1) Lightroom 4 – Photoshop CS5 compatibility.

As you may know, Lightroom 4 (LR4) uses a completely different and new Process Version 2012. If you send a file over from LR4 to Photoshop (PS) CS5 (CS5) for further editing, you’ll get a dialog box that says LR needs Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 7 (which has yet to be released). The dialog box allows you to ‘Open Anyway‘ which is the default or to ‘Render using Lightroom‘. The latter option is the best and should be the default, IMHO. In that case, LR will render the TIFF or PSD (depending on how you set up your preferences) and will send that to PS, so your file will look in PS exactly the way you left it in LR. So this even works with CS4 or CS3.

Another solution for CS5 users would be to install the Camera Raw 6.7 update, which is already available as a ‘Release Candidate’ over at Adobe Labs: this will allow CS5 to read LR4′s instructions when handing over the file from LR to PS, even when you use ‘Open Anyway’ but it will not allow you to edit your images in ACR using the latest Process Version. So, it’s kind of a ‘read only version’ of the new Process Version 2012.

2) Important note when you’re using point curves

Some upgraders have found that LR4 messes with their custom point curves. Point curves are the ones your parents always warned you about. Kidding . If you use point curves, you should probably wait until Adobe, who are aware of this problem, have released a fix. If you don’t even know what a point curve is, you’re probably not affected, unless you often use presets that might use Point Curves without you knowing it…
I personally haven’t encountered this problem, but I don’t use Point Curves a lot and I haven’t yet had the time to go through all of my 60.000 images.

3) Is LR4 worth the upgrade, then?

AB-SO-LU-TE-LY!
I don’t consider the first point to be a problem: it will always be like that when you use different versions of LR and PS and for those who will upgrade to CS6 when it is available, the issue will disappear by itself and furthermore, there’s a workaround. You could even turn the act of sending an image over to PSCS4 or 5 into an ‘External Editing Preset’ so you don’t get the dialog box every time.

If you use a lot of point curves, the second issue might make you wait until there’s a fix for that.

For all the others: just have a look at the before and after image below to see how good LR4 is: this simply wasn’t possible in Lightroom 3.

One of the advantages of the fact that Lightroom is essentially a database, is that you can use Virtual Copies. As I explained during my presentations at Professional Imaging, Virtual Copies allow you to experiment with alternative versions of your pictures. Contrary to Snapshots, Virtual Copies can lead their own life in the Catalog.

Sometimes, as I explained in this recent blogpost, I use Virtual Copies to lessen the effect of a Lightroom Preset.

Saturday, at Professional Imaging, I accidentally discovered a new use for Virtual Copies: I wanted to do a slideshow with some Before & After pictures. I had set up Lightroom so that each picture was shown 2 seconds, with a transition time of one second. But I also had an introductory text slide (which I had made in Photoshop and imported into Lightroom), and 2 seconds wasn’t enough for people to read all of that. I could of course change the timing for the entire show, but then it would have lasted way too long… So, I just made a Virtual Copy of the text slide which effectively doubled the time it would be shown. As this still wasn’t enough, I made a second VC.

For those of you who did not make it to Professional Imaging, here’s the slideshow.

So how ‘bout you: what do you use Virtual Copies for?

Anyway, in the previous tip I showed you how I use the Edit In / Open as Layers in Photoshop feature in Lightroom to ‘fade’ the effect of a Lightroom Preset, for lack of a quicker way of doing so in Lightroom. Today, I want to show you another use of the Edit In / Open as Layers option.

It’s not strictly a Lightroom tip, it’s more of a Lightroom meets Photoshop Workflow Tip… I tend to use Lightroom as much as possible, but for some things, you just have to use Photoshop. Still when I go to Photoshop, I tend to do so from within Lightroom, because I know my edited Photoshop file will be put nicely into my Lightroom Catalog (that is, if I choose ‘Save’ in Photoshop, before returning back to Lightroom. Never choose ‘Save As…’ on a file that you sent from Lightroom to Photoshop, because Lightroom will lose track of it. That’s kind of a tip-within-the-tip for making up for my less-than-frequent posting behaviour

Anyway, here’s the video. If you have other uses of the Edit in / Open as Layers in Photoshop, please share them in the Comments!

One of the next blogposts will feature some behind-the-scenes photos of PortraitsOfAsia , and I also hope to give a review on the gear I used. Finally, if you happen to live in Belgium or the Netherlands, I’ll be hosting a couple of seminars at the Dutch Photography Fair, Professional Imaging, on my Lightroom workflow during PortraitsOfAsia. More about that here.

I’m excited to go there on March 7th, 8th and 9th. Excited, and also a little stressed: the auditorium can hold up to 600 people, so I’m told. Maybe the fair’s Keynote Speaker, Scott Kelby, who’s used to talking to much bigger audiences than this and who probably thinks of a group of 600 people as an ‘intimate get-together’, kan give me some relaxation tips. I’ll keep you… posted!

P.S. I thought I might as well include a Lightroom tip in this post. The photograph at the very top of this blogpost shows, apart from the crappy bokeh of a cheap Nikon lens, a defocused nightly street scene in central Mumbai. As you may know, Lightroom has a Spot Removal Tool (shortcut N), that lets you (non-destructively!) remove spots and blemishes. It’s great for removing sensor dust, because you can correct 1 picture and then synchronise your settings with the Sync… button. But you can also use the Spot Removal tool to add elements to your photo. Here, I used it to clone two light sources into the picture (to improve the balance), rather than to clone them away. I simply chose an existing light blob, and set that as the Source of the Spot Removal Tool. I clicked where I wanted the clone to be, and… voilà. I also cropped the picture using the Crop Tool (Shortcut R). P.P.S. Don’t get too hung up on that Spot Removal shortcut (N): it changes in Lightroom 3 to… Q

In Lightrooms Filter Bar, one of the metadata criteria you can filter on, is ‘Treatment’. That criterium can be ‘Color’ or ‘Grayscale’. Say you want to submit a picture to a B&W photo competition, and you want to use the Filter Bar to only show your Grayscale (btw, they’re called B&W as from Lightroom 3) pictures, you’d choose that option. However, if you look closely at the screenshot above, you’ll notice something wrong: there are at least two pictures that definetely are B&W, yet the Filter Bar doesn’t seem to find them. It categorizes them all as ‘Color’.

The reason is that the ‘Grayscale’ criterium only recognizes photos that have been converted to grayscale in Lightroom itself. If you use a plugin, even if you call it from Lightroom, as I did with Silver Efex Pro, the picture is not recognised as a B&W. Not even if you convert it to an 8 bit grayscale  image (Image > Mode > Grayscale) in Photoshop. The solution is to ‘fool’ Lightroom by actually ‘converting’ your already grayscale pictures a second time to grayscale by hitting the Grayscale button in the Develop panel or hitting ‘v’, which is the shortcut for ‘Convert to Grayscale’. This will not change the look of your pictures, but it will make the Filter Bar recognize the pictures as B&W, and they will show up in your search results as the screenshot below shows.

Well, sometimes Lightroom also puts out APB’s: more importantly if you decide to remove or relocate files outside of Lightroom. I always urge people(ask the attendants to my Lightroom workshops: they hear it a couple of times during the day) not to move, delete or even worse: rename files outside of Lightroom. Lightroom has got plenty of organizational features to do those tasks from within the software, allowing the Catalog to catch up with your changes.

Now, if you do change things outside of Lightroom, Lightroom will lose track of those files or folders and it will put out it’s own version of an APB: it does so by putting a question mark next to the folder or in the top corner of the image thumbnail. That question mark actually replaces the whole question ‘Why on earth did you go behind my back and move stuff outside of the beautiful piece of software that I am?’

If you’ve lost track of a folder, then you can redirect Lightroom to that folder’s location by right-clicking on the folder and choosing ‘Find Missing Folder’ from the list. (Screenshot, left) You subsequently navigate to the folder’s new location. If the folder contains subfolders that were also in Lightroom and have also been moved, then the software is clever enough to update those locations as well.

If it’s not an entire folder, but only a photo that Lightroom’s putting an APB out on, you click on the question-mark and choose ‘Locate’. (Screenshot, right) And afterwards, you solemnly promise Lightroom never to go behind it’s back again. ASAP!

This article was translated and adapted from my Dutch-language book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’. The book not only covers the five Lightroom modules, but pays very close attention to the way they work together and offers strategies on how to get the most out of the software. The book also features a lot of shorter tips and tricks, and an overview of interesting Lightroom Plugins. ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ is published by Easy Computing and isavailable in bookshops across Belgium and the Netherlands. Also available online at www.easycomputing.com or www.hcw.be.

But what if you a distracted, clumsy photographer like myself, and you return from a wedding, only to realise that you’ve not followed your own advice, and the timestamps of your two cameras don’t match?  Then, it’s ‘Edit Capture Time’ to the rescue. You can find this feature in the Metadata Menu of the Library Module.

These photos were taken with two cameras (a Nikon D700 and a Nikon D300) without having synched the time settings. I only realised importing, when I found that the different places where I’d photographed weren’t all nicely grouped together in Grid View.

I made a test shot, at the same time, with each camera. This showed me that the time difference between the two was 8 minutes.

In Lightroom, I selected all the pictures that were made with the D700 (I used the Filter Bar to select only those pictures). I chose Metadata => Edit Capture Time and adjusted the Corrected Time by 8 minutes.

The dialog box also caters to other needs, such as shifting date stamps by a certain amount of hours (Shift by set amount of hours (Time Zone Adjust)) which is, as you might guess, handy if you’ve forgotten to change your time settings when on holiday.

This article was adapted from my Dutch-language book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’, that is loaded with tips and tricks like these. The book is published by Easy Computing and available in bookshops across Belgium and the Netherlands. Also available online at www.easycomputing.com or www.hcw.be.