One of the cool yet often overlooked Lightroom features is the Web Module. As a photographer, you undoubtedly want to show your work to your friends, clients and possibly even the whole world! However, if you’re like me and you think that css is a detective series with enough spinoffs to make you dizzy and that flash is a synonym for a speedlight and not some web-programming language, then you know that designing your own photo website is a probably not the way to go. At least not if you want to get some more photography done before the end of this century. Of course you can hire a web-designer to make a great looking site, but this can easily set you back a couple of G’s. And not all of you struggling-to-get-by freelancers have that kind of money lying around, do you? And if you do, you probably want to spend that on your next camera or lens, don’t you? I hear you loud and clear!

So, what if I told you that someone who knows his Flash from his html from his css had already done all the heavy lifting for creating an out-of-the-box photography website for you. Even better: what if that person had wrapped all this code (the very fact that it’s called ‘code’ is a big sign to us, mere mortal photographers to not even try to understand it) into a nice Lightroom plugin.

Wouldn’t that be worth a 100 bucks to you? 200 anyone? Do I here 300 in the back of the room? Well… this is exactly what Sean McCormack from Lightroom-Blog has done. He’s made a highly configurable yet easy-to understand Lightroom Web Module Engine called LRB Portfolio. It allows you to design a complete photography portfolio website from within Lightroom’s Web Module, including galleries, an ‘about’ page, a ‘contact’ page and the like.

And the beauty is it won’t cost you thousands of dollars, not even hundreds. About 20 USD/15 Euro + VAT is what you’ll pay for the plugin. That’s one less CD or DVD to buy this week, and it’s all paid for. 

Sean has just released a new, identically priced Lightroom Web Engine, called LRB Exhibition. I haven’t had the chance to play around with it yet, but below you find a screenshot from Sean’s site. It allows you to focus even more on your pictures. Being the great lad that the is, Sean has made a good deal even better by offering a 20% discount on his plugins and other Lightroom goodies (such as his Graduated Filter Presets). Check (them) out before midnight of March 12th, because that’s when the discount ends. Make sure to use coupon code FOCUS20.

In future blogposts, I’ll discuss some other interesting web design plugins for Lightroom. Meanwhile, if you use one that you’re happy with, or have an example of a site you created with Sean’s or other Lightroom Web Engines, please enlighten us in the comments!

If you follow this blog or if you’ve read my Lightroom book, you know that Lightroom is my primary raw converter. Still, I quite often use DxO Optics Pro. This software is both available as a standalone product and as a Lightroom plugin (actually, if you buy it, you can use it both ways).

The thing that is special about it, is that, unlike other Raw Converters, DxO’s image improvements are based on actual measurements of how different lenses behave on different cameras, at different focal lengths and ISO’s.

Such a camera-lens combination is called a module. As new lenses and cameras are developed, new modules are added to DxO’s site. The software comes in two flavours: Standard and Elite. If you have a fullframe sensor, you’ll need the Elite version (and you can consider yourself an elitist photographer, from now on ). The Standard version caters to DX or cropped sensor bodies. If you have both, you only need the Elite version, as it also gives you access to all of the modules of the Standard version. It also doesn’t matter if you have one or multiple cameras: let’s say you have a Nikon D700, a Nikon D90, a Canon 5DMkII a Canon 7D and a bag of lenses, you’d still only need one (Elite) license. You can install one license on two computers.

You can find out if your camera is supported on this page. There’s also a roadmap of the modules that will be incorporated in the near future.

Because of this tailor-made approach, it’s very easy to use DxO to automatically (batch-) correct lens problems like complex distorsion patterns, chromatic aberration, corner unsharpness, vignetting and so on. It also also a very handy tool for perspective correction.

You can download a one month trial version from their website. At the end of the trial, you can even ask for an extension for some time! However, it pays to make up your mind a little sooner: until the end of this year, you get a 30% discount. This applies both to the Windows version of the software (which is at version 6) as for the Mac version (which will be upgraded to version 6 in january – you get a free upgrade if you buy now). Depending on the version, the discount lets you save 50 to 100 €.

If it’s true that money less spent is money saved, than you can use your savings to pay (part of the) upgrade to Lightroom 3 later next year !

Related blogposts:

• From Monitor Shock To Moody Blues
• Bay-Bayan Setup (in Dutch)

This picture  of a rickshaw driver in Fort Cochin, Kerala, India was converted to Black & White using Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software. I subsequently added the old-school film border (they’re sometimes referred to as ‘sloppy borders’) with Photoframe from OnOne Software. Of course, as I point out in my book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ (which, by the way, makes for a great New Year’s gift (as long as the one you’re giving it to speaks Dutch ), you could also use a scan of a sloppy border, and apply it in Lightroom as an Identity Plate in the Print Module. But that’s not the actual tip. The actual tip is about Lightroom’s filtering capabilities.

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.