Adobe Lightroom: Lightroom Mobile, Lightroom Web

I wasn’t all that impressed with Lightroom Mobile, because I don’t think i really want to do lightroom work on my phone, but somehow I like the idea of Lightroom Web better…. You can access your mobile lightroom collections from any browser now, and do some light editing. Just log into your adobe account from your browser, or go to lightroom.adobe.com

What I really want though, is the ‘web’ presentation features to be dumped out straight from lightroom to my adobe hosted server, and have the front end be something like smug mug..

Lightroom: Visualize Spots

For Lightroom 5 I just noticed a “Visualize Spots” button for when you are using the healing brush. I’m not sure exactly what it does, but it sure looks cooool!

• Select the Healing Tool
• Visualize Spots check box (with a slider) will show up in the Tools Bar at the bottom of the image.

The official word on Visualize Spots is as follows. I just want to know how to export this image!

The Visualize Spots feature helps you see and fix these imperfections before you print.

When the Spot Removal tool is selected, the Visualize Spots option and slider are available below the image. When you select the Visualize Spots option, the image is inverted, and you can see imperfections more clearly. You can vary the contrast levels using the slider, to look for imperfections in greater or lesser detail. You can then use the Spot Removal tool to remove distracting elements.

!

Lightroom 5: Upright

Upright is an semi-automatied push-button solution to get rid of leveling and perspective convergence problems in your photos. It’s located in the Develop Module >  Lens Corrections> Basic

• Enable Profile Correction and Remove Chromatic Abberation to make Upright work better
• Auto: applies a balanced level, aspect ratio, and perspective correction. Lines may not be perfectly vertical or horizontal, but it looks more natural.
• Level: Enable level correction only.
• Vertical: Enable level and vertical perspective correction only.
• Full: Enable full level, horizontal and vertical perspective corrections.

Synchronizing Upright Settings between multiple photos

• Upright Mode: Applies Upright to each photo individually. Each photo is evaluated independently.
• Upright Transforms: Applies the same Upright transformations to all the photos. Good for HDR or time lapse sequences.

Adobe Lightroom Settings: Creating a Preset vs Copying/Pasting a Setting

I want to create some custom Lightroom Presets. The default images are getting old and boring to look at. Here’s a few things I found out.

• Lightroom Presets don’t capture Local Adjustment settings, which are…
  • Crop Overlay
  • Spot Removal
  • Red Eye Removal
  • Adjustment Brush
  • with the exception of Graduated Filters, which it does capture.
• If you Copy/Paste/Synchronize settings between photos, however (instead of applying a preset)
  you get the capability to transfer over additional settings!
  • Spot Removal
  • Crop (Straighten Angle, Aspect Ratio)
  • Adjustment Brush
  • Graduated Filters (again)

If you think about it, it makes sense. You don’t really want to capture “local adjustments” for “global” presets, especially with the red eye reduction tool, which has very specific size/location. For what I was trying to tweak Lightroom to do though… bummer.

Adobe Lightroom Crop Overlays

Adobe Lightroom’s Crop tool [R] offers a bunch of different crop overlays to help you crop your photos. Just push [O] to toggle through the different options. There’s even a golden triangle spiral!

Lightroom Photo Metadata Attributes: How it Applies in the Catalog

Lightroom seems pretty inconsistent about what kind of metadata attribute can be applied to what, so I thought I’d make a chart. [Also, thanks, WordPress. I havn’t had to hand code a table in a looooooong time.]

Attribute	Is a Part of the…	What it means
Star Ratings	Individual Photos	The photo gets a rating that’s part of its metadata.
Color Label	Individual Photos	The photo gets a color rating that’s part of its metadata. The color rating may change to white depending on the text in the “Color Label Set”
Pick/Reject	Folder/Collection	The same photo may be a Pick in one collection but a Reject in another.
Stacks	Folder	Can only be applied when in Folder view. What gives?
Quick Collection	Catalog Data	Lightroom’s temporary collection.

Applying Metadata: Filtering White Color Labels in Lightroom and Bridge

The real evidence that labels really are text descriptions as opposed to colors can be seen when you try to filter your images. Even if you don’t have ANY matching text descriptions and all the colors show up as white, Bridge and Lightroom will see the text descriptions of the label and allow you to sort by the text label.

Filter by Labels in Bridge

Filter by “Color” Labels in Lightroom

Applying Metadata: Custom Label Descriptions in Lightroom

"Custom" labels are white. When the File's embedded text descriptor doesn't match Lightroom's current setting, it is considered "custom".

Just like in Bridge, if the current Text Label doesn’t match the color label, the color is displayed as white, for “custom” or “other. This can happen when you edit a Label Set, Switch to another Label Preset, or anytime where the current Text/Color Label combination from the file doesn’t match what Lightroom’s current setting is.

Applying Metadata: Changing/Customizing Label Descriptions in Lightroom

Despite being called “Color Labels”, Lightroom Labels are text descriptor based as well. It just so happens that the text descriptors happen to be colors. The Text Labels can be edited, and the edits can be saved as different presets.

The Bridge Default Set has matching descriptions to Bridge’s Labels

The Lightroom Default set has colors as the text description

To create a new label set, or switch to another label set, go to Metadata> Color Label Set>

Applying Metadata: Synchronizing Metadata Across Bridge and Lightroom Manually

To manually synchronize cataloge metadata and embedded metadata in Lightroom:

• Metadata > Save Metadata to File
• Metadata > Read Metadata from File