Round about Lightroom 3.2, Adobe added support for intercepting “lightroom://” URLs, but have not documented it yet, so I'll do so here. It's particularly useful as part of an OAuth-authentication procedure.

What

You can have your plugin automatically respond to certain “lightroom://” URLs if they are formatted correctly, and if you add appropriate support to your plugin.

URL Form

After registering the appropriate handler in you plugin, as described below, the handler will be invoked when your system browser receives a URL of the form:

The “your.plugin.id” is the LrToolkitIdentifier in Info.lua. For example, the id for my Flickr plugin is “info.regex.lightroom.export.flickr2”, so it can be set to handle URLs such as:

etc.

How

Create a .lua file that returns a table along the lines:

return {
   URLHandler = function(url)
       -- The url string sometimes actually have a double quote as
       -- the first and last byte, so strip just in case.
       url = url:gsub('^"(.*)"$', "%1")

       -- Work with url here...

   end
}

Wrapping the function in a one-element table seems like an odd level of indirection, but that's how it works.

You then add a reference to that file in your Info.lua, as “URLHandler”. If the file is named “MyUrlHandler.lua”, for example, the reference in Info.lua would look like:

return {
   LrToolkitIdentifier = "info.regex.lightroom.export.flickr2",
   LrPluginName        = "jf Flickr",
   LrPluginInfoUrl     = "http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr",

   LrSdkVersion        = 3.4,
   LrSdkMinimumVersion = 3.4,

   URLHandler = "MyUrlHandler.lua",
}

Within the URLHandler function, you can access parts of the URL (e.g. in an OAuth situation, the token) and stuff into global variables, and perhaps shut down a dialog that had been open by calling LrDialogs.stopModalWithResult(...).

That last bit seems to be unfortunately necessary... I've found that the handler is not properly invoked in some rare OS/browser combinations, so I feel that to cover all my bases, the plugin must open a dialog to tell the user to paste in their token; if the handler ends up working, the plugin can immediately shut down that dialog so the user is not bothered with it. Usually, that's exactly what happens, and it happens so quickly that the user never even sees the dialog.

I don't think Adobe's plugins do this, so maybe the problem has been on my end, but I thought I'd mention it because this is what my plugins do.

Lightroom 4 has lots of new big-ticket goodies, including a book module, map module (with geoencoding!), soft proofing, more video support, and a new render engine that takes the dramatic improvements in raw image conversion seen in the Lr2→Lr3 to the next leap. There are also many small improvements sprinkled about.

Adobe's Lightroom-Journal announcement gives some details, but for a comprehensive list of changes, see Victoria Bampton's always-excellent “What's New” post. For tutorials, walkthroughs, and other coverage, see this long list of links maintained by Sean McCormack

Important note: the Lr4 public beta is a “beta” in the true sense: take care to have a backup of any images you apply it to, and don't expect that any work you do with it will carry forward to the real Lr4 when it comes out. Use it to play around with and as a basis to provide feedback (at Adobe's Lr4 beta forums), but it's not intended to be used (or ready to be used) in a production environment.

Lr4 and Plugins

Modern versions of my plugins should work just fine in the Lr4 public beta.

Unlike the last major upgrade (Lr2→Lr3), there's not much new (yet?) for a plugin developer like me. There was a ton of new stuff in Lr3 to occupy my time (most of it came in Lr3's second public beta), and the stress of it eventually overwhelmed me, but in the end it caused me to make beneficial changes to my habits. I'm still developing every day, but with more balance. That, combined with a recent willingness to walk instead of take the car and I'm in pretty good shape, at my lowest weight in a decade (88kg · 195lb · on my 6'4" frame), but you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about Lightroom...

Lr4 and Geoencoding

The only Lr4-specific change in my plugins so far is in my Geoencoding-support plugin: the silly kludge of “shadow data” that I had to come up with in Lr1 is now gone because Lightroom's plugin infrastructure finally allows me to update the “real” location data.

The Lr4 public beta does not allow you to upgrade an old catalog to Lr4, so there's not yet a need to migrate old shadow data to real data, but I'll build something to handle that before Lr4 proper is out.

I'm absolutely thrilled that Lr4's new Map Module allows geoencoding, in a variety of ways no less (drop-n-drag on a map!), but I'm not partial to how GPS-unit tracklogs are handled, so I'll probably continue to use my plugin to geoencode with them. My plugin also includes a bunch of other geoencoding-related support functions (enhanced reverse geocoding, view locations in KML, etc.) so I expect the plugin to become even more popular: the ease of the Map Module will bring more Lr users to the geoencoding fold.

Lr4 and Plugin Registration

My plugins are free for everyone to use forever, without payment to me or anyone else. However, I do encourage optional registration, which generally costs 1 cent in a PayPal fee. (If you choose to register and choose to include more than PayPal's minimum as a gift to me, PayPal will take its larger cut in fees, and if there's anything left over for me, you have my gratitude.)

However, none of this has anything to do with the Lr4 public beta, since registration is disabled in the public beta. But it does bring up a point that will matter when Lr4.0 proper is released: the plugin registration system that I came up with ties a registration to a Lightroom serial number, but since a major-version upgrade of Lightroom involves a new Lightroom serial number for Adobe, such an upgrade renders all my plugin registrations invalid. That means that folks who want to register my plugins must re-register them after an upgrade.

The hassle factor makes this really unfortunate, but in the end I hope it's not too burdensome, with registrations being optional and 1-cent and all. I'm sure I'll get flooded with messages by folks not understanding what went wrong with their plugin registration, or those who do understand it but don't like it. Let me offer my apologies up front.

• Canon Powershot S100
• Fuji FinePix X10
• Leica V-LUX3
• Nikon 1 J
• Nikon 1 V1
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX1
• Ricoh GR Digital IV
• Samsung NX5
• Samsung NX2020
• Sony NEX-7

Details and download links available on the announcement at Adobe's Lightroom Journal blog.

It seems that the Lr3.6 beta that Adobe recently put out includes a new version (“Camera Standard v4”) for the Nikon D3, D700, and D300 that has been improved yet again. You can't blindly change from v3 to v4 because v3 is intended to be used with -0.5EV of exposure compensation in Lightroom, while v4 somehow gets around that. (I don't recall exactly why v3 required the exposure compensation, but I remember understanding that it was a problem that could not easily be solved in place, but perhaps with a code change in Lightroom 3.6, they can now handle it without requiring the artificial compensation adjustment).

In any case, v4 (and v3) are far superior to v2 and earlier, so if you have images from a D300, D700, or D3, I recommend upgrading when you can. (I don't know what other profiles might have been updated with Lr3.6, but I recall from the v3 post that the change at that time affected only profiles those three specific cameras, and not, for example for the D3s or D300s)

A couple of months ago in “Saga of Frustration: Developing (and Abandoning) a Lightroom Plugin for 500px” I vented about my horrible experience with the folks over at 500px.com, and said that I would not be developing a plugin for their service (as I have for many photo-hosting services) until they got their act together. A lively discussion followed here on my blog and on Google+.

I noticed today that they finally released their long-promised plugin and I took a look. It seems that they use a bunch of my code under the hood, such as my libraries for SHA-1 Secure Hash computation and HMAC-SHA1 secure signature computation, and for JSON-encoded data consumption and production. The former, in particular, is extremely difficult to do in Lightroom, so without it they may not have been able to do the plugin at all.

I mention this only because it seems somehow ironic, and I wonder whether they even notice the connection between the developer they alienated during the summer and the source of the libraries they later chose to use. If so, did they use my libraries with sheepishness, a smirk, appreciation? It's sort of amusing to wonder.

To be clear, I'm not complaining... I made that code available with the express hope that it would be helpful to those who might want to use it, and it seems that's exactly what's happening here. I did not make its use conditional on attribution or even a kind word of thanks, so I can't fault 500px there, either.

Anyway, I'd given up writing my own plugin because I couldn't get support from them, and I'd needed support from them because their plugin API simply didn't work. I suppose I could take today's events as an indication that at least they finally got their API working, and give my own almost-done plugin another try.... but nah, I don't think so.

I'm not a 500px customer so I didn't actually try the plugin, but if you're their customer and a Lightroom user, give it a try.

Wow, what an ordeal. It started a month or so ago when I decided to put some of my photos on my iPad and iPhone, and found that it was harder to do well than I would have thought. A lot harder.

A month later, finally, and I have a good workflow. It turns out that I ended up writing a new Lightroom plugin (“Crop for iPad”, which I've just released), and updated two others, geoencoding support and my Tree Publisher. All just to get reasonable copies of my photos on my iPad and iPhone.

I wrote up my experiences in a long, detailed post,

It was a heck of a lot more work than I would have ever imagined. I'm glad it, and the long writeup (with 22 screenshots!) is finally done. I hope someone finds it useful.

(Note: it should be useful for preparing photos for other devices as well, not just Apple devices.)

I can't believe it's been a week since I last posted... time has just evaporated as I've been working on a new Lightroom project. Taking a break from that, and realizing that Kyoto is just a few weeks from the start of its most glorious fall-foliage season, I thought I'd dip into my archives from last year for some “Fall Foliage Preview” shots for this year. I was dumbfounded to find several thousand photos from a bunch of outings that I'd not even looked at yet. Always just too busy.

Anyway, I was futzing with a throw-away photo in Lightroom, applying some extreme develop settings (definitely beyond “tweak” that I jokingly use above), and came up with some highly-affected photos with a vibe I like. It's difficult to see in the tiny version above (click through for a larger version, or try one of the desktop-background versions), but the various changes conspire to make it look more like an impressionist painting than a photograph. It's not quite like what one can get with Corel Painter Essentials (as described earlier this year in “Dabbling in Some Fine-Art Printing for My Office”) but it's fast, easy, and can be interesting.

For reference, here's the rather bland original:

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 640 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Original Photo
Prior to those few Lr tweaks

This was the second picture I took on a visit to the Eikando Temple on a cloudy day in mid November last year, a short walk from my house here in Kyoto. That temple is famous for its autumn colors (as evidenced in “Holy Cow, the Gardens at Kyoto's Eikando Temple are Gorgeous!” from a few years ago, and countless other posts over the years that present themselves when you click on the “nearby photos” link under any of these pictures.)

This kind of extreme processing can get old quickly, so I don't want to overdo it, but I had great fun using the settings as a base when playing with some other photos, so today's post are some of those results.

They all look much better when viewed full screen... I think it's the combination of fine detail you get with a large view with the overall vibe that makes them appealing.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 360 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Deep

Desktop-Background Versions
1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 220 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Ultra Crisp

Desktop-Background Versions
1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/640 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — full exif
Dynamic

Desktop-Background Versions
1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/100 sec, f/14, ISO 6400 — full exif
Dreamy

Vertical Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1681  ·  1200×1921  ·  1600×2562

I mentioned that I had thousands of photos from last fall that I hadn't even looked at yet; in rummaging through them to select the photos above, I got only about 2% into the batch before I felt I had enough for this post (like I said, I didn't want to overdo it). 98% remain uninspected, so I'd better get cracking if I want to get through them before this year's season starts.

I'll leave with one last example with processing along the same lines, but whose result has a more subdued vibe...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1400 — full exif
Relaxed

Vertical Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2560

I like this as well, though it was only on a whim that I even bothered to try the processing, for I never would have thought it would actually lead anywhere.

For reference, here's the original.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1400 — full exif

Continued here...

Looking over photos from the Ikebana show I mentioned yesterday, I came across this shot with not a single thing in focus, but somehow I really like its mood. The closest edge is the least out of focus, but everything being out of focus makes the whole thing seem dreamy. I tend to be partial to the “sliver of focus” effect (as seen here, here, here, and here), but this takes it even further by having the “in focus” part not even in focus. It's almost like a painting.

This has only a little post processing, in Lightroom. I set the white balance, adjusting the exposure and blacks, and tweaked the crop, but otherwise it's “as loaded”. In particular, this doesn't use any “negative clarity” in Lightroom, as described in “Funky Joy With Adobe Lightroom” and used, for example, in the first photo here. All the creaminess in this shot is directly from the Voigtländer 125mm's delicious bokeh and my  dumb luck  inspired skill in composition.

With the way the edge comes close to focus but doesn't quite get there, and how it grabs your attention and leads it back to the defocused areas.... somehow I think there's a deep lesson in composition here, but I'm not able to put my finger on exactly what it is. In any case, I really like the shot and will probably frame a print of it for my wall.

I've worked with a lot of companies during my life developing plugins for Adobe Lightroom. I've got 32 different plugins at the moment. With some companies like Flickr and Google and Facebook, my interaction is as an anonymous faceless third-party developer, but with most I have an ongoing personal interaction... for example, I work with Alex at Zenfolio, and with Dave and Andy at SmugMug. There's a long list.

For the most part, I feel a strong partnership with the companies that I have a personal relationship with, and that really helps when technical or logistic issues cause friction in the development/support process, as one might expect happens from time to time over the years. The relationship is built on respect, which helps it withstand minor bumps along the way.

On the flip side, an active lack of respect drives me away from a company. For example, I spent many hours helping DeviantArt develop their third-party API, but walked away from them and from an essentially-completed plugin when it became clear to me that the folks there were a bunch of dirtbags. But this type of thing doesn't happen often because most people are not dirtbags, and frankly, it doesn't take much intelligence to realize that it's a good thing if you can get someone like me to develop, for free, something that helps your customers. Most business folks I deal with care about their customers.

I tend to keep it to myself when things do go bumpy, but the demand for a Lightroom plugin for 500px is so high that I feel compelled to speak out to explain why a plugin for their service will not be coming from me any time soon.....

I started getting a lot of requests for a plugin for 500px.com this spring, and after enough requests I finally sent 500px a note asking about an API with which I could write a plugin. I got no response.

I still got a lot of requests, so a month or so later I sent another note. I got no response, but eventually saw messages on Twitter saying that a Lightroom plugin would be coming by summer. Ah, well, if they're working on it themselves, or perhaps with another developer, they don't need me, which explains the lack of a reply.

But I continued to see 500px's tweets promising a plugin, but no plugin, so I continued to get requests from their customers.

Their occasional tweets had made it clear that a plugin was forthcoming soon, so I was surprised on July 11th to get a note from Evgeny at 500px asking how we can work together to make a 500px plugin a reality. Cool. Point me at an API and I'll make it....

This started a long, slow, painful series of emails with folks at 500px that has been the very definition of frustration.... mind-blowing hair-ripping-out does-anyone-there-talk-to-each-other-or-have-a-clue? frustration.

Notice how I jokingly refer to the response time in the first sentence of my first reply? (I've highlighted it and other things in the emails as presented here, but the actual messages were all plain text.)

That apparently wasn't enough of a hint because a few days later I felt compelled to spell it out for them:

I don't really think I could have been more clear: do what you think is best for your business, but if you want to involve me, don't do so until you can treat me with respect.

I eventually got a note from their developer, Arseniy, asking for my input on how to design an API. I'm a good person to ask about this kind of thing, considering the deep experience I have in working with the API for Flickr, Zenfolio, SmugMug, Expono, PicasaWeb, Facebook, ExposureManager, DeviantArt, Photobucket, Twitter, Kodak, and LifePics. So, I took the time to write a detailed reply, and promptly heard nothing back from them.

More than a month later, they released an API. As one might expect from an initial release, it was poorly documented, buggy, and underpowered — exactly the kind of things they would have avoided had they worked with a plugin developer in tandem with the development of their API. But hey, it's their business. I just wish they wouldn't have wasted my time if they weren't interested in a plugin from me. I sent a note to Evgeny and Arseniy lamenting on the opportunity lost, and wishing them the best with their API.

The response from Evgeny was bizarre, indicating that he thought I'd been working with Arseniy the whole time. The ensuing messages made it clear that folks at 500px were not in touch with what other folks at their small firm were doing, and that no one seemed particularly competent in their respective fields, least of all the developer. Responses from him took days, didn't address the issues raised in the messages, and were exactly the kind of response I'd write if I didn't care and just wanted to get the message out of my inbox.

I made some further attempts to pry some clue from them, and at some point got so frustrated that I actually aired this frustration in public on the limited exposure I have on Google+. It's really rare for me to complain in public, about anything, so this indicates just how frustrating it was.

Alas, after many tries it became clear that it was not going to be possible to get a timely, competent interaction going, and I finally had to cut the cord, venting to them directly and explicitly with:

That was three weeks ago. I got no direct reply, but a few days ago I got another bizarre message, this time from Oleg, the CTO (and apparently a co-founder), referring to some “Diana” that I've never heard of...

... and the message goes on to bottom-quote my prior “it would be much more professional...” note. I just don't see how an understanding of the situation could result in such a generic, blasé message 2½ weeks late.

I replied to Oleg:

It's not exactly true that I don't care one way or the other; a lot of Lightroom users have been clamoring for a plugin, and I want to support Lightroom, so given my druthers I'd prefer to fill that need, but not at the expense of my sanity and self respect, especially considering the troubles plugin development can bring.

For the umpteenth time, someone at 500px.com had the opportunity to be clear, to be respectful, and to look out for the best interests of their company. The reply from Oleg, several days later (today), took the cake:

Arrrgh! I can assure you that there was no arrangement, too, Oleg, because I have never accepted commissions for plugin work (though I'm approached for it often).

I sent Oleg a short note, and in what is perhaps a first, I got a reply from someone at 500px the same day:

And so there we are. The CTO of 500px simply doesn't care about a Lightroom plugin. This is the same guy that promised his users a plugin by the summer three months ago. Well, he's still got time: the autumnal equinox isn't for a few more days.

Abandoning Lightroom users may well be a smart business decision —I'm not privy to their demographics and business plans — but it's something that, if true, their Lightroom-using customers should be aware of.

More likely though, he just wanted to get rid of me, and was embarrassed by his first message. Their API, if it were to actually work as they document, would indeed allow for a basic upload plugin that would satisfy the initial needs of most users. As far as I know, they have fixed the bugs I wrestled with, but I won't bother finding out until I know they can be both respectful and clueful. This is my hobby, and if they don't want to lift a finger to work with me for their own benefit, I certainly won't.

Until then, perhaps another developer with a lower threshold of self respect will provide a Lightroom plugin. I've heard of at least one other developer working on a 500px plugin (here). I wish him, and all Lightroom users, the best of luck.

Continued here...

(This is a big update so I'm mentioning it here, but I don't normally announce updates here. However, all updates appear on the RSS feed for each plugin: there's a link in the upper-right of each plugin page. All my Lightroom goodies are on my aptly-named Lightroom Goodies page.)