I really need to find a 12-step support group, or something, to help wean me off of Lightroom plugin development. I was already way behind on everything before Lightroom 3 came out, and then was inundated with email from that as I tried to get all my plugins upgraded. But then I took time out to indulge in some new development, which yielded my new PhotoSafe plugin, but left me even further behind on email and blog comments.

So yesterday I sit down with the intention to at least do a triage through my waiting mail, and at 10am I [...]

It's been nothing but plugin development in the Friedl household since Lightroom 3 was released, mostly bringing my many plugins up to speed. Frankly, it's drudgery work, so I took time off to indulge in the simple pleasures of development: building something new.

This new plugin, PhotoSafe, allows you to protect photos from accidental deletion from your Lightroom catalog.

In my case, I never want to delete a photo I've posted on my blog, no matter how boring or mundane. Because I post a lot of boring and mundane photos, I have a lot in my catalog that I [...]

More than two years in the works, Adobe has finally released Lightroom 3. You can download a 30-day trial from Adobe's Lightroom product page.

There are plenty of places you can find all kinds of info about what's new, including:

Victoria Bampton's "What's New in Lightroom 3" post. Victoria's what's-new posts are always the most definitive authority on the subject.

Wade Heninger has a robust "Lightroom Tuesday" post with a huge summary of links.

If you're peeking here at my blog, perhaps you're interested in what this means for my plugins, so that's what this post is about....

First of [...]

Sneak-preview video of a lens-correction feature that will be part of Lightroom 3:

Photoshop and Lightroom Lens Correction Feature Preview

The video shows ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), but the presenter (Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's product manager) makes it clear that the same functionality will be part of Lr3 as well.

The ability to correct for lens distortion will be so welcome, especially for lenses that have lots of compromises. For example, the Nikkor 18-200VR I used on a camping trip a few years ago left all the ocean horizons -- which should be flat -- with a strong bow.

So, in my previous post, "Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks", I presented a few odd tone-curve presets for Lightroom that were of marginal utility. In this post, I present additional presets that are even more useless, if that's at all possible. (If you're not familiar with tone curves in Lightroom 3 beta 2, the aforementioned previous post has an introduction and useful links.)

In the presentations below, mouseover the little tone-curve squares under each screenshot to bring up an example of the preset to the screenshot. All the screenshots for a particular section are loaded upon first mouseover in that section, so [...]