Memos From The Digital Darkroom

A common question from clients and students is, “What’s the best device to use for calibrating my monitor?” In some ways this is an easy question to answer. I simply direct them to the devices I’ve used, such as the Spyder 3 Pro, i1 Display 2, and the Color Munki. Because I’ve used these devices, [...]

USB flash drives are very handy for transferring data from one computer to another. In fact, I use one as a “sneaker-net” in my office because sometimes it’s easier to transfer data with a USB drive than with my network.
However, these simple little devices can cause big problems because they are an extremely efficient tool [...]

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 weekend I went to Fry’s Electronics to purchase a new external backup hard drive. The one I have been using for backup is a 500 GB drive that’s is almost full. I plan to store it in a safe location and put a new drive into service. For the new drive, I wanted something [...]

(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 [...]