I’m excited to announce the release of version 2.00 of LR/Blog.
LR/Blog now lets you upload to, and create blog posts on your TypePad account. With this addition LR/Blog now officially supports:
and many other MetaWebLog compatible blogs too.
The upgrade is free to registered users, and I’ve also completely reworked the web site documentation to make things a little clearer, so get blogging!
We occasionally get requests for invoices for the plugins that you buy (or donate towards). Last week silently introduced the ability to get your invoice delivered to you automatically.
Fortunately we hadn’t made a big song and dance about this, because unfortunately we had an error in the generator that meant that the invoices had the wrong invoice number.
If you had downloaded an invoice before today then please download it again. We’re really sorry about this inconvenience.
Many of you use LR/Blog to post your images directly to your WordPress blog and today I’m excited to announce that I’ve taken the plugin even further by adding support the excellent NextGEN Gallery for WordPress.
NextGEN Gallery gives WordPress users much greater flexibility when presenting images on a blog. Thanks to the new integration with LR/Blog you can now upload your images directly to a new or existing gallery, and then create a post that will directly insert the images into the post.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature and also any other requests you have for LR/Blog.
Photographer José Fernández recently contacted the Toolbox to show us the results of his work using LR/Enfuse to blend multiple exposures.
These landscape images are spectacular and we’re only too happy to share them with you. Click the images to see them bigger.
With Impact WSPP you’ve been able to add captions to your web site for a while now, and I promised that this feature would be added to the standard version of Impact too.
I’ve finally had a change to make good on that promise; version 1.70 of Impact offers the same annotation feature as Impact WSPP.
Have fun with it!
ListView is a plug-in for Lightroom 3 that displays images in a list style just like in most other DAM (digital asset management) programs. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to review your metadata entry in a list than by scanning through a grid of thumbnails.
Other things you can do with List View:
You’ve invested a lot of time perfecting your photos and setting up Lightroom to suit the way you work. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow to discover your hard drive had crashed and you had lost all of that work?
Hopefully you will never have to find out, but just in case Matt Dawson has released the TPG LR Backup plugin to simplify backing up your Lightroom environment. It does this by adding the ability to backup Lightroom’s configuration files, and compress Lightroom’s catalog backups, from within Lightroom itself. These tasks can occur automatically as the program starts or manually as required. Setup the automated backups to save onto a second disk and that hard drive crash would be much less painful to recover from than it could otherwise have been.
You can check TPG LR Backup out on the plugin’s main page.
Jean Claude VALLOT a enregistré une serie de didacticiels video, en français, sur l’utilisation des plugins WSPP (Impact et Filmstrip). C’est un travail impressionnant, qui sera particulièrement utile pour les utilisateurs francophones.
For the curious English speakers:
Jean Claude Vallot has created a series of video tutorials, in French, on the use of our WSPP plugins (such as Impact and Filmstrip). It’s an impressive amount of work that’ll be very useful to French speakers.
Perhaps the most important plugin that I offer to professional photographers who license their images is PLUS for Lightroom.
PLUS refers to both an XMP-based metadata standard for embedding licensing information directly into images, and to the large international consortium of companies that form the standard’s governing body.
The PLUS standard is very well designed, being both flexible enough to meet virtually any licensing requirements, and concise enough to be clear and unambiguous in its use.Metadata embedded into images can be read by a variety of tools; for example there are now PLUS panels built into directly into CS5.
Lightroom 3 now includes built-in support for a small but useful number of PLUS fields, such as model release identifiers, licensor information, etc. The fields that are available are those that also happen to be part of the IPTC Extension schema (the two standards bodies work together to avoid creating duplicate metadata fields where their needs overlap).
The PLUS for Lightroom plugin provides photographers with access to all the PLUS fields, and until now it has ignored the presence of the built-in ones, continuing to offer its own variants that were in place since its release (well before Lightroom 3 came to market). This has meant that for Lightroom 3 users there have been two distinct and unconnected fields into which the user could enter the same PLUS image licensing information. With the new release of PLUS for Lightroom I now offer full integration with the fields that are now provided natively by Lightroom 3. Any PLUS metadata that you had previously entered into the fields provided by the plugin itself can be migrated automatically to Lightroom’s built-in ones, resulting in a much more integrated experience1.
This improved integration aside, the plugin continues to offer its impressive feature set – access to the full range of PLUS fields and the ability to easily define licensing requirements and to embed these into your images during export.
If you’re licensing images as a commercial, editorial or stock photographer and you’re not yet up to speed with PLUS then we’d recommend that you take a look at what it can offer you, and then take a look at the plugin – we believe that PLUS for Lightroom offers the best PLUS license creation experience found on any asset management tool.
If you’d like to learn more you can also download the user manual.
We’ve just released a handy plugin for those of you that use ShutterSnitch to wireless send images to your iPad.
ShutterSnitch allows users to rate their images on the iPad, and our Snitch Sync plug-in will allow you to synchronise this information with your RAW images in Lightroom.
The workflow is as follows: