If you're not really into digital photography, you may have never heard of Scott Kelby, but he's quite the media dynamo in the on-line digital-photography world. He founded a Photoshop user's club some years ago, and seemingly has never rested since. As an example of his business savvy, rather than launching the club with a self-limiting name like "Tampa Photoshop Users Club", he smartly called it the grandiose "National Association of Photoshop Professionals", and it took off. Since then, he's got writing credit on dozens of books and instructional videos, and leads a whole self-titled media machine (Kelby Media Group) [...]
View full post »

If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the "Camera v3" beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual profiles are in this ZIP file.)

This is important because in some cases, the standard "Camera" profiles that come with Lightroom ACR fail miserably for these three cameras. For example, consider this crop from the photo above:

Those mottled magenta splotches are not on the flower; they're a bug in Lightroom's camera profiles for the D3/D700/D300.

(The rest of this post is written from a Lightroom [...]

I've just pushed a major update to my Picasa Face-Data Import plugin for Adobe Lightroom so that it now uses new plugin features of Lightroom 3 to maintain real keywords for the names associated with images.

It's much less kludgy than the version for Lightroom 2, but using Picasa on images in your Lightroom catalog still comes with major caveats. See the plugin's page and last year's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" for more.

However, if you do use Picasa and Lightroom in tandem, this plugin makes for a reasonable way to import Picasa's face-recognition data to Lightroom.

I've just published a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom, the JPEG Export Quality Tester that I mentioned in last summer's "An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings". The plugin allows you to quickly generate and inspect versions of an image at all the JPEG quality settings that Lightroom offers.

I'd written the plugin quite some time ago, but it took this long to polish it up enough to publish. It's got somewhat of a limited appeal, but hopefully someone will enjoy it.

It joins my 20+ other plugins on my Lightroom Goodies page.

In my "Namiko Candid Bride Portrait" post the other day, I mentioned that I'd made a photo book for my brother-in-law Shogo's wedding, and showed a two-page spread of a photo of his bride that I was proud of. You can see in the last photo of that post a bit of the 80-page book I created. In this post, I'll talk about the workflow I use to create photo books with Lightroom, InDesign, and Blurb.

This workflow requires Lightroom 3. As for InDesign, I use CS5, but the same workflow should work with older versions of InDesign (at least [...]