The initial destination of my photo outing with Paul Barr yesterday (the one where we discovered the workshop of Nishimura Stone Lanterns) was to visit the Nitenji Temple, nestled up in the mountains of north-east Kyoto, perched precariously over the ravine on the road over to Otsu.

After the outing, we returned to my place and I introduced Lightroom to him, and in using random photos from the day to demonstrate things you could do within Lightroom's Develop module, I happened upon the soft-focus creamy effect you see above. I liked the effect in this case, so I decided to [...]

This makes 19 plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've released, all available on my Lightroom Goodies page.

(This post previously mentioned a second new plugin, "Bulk Titler", but I've withdrawn it because it turns out Tim Armes' LR/Transporter plugin, which I knew did a lot of things related to metadata import and export, also does exactly what my little plugin did. My "Bulk Titler" was almost a throw-away little thing, but LR/Transporter is a first-class professional tool, so I'm happy to point you to it.)

With his kind permission, I'm showing a few of his photos from that set. I've retained his original French captions.

The Jidai Matsuri (lit. Festival of Eras) celebrates Kyoto's more-than-1200-year history, with a long parade of groups in many different periods' period costumes. One great feature (for me) is that it runs right by my house, but a lamentable feature is that it runs right by my house.... in the city... with traffic lights and cars and utility wires and buildings and such. For the most part, photography is just not worth it. (The also-famous Aoi Matsuri runs right by [...]

Adobe today released a public beta sneak-peek version of Lightroom 3. It's intended to show where Lightroom is going, and to allow us to play with it so that we can provide feedback about how we want it to get there.

It's a Beta

The beta release is not intended for real, heavy, day-to-day work.

This is "beta" in the pre-Google sense, where it really means that things are rough, lots of things aren't as smooth as they could be, and some things don't work at all. For example, the image-render pipeline has gotten a bunch of new stuff, [...]

Having been busy with travel and sickness and offline projects for so many months, I think the geek in me was itching to produce something new, so to add to yesterday's new plugin for Adobe Lightroom, today I add another: Extended Search.

Due to Lightroom infrastructure limitations, the search interface is not as smooth as it could be, and there's a nasty bug in Lightroom that sometimes rears its head to make things a bit frustrated, so be sure to read the details on the plugin's page while giving it a try.