Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Mike Wiacek wrote a little program that extracts a Lightroom preset from a Flickr photo. Basically, if you see a Flickr photo you like, you can try out the Preset Extractor to create a Lightroom preset of the effect. The extractor looks at the metadata and tries to reverse engineer it into a preset. Of course it only works if people don't strip the EXIF data from their photos before posting them and it only seems to work with the latest versions of Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Here's the link. Stop by and give it a try.

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Here's a few links worth checking out while you're web surfing today:

• Scott Eccleston over at Weekly Photo Tips featured me in a Q&A.

• Tim Armes has a new plug-in that exports your photos and preserves the folder hierarchy during the export for the new images.

• Cool product of the day alert. I haven't tried the Eye-Fi memory cardsout yet but I think I'm going to have to. Wireless transmitting of photos to your computer has got to be cool! :)

• Sean McCormack over at the Lightroom Blog has released a couple of plug-ins that export photos to your Twitter.com account. One is called LR2TweetPhoto and the other is LR2Tweetpic.

• Sherri Meyer did a top 10 Lightroom tweets of the week. Even if you hate twitter, there's some good links there to check out.

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Hey folks. I'm out in the Palouse region of Washington state teaching my GAPW workshop and getting up at oh-dark-thirty every morning. Seriously, we were driving to our sunrise shoot today (well Thursday which is when I'm writing this) at 4:10am and the sky was already blue. By 4:45 there was sun and by 5am it was bright as can be. It's even more odd when we were shooting the sunset at 8:45pm that same evening. That is one long day but I've got a great class here and we're having a really fun time. Anyway, on to the tip...

I always forget how cool the History panel is in Lightroom. It's basically undo's forever, of whatever you've done to your photo. If you're in the Develop module and you'd like to jump back to a specific point in the editing history of your photo, just look at the bottom left side of the interface for the History panel. Lightroom shows you every single history state that your image has gone through. It's just like Photoshop but when close your image in Photoshop, Photoshop forgets about the history. Lightroom doesn't. This really helps though when you're not sure what point you want to step back to and you don't feel like pressing Control/Command - Z a bunch of times. Just look for the specific step in the History and click on it to jump to that point. Hope you have a great weekend everyone! Get some extra sleep for me :)

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Hey, its posts like these that let me get my shameless plugs in for where I'll (and my friends) are going to be teaching. So in case you're interested, read on. If not, just read the next post for today for some Lightroom stuff.

• Lightroom Seminar Tour Dates - I'll be teaching a full-day Lightroom seminar for Kelby Training in Chicago on July 20th and in New York City on July 22nd. You can find out more about the tour and the full-day schedule here.

• Great American Photography Workshops - Later this week I'm heading to the Palouse Region of Washington to teach a full 3 day Photoshop/Photography workshop. If you're scratching your head saying "What is the Palouse", then check out this portfolio I found from photographer Chip Phillips. There's some really nice photos of the area. Anyway, these workshops are a great opportunity to get some one-one-one learning, as well as learn how to bring your photography and post-processing work together since we'll be shooting as well as spending lots of time in the classroom.

• Bogen is putting on a free Webinar. It's called A Budget Safari - Wildlife Photography at Your Local Zoo: Roundtable with Julie Larsen Maher. Click here to find out more.

• Photoshop/Photography Cruise - Dave Cross, Corey Barker and I are teaching on a week-long cruise. Now, its not until October and I know that's a long time to think ahead. But, when it comes to cruises time is running out so if you're thinking of going you can actually sign-up and reserve your spot (in the seminar and on the cruise) for only $100. You can also check out the website and see the full seminar schedule.

Hope you can make it out to one of these events.

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Hey there my fine tethered friends (that was such a bad joke - sorry). I wanted to give you guys a quick update on tethered shooting options for Lightroom. As usual, there's a few different options and most of them are for Nikon shooters. If you're wondering why, its because Canon DSLRs come with a free program that takes care of tethered shooting.

1) Canon EOS Utility (Mac/PC, $Free, Canon only) - This is the program if you're shooting Canon. You use it to tether your camera to your computer and transfer files into a folder that you set up. Then you set that folder as a watched folder for Lightroom to automatically import from.

2) Nikon Capture Control Pro (Mac/PC, $150+) - If you're a Nikon shooter then this is probably the most stable option. Its from Nikon and works great when you set it up with Lightroom. It'll run you at least $150 but if you're doing this for a living you'll make that money back pretty quick.

3) Sofortbild (Mac only, Nikon only, Free) - This one is a newcomer to the market and looks really good. I haven't personally tested it out but Scott Kelby has and is incorporating it into his next Lightroom seminar so I'll probably do the same. Speaking of Lightroom seminars, I just happen to be teaching one in Chicago on July 20th and New York on July 22nd. I'm just sayin' :)

4) Mountainstorm Studio & Lightroom Tether (Mac only, Free, Nikon only) - I've had pretty decent luck with this one. Plus, it supports Live View which is kinda cool. They have a very easy-to-follow manual and you can get a good idea of how it works from reading it (takes about 2 minutes to read).

5) There's is another free option for Nikon (only tested on some cameras) but it's only for Windows users. It's called DiyPhotoBits.com Camera Control 4. Here's the link. Interesting side-note: There also appears to be a script for viewing in Bridge as well.

So while the Lightroom/Tethered party isn't a fun one yet it definitely looks like things are getting better. Software developers seem to recognize the need for tethered shooting and are coming out with new versions of their software to help out. Should be interesting to see where it goes in the future.

One more thing. If you've got experience with any of the above-mentioned products then let us know in the comments. It think it helps others out as they're trying to figure out which software will work best for them. Thanks!

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