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.

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I recently replaced a six-year-old low-end Dell monitor with an Eizo FlexScan SX2462W, a widescreen mid-level monitor with many good features for photo work. Having moved from this setup to one now with two widescreen monitors, I decided to put the extra monitor on its side, vertically, so that the long edge is up and down. (You can see it in this photo.)

So, now having one portrait-oriented monitor, I suddenly had no photos to use as its desktop background. Especially since it's the "extra" monitor, and by default will be unused unless I'm doing something particular with it, I [...]

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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 [...]

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FYI, I've updated my Photoshop Calendar-Template-Building Script page with pre-built calendar Photoshop files for 2011, for those who can't (or don't want to) run the script to build custom calendars. If you can run the script (should work in Photoshop CS2 or later), you can run it to build customized calendar pages that you can then drop your own photos into before printing.

(I built the calendar page show above just for this post... the image has been washed out a bit for the calendar page, but I'd probably wash it out even more for a real calendar, because I [...]

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Having my time at the computer limited by some nagging arm pain, I've been able to enjoy more of what has always been a guilty pleasure: reading for pleasure. And to my great surprise, reading on the iPad has really enhanced the experience.

Overall, I've found that eReaders like those on the iPad (and Kindle and Nook, I would assume) have some clear pluses and minuses:

General eReader Cons Needs electricity Subject to eBook availability Difficulty to see screen in some situations Size: reader may be larger/heaver than the physical book Loanability: can't necessarily loan books to others Style factor: [...]
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