New from John Beardsworth, a plug-in that lets you copy the metadata from one file to another one of the same name (From a JPEG to a NEF for instance). John’s hard at work on Lightroom Plug-ins, which is good for people who want to use the program and need extensions to the file or metadata handling capabilities.
From his blog:
My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available. Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to copy the metadata between two groups of files and can use the filenames to match up pairs of images. So imagine you have lots of raw files with metadata, and TIFs of JPEGs whose metadata should match the raw files from which they were created. Syncomatic simply runs through the two groups of pictures and makes the metadata of 1234.jpg the same as 1234.raw, makes 6789.jpg match 6789.raw…..
Editor’s Note: This post was created more than a year ago, and was lost to a blog hack. Thanks to John Beardsworth for helping to sort out the hack, as well as a more recent one that we’ve been battling for the last month of so. The recent July 4th holiday has prompted me to bring it back out.
Every now and then, I get to work on a project that I’m really proud of – something that is really important. I consider the virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be one of the best. I was commissioned by Footnote.com to make a digital representation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. They wanted to provide a way for everyone to experience the power of the wall, regardless of their ability to travel to Washington. And they wanted to let visitors leave behind comments and photos, in the same way visitors do at the real wall.
When you click on the name of any person on the wall, you get some information about that person, age, hometown, rank, cause of death. You also get the opportunity to upload comments or photos to the record of that person. In this way the wall becomes more than just a list of 58,000 names – it becomes a record of 58,000 individuals. The tragedy of war, and the depth of the sacrifice of the individual soldier is made all the more real when you see the comments of family, friends, and comrades left behind.
Tips on navigating the site and more on the project after the jump.
In this movie for dpBestflow, we further examine camera scan workflow for black and white film. This workflow outlines the optimization of a single image, including custom use of the curve, dust removal, local corrections, and more. You can go to the whole page here.
One of the less-trumpeted features of the Lightroom 3 final release is the addition of the IPTC Extension to the metadata panel. These new metadata categories were approved nearly 2 years ago, but few applications have adopted them. (Of course, idImager was probably the first – Hert is always ahead of the curve).
These new panels offer the ability to describe your images in some interesting ways. You can note the name of people who are in the picture, for instance. (A picture of the White House might be about Barack Obama, for instance, even though it is not of him.) You can also note the presence and id of a model release, lots of information about artwork that is pictured, and additional location tags. Of course these won’t all be useful to everyone, but certain fields will be quite valuable for certain images.
Yes, kids, it’s that time again – another Lightroom Beta has hit the streets. Big news includes Video support, tethered shooting, and new noise reduction. This one’s much closer to finished software than the first beta, although it still has some kinks in it, and it’s not totally feature-complete. Read more from these Lightroom experts.
Adobe Labs has updated DNG conversion options in Lightroom, ACR, and the DNG Converter that offer some (possibly confusing) new options. You now have a preference pulldown for compatibility settings. What’s up with that? The short answer is that new functionality has been added to the DNG specification (and to the latest version of Camera Raw) that can do new tricks to the pictures.
For instance, there is now a way for Adobe (and others) to remove lens distortion from the image. Since this is a new function, it’s necessary to make a new version of the spec that details how to save and apply the instructions. One thing this enables is for cameras that don’t work well with the current DNG spec to now be supported. Check out Tom Hogarty’s blog to see the new camera support.
Some new DNGs that make use of these new tools won’t be fully compatible with all DNG applications. You can save them so that they will work with the older software, but they will lose some of their rawness. How the heck does one decide which to use?
Here’s a quick tip to speed up Lightroom on an intel Mac. Select the program in the applications folder (single click), and then go to File>Get Info. In the General Panel, there is a checkbox to run the program in 32 bit mode. This is the default setting. Uncheck this box, and Lightroom will now run in 64 bit mode, speeding things up.
This is not available for G5 or earlier computers, nor for OS prior to 10.5.
On PC, you need to be running a 64 bit OS to install the 64 bit application.
