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New Lightroom 4 is Here! Learn it All!

March 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Light­room Overview

Before we get in the Light­room 4, let me explain what Light­room is. Light­room is all about pho­tog­ra­phy, speed and work­flow. It was designed for the pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher along with the advanced ama­teur who needs a fast way to process their images. For more detailed edit­ing Light­room works seam­lessly with Adobe Pho­to­shop CS5, along with older ver­sions of Pho­to­shop. If you can’t afford Pho­to­shop, con­sider using Pho­to­shop Ele­ments with Light­room. There’s a cool plug-in from pho­tog­ra­phers tool­box that allows you to run Pho­to­shop Ele­ments 8 or newer through Light­room. The plu­gin requires a small dona­tion to acti­vate.  Not only is Light­room a great photo orga­niz­ing tool with its library mod­ule, It is also a fast photo edit­ing tool in the develop mod­ule. In the web mod­ule you can cre­ate web­site flash gal­leries fast and pub­lish them on your web­site. In the slideshow mod­ule you can cre­ate slideshows  with sound that you can share on YouTube, Face­book or save as a video file. The print mod­ule is all about print­ing that allows you to print pic­ture packs and indi­vid­ual prints.

What’s New in Light­room 4

In the new ver­sion of Light­room 4 Adobe has added two new mod­ules. The Map mod­ule lets you view and orga­nize your pho­tos by map loca­tion with your geo-tagged pho­tos. You can also man­u­ally add the GPS loca­tions to your meta data. In the new Book mod­ule you can cre­ate books right within Light­room and pub­lish them directly to Blurb, the photo book pub­lisher. You can also save books to a PDF file for­mat to self pub­lish or send off to your favorite book pub­lisher. The hot new fea­ture in Light­room 4 is the abil­ity to orga­nize, view and edit your videos. Videos can be viewed and played right in Light­room 4. Videos can also be trimmed at both ends and minor adjust­ments can be made like color tem­per­a­ture, tint­ing, expo­sure, clar­ity and vibrance. There are many more enhance­ments in Light­room 4 and is well worth the upgrade price.

Light­room 4 Try it Before You Buy

If you have never used Light­room before you can down­load a free 30 day trial or you can buy it  here  Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4

Learn Light­room 4 and Photoshop

If you are new to Light­room, or have been using Light­room for a while, lynda.com is a great resource for learn­ing Light­room and Pho­to­shop. There are 14 courses on Light­room and 129 courses on Pho­to­shop. One of my favorite instruc­tors, Chris Orwig, is a pho­tog­ra­pher and instruc­tor at the Brooks Insti­tute of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Santa Bar­bara, Cal­i­for­nia. Chris alone has pub­lished 37 courses at Lynda.com. What’s really nice is you can try these courses out for free. Just go to Linda.com and find the course you’re inter­ested in and click on any mod­ule that is high­lighted in blue. It’s that easy!  You can also sign up for a 7-day free trial to lynda.com. I’ve been using Lynda.com for soft­ware train­ing for a lit­tle over a year now. Sign up for Lynda.com for for a small monthly fee and some of the courses are even avail­able on DVD for pur­chase.  Chris is a very enthu­si­as­tic instruc­tor and makes learn­ing Light­room and Pho­to­shop fun, fast and easy.  Watch the videos below and see if Chris Orwig is the instruc­tor for you.

There are 3 Video Courses on Light­room 4.   These courses include:

Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 new features

Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 Essen­tials: Orga­niz­ing and Shar­ing with the Library Module

Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 Essen­tials: Enhanc­ing Pho­tos with the Develop Module

Light­room 4 Sam­ple Video Courses


Filed Under: Lightroom, New Lightroom 4 is here Learn it All

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Learn Adobe Lightroom 4 BETA Fast with Chris Orwig

January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Visit the download page of Lightroom 4 Beta

New post Update visit: New Light­room 4 is Here! Learn it All!

Adobe has just announced its release of Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 beta. I am really excited about the new fea­tures in this ver­sion of Light­room. I would like to also intro­duce Chris Orwig pho­tog­ra­phy instruc­tor. Chris has just released his free new 2 hour train­ing video on Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 Beta at Lynda.com. Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room is an ele­gant pow­er­ful photo orga­niz­ing and edit­ing tool that will improve your work­flow. It is for both pro­fes­sional and advanced ama­teur photographers.

Light­room 4 Beta

First, we’ll start with some of the new fea­tures on Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 Beta.

  • High­light and shadow recov­ery — Bring out the detail in the shad­ows and high­lights more efficiently.
  • New Tab — Cre­ate photo books — Eas­ily cre­ate photo books with easy-to-use tem­plates and then pub­lish right from Light­room to blurb or a PDF file.
  • New Tab location-based orga­ni­za­tion — You can now orga­nize your pho­tos by GPS loca­tions with GPS enabled cam­eras and dis­play them in Light­room on Google maps within the program.
  • White bal­ance brush — With the new white bal­ance brush. You can now adjust the white bal­ance of a spe­cific area of your photograph.
  • Local edit­ing con­trols — You can now reduce noise to a tar­geted area of your pho­to­graph with­out affect­ing the rest of the photograph.
  • New Tab expanded video sup­port — eas­ier orga­niz­ing and view­ing of videos plus adjust­ing expo­sure and trim­ming of video clips right within Lightroom.
  • Soft proof­ing — Eas­ily pre­view your images before they are printed.
  • E-mail directly from Light­room — You can now e-mail your pho­tos directly from light­room using the e-mail account of your choice.

With these new fea­tures Light­room 4 will be an excit­ing new upgrade that is going to come out some­time in March 2012. But you don’t have to wait to try out Light­room 4.  You can Click Here to down­load the beta ver­sion of Light­room 4 right now or you can Click Here to try out the cur­rent ver­sion of Light­room 3.6

learn Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 4 with Chris Orwig

Chris Orwig one of my favorite authors at Lynda.com and has just released a new two-hour train­ing video on Light­room 4 beta.  You can view the entire video tuto­r­ial series for free. Just Click Here to view the entire course or watch 2 intro­duc­tory video bel­low. Either way, this is a great way to try out Lynda.com for free and see why Chris Orwig is such a great instruc­tor. Chris Orwig is a pho­tog­ra­pher and  a teacher at the Brooks Insti­tute of pho­tog­ra­phy in Santa Bar­bara, Cal­i­for­nia and has also pro­duced 33 courses at Lynda.com. There are over 1000 courses at Lynda.com and a good major­ity of the courses our on pho­tog­ra­phy, video edit­ing, graphic design and many other busi­ness soft­ware titles.

The New Book Cre­ation Tab

The New Video Tab

 

 

Filed Under: Learn Lightroom 4 BETA, Lightroom, Photo Stuff

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Build or Buy a Computer for Lightroom 3

July 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Look­ing to speed up  Light­room 3?  In my last arti­cle, Speed Up Light­room 3, I talked about set­ting up pref­er­ences in Light­room 3 to increase per­for­mance and adding a few small upgrades to help speed things up.   But, some­times, your com­puter may be too old to make a dif­fer­ence. you may need a major upgrade or a new computer.

I recently upgraded my own com­puter and saw sig­nif­i­cant Light­room 3 speed increases. Well, it’s basi­cally a brand-new PC at this point. My old com­puter had a Giga­byte brand moth­er­board with the Pen­tium D dual core proces­sor 2.8 GHz proces­sor with 4 GB of mem­ory. Here is a list of the com­po­nents I used to build my new PC:

Case – Cooler Mas­ter Haf 912 with three addi­tional optional fans. Five fans total. Why so many fans? Heat can kill a com­puter or at least slows it down. A cool PC is a happy PC.

Power Sup­ply – Antec 520 Watt high cur­rent power supply.

Moth­er­board – Giga­byte brand model Z68X-Ud3-B3 dis­con­tin­ued. (Update Decem­ber 2011 new gen­er­a­tion moth­er­board Giga­byte brand model GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3) This is my third Giga­byte brand moth­er­board I have installed in my com­put­ers. I just install them and they work.GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

  • LGA1155 CPU Socket
  • Intel® Z68 Express Chipset
  • 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sock­ets sup­port­ing up to 32 GB
  • 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors
  • 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
  • Up to 14 USB 2.0  ports 8 external
  • Up to 4 USB 3.0  ports 2 external
  • ATX Form Fac­tor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm
  • 6 x audio jacks
  • Up to 2 IEEE 1394 port 1 external

Intel-Core-I7-2600kCPU – Intel Core I7 2600k 4 core / 8-Way Mul­ti­task proces­sor. Unlocked 3.4 GHz and 3.7 GHz in turbo mode. This proces­sor and moth­er­board com­bi­na­tion can be over clocked but it is not nec­es­sary at this time.

Mem­ory – 2–Gskill, 4GB, 2 chan­nel DDR3 1600 mem­ory mod­ules for a total of 8 GB.

I used my old hard drive. Sea­gate 1TB

I also used my old video card – EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 512MB video card. New ver­sion EVGA GeForce GT 430 1GB

Oper­at­ing Sys­tem – Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional.

Upgrad­ing the PC to this new con­fig­u­ra­tion has dra­mat­i­cally improved my per­for­mance when using a pro­gram like Light­room 3. Just start­ing up Light­room would take approx­i­mately 60 sec­onds and now it only takes 3 sec­onds. Other Pro­grams like Pho­tomatix Pro, an HDR plug-in for Light­room used to take 5 to 6 min­utes to process, now takes less than a minute. Another pro­gram I use is Proshow Gold, a slide show pre­sen­ta­tion pro­gram, also saw dra­matic improvement.

Win­dows 7 is a real improve­ment over Win­dows XP. I chose Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional because it has a Win­dows XP emu­la­tion mode that allows me to run older soft­ware that is only com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows XP.

Con­clu­sion

Cooler Master HAF 912Upgrad­ing this com­puter was well worth the expense of about $700 to $800. You may not want to build a com­puter your­self, but if you’re look­ing to pur­chase a new com­puter you can use the spec­i­fi­ca­tions here to give you a guide on what to look in spec­i­fi­ca­tions. I hope this arti­cle helps you in your pho­tog­ra­phy edit­ing and improves your Light­room experience.

In a future arti­cle I will dis­cuss drive man­age­ment — how to pro­tect your pho­tos and data.

Places to buy com­puter and com­puter parts

Newegg

Com­pusa

Learn more about Light­room 3

Filed Under: Computer for Lightroom 3, Lightroom, Photo Tips, Resources, Reviews

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Speed up Adobe Lightroom 3

July 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Light­room 3 is a great pro­gram to orga­nize your pho­tos and is an excel­lent tool for edit­ing your pho­tographs. But, if you have an older com­puter sys­tem like I had, Light­room 3 can get a bit slug­gish. Here are a few things I found that can help.

Opti­mize Catalog

After a while using Light­room you may notice that Light­room is run­ning a lit­tle slower than usual. By opti­miz­ing your cat­a­log you can fix this prob­lem eas­ily. To do this go to the top and select file then select Opti­mize Cat­a­log. Now you will get the Opti­mize Cat­a­log dia­log box.(See Below) Now select Opti­mize Cat­a­log. This will take a few min­utes depend­ing on the size your cat­a­log. You will not be able use Light­room dur­ing this period.

Card Read­ers

When upload­ing pho­tographs use a card reader rather than directly from your cam­era and use a card reader that uses USB2 or USB3, if avail­able. This way the upload is notice­ably faster.

TIFF rather than PSD

For exter­nal edit­ing use TIFF rather than PSD file for­mat. TIFF files process faster than PSD files. To set this up, go to the top and select Edit then Pref­er­ences. This will bring up the Pref­er­ences dia­log box.(See Below) At the top of the Pref­er­ences dia­log box select Exter­nal Edit­ing. Go to the drop down box File For­mat and select TIFF. These are a few of the other set­ting I use. In the Color Space select Prophoto RGB. In the Bit Space select 16-bit/component. Set Res­o­lu­tion to 300. Finally, set Com­pres­sion to None. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Trash Bin

Empty your Trash Bin often. Light­room cre­ates a lot of extra files. Do this and it will keep your sys­tem clean.

Uncheck Auto­mat­i­cally write to changes in XMP

To do this go to the top and select Edit then select Cat­a­log Set­tings. The Cat­a­log Set­tings dia­log box will now appear.(See Below) Select Meta­data at the top. Uncheck the box marked Auto­mat­i­cally right to changes in XMP. Then press OK. Please Note: This will dis­able the cat­a­log from sav­ing any changes you make in the cat­a­log from updat­ing the XMP Side­car file. But it does improve speed. After you have mod­i­fied a group of pho­tographs, you can man­u­ally save to the XMP Side­car file. Select all the pho­tos that you are work­ing on and press Con­trol and then S to save the data to your XMP Side­car file. This way other pro­grams that use the XMP file can rec­og­nize the changes you made. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Change the cam­era raw cache settings

To do this first select Edit. Then select Pref­er­ences. You will now see the Pref­er­ences dia­log box.(See Below) Go to the bot­tom of the dia­log box and change the default from 1 GB to a higher num­ber like, 10, 25 or even 50 GB. I use 25 GB. Cam­era cache is used to store the image pre­views. By increas­ing the cache size it allows you to store more pre­views. This will increase your speed of mov­ing between pho­tographs. Then press OK at the bot­tom when fin­ished to save the changes.

Build Pre­views

To help speed up your photo edit­ing we are going to select a group of pho­tos and have Light­room cre­ate pre­views for that whole group of pho­tos. This will allow you to move from photo to photo in a shorter period of time. In the Library sec­tion first select a folder or group of pho­tos. Don’t select the whole cat­a­log, as this could take a lot of time to process and is not nec­es­sary. To do this at the top select Library then Pre­views then select Ren­ders Stan­dard Size Pre­views. A dia­log box will appear and then choose Build All. This will build pre­views for all the pho­tos you selected. Now when you go and access each one of those pho­tographs they will pop up much faster and not need to build pre­view each time you select it.

Lynda.com has over 1000 video courses on sub­jects like Light­room, Pho­to­shop, Pho­tog­ra­phy and other soft­ware pro­grams. click below to learn more.

Lightroom tutorials

Com­puter Upgrades

Here are few upgrades you can per­form on your com­puter that may improve the per­for­mance also:

Use a faster hard drive — This will improve your over sys­tem performance.

Add RAM of 8GB or more. Light­room uses a lot of mem­ory. so this will help with Light­room performance.

Con­clu­sion

If these steps don’t help enough it may be time for a new com­puter. In the next arti­cle I will be build­ing a new com­puter with the new Intel Core I7 2600K Proces­sor to super­charge the per­for­mance for Light­room 3 and video editing.

Filed Under: Lightroom, Speed up Adobe Lightroom 3 Tagged With:

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Online Training Videos

January 19, 2010 By 2 Comments

Lightroom tutorialsWhen I first con­sid­ered Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 2, I wanted to try it out.  You can down­loaded it as a free 30 day trial from Adobe.   From  my research, this pro­gram was just what I was look­ing for.  You can orga­nize your pho­tos and edit them very quickly.   The prob­lem is,  learn­ing all the fea­tures in this pro­gram using the man­ual could take months to learn.  Then I found the lynda.com online train­ing course by Chris Orwig, a pho­tog­ra­pher and instruc­tor at the Brooks Insti­tute of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Santa Bar­bra, Cal­i­for­nia.  In a mater of days after view­ing his online video course I was pro­fi­cient in Light­room 2.  After a week I had all my pho­tos cat­a­loged (about 25000 pho­tos) and could edit about 100 pho­tos in about an hour. Wow! Other pro­grams would have taken me days to edit.  Now I’m really excited about the new Light­room 3.  Chris is a great instruc­tor and pas­sion­ate about pho­tog­ra­phy.  He made this course easy and fun to learn about Light­room 2 and Light­room 3.  Watch the videos below and see if Chris Orwig’s online video train­ing on Light­room 3 or other Lynda.com videos are right for you.

Chris intro­duces him­self and some of the new fea­tures in Light­room 3 Beta

Want more from your software? Learn new skills.

Light­room 3 Beta preview

Light­room 3 Beta is now avail­able for down­load  from Adobe and it’s free until it’s  final release some­time in April 2010.  To down­load Light­room 3 ‚  go to Adobe.com and search for Light­room 3 in the upper right cor­ner of the site.


Adobe Lightroom 2

Intro­duc­tion to Light­room 3 Beta
Sharp­en­ing in Light­room 2 vs. Light­room 3 Beta

I hope you enjoyed the­ses videos by Chris Orwig on Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room 3.  Lynda.com is a great source for online train­ing which includes classes on pho­tog­ra­phy, graphic design, web design, pro­gram­ming and soft­ware & web appli­ca­tions.  With Lynda.com you will have access to over 1000 online courses 24/7.  Course sub­jects I have taken thru Lynda.com are:  Light­room 2, Light­room 3 Beta, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, Word­Press,  Twit­ter, Face­book, Prod­uct Pho­tog­ra­phy, Sell­ing & Pub­lish­ing Pho­tog­ra­phy, HTML, Pho­to­shop Ele­ments, Word, Excel and Expres­sion Web.

So visit and try

lynda.com

Pho­to­shop Light­room 3 Essen­tial Train­ing [CD-ROM]

 

Filed Under: Adobe Lightroom 3, Lightroom, Reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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