WayWest

Lightroom inSights: my new blog & book

Peachpit Press is now shipping my latest book, Lightroom 3 Visual QuickStart Guide. A new blog/companion site can be found here with lots of info, including sample content, the table of contents, and lots of tips.

R.I.P. would disappoint him

Master photo printer Ctein has a wonderful essay on the death Tuesday of Jim Marshall, whose photos of rock'n roll and jazz musicians are embedded into our collective pysche:

"And that's all he wrote. Possibly the most generous and irritating man I've ever worked with. I'd be surprised if I ever meet anyone more generous. I sure as hell hope I never meet anyone more irritating. Alkie, druggie, abusive, and open-hearted. An exhausting combination. "

Staying atop the flood of images

Amid all the great books about digital shooting, there's precious little about what's probably the most common—and daunting—issue: how best to weed down the flood of images. This wonderfully detailed post by Carl Weese over at The Online Photographer wrestles that beast to the ground:

The trouble with a dense forest of captures is how to find the best trees. There's also the issue of "what was I really trying to do with this shoot?" That question may not apply to conceptual artists who start with an idea and set up a shot for the camera, but for any photographer who likes to work by going out into the world just looking for the unexpected, the unedited take can be completely confusing. The whole collection is overwhelming so the trick is to slice it into manageable chunks.

While Lightroom is a terrific, powerful tool, how-tos like this one really help in the day-to-day work of staying atop your personal flood of images.

Sample Lightroom chapter to help you decide

If you need help deciding whether to jump on the March-only discount price for Lightroom 2 VQS, you might want to read this sample chapter. Taken from Chapter Four, it highlights one of Lightroom's best features: The Library module. The Library module is what gives Lightroom an edge over its more well-known cousin, Photoshop, and it's where you'll do most of your organizing and reviewing of images.

Only 9 days to save $9 on my Lightroom book

Save 30 percent at Barnes and Noble on select Visual QuickStart Guides—including my own Adobe Lightroom 2 VQS. That's $9 bucks off the regular $20.99 price. But deal ends March 31, so click now!

(Via Peachpit Press)

Get your downloads: Lightroom 2.3 + Camera Raw 5.3

Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 are now available for download.

In addition to added support for a few newer cameras (the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30), there have been lots of little tweaks to Lightroom overall. Nothing major, but all signs of Adobe's continued dedication to keep Lightroom the best tool around for digital photographers. Adobe's installation PDF has the details.

Exceptions are everywhere

Photographer Ctein is talking about judging individual cameras amid a sea of performance stats but his words ring true across the board:

Exceptions are not the norm (that's why we call them exceptions) but they're ubiquitous.

It resonates with something psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his New York Times primer on genetics and personality in which he tries to tease out which is which and why we can't yet:

Even in the simplest organisms, genes are not turned on and off like clockwork but are subject to a lot of random noise, which is why genetically identical fruit flies bred in controlled laboratory conditions can end up with unpredictable differences in their anatomy. This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance.

Full piece worth a read in the Jan. 11 New York Times magazine.

Rx for holiday camera lust

In an article that starts out as a classic gear-head piece, Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer compares digital cameras with full-frame sensors to those with more common (and way less expensive) APS-sized sensors. He reveals hot tech specs, even shows a pixel close-up to get us really worked up. Fortunately, he also offers this Rx for all of us suffering gotta-have-it camera lust:

"What's the cure for camera agony of any sort? Just work. Shoot. Get interested in something. Take stock of what equipment you already have, and figure out what it can be used for. Go shoot. Get involved in the pictures. If your camera isn't the last word in high ISOs, then find a little more light and shoot at lower ISOs. You'll live."

Keep it in mind—camera fevers can be especially contagious this time of year.

Lightroom 2.2 now available

Adobe has finished whacking the latest bugs in Lightroom and has released version 2.2 to send them running. Tom Hogarty details the fixes, the most welcome being that the Adjustment brush now works much more smoothly. If you're already running Lightroom 2, of course, it will automatically alert you about the update.

While it sometimes makes sense to hold off and let the early adopters find bugs in the updates, this particular round of fixes has been in the works for at least a month. Beta testers (not that I know anything about that) hit it hard early on, so it's one I installed immediately. 

Lightroom 2 Beta: sweet & public

Adobe released a 2.0 public beta of Lightroom this morning that includes so many of the items we've been asking for:

• Support for multiple monitors, something Apple's Aperture has had from the start that stirred a lot of envy among Lightroom users
• A Detail pane so you get a real-close look while keeping sight of the full photo
• Localized adjustments, aka dodge and burn, without having to hop over to Photoshop
• Smart collections, which automatically gather up photos by your criteria, such as keywords, ratings

I'll have more details in the days ahead. In the meantime, here's a sample of what the multiple-monitor support offers:

Keep your overview using the Grid view on main monitor…
…while seeing the details, using Loupe view on a second monitor.