Fitness Center

This is one of my favorite frames from a recent shoot I did at the Fitness Center at EWU. Using Lightroom 2, I color balanced the light and reshaped the tone curve to give it a more industrial look.

Turkeys

Here's a shot I took in the spring of 2008. The exposure was terrible. The white balance was shifted extremely pink. I used Lightroom 2 to pull a reasonable exposure. I cranked the vibrance up to pull some richness in the colors. I love what vibrance does to polarized windows, it turns them a beautiful shade of teal blue. It was exciting seeing wild turkeys foraging around on the front lawn of Showalter Hall.

From Lightroom to flickr by Magic

I was given a link to this great Lightroom 2 plugin by a good friend that throws me tidbits of social networking goodness occasionally. This plugin allows you to export directly to your authenticated flickr account. It is truly a timesaver.



This talented programmer is living in Japan. His name is Jeffrey Friedl. After downloading and installing the plugin I was having trouble with it enabling. I sent him a bug alert and he emailed me with a fix within a few hours. Great customer service for a guy that was just demo'ing his plugin.

The plugin basically puts the functionality of flickr into the export section of Lightroom. You can not only upload the exported media to flickr but you can click about a million option boxes to totally optimize the way your media is handled by flickr. You can put your photo in a preexisting set or create a new one. You can send the photo to a group photo pool. You can specify the level of permission the photo gets and then send a tweet about it.

I love it when software goes above and beyond by not only giving me what I want, but giving me 100 extra things that will give me new ideas for working. That's what makes great software. Check him out .

Saving Lightroom Edits to Metadata

Lightroom is a great tool for digitally developing photos. It does what Adobe Bridge, DNG Convertor and Camera Raw 4.0 do in one easy package. The problem is that it doesn't do what Bridge does well... namely working with metadata. When you change metadata in Bridge such as a keyword or a develop setting the changes are saved to the DNG file automatically. In Light room the metadata may be saved to the Library, but not to the metadata. So when you make the perfect crop and white balance adjustment in Lightroom those changes will not appear in Bridge. You have to save the settings in Lightroom manually using the ctrl-s keystroke as it does not exist in the Edit tab.

Also another note: if you are in the Develop module you can only save the metadata of one file at a time, even if you select all. I found that if you jump back to the Library module, select all then save, all of your files will be updated.