iPhone Photo Video » Lightroom

LrSaver to create screensaver from your Lightroom catalog

Veit — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:18:53 +0000

If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive holiday gift for a photographer who uses Adobe Lightroom, LrSaver might be it. It’s a simple program which does one thing – create a screensaver based on your Lightroom catalog.

There are two features I like about LrSaver:

You can use smart collections, which are based on any combination of metadata, to pick the images for your screensaver.
LrSaver utilizes your Lightroom cache, not your actual images, for the screen saver. If you have your images on an external drive, you can still use LrSaver even if that drive is not connected.

Availability for Windows and Mac

Price: $9.99 at LrSaver.com

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta available for download

Veit — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:19:38 +0000

Regardless whether you already own a copy of Lightroom, a beta of version 3 of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is now available. As always, it can be downloaded from Adobe’s Download Center. Luminous Landscape has an excellent preview article on what’s new in this beta version.

I don’t know about you, but my copy is already downloaded.

Adobe and Lexar offer discounts on Lightroom, Photoshop

Veit — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:40:32 +0000

Lexar joined forces with Adobe to provide special discounts on Photoshop Elements 8, Premiere Elements 8 and Photoshop Lightroom 2. All Lexar Professional CF memory cards will offer $100 off the purchase of Lightroom 2, and $30 off Photoshop / Premiere Elements 8.

I’ve always been a fan of Lexar Compact Flash cards and at least the $100 offer for Lightroom 2 (currently around $250 at Amazon) is generous. As always, I’d check out Adobe’s upgrade eligibility first, but this promo would currently be the avenue I would take, if I wanted to get a full license of Lightroom.

The new offerings and promotions from Lexar and Adobe will begin in November.

Why is Lightroom preferred over Aperture even on a Mac?

Veit — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:04:57 +0000

According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.

Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:

Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.

Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.

Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?

iPhone as a platform for educational videos

Veit — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:08:24 +0000

GetGoing released its newest set of training videos, in this case for Adobe Photoshop. It will be available for purchase as a QuickTime download, DVD-ROM or iPhone / iPod video version.

By no means is this the only training offering that photographers could utilize on their iPhones. There’s quite a range of video podcasts for Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture and others that you can access for free on iTunes. Simply subscribe to them and start learning. And by the nature of iTunes, they are all downloadable to the iPhone.

Here’s my problem with this approach – I don’t watch training videos on the iPhone. For starters, most of these videos or video podcasts include screen captures taken from the Mac or a PC at full resolution, so it is hard to see the action or the mouse on the small iPhone screen. Even more importantly, while watching them I also like to have access to Photoshop, so I can practice while I learn. No such luck on the iPhone – there’s no Photoshop for the iPhone.

So while I watch many of the terrific video podcasts for photographers on my Mac, I do not watch them on the iPhone. Do you?

iPhone geotags your DSLR photos

Veit — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:08:09 +0000

Would you like to geotag your photos that you shoot with your DSLR or point & shoot camera, even if the camera itself does not allow you to do so. Or do you shy away from geotagging because the manufacturers’ solutions are too pricey? There is an alternative, if you have an iPhone!

Simply install GeoTag from Salt & Pepper on your iPhone. When in the field shooting pictures, turn on GeoTag, so it records your GPS coordinates. Once back home, download your GeoTag information into the free Geotag desktop companion software and then merge them with your images inside the Geotag desktop. From there, you can import your images into Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, iPhoto or your favorite photo editor.

This does not only work for JPGs, but also a variety of RAW formats, including Canon’s CR2, Nikon’s NEF, Olympus’ and Panasonic’s RAW formats and with a variety of other image formats (TIF, PNG, others).

A flow-chart with more details can be found at Salt&Pepper’s Geotag website.

There are two downsides to this process:

First, Geotag Desktop is Mac only at this time. No luck for Windows folks who have iPhones.
Secondly, there is an extra step required to merge the geotags before you can import the images into your photo editing or management software. You cannot do it there directly. But then, given the low price of Geotag, it’s worth the extra step to many of us!

Price: $3.99 from iTunes.

PhoneView helps manage iPhone photos

Veit — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:26:06 +0000

I am a fan of MacHeist and MacUpdate bundles – I bought five of them in the last 24 months. How can you not be a fan? Get 10 or more full-featured apps for less than $50! Typically, these bundles include 1 or 2 apps that I really want and a few more that I don’t mind having. And I always find at least one hidden gem – an application that I did not see a need for having but ends up being used on an almost daily basis. The gem from the last MacHeist bundle was PhoneView.

ecamm’s PhoneView is a desktop companion for the iPhone or iPod touch. It allows you to move files to and from the iPhone, so you can use the iPhone as a storage device (essentially, a very expensive thumb drive). You can also save your SMS and your Call History (I do both). You can upload ringtones (OK, not my thing). And as I found out, it’s awesome at managing your iPhone pictures (a great surprise).

Most Mac users manage their photos through iPhoto – I manage mine in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
. In fact, I don’t really use iLife at all. Thus, I found it cumbersome to have to import all of my photos into iPhoto just for the purpose of synch’ing them to my iPhone. Plus, I’ve always had problems downloading my iPhone photos into iPhoto (I assume the reason for this is that I’m still on iLife 2007). Not so with PhoneView – simply export your photos from Lightroom into the PhoneView image folder, then click Copy to iPhone in Phoneview. Done! Similarly for downloading images – click the pictures you want to download, then Copy From iPhone. Very quick and handy!

This is a companion app that is worth its money!

Price: $19.95

How to best display your photos on an iPhone

Veit — Sat, 16 May 2009 23:34:52 +0000

If you carry an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you also carry a great platform for displaying your photos. While photographers such as Scott Bourne claim that they sold artwork straight after showing it on their iPhone, this has never happened to me. But I’ve shown my photos in a number of casual settings, often by accident, since the topic just came up. Thus, it pays (literally and figuratively) to be prepared.

So how do you best showcase your photos on an iPhone? Here are some tips:

Resize your images: The iPhone’s native resolution is 480 x 320 pixels at 163ppi. Since it allows you to zoom in, I resize my images to 960 x 640 pixels at 163ppi. You could make them even bigger, but since the iPhone’s storage space is limited, there’s a tradeoff between better resolution and more images.

Create portfolios: Similar to any showing of your photos, create portfolios centering around subjects, trips or events, then pick only the best images. Store these as separte portfolios, then transfer them to your iPhone. When you show your photos in a more ad-hoc or casual setting, people don’t have the time to look at 300 pictures. Thus, I typically pick between 10 and 20 pictures for a portfolio.

Adjust for the iPhone screen: The iPhone screen is not color-calibrated and to my eye, it’s very contrasty. Thus, I have to adjust my images, so they display at their best on the iPhone. Unfortunately, this is a manual process – there’s no one-setting-fits-all slider, button or action you can use in Photoshop. However, if you use a sequence of images in a portfolio that were all taken under similar lighting conditions, Photoshop, Aperture and Lightroom make it easy to apply adjustments to a set of images, so you do not have to do this manually for every single image.

What other tricks do you use to best show your images on an iPhone?