lightroom

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Photosmith for iOS: Using the iPad with Lightroom

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I've recently been in a number of situations where I wanted to look at my just-shot RAW photos but didn't want sit up in my office at a desk all night. I just wanted to sit on the couch with my iPad and have some impact on my overall photography workflow.

Enter Photosmith. This is the iOS app I'd been looking for.

I look at it as a way to sit on the couch, import a bunch of RAW photos to my iPad and do some Lightroom work without using Lightroom just yet. Don't get me wrong, I like Lightroom, but nothing beats an iPad for being able to hold the photos you took in your hands. 

Photosmith syncs with Lightroom using a simple plugin, so all the metadata I add to the photos in Photosmith winds up in my permanent Lightroom library.

As an example, tonight I took 60 photos of my daughter. I imported the RAW files to my iPad and used Photosmith to create a collection, star the photos I wanted to edit eventually, and added some creative commons metadata.  Then I opened Lightroom on my Mac and hit the sync button. Because both my iPad and Mac are on the same network the photos started showing up in my Lightroon library with all the metadata intact. Sweet!

The workflow looks like this:

   1. Take pictures

  2. Plug in Camera Connection Kit, and allow the built-in Photos App to start

  3. Import the photos from the camera or card

  4. Start Photosmith

  5. Do your tagging 

  6. Sync to Lightoom, start Lightroom, run the plugin, and import directly from Photosmith

  7. The images and all the settings are transferred over WiFi and added directly into your catalog

I'm planning an amazing trip to New Zealand in the coming months and Photosmith may become an important tool for my return flight. At 30,000 feet it'll be wonderful going through hundreds of photos on an iPad's touchscreen. When I get home I'll be ready to edit and process the photos I've already picked. 

 

 

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Lightroom Digital Workflow

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Keeping track of photo files is a pain in the ass. But now with my new digital workflow I'm breathing a little easier.

I knew that if I wanted to get serious about photography this year I'd need to get disciplined about keeping all these files in order. ​RAW photos are massive files and storing them on my Retina Macbook Pro is a non starter given the small size of the hard drive. Not to mention just keeping all these files in some searchable order. So I came up with a system that's not perfect but it does have chunks of help from my friend Trey Ratcliff. He had some great suggestions about keeping family photos separate from my art photos.

To start I created some collections in Lightroom. ​

Screen Shot 2012-09-24 at 9.11.32 PM.png
  • processing now
  • unprocessed art
  • ​unprocessed family
  • art keepers​
  • family keepers​

And I created a few Smart Collections​

  • ​5 Stars
  • 1 Star​
  • picked complete photos​

Once I had my collections complete I was able to begin importing the photos. During the import process I let the default settings automatically create sub folders based on the dates the photos were taken. This is really handy. 

In these dated subfolders it's not important that there are a few non-birthday pictures in a folder filled with those soccer photos because we're going to go through those folders anyway.​

Here's where the hard work comes into play. Next I go through each photo in the folder and rate them one at a time using the starring system. Either I give the photo 5 stars for processing later or I leave it blank to sit on my hard drive for future use.  I'm not worried about storage since I'm keeping every photo backed up on my Drobo anyway  By tagging a photo with 5 stars I'm saying to myself, "Self, you like this photo enough to process it soon". 

Once I've starred a bunch of photos I hit shift-click to select all the 5 starred photos and move them to either 'unprocessed family' or 'unprocessed art' depending on the content. ​Then when I find photos I'd like to process I'll take those photos and drag them to 'processing now'. Then I'll delete them from 'unprocessed' folder because I'm now 'working' on them.

Once I've processed a photo I'll delete it from my 'processing now' folder and export it to a bunch of places. I export it to iPhoto where I keep my family folders and my folder of completed Lightroom edits. I also send my photos to a networked Drobo FS​ where my wife and I share family photo folders. So all the apple picking photos I shot this weekend are now sitting in our shared 'Family 2012' folder with a sub-folder called 'Apple Picking'.

​I know this seems like a lot but it really isn't once you get the hang of it. It's much better than having no system at all!

Fixing a Photo

Last week I published a birthday photo of my wife. Initially I ran it through Lightroom in an attempt to fix the photo. I didn't do a great job and I asked all of you to explain what you would have done to fix it. You had some wonderful suggestions. So I went back to the photo in Lightroom and attempted to fix it.

've put together a screencast that takes us through that process. And then I've posted both versions of the photos below.

Last week I published a birthday photo of my wife. Initially I ran it through Lightroom in an attempt to fix the photo. I didn't do a great job and I asked all of you to explain what you would have done to fix it. You had some wonderful suggestions.