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.

More info after the jump

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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.

Victoria Bampton, Lightroom Queen

Richard Earney’s Lightroom Blog

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom Product Manager

Sean McCormack’s Lightroom Blog

Jeffrey Friedl, Master Plug-in maker

Ian Lyons at Computer-Darkroom

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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?

Answer after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

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