Memos From The Digital Darkroom

My favorite thing about my iPad is the ability to show my photography no matter where I am. Photos look great on the iPad and I can load as many albums as I like so that I have a huge variety to show. The usual process for creating and adding these albums is to use [...]

Earlier this week I was helping a Portland commercial photographer rebuild her Lightroom catalog when I learned something new. Something that anyone using Flags as a rating system in Lightroom should know. Before I get to that, let me tell you what happened.
A Crash Raises a Question
Because of a series of computer mishaps, my client [...]

Two separate clients recently contacted me regarding unusual problems they were experiencing. Though one person was having a problem with Lightroom and the other with Photoshop, it turns out both problems had the same solution. Here’s the story:
The first client had recently purchased a new computer, installed Lightroom 3 onto it, and then transferred her [...]

When you import existing images from your hard drive into Lightroom, the folder with the files in it is listed in the Folders panel in Lightroom. However, if that folder is inside of another folder, the parent folder is most likely not listed.
Here’s what I mean. My system is to have one main folder or [...]

(This is a article I wrote for the Portland Metro Photographic News website. )
The first time I saw Adobe’s Lightroom, while it was in its earliest beta version, I wondered what the point of it was. I could already do everything it did in Photoshop. Why did I need to learn a new way of [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was teaching a Lightroom workshop to a group of photographers in Eugene, Oregon. When we were going through a hands-on exercise on importing files, three of the students had a problem following my instructions. It seems that some of their file naming presets had gone missing. Fortunately, the same [...]

In earlier days of digital photography, the primary approach to organization was to organize files into specific folders based on image content. This system can lead to some problems. A much better system is to use keyword tags to identify and filter for specific image content.

A change to the preferences in Bridge CS4 affects the way labels added in Lightroom are shown.

You can quickly navigate through files in Lightroom or folders in Bridge using the back and forward buttons on your mouse.

When I sit down with a new client, I ask them a series of questions that are designed to help me understand their level of workflow skills and knowledge. I’m often amazed at how often people who seem to be Photoshop savvy seem to get sharpening wrong. I ran into this twice last week so [...]