Lightroom Killer Tips

If you're an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom user, you should check-out a great blog called lightroomkillertips.com Matt Kloskowski of Kelby Training posts a wealth of information, with a mixture of tips, videos and free presets. The blog has been running for a long time now, so there's loads of content to work through. You can also expect a lot of tips for Lightroom 3, now that it's on beta release.

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta is available for download here. You should also watch the three tutorial videos at AdobeTV while you are finding your way through the new version. This is a Beta version for testing, and not the official release. At first glance there doesn't look as though much has changed, but when you start to poke around, you can see that there's quite a lot of new features.

The Library Module: As soon as you click the import button you will see a full new section that can be set to full screen mode for initial set-up and then reduced to a thin bar for day to day imports. A great new feature here is the ability to save import settings as snapshots. Unfortunately the import page keeps causing Lightroom to freeze all the time (it is Beta). Another great new feature in the Library Module is the ability to upload directly from Lightroom to Flickr.

The Develop Module: The big changes here are in the sharpening and noise reduction. There is a new Effects panel that revamps the way that post crop vignetting is applied. The Grain slider is a very welcome feature too.

As I've only downloaded L3 Beta today, I haven't had time to go through the full application, but I like what I've seen so far.

Nikon D300s Raw Files:: DNG Workaround

So, if like me, you have your new Nikon D300s and are out there shooting lots of photos to test it out. Maybe, like me, you have an important job coming up and you’re looking forward to putting it to work. But if you shoot in RAW and use Lightroom or Aperture, you have a problem, as the D300s is so new, neither Lightroom nor Aperture can handle the Nikon NEF RAW file format for the camera yet. So until they have been updated, you will either need to shoot JPEG or use Adobe’s DNG converter (*see bottom of this post about Camera Raw 5.5). I always shoot in RAW, so JPEG is not an option for me.

Using Adobe DNG converter, there are two ways to go. The first option is to convert NEF to DNG...job done. The downside is that you can’t extract the NEF file once the Lightroom/Aperture updates are available. The second option is to convert to DNG, and embed the original NEF file inside the DNG. The downside to this is that the converted DNG file will be around 25mb, double the size of your original NEF, but you will be able to extract the NEF at a later date.

*There is a 5.5 update for Camera Raw which covers the D300s, but it looks like it will only load on a 64bit machine. Photoshop CS4 will not work on a 64bit machine (according to the forums). Camera Raw 5.5 won’t work in Elements either...useless!

Download Adobe DNG converter at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.5

If you want to see previews of your DNG’s in Windows explorer, you will need to download the DNG Codec at http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Codec