The tone curve is one of the ways that Adobe Lightroom offers to adjust an image. It's basically a "brightness map" that normally indicates "dim parts of the image are shown as black, bright parts are show as white, and things in between are shown proportionally somewhere along the line between the two". The screenshot below highlights Lightroom's default tone curve, which is mostly a straight line (that is, "proportional") from dark to bright...

The idea of a tone curve is general to photo-editing applications; if you're not sure of what one is, you might take a look at this [...]

Adobe has released a second free beta for Lightroom 3 ("Lightroom 3 Beta 2" -- Lr3b2) with a lot of bug fixes and speed improvements, and a few new goodies not found in Lr2 or the first Lightroom 3 beta, including:

Basic video-file support.

Initial tethered capture support for recent Nikon and Canon SLRs.

New rendering engine, new sharpening, new grain, new noise reduction, new tone-curve control, etc. I used the new point-curve tone control to create the freaky rendition above, of a photo from February's ski trip with Anthony.

Unofficial support for Chinese (two flavors), Dutch, French, German, Italian, [...]

When I started to take photography somewhat seriously (circa January 2006 when I got a Nikon D200), a long-time friend who happened to work at Apple extolled the virtues of Apple Aperture, which had just been released. It was, he said, still a bit buggy, but even so was so much better than working with files one by one in Photoshop. He had a hard time constraining his excitement of the new workflow paradigm, even if the current implementation still needed the kinks worked out.

I wasn't sold on the whole new-paradigm idea, but when Apple announced their new line [...]

Just a short followup to last week's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" post, I've gone ahead and released the Lightroom plugin I'd built before realizing the major problems plaguing Picasa's face-recognition feature. If you've invested time in Picasa's face recognition, use Lightroom, and are lucky, the plugin may be of use.

Here it is:    Jeffrey’s "Picasa Face-Recognition Import" Lightroom Plugin

It was more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. I am so exhausted (from it, and from not having slept last night trying to build a plugin for Adobe Lightroom to import face-recognition data from Google's Picasa photo app) that I have not even unloaded my images from the camera.

But Paul, who has never used Lightroom, wanted to give it a try, so I loaded his images and gave him about a minute's instruction, and let him loose. Having been inspired by some of Stéphane Barbery's recent work – such as his Jidai Matsuri shots, [...]