Having established that it would be a good idea to save the result of any editing I do in Lightroom in to an archival format, an email flooded in asking why I chose tiff format rather than psd.

Well my gut feel is that tiff is a well understood format supported by lots of vendors, whereas psd seems to be a bit more tied into Photoshop. But my guts and their feelings are not of interest to most right thinking people. So I can do no better than quote this post by Jeff Schewe:

.PSD is now a bastardized file format that is NOT a good idea to use. Even the Photoshop engineers will tell you that PSD is no longer the Photoshop "native" file format. It has no advantages and many disadvantages over TIFF.

TIFF is publicly documented, PSD is not. That makes TIFF a preferred file format for the long term conservation of digital files.

TIFF uses ZIP compression for max compression, PSD uses RLE which if you save without the Max compatibility will be a bit smaller, but at the risk of not being able to be used by apps, like Lightroom.

TIFF can save EVERYTHING a PSD can save including layers, paths, channels, transparency, annotations and can go up to 4 GIGS in file size. TIFF can save all the color spaces PSD can. The ONLY thing I can think of that PSD can save that currently TIFF can't save is if you Save out of Camera Raw a cropped PSD, you can uncrop the PSD in Photoshop CS, CS2 or 3. That's one tiny obscure thing that PSD can do that TIFF currently doesn't. How many people even knew that let alone use it?

PSD used to be the preferred file format back before Adobe bastardized it for the Creative Suite. The moment that happened, PSD ceased to be a Photoshop "native" file format. PSB is the new Photoshop "native" file format for images beyond 30,000 pixels. And , at the moment, only Photoshop can open a PSB.

Getting back to the fist point, Adobe can do anything including stopping support for PSD because it's a proprietary file format. TIFF is public, even if it's owned by Adobe (by virtue of the Aldus purchase). Even if Adobe went belly up tomorrow, TIFF would continue.

And, let me be blunt, anybody who thinks PSD is "better" than TIFF is ignorant of the facts. If Adobe would let them, the Photoshop engineers would tell you to quit using PSD. Lightroom for the first beta did NOT support PSD and Hamburg fought tooth and nail to prevent having to accept PSD. He blinked, but you still can't import a PSD without Max compat enabled-which basically makes it a TIFF with a PSD extension.

Look, I'll make it REAL simple...

TIFF = Good
PSD = Bad

Ok?

If only Jeff wouldn't sit on the fence so much, we would know what he really felt about the matter!

Labels: File Formats, Lightroom, Photoshop, Workflow

So, as regular readers will be aware, I am slowly moving my workflow to Lightroom. It's a fun project and has given me the opportunity to reassess the way I currently work & compare it with other photographers.

My goal, is to follow "best practice" for digital image management whilst minimising the amount of work I actually have to do in front of the computer. So I am spending a lot of time reading blogs, books & forum posts as to how others manage their workflow and working out which will be right for me.

One of the considerations a digital photographer has to take into account is how many copies of each image to store. If you are not careful it can easily become a nightmare. First you have your original raw file. Then you might have one or two tiff files associated with it as your finally developed image. Finally you end up with s numerous jpgs sized for various output mediums (web, print, magazine submissions, etc). If your not careful it could all end up looking like the tide line on a Cornish Beach:


A while back I decided that I would only keep the original raw file & the finished tiff file for each of my images. Using QImage I could print the tiff file in any size I choose, so there was no need to store versions at different print sizing. Jpgs are really just an output format, so I don't keep them as they can be recreated at any time from the tiffs.

So for a long time I have had only one version of my images (the tiff) , I kept the raw files so I can go back to the raws if I need to, and all is right with the world. But then along came Lightroom2 and it's targeted adjustments...

One of the big things that you hear about Lightroom2 is that it features "Non-destructive editing" . Unlike photoshop, your original image is safe no matter what you do to it as all that is stored is your original image and a history of the changes you made to it. In order to undo something you just go back as far a you like in that history. For people who shoot jpgs this is a major advance - your originals are safe with Lightroom. For Raw shooters it's really not such a big deal, no raw converter changes your raw files, they simply generate a tiff or a jpg.

But Lightroom's target adjustments change the rules. You can (in a lot of circumstances) just use the Lightroom tools to make the adjustments and never need to go into Photoshop. From Lightroom I can print, show it in a slide-show and even generate any jpgs I might need to send out. So now I only need Lightroom and my raw files - it's time to say goodbye to storing tiff files. This has to be a good thing...doesn't it?

Well as i see it Lightroom is storing a set of instructions on what to do with your image very much like a recipe book tells you what to do with raw ingredients. As we know with recipes, two cooks can follow the same recipe and produce 2 different results, or if the recipe is in English and the chef only speaks French you are going to have lots of problems. Does the same hold true for the recipes we have in Lightroom? Well yes I believe it does.

If our recipe for the perfect picture includes the instruction "increase vibrancy by 30", none of us outside of Adobe really know what calculations Lightroom performs on our files. In a few years time when you are running Lightroom 5.3 on Windows 11 (or OS-X Domestic Moggy or even Google Spangled Metal 3), you have no real guarantee that "increase vibrancy by 30" will produce the same look as it did back in 2009. I am sure Adobe would do their best to keep things consistent but it's not easy to guarantee that as developers try to fix bugs in the code and extend it to add more functionality.

Even more importantly, what happens if Adobe drop support for Lightroom due to it rapidly losing market share to some other new technology coming along? What if it becomes to costly to continue to support the raw format of your files? Now we are in a much, much worse position than we ever were, as now we have an archive of raw files in a proprietary format plus a set of instructions in an equally proprietary format that it may be difficult (if not impossible) to get any other software to understand.

That's why, to me, storing raw + lightroom adjustments is just not an archival format as it cannot be opened by other applications and may produce different result over time. Tiff files I created 5 years ago in Photoshop 7 still open and print just as they always did and I can use a wide variety of software to access them. It's an open and widely used standard, so I think I will be sticking with Tiff files as my format for the moment.

Am I right? why not add a comment below & let me know what you think.

Labels: File Formats, Lightroom, Workflow

Hopefully long term readers remember my articles on backing up to the cloud:

Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts

Well I am sure that none of you care but I just thought I would mention that my image archive backup is now complete and safe in the web:


My Image archive was 300gb but I decided to got through it & cull a load of images I didn't want and would never use. I know some people keep everything but I really can't see the point in keeping out of focus shots, test shots, etc.

The cull got it down to 150mb and it has since grown back up to 285gb (sheesh those 5DmkII files are big). So it has take 163 days (I lost 10 due to being away) and has averaged 1.74GB a day. That means the system can cope with around 50GB a month of images, which is easily enough for my needs.

Think we can count that as a success and I can rest easy knowing my images are safe.

Labels: Backups, Cloud, Data Security, Equipment, Web, Workflow

In part one of these ramblings I noticed that although you could force Lightroom, kicking and screaming, to use relative paths. It's good friend Photoshop was having none of it.

Not to be discouraged I put on my hacking trousers and through together a solution. If there is anyone out there who cares, here is how you fix the problem:

Download This install file and run it in the normal way (press next at all the prompts) - if you don't have the .Net framework 2.0 installed you will need to download & install that too.

Now nip into Lightroom preferences and create a new External Editor.


You need to hit the browse button and chose the program you have just installed (yes I know DaDoRunRun.exe is a rubbish name bt it was the best I could come up with at the time.

Now when you chose to use this External Editor this dialog box will appear:


Just click Edit and a new dialog pops up.


Click on the browse button (...) and point the program to the right path for Photoshop on your machine. Now click OK and all being well Photoshop will open with the correct file.

This is a bit intrusive so next time you call the editor click on the "don't show me this dialog" button and the box will never appear again.


That's it problem solved! Well except that Lightroom won't stack files in different directories. Now that is a weird limitation, I thought the whole point of Lightroom was that directories weren't that important any more - looks like I'm wrong on that one.

I bet no one ever uses this information but, I still feel I should make it available - as a public service. Of course I am happy for someone to post a comment telling me why relative folders are such an evil concept that they should be banished...

Related Posts
Using relative paths in Lightroom part 1

Labels: Lightroom, Photoshop, Workflow

As part of my adventures of moving to a Lightroom world, I've started to look at Keywording. Now the Lightroom Hierachical keywords, seem like a really good thing and although I can easily build up a big set of keywords thanks to The Controlled Vocabulary what I really want is to pull in the hierachy of Catalog Sets I spent ages creating in iView.



As far as I can see the only real way to get this list would be to recreate this in Lightroom manually. As I didn't fancy all that typing I came up with This Script (which is heavily based on John Beardsworths script I used previously)

To use it all you need to do is change one or two lines in the file:

Change this to the name of the catalog set you wish to export:

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Places"


If you should wish to change the name or location of the file of hierachical keywords you create then this is the line to change.

const filePath = "C:\iViewCategories.txt"


Once you have edited the file, save it in your iview scripts folder. The Open iview with the catalog containing the sets you wish to export. Run the script from the script folder and after a few seconds you should get a "Done" message.

Open lightroom and select the Library module. Select Metadata>Import Keywords and brows to the file you have created C:\iViewCategories.txt and your Keywords should apear as if by magic:

Labels: iView Media Pro, Keywording, Keywords, Lightroom, Workflow

Part of a series of posts detailing my slow move into the brave new world of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

I have my photos split between a working area, which holds the current month and a bit photos and an archive of everything else.
The archive is managed with iview, but the working area is managed by a whole mish-mash of tools including Downloader Pro, BreezeBrowser, Capture One, Photoshop, Qimage and a few custom tweaks and scripts.
The working area is where I will be concentrating on using Lightroom.

Once a month I move the previous months photos from working to archive, before I do that I do the following:
1. Delete all the pictures I don't want to keep 2. Add star ratings 3. Ensure all metadata is written to the files correctly

Item 1 was my first candidate for Lightroomification. At the moment it is a relativly simple process of opening each directory in Breezebrowser, running a slideshow (ctrl A, ctrl S), tagging each reject (up arrow), then selecting all rejects (f6) and pressing delete.

So is this any easier in Lightroom? In the Library module I an select the entire months images in one go...which is better. I can then run in "Lights out mode" (L,L) using the arrow keys to move through the images and flag the rejects (x to reject, U if you accidentally rejected something), then use the delete rejects option and you are done.

The big advantage of doing this in Lightroom is you get to see the post-processed images, rather than the jpeg preview you get on Breezebrowser, this can make a lot of difference. There is consequently a delay sometimes in building the previews but it doesn't seem particularly onerous & you don't have to wait for it to complete. I'm not sure what else Adobe do to the previews but they do look really good in LR for some reason.

The only option I really miss from my old way of doing things is a quick B&W view. In breezebrowser I can simply press ctrl+w and the image is displayed in black & white, pressing it again switches to colour. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to this in Lightroom*.

So far it looks like a win for Lightroom.

*Oh hang on a sec - looks like pressing V does that...marvellous!

Labels: Breezebrowser Pro, Lightroom, Workflow

Regular readers will know that I use iview to generate my web galleries incorporating a Paypal shopping cart as I detailed here.

Phil Thomas contacted me to point out that although he had put the title of each picture into the metadata in Lightroom the titles were not appearing in the paypal shopping basket when he generated the galleries from iview.

It turns out that the field that Lightroom uses for "Document Title" in Photoshop maps to "Product" in iview... so the solution is fairly easy. If you look through the media.html file you will see the line:


<input name="item_name" value="(iView:Headline) (iView:Item1Description)" type="hidden" >


repeated for each of the different items you are selling (item1Description will become item2Description on the next entry).

(iView:Headline) inserts the iview headline field into the code, so all we need to do is replace that with (iView:Product) and we are sorted. If you would rather use the filename simply replace (iview:headline) with (iview:filename) on each of these entries. Or you could even just put (iView:Headline) (iView:Product) (iView:filename) and get all three values in the text. If you want to use other fields take a look at the documentation here.

The alternative is to copy the product field to the headline field in iview, so here is a little iview script to automate that process for you.

Thanks for pointing this out Phil - saved me finding the problem myself.

Related Posts
Creating an ECommerce Site with iView and Paypal
Using The Controlled Vocabulary with iView Media Pro
Alternative template for iView Media Pro and the PayPal Shopping cart

Labels: iView Media Pro, Lightroom, Paypal Shopping Cart, Web, Workflow

For sometime now I have been advising people who asked me, to use Adobe Lightroom to manage their workflow. This is because Lightrom offers a structured environment for you to manage your photos in and there are plenty of examples workflows available for you to follow.

But the thing is, I don't use Lightroom myself...so why not ? Well I have a workflow that is very organised already and uses a whole wedge of different software and tools to get the results I want. So Lightroom's all-in-one model doesn't particularly hold a great set of advantages for me. I tried Lightroom 1 and wasn't hugely impressed as it seemed to lock you into its ow view of the world and so didn't fit too easily into my workflow.

I have been meaning to take a look at Lightroom 2 for a long time, but it has been difficult to find the time until now. I recently was hit by the swine flu virus and consequently spent a lot of time laying exhausted around the house. Having bored myself senseless with daytime TV, I decided that it might be worth taking a look at Lightroom.

I spent the small amount of time I had between sleeping and coughing, watching the Adobe video guides to Lightroom and I have to say that it does look rather good. It still feels a bit "claustrophobic" to me and i have a feeling I will soon be learning LUA (The scripting language of Lightroom) to get round what i see as the limitations. But it does seem to be worth a play with now.

I have ordered a couple of books so I'll be reading them over the next few weeks and working out the best way to integrate it into my workflow. I'll let you know what I discover.

Labels: Lightroom, Workflow

My long term archive of images is indexed in iview media pro. I still haven't bothered to move to Microsoft Expressions Media yet as there don't seem to be any killer reasons to do the upgrade.
I generate my web galleries from iview using my own custom template, everything is automated and life is good.

I noticed the other day that although I use the (iview:keywords) tag to put all my keywords as metadata into the generated HTML pages, a fair bit of the information I am recording is not being inserted in the files because it is held in catalog sets.



Catalog sets are the iview way of providing a hermetical structure to your metadata. My main use of catalog sets is for locations, for example the image above would be in the Horsey Mill set,which automatically infers that it is also in the Horsey, Norfolk Broads, Norfolk, England and UK sets.


So what I really need is a way to collapse the catalog sets into the keywords field before I create my web galleries. I figured this would need a script to work out which catalog sets apply to an image and then to put them into the keywords metadata for the image.

Searching around the web found a lot of rumours of such a thing but none lead to the code, until finally I came accross this post by John Beardsworth. I simply took Johns code and edited the line:

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Keywords"

and replaced the word "Keywords" with the name of the top level catalog set I want to flattern into the keywords i.e.

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Places"

then run it on the selected images. It worked perfectly..hurrah!

Labels: iView Media Pro, Keywording, Keywords, Workflow

At home I have a whole series of photo frames and from time to time I like to swap the contents of them. One of the things I have noticed is that often when I open the frame a ghost image has appeared on the inside of the glass.

As the image doesn't touch the glass - how does it happen? Well apparently it is caused by solvents in the inks "out gassing". I came across this article that explains why this fogging occurs and how to stop it.


In a nutshell Epson recommend:

1. After printing, let the print rest for 15 minutes.
2. After 15 minutes, place a sheet of plain paper (not photo paper) on top of the print and let
dry for 24 hours. The paper acts like a sponge to absorb the gasses and accelerate the
outgassing. (You may stack the prints if you are printing more than one. Be sure to
interleave each print with a sheet of plain paper.)
3. After 24 hours, remove the plain paper. You may notice the plain paper is wavy. If it is,
repeat the procedure again with a new sheet of paper for another 24 hours, after which the
print should be ready for framing. If it is not wavy, this indicates that the solvents in the
print should now be completely dry and the print should be ready for framing
immediately.

I'll have to try this and see how it goes.

---

Related Posts

Mounting and Finishing Photograpraphs

Labels: cleaning, framing, Mounting and Finishing Photographs, Printers, Printing, Workflow

Well I have managed to stick to one of my New Years Resolutions (from last year) - I suppose there is a first time for everything!

My resolution was to get more organised. There were hundreds of things that I had promised people, decided to do or needed to be done and I was drowning in a sea of disorganisation. I would spend whole weekends doing things that weren't particularly important and then realise that I should have been doing something else.

What I needed was to get myself organised.


What I needed to do was get a jobs to do list organized, prioritise it, add diary entries for repeating items and generally sort out what I should be doing when. I found the ideal tool for this: RememberTheMilk.com. RTM (as it's known to its friends) is a brilliantly simple application for managing your todo list.

First thing I did was to go through, all the emails I had marked, notes I had written, things in my head and add them as a list of things to do. Next I added any repetitions, for instance I like to archive off my work once a month, check my backups once a month, and put the rubbish out every week. Finally I marked the tasks that were important.

Now it is simply a question of adding dates in to do things, I like the way the system takes entries like "Wednesday", "next thursday", "2 weeks" and a whole host of similar entries. Each week I shuffle round all the things to do so I hit whatever deadlines I have.

So what makes it so much better than a paper list or any of the various other options. Well I like the fact that I can have my todo list wherever I need it. I have it showing on my Netvibes page, any web browser I can get to, I can use it off-line on my laptop thanks to Google Gears, and even on my mobile all for free.

The second feature I like is that your todo list comes with it's own (hard for spammers to guess) email address. Forward an email to this and it becomes a task. So when an order comes in from my website I have a rule set up in my email client that automatically forwards the order onto my todo list as a high priority task.

I can also have shared todo lists wih my wife, so we can see which jobs we need to tell each other to do.

It's a really useful bit of software and it's free..we like that.

Labels: Getting Organised, Web, Workflow

It seems that quite a few people who wanted to use my Limited Edition management system were put off by the need to purchase Microsoft access to run it. To get round this, I have created a version that uses the free Microsoft Access runtime.

You can download the latest version of Lemon from here.


The current release features:

• Keep track of editions and sales easily from one screen.
• Block Allocate ~ reserve a group of prints for a particular customer.
• Certificates of Authenticity.
• Print Run ~ Mark a group of prints as printed and generate the appropriate certificates.
• Sales reports.
• AutoAllocate © ~ When creating an edition numbers can be automatically allocated.

Labels: Limited Edition, Workflow

There are few times in my life when I have unrolled the contents of a cardboard tube and exclaimed "wow" but this weekend was one of them!

I have just had some large A1 sized prints made of some of my favourite pictures and I have to say I am very impressed. Up till now I have not bothered getting large prints done as finding a supplier who can reliably reproduce images at a reasonable price can be a bit of a pain, I often have been disappointed with the results…but not now!

My prints were produced by Dave Newton of Photopositive, for those of you who don’t know Dave he is the technical editor of CPN (Canon Professional Network) and EOS Magazine and more importantly he is very, very picky. Years of testing cameras and lenses means that he knows "pin sharp" from just "sharp" and he knows a good colour rendition from a bad one. Dave’s site features printing services, which uses a simple 4 part process to produce your prints:

• Preparation - simply sort out the pics you want printed and create a text file explaining what you want printed.
  
• Upload - either ftp or snail-mail the files.
  
• Payment - The site features a rather wizzy javascript calculator that works out the pricing for you. You then click the paypal button to pay (using either your paypal account or a credit card).
  
• Wait - for your prints soon your prints will arrive through your (or even your customers) door.

Now I have a reliable supplier, it won't be long before I am offering large prints of some of my more popular shots.

Labels: News, Printing, Workflow

I have had a couple of mails from people trying to use my Limited Edition Management System (LEMON) on Access97 and failing miserably.

For these poor souls I have created LEMON for Access 97, I hope you find it of use.

And for no apparent reason here is a picture I took in Southwark Cathedral the other day as part of my Friday Lunchtime Project:

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Related Posts

Lemon ~ Limited Edition Management ONline

Labels: Exhibitions, Limited Edition, Workflow

One of the regular complaints about Capture One V4 is the way it fills up your various directories with its cache and setting files. Personally I have no need to archive or back these up so I wanted a way to remove them from all the sub directories in one go.

In the end I came up with the following solution - but it only works for windows users so you chaps with nice shiny Macs will have to use something else...sorry!

Select and copy the following line:
FOR /R "c:\Working" %%a IN (CaptureOne) DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%a"

Open Notepad and paste in the text
Replace c:\working with the name of the directory where you keep your photos;
i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\My Documents\My Pictures
Save the file as C1.bat on your C: drive.

Now when you double click on c1.bat in Explorer, all the Capture One temporary files will be removed as if by magic.

Labels: Capture 1, Workflow

Here is a little Photoshop technique I developed the other day to make shiny metal really shiny (click on any image to view a large version).

First duplicate the layer:


Run the High-Pass filter with a large number of pixels so that the shiny areas get emphasised.



Finally then just change the layer blend mode to soft-light ( or hard-light) to make it all shiny:

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Related Posts
Beginners guide to Photoshop Layers:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Labels: Photoshop, Workflow

I often see on forums, people saying that they have shot both raw and jpg and can't see a difference. An additional comment, since Lightroom has entered the fray, is "Lightroom handles jpgs and raws..so why bother with raw?".

Over at The Luminous Landscape, Michael Richeman has produced a great example of the difference between the two formats when you actually do the same processing on them.

Here is a photo from my recent trip to the Lake District and yes it was captured in Raw:

Labels: Lightroom, raw, Workflow

The Second Beta of Capture One 4 has just been released. My first impressions are that they have fixed quite a few of the obvious bugs, the controls seem more usable and it's relatively stable.

From the release notes:

What’s new from beta 1
This is a non-exhaustive list of issues we have solved with beta 2:

• Viewer adjustable background (Windows only)
• Importer (new on Windows)
• Improved, brighter and larger icons
• Better file management (drag and drop, rename, delete)
• More room for sliders (min max labels have been removed)

Capture One 4 beta 2 now runs on Windows Vista 64-bit edition and on Mac OS X
Leopard.

I processed this last night:


And everything seemed to go swimmingly. Why not download it and have a play.
Please Note though this beta will not run on AMD XP processors.

In a separate announcement Capture One have signed a strategic agreement with Microsoft. Hopefully this should mean better integration of iView and C1 as part of an attempt to take on Lightoom and Aperture.

Labels: Capture 1, Workflow

Ohhh, I'm so excited - I'm about to lose control and I think I like it!

Finally, Phase One have released the beta of my favourite raw converter Capture One. I have only just downloaded it so no conclusions yet but if the image quality is as good as Capture One v3 and the promised workflow improvements work I will be a happy bunny.

Why not give the beta a try too?

Update

I've been having a play with it, on some shots I took of a chair I found in the middle of Epping Forest, and I'm very impressed so far.

• It seems pretty stable for a beta, certainly much more usable than the Lightroom betas.
• UI seems to have taken a lot of the good features from Lightroom & aperture and made them workmanlike rather than gimicky.
• Variants are a great addition to the product and seem to work well.

Labels: Capture 1, Workflow

I was talking to another photographer about their workflow the other day and they said something like "I use raw for important stuff and jpg for everything else". I replied with 2 questions - "Why? and how do you know which is which?".

For me the best thing to do is to stick to one workflow and treat everything as important...

Take 2 workflows into the shower?...I just want to raw and go!

The important part about setting up a workflow is that it should become automatic for you. Once you have taken the time to work out what you do at each point, and made sure you have each part of the process protected from failures, the hard work is done. The workflow should automate as much as possible so you can concentrate on creating fantastic images and not worry about filenames/directory locations/backups/etc.

If you have two workflows, each will be slightly different and you have to think what you are doing - and that's not good. It also adds an extra stage when you come to access the images at a later date as the first thing you need to decide is "did I think these were important?" before you attempt to retrieve them.

So what's important to you?

The thing to note is that the importance of an image changes over time.

Many pictures simply have value through their age - take a look at any of the shops selling old photos of street scenes. At the time they were taken most of the photos were as dull as ditchwater, but now they have a value just due to them representing the time they were taken.


Pull out an old photo album and shots that had little importance then, seem to have a magic all of their own as you discover long-lost events and friends smiling back at you from the page.

I have misjudged the importance of an image too many times:

• A simple snap of a friend became very important when that friend died a few days after.
• Some snaps of dogs playing on a beach weren't important to me but one of the owners loved it and wanted a large print.
• Whilst staying at a farm/nature reserve - I just took some shots of the wildflowers to get to grips with a new lens, not important top me, yet the farm has asked if they can use them as 6 foot high posters in their new education centre.

A snap today could be an important historical record today.

---

In Praise of the snap
Workflow

Labels: Taking Pictures, Workflow

OK I am officially confused by monitors and colour calibration.

The trouble all began when I accidentally managed to select the wrong profile in Capture1 without noticing. My images colours had all gone wrong when I got them into Photoshop.

The problem was occurring on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop, so I used my spider monitor calibration system and colour plus software to recalibrate the screen. Since then things got worse and worse with images looking fine on the laptop but lacking completely in contrast when viewed on other screens.

The most obvious way to see how the monitor was performing was to use the Monitor Black Point tests. Performance was frankly poorer than a Enron share holder. I tried a few things:

• Setting the right profiles in Capture 1
  
• Removing the monitor profile
• Adjusting Screen brightness
• Uninstalling the Colour Plus Software.

Only the last one actually solved the problem. So what exactly is the monitor calibration software for? If it makes things worse, what exactly is the point of it? Anyone less confused than me?

*It's driving me nuts!

Labels: Capture 1, Colour Managment, Equipment, Workflow

Following on from the previous post about image theft, I got a mail from a friend (hi Steve) asking what you could actually do to protect your images from theft.

Its very much like protecting your home from burglars, you can never really stop a determined thief but you can slow them down and make things more difficult so that they go somewhere else.
David Riecks has produced a very useful list of possible image Protection Methods, I hope you find it of use.

As we haven't had a photo for a while - here is a shot from my recent trip to Cornwall.

Labels: Image Theft, Plagarism, Workflow

Its not an uncommon event for people to steal images of photo sharing sites and pass them off as their own work. Usually it is just a kid who enjoys getting the adulation from their piers on the site. They are usually caught out by other photographer who notice a sudden improvement in the quality of their work or just recognise other peoples shots.

Whilst annoying for the photographer who actually took the shots, the disruption doesn't last long as most sites have staff and moderators who are well experienced in dealing with this sort of thing. But today Paul Indigo brings us news of A stolen picture winning a prize in a photo competition. The brazen cheek of the thief involved is amazing - how did he think he would not go undiscovered.

It begs the question how do you prove that you took a particular image? All I can recommend is that you keep hold of your raw files and make sure they are backed up and archived so that you can get your proof if you need it.

Update

Stephen Baker, the same member of the Fuji website has stolen yet another photo from Trekearth and used it in the current Fuji competition. The photo belongs to TrekEarth member: Antonio (aznegrao) and the photo is named 'The Capoeira'.

Stephen Baker has posted the photo on the competition entry page as seen on the Fuji website.

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Related Posts

Archiving

Labels: Image Theft, News, Plagarism, Workflow

LightroomGalleries.com keeps going from strength to strength. Joe has now added a whole raft of features to the free templates there including paypal support.

I won't be doing any more with Lightroom web galleries as I generate all my own galleries using iView Media Pro and the Lightroom Stuff came about as the result of being dared to do it by John Beardsworth. So those of you who have come here looking for stuff on Lightroom and Paypal are welcome to checkout the related links below or surf on over to LightroomGalleries.com and use theirs.


Related Posts

• Creating Web Gallery Templates for Lightroom
  
• ECommerce sites with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and the PayPal Shopping cart
  
• ECommerce sites with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and the PayPal Shopping cart..continued
• Lightroom Paypal Galleries

Labels: Lightroom, Paypal Shopping Cart, Web, Workflow

No sooner had I blogged that the new version of Lightroom works with the Controlled Vocabulary Catalogue then David Riecks of ControlledVocabulary.com has produced a new version for Lightroom and documented it too!

CVKC for Lightroom

CVKC for Lightroom help

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Related Posts
Controlled Vocabulary and Adobe Lightroom 1.1
How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (part 1)
How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (part 2)

Labels: Controlled Vocabulary, IPTC, Keywording, Keywords, Lightroom, Workflow, XMP

Well Adobe Lightroom 1.1 as just been released and in amongst a whole host of improvements the Lightroom team have improved the performance of the database and keywords.

I have just tested using The Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalogue in Lightroom and the performance has really improved beyond all recognition. So it now seems to be a workable option for those of us who really want to control their keywording.

Update:
About the same time as I was testing, Mr Controlled Vocabulary himself David Riecks (that's "i" before "e", but the "e" is silent) was testing 1.1 and the CVKC and here are his observations:

Well, I have to give Kudos to the Lightroom engineers. I imported the PhotoMechanic version of the CVKC in less than 9 seconds (I used a stopwatch). This was on a new MacBook Pro, so it's a different machine than before. I did have to change the file from the ".utf8" extension to a text file. Just to be safe I opened the file in TextWrangler and resaved as with Mac line breaks, and unicode UTF-8
no BOM encoding first.

I imported a 4 gig card with about 2.29 gigs of images (from my recent trip to Italy) and it took about 5:46 minutes to import.
The new Lightroom is able to distinguish between regular keywords, (solid white triangle to left if there are subcategories), excluded category headers (triangle to left is a series of dots, ie not solid), and synonyms.

It took virtually no time at all to actually assign the keywords, even within the 11,000 terms in the current CVKC. However, I'm either confusing LightRoom with another application, or they have changed how you locate the keywords within the tags. The only way I could find within the left side Keywords tag panel was to reveal the lower levels by clicking on the arrow to the left of the term.

I thought there used to be a search function at the top, but if so it's now gone.

There is a new tool (or at least I think it's new) called the "spraycan" which can be used to apply keywords. When you choose this tool, there is a pull down that allows you to select keywords (or labels, flags, ratings, rotations, or other forms of metadata... none of which I tested at this time). If you choose Keywords, then you CAN type in a word here and it seems to find it within the hierarchy.

I found this much easier than having to remember which region Rome is located within (it's Lazio BTW), or where another keyword is located within the hierarchy.

I'll make the converted file part of a new Lightroom download and get that up on the download page in the next day, after I write up instructions for how to install and apply keywords.

I've not had time to test any of the other improvements, and/or possible addition of DAM features, so that will have to wait for a more thorough review. However, the Adobe Lightroom engineers do seem to have listened and made some remarkable improvements in a very short time.

So it really looks like it will works...hurrah!

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Related Posts

How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (part 1)
How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (part 2)

Labels: Controlled Vocabulary, IPTC, Keywording, Keywords, Lightroom, Workflow, XMP

As I detailed in my blogs on workflow I use Capture 1 (C1) for my raw processing. I am still waiting for the next release of C1 to compare it against Lightroom 1.1 to decide which one I will use in future but at the moment C1 produces the results I need with the minimum of fuss so I am sticking with that.

Being a fan of doing the development in the raw converter rather than Photoshop I was glad when I came across a technique the other day which details a great way to create black and white images from C1.

It's quite simple really:

• Download the file, unzip the fie and double click on the profile file to install it.
• Start Capture 1 and change the camera profile to the new one.
• Process your images as per normal to produce B&W how you like.

Cool! Here is one I processed earlier:

Labels: Black and White, Capture 1, Monochrome, Workflow

The final part of my workflow is to archive the files so that they are protected from disaster and so that I can find pictures when I need to. So once a month I archive off the previous months working directory to my archiving system.

First I go through the months images using the Breezebrowser Pro slideshow facility and delete out any images I don't want to keep. Sometimes I also find images that missed my attention first time around and they get processed in the usual way.

Next I load the images in to a temporary iView Media Pro catalogue and do some fine level keywording classification. During the load process images already receive a lot of keywording so this process covers things like the names of people in the shot and descriptive words like emotions and colours.

Once the keywording is complete the keywords are written back to the files using the synchronise command in iView.

The months files are copied and created as a new directory on my heard of buffalo. Finally these files are imported into an iView database covering the entire archive.

My Workflow

• Capture
• Processing
• Output
• Archiving

Labels: Breezebrowser Pro, Controlled Vocabulary, IPTC, iView Media Pro, Keywording, Keywords, Workflow, XMP

The next stage in my image processing workflow is to output to my chosen media. the actual process depends on my intended target.

Web Site
I often display my work on websites like Ephotozine to get feedback on my work. To prepare for a web page I do the following in Photoshop.

• Add a border.
• Select Image>Mode and convert to 8bits per channel.
• Use Image>Image Size to reduce the size of the so that maximum height is 800 pixels and the maximum width is 1000 pixels. I ensure that bicubic sharper is selected.
• Then I convert to SRGB using Edit>Convert to profile.
• Finally I add an unsharp mask of around 40%, 1 pixel threshold 1.
• use Save For Web to reduce the final image size to around 200K.

All of this has been recorded as an action in Photoshop so it is actually a matter of clicking and waiting for a few seconds.

My Web Galleries
I will cover part 4 of my workflow (archiving) soon but for the moment trust me when I say it relies on iView Media Pro quite heavily. My web galleries are generated directly from iView.

A catalogue set for the gallery is created and all items selected for the gallery are added to it. Each picture has the comments updated and a title added. The Gallery is then generated and uploaded through Dreamweaver.

Print
For Print output the image is resized to the required output size at 300dpi with bicubic-smoother selected. I then use the professional sharpening toolkit from The Lights Right Studio to sharpen the image with specific settings for ink-jet at 300DPI on matte paper.

Finally the prints are produced on an Epson 2100 printer on to Epson archival matte paper using genuine Epson inks. Prints are left to dry for 24 hours then checked and signed in pencil and mounted using acid free mountboard.

Part 4 covers the final part of the workflow - Archival.


My Workflow

• Capture
• Processing
• Output
• Archiving

Labels: iView Media Pro, Photoshop, Web, Workflow

In Part1 I covered capture and getting the images on to the PC

Having downloaded all my files to my PC, Downloader Pro then launches straight into Breezebrowser Pro for the initial sort out of images. Breezebrowser Pro is a great tool for handling batches of raw images, it makes it easy to email proofs, generate webpages, edit metadata and sift through a group of images in slideshow mode.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

The first thing to do with my images is to delete the duff shots from the shoot. First I check that BBPro is in the "High Quality" mode (Ctrl+Q) which applies screen sharpening to each image which makes it very easy to see the sharpness of an image.

I then select all the images in the shoot (Ctrl+A) and display them as a slideshow (Ctrl+S). I move through the slide show using the right arrow key and tagging any images for deletion using the up arrow key. At the end of the slideshow I select only the tagged items (f6) and send them to the recycle bin (del).

The number of images I delete on this first pass varies with the type of shoot: on a carefully measured landscape shoot there would only be one or two deletions but if I was trying to shoot dogs running about on a windswept beach over half the shots can be rejects due to the conditions and the models not being too co-operative!

The reason that I can be quite harsh with these deletions is that my download procedures make sure I always have a backup of every image. If I delete an image then the backup becomes the only copy of the image, so that’s why I use the recycle bin – just in case I decide that I shouldn’t have deleted it.

Deciding what to process

I could use the built in raw converter in BBPro or the converter built into Photoshop – both of which could be started automatically from BBPro but unfortunately I find that Capture One (from Phase One) produces the best results. The current version of Capture One doesn’t support a way to start it in a particular directory, so I have to start C1 and then navigate to the right directory and file to do my more detailed viewing and raw processing.

I now use the full screen view in C1 to work through the images tagging those which will be worth running through the raw converter.

Processing in C1

The raw processing in Capture One consists of the following:

• Adjusting the White Balance
• Adjusting the Exposure
• Outputting as a 16bit tiff

The processed file then opens automatically in Photoshop.I won’t detail the whole process as Keith Henson has done a great job in his Capture One Tutorial.

Photoshop

The first job in Photoshop is to view the image at 100% and clone out any dust spots using either the clone tool or the spot healing brush tool.

Usually I like to keep my images close to what comes out of the raw convertor but the extra processing depends on the images but may consist of:

• Colour adjustments
• B&W conversion
• Digital Velvia

All adjustments are done on layers then the image is saved back to the tiffs sub directory.

For security, all the files mentioned in this part of the workflow (raw, tiffs & web-ready) are backed-up using the Microsoft Synctoy tool, which is set to backup the machine from a scheduled batch file.

In part 3 I will be cover Outputting the image to web and print.

If you are getting a sense of Deja-vue that is because this blog was originally in the Articles section of the site...but I'm having a tidy up!

My Workflow

• Capture
• Processing
• Output
• Archiving

Labels: Breezebrowser Pro, Photoshop, Workflow

"What’s that you are reading?"

"The DAM Book"
"Charming! I only asked!"

Be prepared for this conversation if you read the highly recommended "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh, but it's worth it.

So what is DAM?

DAM stands for Digital Asset Management, which means managing your images so that you can find your images easily and they are backed up properly, which will ensure you won't loose them in event of a hardware, software or user error. In order to achieve this you need to have a well thought out workflow that you stick to consistently.

A workflow is the series of processes you go through to handle your images. A comprehensive workflow covers everything from downloading from the cards, through sorting, indexing and classifying, raw conversion, Photoshop work, archiving and backup.

The DAM Book provides a complete working and proven workflow based on the Adobe Bridge product (which comes as part of Photoshop CS2), Adobe DNG and iView Media Pro plus some other bits and pieces downloadable from its own website. Even if you don't use the flow described in the book it is a great tool for reassessing how you handle your images.

Reading the book made me decide to re-plan and document my own workflow. So I thought I would share it with my readers. This article describes the very first part of the workflow – Capture and download.

Capture

I shoot on a canon 20D using the raw file format. There are many reasons for using raw which have been detailed in articles such as this one. Two reasons draw me to this way of shooting,: the first is being able to deal with white balance problems easily and the second is that using a good raw processor like Capture 1 allows you to replicate the traditional processes of printing an image, minimising the amount of correction required in Photoshop. For me, the more I get an image right in the camera (and the raw processor) the more I like it.

I use 512Mb Compact flash cards, which seem incredibly small and cheap in these days of 8GB cards. There are a couple of reasons for using smaller cards:

• A 512mb card fits neatly on to a CD which makes backing them up a doodle, by the time I buy my next camera I expect sensors to be up to 20+ megapixel sizes at which point 4GB cards and DVDs might be a good pairing.
• I get 50ish raw files onto one card, which is about the maximum number of images I could bear to lose in one go should I drop it in the sea, a lake, a washing machine, a volcano, etc, etc.

I store the cards in Jessops media cases, which hold 4 cards at a time and provide them with a degree of shock proofing. I know it's not the most original system in the world but I keep track of which ones have been used, by keeping empty cards face up & shot cards face down. I always reformat cards every time I put them into the camera in an effort to reduce the possibility of file system problems on the card.

Numbering the cards helps to identify if there are any recurring problems with a particular card or not.

On returning from the shoot my workflow depends on if I am back at base or not.

Normal workflow

On returning from a shoot, I use a card reader to download the images to my laptop using Downloader Pro. See this Blog for more details on setting up Downloader pro and the Controlled Vocabulary. I have this, deceptively easy to use bit of software setup to completely automate the download part of my workflow:

• Files are copied into a directory within my working area which is named based on the year and month. i.e.: C:\Working\200611_Nov\04Nov06\Raw - where:
• "C:\Working" is my working directory
• "200611_Nov" is a directory for nov 2006-11-04
• "04Nov06" this is the actual date of the shoot
• "Raw" indicates that these are the raw files.


• Files are renamed based on the original name, job code and date i.e.: CS20061104-IMG_0123_Epping Forest.cr2 - where:
• "CS" are my initials
• "20061104" is the date in YYYYMMDD format
• "IMG_0123" is the original file name
  
  
• 2 directories are created at the same level as the "RAW" directory. These are:
  • "Tiff" - for files converted from raw
  • "WebReady" - for files converted too web proofing size.
    
    
• IPTC/XMP data is added to each file automatically adding creator, copyright, contact info, keywords & location etc to every file.
  
  
• Files are automatically copied, across the network, to a second PC (my file server) to ensure I have a backup of every image.
  
• When the download is complete the card is completely erased ready for reuse.

Amazingly it does all this automatically when I insert a card in to the card reader. At some point in the future I may take advantage of downloader pros ability to automatically generate DNG files, but at the moment I don't feel DNG fits into my workflow very well.

Now the images are ready for rating and raw conversion as detailed in part 2.

On-Location Workflow

The normal workflow relies on a network file server to provide a backup of all the images downloaded. This is not possible when I am away from base and simply download all the files to my laptop is not a secure option because the laptop could crash or be stolen and I would lose an entire expeditions work.

Instead I use a digimagic CD writer to duplicate each card to CD. Spindles of CD-Rs are very cheap these days and provide an ideal backup medium. I then load from the CD into the laptop using Downloader Pro which does all the renaming/directory creation as detailed in the normal process. This way I can be sure that not only do I have a backup but that backup works!

On returning I use the Microsoft Sync-toy to duplicate the working directory back to the file server.

In part 2, I will detail the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff and converting raw files into a usable format.

If you are getting a sense of Deja-vue that is because this blog was originally in the Articles section of the site...but I'm having a tidy up!


My Workflow

• Capture
• Processing
• Output
• Archiving

Labels: Controlled Vocabulary, Downloader Pro, IPTC, Keywording, Keywords, Workflow, XMP

Over at lightroomgalleries.com Joe has got galleries with paging working...hurrah!

Why not take a look at the site, it looks like it will develop into a very useful resource.

Labels: Lightroom, Web, Workflow

Those of you who are interested in Lightroom web templates (and there does seem to be an awful lot of you) will be pleased to know that I have extended the template to add two new features:

• Sequential numbering for each item.
• Next & Previous buttons for each image allowing users to easily page through.

Install instructions are the same as for the previous version except you will need to download this new version of the file from here: paypalLightroomForwardBack.zip

I will be leaving each of the different versions available so that you can see how each of the elements was added to the template. hopefully this will help people develp their own versions.

I am currently working on getting paging working.

Things I have yet to work out is how to get keywords & descriptions in to the source xml.

After that I will look at how to get settings in to the lightroom panels...still a long way to go.

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Related Posts

• Creating Web Gallery Templates for Lightroom
  
• ECommerce sites with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and the PayPal Shopping cart
  
• Lightroom Paypal Galleries

Labels: Lightroom, Paypal Shopping Cart, Web, Workflow

In my previous post I covered what I have learned so far about Adobe Lightroom Web Gallery Templates.

Using what I have learnt so far I have created a template for web-gallerys that uses the paypal shopping cart. It's far from perfect..but I intend to re-visit the issues when I get a chance, and others might be able to progress things faster than me.

To use the template:

1. Download the paypalLightroom.zip file.

2. Unzip it to the Web Galleries folder (by default you don't have one so you will need to create it):

• On Mac, <your home directory>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries/.
  

• On Windows, put the gallery in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries.

On a PC the Application Data directory is hidden so you will need to enable "show hidden folders" before you can browse to it.

3. Edit the transformer.xslt file:

near the top you will find a section that looks like this:

<!-- paypal Settings -->
<xsl:variable name="PayPalAccount">You@there.com</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="ReturnScreen">www.test.com</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="CancelScreen">www.test.com</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="CurrencyCode">GBP</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="CurrencySymbol">&pound;</xsl:variable>

<!-- Individual Sale Items -->
<xsl:variable name="Item1Description">10&quot;x20" Print</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item1CodeNo">100</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item1Price">150</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="Item2Description">11&quot;x22" Print</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item2CodeNo">101</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item2Price">155</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="Item3Description">10&quot;x20" Print framed</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item3CodeNo">102</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item3Price">150</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="Item4Description">11&quot;x22" Print framed</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item4CodeNo">103</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Item4Price">155</xsl:variable>

You need to change the values between <> and <> on each line to reflect your settings.

The Settings:

Setting	Current Value	Description
PayPalAccount	You@there.com	Your paypal account ID
ReturnScreen	www.test.com	URL to return to after a succesful purchase
CancelScreen	www.test.com	URL to return to after the user has pressed cancel
CurrencySymbol	£	Currency symbol in HTML (£ = £, $ = $ € = €)
CurrencyCode	GBP	Currency code (GBP = pounds, USD = dollars, etc )
Item1Description	10"x20" Print	Description of first item type you sell
Item1CodeNo	100	A code number for this item if you have one
Item1Price	150	Price for item 1
Item2Description	11"x22" Print	Description of second item type you sell
Item2CodeNo	101	A code number for this item if you have one
Item2Price	155	Price for item 2
Item3Description	10"x20" Print framed	Description of third item type you sell
Item3CodeNo	102	A code number for this item if you have one
Item3Price	150	Price for item 3
Item4Description	11"x22" Print framed	Description of fourth item type you sell
Item4CodeNo	103	A code number for this item if you have one
Item4Price	155	Price for item 4

Having made all the changes, save the file.

4. Now use the new template

In Lightroom generate the web site using the new Paypal Template.

Summary

As I said it's not perfect yet but hopefully it will give those of you who wish to dabble, something to dabble with.

Update 16 April 2007

Improved version with forward and back buttons added.

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Related Posts

• ECommerce sites with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and the PayPal Shopping cart..continued
• Lightroom Paypal Galleries

Labels: Lightroom, Paypal Shopping Cart, Web, Workflow

I have started looking at the process for creating your own custom HTML web galleries in Lightroom and I thought I would pass on what I have learnt so far.

1. There ain't much documentation out there.

For a flagship product like Lightroom Adobe seem to have been particularly tardy in providing the documentation as to how to create your own web galleries. The entire total of what I have found is this:

• This post in the Lightroom journal ,which updates this original post.
• This article, which majors on Flash but has a lot of useful nuggets of information.
• This pdf, which gives you some clue about the XML Specifications
• Seans Blog which is full of tips about Lightroom.
  

2. Getting Started

Check you have a Web Galleries folder (by default you don't) so you will need to create it:

• On Mac, <your home directory>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries/.

• On Windows, put the gallery in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries.

On a PC the Application Data directory is hidden so you will need to enable "show hidden folders" before you can browse to it.

Download the demo template from here: lightroom_wpg_example.zip

Unzip the file into the web galleries folder you just created.

If you now open Lightroom and go to the Web module, you should see this available as a new option:

Now close Lightroom as it caches the web templates so you won’t see them unless you close and reopen them.

3. Create your own web Gallery

Copy the example folder in Web Galleries and give it a new name.

Now open the galleryMaker.xml file and edit the values in the <galleryInfo> section to describe your template (unless you change these values Lightroom won’t detect your new template):

Original version
<galleryInfo>
<amg ver="0.5" />
<thumbnail path="preview.jpg" />
<galleryName>Demo Template</galleryName>
<galleryDescription></galleryDescription>
<gallerVersion ver="1.0" />
<livePreview enabled="yes" />
<creator company="Adobe Systems, Inc." designer="Adobe Lightroom Engineering" />
<category>Web photo gallery</category>
<identifier>com.adobe.wpg.demo1t</identifier>
<ag:galleryType>HTML</ag:galleryType>
<ag:maximumGallerySize>20</ag:maximumGallerySize>
</galleryInfo>

My Version

<galleryInfo>
<amg ver="0.5" />
<thumbnail path="preview.jpg" />
<galleryName>PayPal Template</galleryName>
<galleryDescription></galleryDescription>
<gallerVersion ver="1.0" />
<livePreview enabled="yes" />
<creator company="www.shepherdpics.com" />
<category>Web photo gallery</category>
<identifier>com.shepherdpics.wpg.paypal</identifier>
<ag:galleryType>HTML</ag:galleryType>
<ag:maximumGallerySize>20</ag:maximumGallerySize>
</galleryInfo>

Start Lightroom and you should now see your new template in the available list.

Once again close Lightroom.Edit the GalleryMaker.xml file to Generate the output sizes you need.

For my templates I wanted both thumbnails & large images so I changed the <sizes> section from this:

<sizes>
<size height="130" name="thumb" width="130" />
</sizes>

To this:

<sizes>
<size height="130" name="thumb" width="130" />
<size height="500" name="full" width="500" />
</sizes>

Though you might want loads of options - like this:

<sizes>
<size name="thumb" width="160" height="120" />
<size name="small" width="640" height="480" />
<size name="medium" width="880" height="660" />
<size name="large" width="1024" height="768" />
<size name="video" width="400" height="300" fps="30">
</sizes>

Open Lightroom and Export the web gallery to a new directory. If you open this directory you should see contents similar to this:

In the main directory are the index.html and individual html documents for each image. The thumbnail images have been created in the images/thumb directory and the larger images are in images/full.

4.Edit the transformer.xslt file

The transformer.xslt file is an XSLT template that you use to transform the XML in source.xml into XHTML files. If you didn't understand that last sentence you are in for quite a rough ride and it might be worth looking through some tutorials on XSLT now.

Some things I have learnt about the transformer.xslt file are:

• It does not support the <xsl:include> tag so you have to put everything in the same file.
• If you have any errors in your transformer.xslt file then Lightroom will just not generate the file…no error messages, no logs nothing.
• A good XSLT tool like Stylus Studio makes developing the pages considerably easier.

Some things I have still to work out are:

• How to implement multiple index pages
• How to get resource files (css/buttons/graphics) copied to the new directory
  
• Why Adobe picked quite such a complicated way of doing things.

Next blog I will be posting my first go at integrating Paypal and Lightroom Web-Galleries. This will include example download files for you to use.

I hope this posting has been of use, please feel free to add a comment if this has helped you or if you have discovered anymore information.

Labels: Lightroom, Web, Workflow

In Part 1 I discussed how to set-up Downloader Pro and The Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalogue to enable easy file management and downloading. So now we have set it up, how do we go about using it.

Insert a Card in your Cardreader.

Once Downloader Pro has been setup to detect card events, inserting a card with images on will automatically fire you into Downloader Pro. If you have the option to prompt for job-code set then the first dialogue will prompt for job-code:


Enter a descriptive job-code or select a previously used one from the dropdown and click OK. Next you will be prompted for the metadata and the dialogue will appear, prefilled with the entries you added during the setup.


Click on the Keywords tab, here you can enter keywords separated by commas. To use the Controlled Vocabulary click on the catalogue button.

You can either browse the catalogue using the tree view or just enter a search string and click find. For example entering "beach" returns two possible results:


Select the ones you want and click OK. Repeat this process bringing in all the keywords that apply to your set of images.

Note: that some terms or phrases are in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and may not make much sense as keywords by themselves. These terms are needed in order to create a branch under which other terms may be grouped. However, once you have pulled them into the BreezeBrowser list, they have served their purpose and can be removed from the list.

Once you have added all the keywords you need then clicking OK will bring you to the automation dialogue.
Click Yes and everything happens by magic! Files are downloaded, renamed, keyworded, backed-up , metadata added, directories created and the card deleted..all in one little measure - marvellous!

Labels: Controlled Vocabulary, Downloader Pro, IPTC, Keywording, Keywords, Workflow, XMP