Nolan Hester: Lightroom 3: VQS
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Nolan Hester: Lightroom 2: VQS
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Mount Rainier National Park's Sunrise Road climbs to a 6,200' ridge where you get an incredible view of Mt. Rainier's 14,411' top. You can stand there and just watch the lenticular clouds form and reform over the peak.
This photo, btw, was posted directly from Lightroom, using Tim Armes' great export plugin LR/Blog. Very cool. At $12.60, it's a major bargain. You can see it and a bunch of other Lightroom plugins at The Photographer's Toolbox.
Adobe has updated Lightroom to version 3.5, which is available for immediate download. You'll find a mirror update for Camera Raw 6.5 there as well.
The updates add support for about 20 cameras, 26 more lens profiles, and several minor bug fixes. Added cameras include the Nikon Coolpix P7000, Olympus E-PL3, and Sony SLT-A77. The new lens profiles include four for Nikon, two for Canon, three for Sony, and 14 for Hasselblad.
It also fixes a couple of bugs: one for Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and some tethered-shooting ones for Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). For all the details, see Tom Hogarty's note on Adobe's Lightroom Journal.
Thought that headline would catch your eye. Most times, an x.x.1 update might seem not worth bothering with. But if you're using the HP PhotoSmart R607 camera, you ought to grab this one now. Or within Lightroom 3, you can choose Help > Check for Updates; in Photoshop CS5 it's Help > Updates.
The reason: A bug introduced in the April 29 releases of Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 can corrupt photos shot with the now discontinued R607—at least in a few cases. (Adobe's May 19 alert explains the nitty-gritty.)
If that's not your camera, you can rest easy. If you're using a Canon Rebel T3i, Nikon D5100 or Fuji FinePix X100, the update includes new support for those models. For the rest of us, it's reassuring that Adobe rolled out the fix less than a week after the alert.
One of the book's readers recently was disappointed to discover that Lightroom doesn't support PNG files. As his note explained, "When I pointed [Lightroom] at a folder to import pictures, it only “sees” JPG images. The PNG are ignored."
It's true: Lightroom, which is aimed squarely at digital photographers, does not support PNG. (Here's a list of what formats Lightroom does support.) The main reason: digital cameras don't use PNG. But that's only part of the answer. The larger answer is that Lightroom is no substitute for Adobe Bridge, which the company bills as a media manager for "all your creative assets." While you can't buy Bridge as a stand-alone product, Adobe includes it in all its Creative Suite combos, as well as with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash. Notice Lightroom's absence from that list.
While I use Lightroom everyday for tracking my photos, I depend on Bridge for keeping track of all kinds of other images. That includes PNGs and anything else I don't' want clogging up my Lightroom catalogs. For example, in writing these books I take literally thousands of screenshots using Snapz Pro X. By default, they all go into a special folder named, well, "Screenshots."
Within Bridge, I've marked that folder as a Favorite which allows me to jump straight to its contents. If I was using Lightroom to keep track of those screenshots, I'd first have to import them, then apply a keyword or two to make them easier to find. That's too much hassle for images that really have nothing to do with my photo work.
Make no mistake: Lightroom's a great tool and serves as my main hammer. But not every image is a nail.
I used an iPhone 4 to shoot this page's previous banner image of a utility pole peppered with staples. With iPhone photos weighing in at a measly 5mb, you might think it'd be a stretch to use them for full-page banners. Especially since the super-horizontal crop required zooming in on just a sliver of the original photo.
In this case, however, it works fine. Here's why.
For one thing, it's a relatively high-contrast scene. Leaving it that way, by skipping a lot of Develop mode work, immediately tells the viewer that this is not a traditional portrait or landscape shot packed with tonal detail. I also converted it to black and white, using a Lightroom preset. Together, the changes serve to shift the photo to an illustration, which our eyes don't expect to include realistic details.
The final step of adding type—by choosing Photo > Edit in > Edit in Photoshop—completes the transformation. The take-away: Used in the right circumstance, small-file photos can punch well above their official weight.
It was beautiful while it lasted, but leaves have replaced the blossoms on our cherry tree. So it's time to retire last week's banner image. Click the thumbnail to see it full size.
Had thought about making this the blog's new banner image, but realized the crop would be too horizontal even for my tastes. Here, at least, you can see it as shot.
The background is Wake, a Richard Serra rusted-steel piece at Seattle Art Museum's outdoor sculpture garden. The wall—one of five—is 14 x 48 x 6 feet.
