Archive for September, 2010
Lightroom training course, Central London, 18th and 19th October
Last updated: Monday, 27th September: booking page is now live.
We’re really pleased to be able to offer you training in central London, at last! We’ve had lots of requests for more affordable training and we’ve now found a solution we’re delighted with.
We’re bringing to this group training course everything we’ve learned from our successful one-on-one workflow tuition about what photographers find easy and what they find difficult, so we know what to spend a little more time on.
We’ll keep updating this post with more details.
Where
The training sessions will be held at the seminar room at Jacobs, the famous photographic retailer, on New Oxford Street. They’ll run from 10am to 5:30pm with a break for lunch and short mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks as well.
Affordable and flexible
The training costs just £70 per person per day, including VAT. This really is fantastic value for a small group course. (Maximum twelve attendees.)
We’ve done everything possible to keep costs low so there are no frills. We’re not training in a computer room so you won’t be needing your laptop—just bring along a pen and notebook (the type with paper in it, not a CPU, Intel or otherwise). The cost covers just the cost of the course.
You’ll definitely get more out of the training if you can make it to both days. On the second day, the format will allow question-and-answer time and recap but we’ll also go on to cover more advanced topics; that approach always helps the learning process. However, you’ll be able to book just the first day or (if you just need some questions answered and a little help with more advanced topics) just day two. Again, we’re keeping things as flexible as possible.
Day one: Introduction and complete overview of a Lightroom 3 workflow, Monday 18th October 2010
This day will leave you feeling well informed about the complete workflow and about what Lightroom 3 can do for you. Many of the photographers we’ve trained over the last year have been wary of at least one aspect or another—this first day of training is where you leave behind that uncertainty and learn the power of every part of the application; it builds knowledge and confidence. Setup, preferences, importing, filing strategy, keywording, collections, development, filtering, export for web, printing… this day will be a thorough introduction to a workflow based on Lightroom 3.
Cost: £70 including VAT.
Day two: intermediate and advanced Lightroom 3 tuition/Q&A, Tuesday 19th October 2010
More detail on day two and a more open format, with lots more time for questions. We’ll be looking at some essential third-party plugins and providing recommendations, we’ll go into detail about the various ways in which you can combine your Lightroom workflow with Photoshop and we’ll talk about creating your own presets to speed up every aspect of your Lightroom workflow (import, development, local adjustments and export). We’ll cover local corrections in more depth. You and the other attendees will lead the Q & A. Again, check back later for details.
Cost: £70 including VAT.
Get all your Lightroom questions ready and bring them with you on Tuesday—you’ll get plenty of time to ask them and get them answered in detail.
Payment
You can able to pay with PayPal (which accepts credit cards, if you have no PayPal account) or by bank transfer (contact us for details) or by cheque. You willll get a full VAT invoice.
Transport and location
There could hardly be an easier London location to get to. Jacobs is in the West End, near Tottenham Court Road tube station (Central and Northern lines) and close to Oxford Circus (Victoria and Central lines) in an area served by many bus routes. You can plan the London part of your journey by clicking here to get to TfL’s Journey Planner. (The link will set things up correctly for Jacobs, New Oxford Street, as your destination. Just enter your starting station or post code.)
Jacobs
Big photographic retailer in London with an excellent reputation and keen prices. The course will be held downstairs in the seminar room in the Professional Services department. Jacobs have been very accommodating in our dealings with them and we can highly recommend them. You’ll find an excellent stock of cameras and lenses (new and used) and a wide range of accessories at very keen prices.
How to book
Just visit the booking page here.
Pass it on
If you know people who might be interested in this offer, please pass on our details and tell them to check later in the week.
Questions?
Fire away—send e-mail, leave a comment or give us a call: 020 3092 2907.
Updates
For updates, check back here or subscribe to the blog by e-mail or RSS/Atom.
September 3rd, 2010 by Bahi
Colour in h.264 slideshows created by Lightroom 3
This article is about a Lightroom 3 quirk we’ve recently become aware of: a colour shift when exporting slideshows as self-contained movies for use iPhone, iPad, YouTube and Facebook. We see the problem on all our Macs; we haven’t tested yet on Windows.
Summary of the issue
Playing back self-contained slideshow movies that you create using Lightroom 3 might show significant colour shifts if you export at 720p or 1080p. (Tests done on Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Lightroom 3.2.) Update: a 720×480 movie also shows the issue, and I’ve updated the example zip file to include a sample at this resolution.
Background
We do post-processing work for weddings shot by a local professional and, as part of the package of print-ready and screen-ready images we produce for him, we now include two movie slideshows with soundtracks. (Good for wedding gusts to have a chuckle over.) The smaller slideshow movie (480 pixels) is for use on an older iPhone or Android device and the bigger one (at 720p HD) is for upload to Facebook or YouTube, or for use on an iPhone 4 or iPad. Both movies use the h.264 codec, which allows excellent compression and relatively small file sizes.
Colour shift at 720p and 1080p
What we’ve noticed is that the colour palette displayed in movies exported from Lightroom 3 varies with movie resolution and is not consistent when played back in different players; in particular, the 720p and 1080p sizes, coming straight from Lightroom 3, display different colours from the other sizes. (Other resolutions show some subtle colour shifts but their colours are still acceptable and are consistent across sizes. Not so for 720p and 1080p.)
Here are are some screen shots from two example slideshows, with a gaudy background colour wash, chosen so that you can see the affect on both warm and cool tones.
Above: a screen shot of a 480-pixel movie slideshow playing.
Below: a screen shot of 720p slideshow. Resolution aside, no differences in the settings between the two. Compare the colour of the blue MINI in the two pictures above and below.
Finally, below is the picture exported from Lightroom 3 as a JPEG in sRGB colour space, to act as a comparison against both movie screen shots. You can see that the 480-pixel shot is closer to displaying accurate colour.
When we originally saw the phenomenon, we were using Lightroom 3.0; the screen shots above are from the Mac version of Lightroom 3.2. The player was Apple’s QuickTime Player X.
Different results when movies are played in VLC or QuickTime Player 7
If you use VLC (free for the Mac, Windows and Linux) or QuickTime Player 7, colour is at least consistent across all movie sizes but is consistently wrong—VLC 1.1.3 (current version as of August 2010) and QTP 7 running on Mac OS X 10.6.4 appear to be ignoring the display’s ICC profile (ColorSync profile).
Download examples of h.264 slideshows from Lightroom 3
Here’s a seven-megabyte zip file containing a single-image slideshow at different movie resolutions, together with a 960-pixel JPEG of the same image in the sRGB colour space, for comparison. All the movie files came directly from Lightroom 3.2, with no change of settings between exports other than output resolution. You might notice that the colour in the 720p and 1080p versions are different from the rest.
AVC vs h.264
In QuickTime Player X, the 720p and 1080p clips also list “AVC” instead of “h.264″ as the codec used; in theory, h.264 and AVC should be identical so it’s not clear whether different code is actually used by Lightroom 3 to generate these two HD resolutions or whether QuickTime Player just identifies the same codec differently at these particular resolutions. In other words, this particular point could just be a client issue. QuickTime Player 7 lists all the movies’ codecs as being AVC and get the colour wrong on all of them, too.
The importance of your display profile (ICC/ColorSync)
Our tests suggest that your display profile will make a big difference in determining whether you see these colour shifts or not. The further it is from a regular, canned sRGB or “Color LCD” profile, the more difference you’ll see between the two AVC files (720p and 1080p) and the rest. Switch to a custom profile generated with a colorimeter or spectrophotometer and there’s a good chance you’ll see a bigger difference. (If you want see a huge difference between the two AVC files and the rest, set your display’s profile to “Wide-gamut RGB”.)
Preliminary advice on h.264 movie slideshows from Lightroom
We’re reporting the issue to gather feedback and direct it to the right place. We don’t have any definite answers (we don’t even know whether the problem is definitely a Lightroom issue or an OS issue) but here are some suggestions.
- Test your own h.264 slideshow output from Lightroom 3 at different sizes to see if you experience the problem and if you do, decide whether it’s a show-stopper. (It may not be—our example is likely to show a worse problem than most real-life files.) Compare your own results with our zip file of examples.
- Be aware that your clients who use different movie players might see different results from you when you provide h.264 output at 720p or 1080p. The differences will probably most important for product photography, portraiture and fashion. Colour in slideshows with music isn’t usually quite as critical as it is with files you submit to a stock agency or an art editor so this may not be a huge problem. If your results vary from ours, please report your findings on the Adobe Lightroom support forum, where I’ve just started a new thread about this problem. If you report the issue, provide as much information about your environment as you can (hardware, OS version, Lightroom version, display profile, details of media player).
- We only see the problem in 720p and 1080p slideshow exports from Lightroom 3. One workaround for now is to stick to 480-pixel or 960-pixel output. That way, when it’s played on another colour-managed computer in QuickTime Player, its colour will stand a better chance of being acceptable.
If and when we find out more, we’ll post something. This problem may be something to do with Lightroom, Mac OS X components, Quicktime Player or, erm, user error. More to come on this if we get something interesting for you.
The metadata
You can subscribe to these articles for free by e-mail (managed by Google) or by RSS/Atom. We never pass on your details to anyone. If you’re interested in technical training or help, please consider using our contact form to get in touch. You can also support this site by shopping at amazon.co.uk using this link or amazon.com using this link. (You pay the same low Amazon price but we get a bit from Amazon’s profit.) Thanks to everyone who uses this link… we don’t get to see your names in the Amazon reports so we don’t know who you are but we’re very grateful for your support.
September 3rd, 2010 by Bahi
Controlling JPEG file sizes in Lightroom 3
Summary: file sizes of low-resolution JPEGs that you export using Lightroom can be excessive if you don’t take steps to control the embedded metadata. The large file sizes can affect your site’s loading speed and that in turn can now affect your Google search rank.
re-photo.co.uk
Earlier this week, I was catching up on some well written and informative articles by London photographer and writer Peter Marshall when I came across this one mentioning the release of Lightroom 3.2RC; in the piece, Peter mentioned that he’d found Lightroom 3 to be generating relatively low quality JPEG files for a given file size, at the 600-pixel dimensions that he uses for his site.
Peter had noticed two significant things: first, that he was getting better JPEGs at any given file size when he created them using Lightroom’s web module (which is designed to export a complete web site) instead of the usual JPEG export method; second, that the problem was worse when he was exporting JPEGs of images for which he’d made use of Lightroom’s local adjustments, meaning brushes and graduated filters.
It turned out (see his follow-up post here, and the comments that follow it) that the metadata associated with the file was causing the bump in file size. Clicking “Minimize Embedded Metadata” when exporting JPEGs helps; installing a copy of Jeffrey Friedl’s Metadata Wrangler plugin for Lightroom 3 fixes the problem completely and has added benefits: you can set up presets that get saved with Lightroom’s own export presets. That means you can build a one-click Lightroom export preset that generates the right picture size for your site with all but the unimportant metadata removed, and just the important stuff retained. (Presets are the key to working quickly within Lightroom and are probably its most overlooked feature.)
Above: the checkbox used during export to minimise metadata. Not as effective as Jeffrey’s Metadata Wrangler.
Explanation: all local brush and graduated filter adjustments that you apply in Lightroom become part of an images’s metadata and are included on export, bumping up the size of the final JPEG file—particularly noticeable for small JPEGs, because this metadata size is a constant and can easily double the size of a file. Not a huge problem if you’re hosting one or two images on a page but if you’re putting up many, the extra file size is significant. For blogs that have the usual rolling front page, hosting all images from the last ten or twenty posts, this sort of thing can make a big difference for your visitors… and for Google.
Important for your photography site’s Google rank
These days, your site’s Google rank is partly dependent on the speed at which your site loads—see this important article from Google on the subject. It’s well worth doing what Peter is doing, optimising carefully and minimising JPEG image size. (On which note, if you’re using WordPress software and your own hosting account to manage your site’s content, you should make every attempt to install and enable WP Super Cache to speed up your site’s response under load. This isn’t the appropriate place to discuss the technical aspects of that plugin but it does its job very well. Obviously, make complete site backups first.)
Above: JPEG file sizes before and after reducing metadata in different ways. No affect on image quality.
Photo forum
As Peter mentions, we met at a monthly London event called Photo Forum where photographers (mostly photojournalists) show and discuss their work. The two of us here at Shoot Raw have been three or four times and always enjoyed it. It’s a busy event but a good way to see work that might be new to you and to meet other photographers, established and upcoming. (At the time of writing, the next event is on 9th September 2010.) It’s a credit to Jacobs Professional Services that they host the event every month.
Friedl on JPEG quality versus size in Lightroom
Jeffrey’s definitive article on Lightroom 3′s JPEG quality made the rounds a while back. If you haven’t read it and you generate JPEGs from Lightroom, pay a visit. It’s the last word on Lightroom 3′s JPEG quality versus file size and even those of us who thought we knew exactly what Lightroom was doing in this area learned a few things.
The metadata
You can subscribe to these articles for free by e-mail (managed by Google) or by RSS/Atom. We never pass on your details to anyone. If you’re interested in technical training or help, please consider using our contact form to get in touch. You can also support this site by shopping at amazon.co.uk using this link or amazon.com using this link. (You pay the same low Amazon price but we get a bit from Amazon’s profit.) Thanks to everyone who uses this link… we don’t get to see your names in the Amazon reports so we don’t know who you are but we’re very grateful for your support.
September 23rd, 2010 by Bahi