Lightroom inSights

Mastering the Newest Tool in Your Camera Bag

Jeff Carlson's new book from Peachpit Press, The iPad for Photographers: Master the Newest Tool in Your Camera Bag, does a great job of rounding up tools and tips for how to make your iPad part of your field photo kit. And the eBook version, at $15.99, can go right onto your iPad.

If you consider the iPad just a photo-viewing device, think again. I use Lightroom, always shoot in raw format and depend on my iPad for my field-to-desktop workflow. Thankfully, we've come a long way from the embryonic days when the release of the iPad-camera connector was a big deal.

Btw, his web site keeps you up to speed once you’ve absorbed the book’s info. Jeff’s also published an eBook on using Photosmith, which shows you how to use that app to tag and organize your photos while you’re away from your desktop copy of Lightroom. After repeatedly hitting the wall with the app’s own chock-full-of-blind-spots documentation, I found this the best $4.99 I’ve spent on photography.

Revel update now more useful for Lightroom

When Adobe first release Revel, its cloud-service program for sharing photos, I found it tremendously awkward. I quickly decided it wasn't worth the $59.99 annual/$5.99 monthly subscription.

But as Adobe evangelist Terry White explains, Revel 1.5 and Lightroom 4.2 release candidate let you create a simple workflow for sharing Lightroom-edited photos across all your devices. The secret sauce? A Publish Services plug-in. Depending on your needs, it might be worth the dough.

For now, I'm using Apple's Photostream to mesh my iPhone, iPad, and Mac photos. Also awkward, but free.

Lighten up: iPads and field work

Miles Hecker over at The Luminous Landscape has posted two quick pieces on why field photographers really ought to make tablet PCs part of their kit. He rightly argues that the weight difference alone between a tablet and a laptop is worth the inevitable tradeoffs in performance.

His first piece rounds up the hardware choices, though as my post title suggests, I think the iPad outshines any competitors. The second piece looks at the software side.

For now, the software choices remain limited, though the eventual release of Lightroom 4 should improve the situation as third-party developers better integrate tablet-based apps with the Lightroom workflow. One promising example is Photosmith, which is working on an all-new version of its Lightroom plug-in.

The Lightroom community initially was quite excited about Photosmith in early 2011 because it offered the prospect of being able to dump a card's worth of photos to your iPad, where you could add keywords and tags while still in the field. Once you got back to your Lightroom-equipped main computer, you'd be able to move those photos off the iPad right into a Lightroom catalog—along with the tags.

Alas, Photosmith v1 forced you to apply those tags one photo at a time, a deal-killing time suck that caused me and others to reluctantly abandon the plug-in. To their credit, Photosmith's developers have kept, um, plugging away at reconceiving and recoding the plug-in to coincide with Lightroom 4's eventual release.

When that time comes, I'll let you know how v2 fares in the field. Like plenty of other photographers, I can't wait to leave my laptop behind for good.

Fall's last days on Mt. Rainier

Mount Rainier National Park's Sunrise Road climbs to a 6,200' ridge where you get an incredible view of Mt. Rainier's 14,411' top. You can stand there and just watch the lenticular clouds form and reform over the peak.

This photo, btw, was posted directly from Lightroom, using Tim Armes' great export plugin LR/Blog. Very cool. At $12.60, it's a major bargain. You can see it and a bunch of other Lightroom plugins at The Photographer's Toolbox.

Smoother iPad-to-Lightroom path emerging?

As  explained in an earlier post, it's a hassle to get photos downloaded to an iPad over to your main machine for Lightroom work. You can do it, but geez it's hardly straightforward.

A still-in-beta app—Photosmith—just might bring us that much closer to the notion of carrying only your camera and iPad into the field.

With this app, to be released sometime in March 2011, you would port your photos to the iPad where you could then mark picks and rejects, plus add tags. That would give you a big jump on organizing your photos before returning to your main machine. Once you connected the iPad and main machine (whether by WiFi or USB) Lightroom would import them and pick up your pick/reject marks and tags.

In following the beta's progress at Photosmith's blog, I've been encouraged that the designers have kept focused on adding to Lightroom's utility rather than adding lots of beside-the-point bells and whistles. Of course, it's still in beta so we'll have to wait and see.

Btw, it's hard to imagine that Adobe's not also working away at incorporating iPads into their Lightroom workflow. Adobe's John Nack suggested as much on his blog, saying, "The time is not yet right" to say more. Competition is a good thing.