Lightroom 2 keyboard shortcuts

Technique

LR2 displays few of these

When you want an on-screen reminder of the many keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom 2, you press the ‘Command – /’ key pair for a heads-up display on your screen, thus:

Click on the pop-up display to dismiss it.

The snag is that this display only shows a small fraction of what is available. You can download a PDF of all LR2 or LR1 shortcuts here. Surprisingly,I can find no such LR2 guide on Adobe’s web site.

Dense as it is, it repays study.

For example, I have found use of the adjustment brush frustrating in that one has to view the red mask to see the area which has been brushed. You do this by hovering the mouse cursor over the mask pin (the little blob which appears on your screen). If you want the red mask to show continuously when using the adjustment brush you can toggle full time display while the adjustment brush is in effect by hitting ‘O’ on your keyboard. This makes masking very easy and allows you to adjust exposure/brightness etc. after you have delineated the area of choice for adjustment.

In the above example, after switching on the adjustment brush in the Develop module I hit ‘O’ and, thereafter, could see the red mask as I applied it by brushing areas of the image. Once satisfied that the right parts had been brushed, I switched the red mask off (hit ‘O’ again – it’s a toggle) and then applied adjustments as required.

If the default red color interferes with the image and your assessment of the masking you have applied, you can cycle through mask color options using the Shift – O key combination while the adjustment brush is live. In the following example I have changed the mask color to green using the ‘Shift – O’ key combination.

Very handy. There are many more gems in this long list and a few are even worth learning! Now if only Adobe could add all their keyboard shortcuts to their ‘Command – /’ key on screen display.

Follow-up: A reader has kindly pointed out that Adobe’s version of the short cuts is to be found here and the presentation, which is by module rather than in aggregate, is far more useable.

Bricked up

Architecture

Why do I smell government at work here?

It’s not like only modern architects and builders have the sole franchise on boo-boos:


5D, 24-105mm at 97mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO 400

Now what kind of twit would do a thing like that to a beautiful facade?

Could it be because the building belongs to the local government here in Paso Robles, CA?

Maybe the person doing this was concerned about a Window Tax – something which wouldn’t surprise me given the composition of our local government here and its greed for tax revenues. But wait a minute, no government would tax itself, right? And how could all that material and labor cost be cheaper than a pane of glass?

Eureka! I get it now. The bricklayer was the mayor’s brother!

Tethered photography with Lightroom 2

Lightroom

A bit tricky.

The idea of tethered photography with a digital camera is that what you snap appears shortly thereafter in Lightroom on a screen size of your choice.

Practically, this translates into controlled conditions where the camera and a computer can remain close together, so think studio photography. No matter whether your subject is a flower or a person.

The opportunity of immediately seeing your pictures in Lightroom, with default import processing (camera profile, sharpness, etc.) applied, all viewed on a large, properly profiled screen will take you as close to visualizing the finished thing as you can get. Indeed, if computer display is your goal you will see what you are getting; those who print and have a properly profiled screen/printer will be just as happy.

In a perfect world you should be able to attach your camera to your computer, open Lightroom and bang away. In real life the process is two stage. First, you have to tell Canon’s software (ugh!) to deposit pictures in a named location. Second, you then tell LR2 the name of this folder which it will monitor, transferring any new content to a different folder seen by LR2. Thus the first folder is emptied by LR2 and the second is transferred by you, the user, within LR, with contents either moved to your LR catalog or bad snaps moved to Trash. So you start and finish with these two empty ‘transit’ folders but they must not be removed for everything to work. That’s for the neatniks amongst us!

What follows applies to Canon DSLRs but doubtless similar steps apply with others.

With most modern Canon DSLRs (5D, 40D, whatever) you will need current versions of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (I am using DPP 3.5.1) and Canon’s EOS Utility (2.40). You tether your camera to a USB connection on your computer (laptops are ideal for this) and the camera end is connected with a miniature USB plug. As the one supplied with the camera is short, you can either buy a USB-A to USB-A extension cable, or simply get a longer USB-A to USB-Mini cable. Radio Shack or whatever. There’s no brand value here.

Plug in your camera, switch it on and fire up DPP, then click on Tools->Start EOS Utility. Go to EOS Utility->Preferences and check the box shown below:

This makes sure that what is transmitted to your laptop is also saved on the card in the camera. A useful safety precaution.

Now using Finder, create a unique folder you want monitored. I call mine ‘Canon EOS 5D Capture’ in my user directory.

Back in EOS Utility, go to the Destination drop-down box and enter that destination:

Before even getting into Lightroom 2, check this setup. Take a test picture and it should appear in a few seconds in DPP. With my 5D on a MacBook it pops up in DPP in 4 seconds – that’s for a RAW original.

Now Lightroom 2 has to be told where to look for the picture you have just taken.

Go to File->Auto Import and check ‘Enable Auto Import’ thus:

The click on ‘Auto Import Settings’ and enter the exact folder name under ‘Watched Folder:’ you just created in EOS Capture as shown:

Any typos here and nothing will work.

Back in Finder, create a new folder for the destination of your pictures as seen by LR. I have used the default name of ‘Auto Imported Photos’ which LR2 suggests, above.

Now take a test snap and the left panel of LR2 will show the following:

The new folder you designated appears in LR2. Click on it, hit F5, F6, F7, F8 and L and you will see this and all future pictures presented in their full glory, filling the screen. It takes 7 seconds from click to view with my 5D and modest MacBook (2.1 gHz C2D CPU, 4 gB RAM) with RAW originals. Doubtless JPG would be faster as less processing is involved, but JPG so compromises quality I do not bother with it.

If you like what you see, remember to drag-and-drop (move) the keepers to your permanent Lightroom catalog. Then, still in LR, delete the losers.

If you power down your camera or the battery fails or you disconnect the cord, you will need to go back into DPP and reload EOS Utility from the Tools menu. Other than that, it’s plain sailing. I’m using OS 10.5.5 Leopard and LR 2.1; earlier versions of Leopard seem to have had issues with the Canon software but now all is well. You can check Canon’s site for free upgrades to the latest DPP and EOS Utility software. (The older Capture application refuses to work with Leopard on my MacBook, so don’t bother with it if you are using like tools).

If you read that tethered photography was only fixed by Canon in the 5D Mark II, save yourself the upgrade money. My 5D Mark I works fine with this technique.

There’s no better way to preview studio snaps even if they involve moving subjects. You can check light and color balance from just a few test snaps. Very handy when you are using studio flash where its virtually impossible to ‘see’ how your lighting has turned out on the camera’s miniscule LCD screen.

Once you have made the settings above, tethered photography involves the following simple steps:

  • Switch on camera
  • Connect to computer
  • Load Canon DPP and EOS Utility
  • Load Lightroom
  • Take a test snap
  • Navigate to the folder in LR and expand the test snap to full screen
  • Bang away

Your camera will use up its battery faster this way as it’s saving both a card image and transmitting a copy to your computer, so come prepared with spares!

Come to think of it, a battery powered netbook computer and a tethered camera would be more than useable in the field. An ideal combination, perhaps, for those who like to take their studio with portable strobes with them. Of course, you would have to convert the netbook to running OS X to use your time effectively ….

LIFE and Google

Photographs

Google is doing what LIFE could not.

Google recently announced that it is digitizing some 10 million images from LIFE’s files. High time and well done, Google. Beats me why Time-Life couldn’t do this. These precious images will only last so long before the next bankruptcy/fire/reorg results in their loss for ever.

Here are some links:

FDR

Marilyn

Vietnam

Here are examples of the quality of the work heretofore hidden from view:


Alfred Eisenstaedt – 1939 World’s Fair, New York


May 1945. Sir Winston Churchill leaving St. Paul’s Church following the memorial service for
Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed by his daughter, Sarah.

By the way, you can see his daughter Sarah in the great Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding. It’s the one with the amazing scene where Astaire dances on the ceiling. She was a half decent dancer and actress – career choices which made WSC none too happy.

To search Google Images just click here. To limit your search to LIFE pictures, enter your query thus – in this case you would be looking for WSC:

Winston Churchill source:life