About a month and a half ago I was futzing around with night exposures and took this 30-second picture of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. I was wondering whether I might get the really interesting results as I did during cherry-blossom season, but in this case the result was thunderously boring.

However, it was about this time that I decided to finally start playing with the new sharpening controls in the betas I was testing for Lightroom 1.1, and for whatever reason, I used this image as my first test.

Proper sharpening seems to be more an art than [...]

As mentioned in my previous post, Adobe has just released Lightroom 1.1, a free upgrade to their wonderful photo-workflow application. Correspondingly, I have upgraded my Custom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder, a web application that allows you to create custom metadata display configuration templates for use within Lightroom.

This description is presented with Lightroom 1.1 as an example, although the config files should work in any version of Lightroom 1.x, including 1.3.1.

This post is the introduction and documentation for my template-builder application. If you have used the previous version, you'll find lots of new things here, including new [...]

Adobe has officially announced the highly anticipated "Version 1.1" upgrade to their Lightroom photo-workflow application, four months after Version 1.0 was released. Lightroom creates a whole new world of organization and expression for photographers, one that fulfills many needs the user might not have even realized where there.

Yet, once the user settles in, they find themselves invigorated into wanting even more organizational and creative functionality, and this free upgrade is a step in that direction.

There are many new features in 1.1, some of which have been previewed already (including the new sharpening controls released in [...]

"I think Lightroom will be to photographers what Photoshop is to photographs." -- Reid Thaler Digital Photography Review forum post May 23, 2007

This excellent quote succinctly clarifies the difference in focus between Lightroom and Photoshop. I only wish I had come up with it!

When a digital camera produces a standard JPG image file, it does so after internally processing its sensor's raw data. This processing includes the mathematical application of various settings for exposure, white balance, sharpness, color saturation, and other algorithms that massage the image data in an attempt to achieve a particular look.

Many cameras offer "scene" settings that can impact how this processing is done. For example, a "portrait" setting may reduce the amount of sharpening applied.

Raw

When shooting in a raw format, this processing is taken out of the camera, and left to your image-processing software. I [...]