoroughly mercenary link to my Amazon wish list.
While the plug-in does have its immediately-practical purpose, that's not the real reason for creating it. It may have taken me almost a year to get round to it, but finally when the neighbourhood's bubbling with a fifth of the UK's confirmed swine flu cases, it seems such a good time to learn the horrid Lua....
Best shot?
Chris Killip has chosen as his Best Shot a picture of pilgrims from his latest and long-overdue book Here Comes Everybody: Chris Killip's Irish Photographs. Much as I like that picture, and the boy looking away, it's going to have to be one hell of a set of images to beat those in his wonderful In Flagrante.
When it was published in the late 1980's, I was only just getting into photography and vividly remember the impact of seeing a big print of his Newcastle skinhead gig, while it's still impossible to see the one on the left and not be reminded of Thatcher and her "there is no such thing as society":
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Fri May 01, 2009
Josef Hoflehner
Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner was featured in this month's Black and White Photography and his site's well worth visiting with some wonderful images from all round the world. Some of the pictures are a little "still water and jetty" style (the Kenna look) but others such as this image is from his recent Dubai series rise, in this case literally, well above that level. Also check out Iceland and Socotra.
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D-Town
D-Town TV is a new set of weekly Nikon-oriented podcasts from Scott Kelby and Matt Kolskowski. Each show is an easily-digestible 10 minutes and though there wasn't anything new to me in episode 4 on controlling off camera flash, I did pick up a little trick for the D700 in each of shows 1 to 3. One tip, setting the command dial to control playback, is so handy I'm now catching up on the ones I've missed. After all, isn't it always interesting to see what someone else discovered buried in all those custom modes?
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Wed Apr 29, 2009
iPlayer goodies
There seems a lot of stuff on the BBC iPlayer right now on my various interests:
- If you're going to try any of these links, go to Barbado'ed: Scotland's Sugar Slaves, a BBC Scotland production about the descendants of prisoners who were transported to the W Indies to work on sugar plantations.
- Historian Mark Stoyle on the siege of Lyme Regis
- Radio 3 essays on aspects of Henry VIII
- Mark Steel's wonderful Oliver Cromwell (note it's in 3 parts)
- Rankin tries to capture members of the public with 'the look' that defines Britain today (these pictures?), part 1 of a 5 part series on Radio 4.
Sun Apr 26, 2009
To die for?
Biographer Simon Garfield gives The naked truth about Bob Carlos Clarke (pictures):
Why did he kill himself? There are several answers. He was depressed to be growing old while all his models always seemed to stay 21, not least because he felt he no longer had a chance with them. He detested the emergence of digital photography, which gave everyone the impression they were the next Cartier-Bresson. And he doubted the power of his own talents...
I never really cared for his fetish scene photos - too tame ;) - and always felt that his forks and beach studies like this Sensual Stones were so much sexier (very much like Mapplethorpe's flowers).
Also see this slideshow at Carlos Clarke's site.
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