More discoveries in LR3.

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After the first early experiments and successes documented here over the past few days, I have started digging deeper into the excellent Slideshow module in Lightroom 3.

Click on the ‘ABC’ panel at the base of the screen when in the Slideshow module then click on the arrows and this is what you see:

This means that you can click on any of these so called ‘EXIF’ data fields (stored by your digital camera and uploaded to Lightroom when you imported them) for inclusion on the slide itself or add your own custom text.

Further, Click the ‘Edit…’ option and you can create a custom field of your own design:

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When you add these fields of information to your image, sizing and placement are easily controlled with the mouse, though the font appears to be fixed at this time.

I illustrate this technique in my Abstractions eBook, where I have included the Camera and Exposure data as well as sequential numbering, as examples. The snag with EXIF data is that film originals scanned into the Lightroom catalog will have none, so I’m looking into batch editors to determine effective ways of doing this.

This has long frustrated me as when someone asks for a particular picture (and I confess my keywording within the Lightroom catalog is less than spectacular) I often find that I associate an image with the gear I was using at the time. “Oh! yes, I recall taking that on the old Rollei 3.5F” sort of thing. So I want to search on Camera but naturally that only works on digital camera images.

Further, as you will see, some of the Camera data in Abstractions is missing the lens in Panny G1 images. Early G1 (and Canon 5D) firmware had a glitch which precluded upload of lens data, so even some of the digital camera images need work on the EXIF data.

So in a forthcoming piece I hope to have researched software which will allow batch additions of EXIF data to old film images, thus making the filter tool fully functional and speeding location of pictures within Lightroom. Something tells me this process will not be easy.

To view the result, click the cover of the eBook below.

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You can see just what a mess my EXIF data are by looking at the EXIF summary of my Lightroom catalog – no, I was not around in 1903! And ‘Camera = F-12 Plus’ refers to a commercial Fuji film scanner used by a local photo lab. Go figure. The ‘Unknown Camera’ pictures are all from scanned film originals, as are the Perf2450 (my Epson flatbed scanner) and Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN (my slide scanner, now sold).

To read the whole series on eBook publishing, click on categories->photography->technique->ebooks in the right hand column above.