I’ve been using the Vignette app for photography on Android ever since Dawn recommended it to me. It allows me to tap to shoot (avoiding the balky Droid X camera button) and offers a bunch of shooting options.

It also offers dozens of filters for creative photo-making, any of which can be applied either at the time of taking a shot, or later, to any photo in the Droid’s gallery. In fact, there are so many filters that I have trouble keeping track of all of them, and developers neilandtheresa (who, by the way, have an utterly charming blog and web site that seems not to discuss their super application at all) continue to add more with each update to the app.

So I cheated and made myself a handy reference for the current set of built-in effects. It’s a little unwieldy to use on the droid itself, but not too bad — and it’s a big help for thinking about post-processing of photos that I’ve already shot. It includes examples of the vignette, coloring, camera and film effects styles and more. I hope it’s helpful to you. Click through for the full-size sheet at flickr.

Keep in mind that the effects can be layered on top of one another via the customizations menu, allowing the stacking of any number of treatments. This sheet doesn’t show any of those combinations.

One hint for working with Vignette: Set a favorite preset with all effects, frames and customizations to Normal/None; then you can quickly toggle from fancy-pants artistic to straight normal settings.

For the sake of completeness, here’s a list of all the effects currently in the application (note that not all simple color variations are included in the example sheet).

COMPLETE EFFECTS LIST as of Aug 21 2010
1. Normal - Generic film effect
2. Vignette
3. Portra
4. Velvia
5. Ilford
TOY
6. Toy Camera
7. Toy Camera BW
8. Leaky
9. Cross-Process
VINTAGE
10. Faded
11. SX-70
12. Summer - hazy grns and browns
13. Colourised - flat pastels
14. Oversaturated - bright washed out reds & yellows
15. Yearbook - faded B&W
16. Sepia
17. Platinotype - bright smooth tones & deep shadows
18. Retro Red - faded color variation
19. Retro Yellow
20. Retro Green
21. Retry Cyan
22. Retro Blue
23. Retro Magenta
COLOUR HIGHLIGHT
24. London - contrasty b&w and red
25. Paris - contrasty B&W and blue-green
26. New York - contrasty black & white and yellow
COLOUR SWAP
27. Red/blue
28. Red/green
29. Blue/green
30. Rotate Hue
TINTED MONOCHROME
31. Sepia - same
32. Platinotype - same
33. Bleach bypass
34. Night vision- grainy and green
35. Duotone red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta
LENS EFFECTS
36. Dreamy - soft-focus
37. Tilt-shift - portrait and landscape modes
38. Tobacco filter - deep orange tint for dramatic skies
39. Grad tobacco - portrait and landscape
40. Grad ND - portrait and landscape
41. Red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta simple filters
CINEMATIC
42. Action movie - vivid reds w/blue-green tint
43. Technicolor - red and cyan 1930s look
44. Scary movie - tri-tone blue and magenta
MISC
45. Posterise
46. Blackboard
47. Infrared
48. Rainbow
49. Negative
50. Invert
FRAMES
51. Bordered
52. Rounded
53. Oval
FRAMES - INSTANT
54. Instant classic
	variants: Wide, mini & square
FRAMES - GRUNGY
55. Instant transfer 1
	variants: 2 (smaller border) and 3 (yellow/magenta border)
56. Filed carrier
FRAMES - FILM
57. 35mm
58. 35mm full bleed
59. 6x6
60. 6x6 full bleed

Now that I have a photogenic, tiny gurgling creature in the house, I’m shooting a lot of photos, both on the Droid X and the Pentax. Most of these photos end up, one way or another, in Lightroom for cataloguing, and as I’ve described earlier, I have a nice workflow for updating these rapidly-growing galleries on my iPad.

But how about the Droid X? It has a nice screen, and I want to foist photos of my beautiful boy on anyone I happen across — so I started to wonder if, continuing to use Lightroom as my core platform, I could keep a small gallery of photos on the Android phone with as little manual work as possible.

Here’s the executive summary: I again use a smart published collection in Lightroom to create the gallery; then I use a LaunchAgent in OS X to monitor the mount point of the Droid X on the filesystem; and a tiny shell script syncs the published gallery to the Droid whenever I plug it into the MacBook Pro. Read on for altogether too many details.

First, a couple of things to note about how the Droid X generates image galleries [ note that this may apply to all Android devices; I have no idea, and your mileage may vary ]:

• Android automatically displays galleries based on image type — so you don’t need to update a database or anything to build your galleries on the phone. You just need folder(s) full of images.
• When you run the Gallery app, it will display galleries with the name of the parent folder containing the images. This means you can make a folder tree on the Droid’s SD card and neatly package multiple gallery folders within it, without cluttering up your root directory.

Prepare the SD card

When I attach my Droid X via USB to the MacBook Pro, it automatically mounts it as a volume titled NO NAME, so I used the Finder to change the label to DROIDX. This, happily, seems not to have affected any of the phone’s operations; the Droid must not depend on the name of the SD card for any of its internal work.

The second preparation step is to create a master gallery directory on the SD card. This is just for housekeeping purposes; everything in the galleries will be in a subdirectory of that top-level directory. Again, I simply did this with the finder: navigate to the DROIDX drive when the phone is connected, and create a new top-level directory, Galleries.

Your SD card and Droid should now be ready to go.

Set up the Gallery/Galleries

Just like last time, I’m using smart publish collections, based on keywords, to populate the galleries that will be synced. I decided to prefix all the keywords for this usage with dx — so, dx-gallery is my main tag, and I’ve edited it in LR to not be included in export. It’s a housekeeping tag only.

I’ve tagged a bunch of images with the dx-gallery tag.

Then it’s off to build the publish service. Here’s what it looks like in the publishing manager:

And add to that service a Published Smart Set that looks like this:

You can assign multiple keywords to the Smart Set, or create as many smart sets as you want galleries, and use unique keywords to assign photos to each. Each smart set within the published collection will appear in your directory tree as a subdirectory of the top-level folder for the set — and that makes the syncing to the Droid easy.

Automate syncing via LaunchAgent

Everything I know about LaunchAgent I learned from this tutorial. This is basically a concise repeating of that description, edited for our purposes. (I’ve previously described using this process to perform system backups)

First, if it’s not already there, mkdir ~/Library/LaunchAgents. This is the folder that OS X will watch for scripts triggered by system events such as mounting an external drive, which is exactly what plugging in the Droid does.

In that directory, make a new plist file (I called mine droid-sync-watch.plist) and give paste this into it:

In short, this plist file tells the OS to run the identified script (~Library/Scripts/droid-sync) when the specified WatchPath changes.

The sync script itself lives in ~Library/Scrips and consists of a check against the desired volume (here’s where naming the Droid SD card comes in) and an rsync of the designated published collection to the previously-generated target directory on the SD card.

Finally, tell the LaunchAgent controller to watch your scripts by doing the following at a terminal:

• launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents
• launchctl list | grep sync

You should see your droid-sync script appear in the list produced by the second command, above.

Now you’re ready!

Plug in and go

That really should do it. When you connect the Droid X, you can watch the messages in the sync script appear in your console log, and everything should work — after syncing, disconnect the device again and fire up the gallery application; in the “Folders” section of the gallery you should see an item for each gallery you create in Lightroom. You’re done!

As with the iPad workflow, the great part of this is that once it’s set up, it’s pretty automatic. If you edit, add, or remove photos, as long as you republish the collection, those changes will all be pushed over to the Droid. Thanks to a little nerdery and Lightroom, we’ve built a bit of functionality that the Droid software doesn’t directly offer — and it’s still done with LR as the core of the photo library.

(Or, an efficient way to use Lightroom to manage photos on your iPad)

I got myself an iPad a few weeks ago. Short review: It’s a big iPhone only in the sense that an iPhone is just a phone; that is, it’s hawt and I love it. (More ZOMG iPad articles to follow, I’m sure.)

The iPad really shows off photos, so I’ve been thinking about the best way to manage the photos that I want to put on it. With the non-beta release of Lightroom 3 this week, I think I’ve found a start at a workflow in the new publishing service that it offers.

First a note about syncing photos to the iPad. Like the iPod/iPhone, you have to select a single parent directory, and optionally subdirectories, of photos that you want to sync. The iPad stores photos in a series of albums simply named after the subdirectory where they live on your hard drive. In my case, I keep the photos that I publish out of Lightroom in one of a number of subfolders of a ~/Pictures/Exported Photos directory, but I don’t necessary want to sync all of them to the iPad. And, for the iPad, I wanted a little more control over the album naming for purposes of navigation — so I didn’t want to keep the directory names I’ve previously used for simple file management.

So: I have an “iPad” directory in my exports folder, and that’s what I sync to the iPad — along with all its subdirectories. I’ve copied a handful of existing albums into that directory, which isn’t a great solution but it does work for now. Apple has apparently decided that symbolic links cannot be synced [that would be a great capability, wouldn’t it?], so I can’t simply create links to the file locations of the existing, non-Lightroom albums that I want to sync.

But the Lightroom albums are another story. Right now, I’ve simply created a couple of Hard Drive publish services, each of which publishes to a subdirectory of that “iPad” folder I described above. For example, the current flickr one simply sets up a set of export parameters for photos that will be published to a subdir.

But the slick part comes by making a smart collection that will publish everything I post to flickr in 2010. Simply build the smart collection within the publish service:

And then set it to include all photos that match some key criteria: Since I use Jeffery Friedl’s flickr plugin, I can call directly on the metadata it creates at export:

I now have a smart collection within a publish service, so the photos that I export that match that criteria will automatically be added. I’ll have to occasionally republish to the service itself; and each time I do so, the iPad will gather up those photos the next time I sync.

You can use the same methodology to set up hard drive publish services for any album you like; each service will appear on the iPad as an album, and if you create a smart collection (or a series of them) as part of the service, then they’ll be updated automatically as you perform you regular photo workflow.

One final note on why I think the publish service is an ideal tool for this workflow, rather than a solution such as simply exporting to a folder: The publish service will apply future changes to the service settings to all photos under its control. So, were I to decide to apply a watermark, a border (via, for example, LR/Mogrify 2), or adjust photo quality in order to save space on the iPad, those changes made to the publish service would result in the option to re-process the current photos:

In a sense, then, the photos produced via the publish service are truly synced — future changes will be managed and will trigger re-processing, if I choose. I think that’s pretty Good Stuff.

The Pentax K-7, Pentax’s current flagship DSLR, is on big sale today at Amazon:

In-body shake reduction (full shake reduction on ancient lenses!), 720p movie mode, 5 frames per second, and dust, moisture and weather resistant case. This is the first time I’ve seen the camera for under about $1200, so it’s significant savings. Both body-only and kit models are available. I just might pick one up. (And so might you.)

Following in the modest two-year tradition I’ve established (see 2007 and 2008 posts), here is my 2009 photo data from my Lightroom catalog!

[ quick howto: Lightroom 1 & 2 (and 3) databases are in sqlite3 format, which means that freely-available tools can extract data from them. I use sqlite3, some shell scripting, and R (and occasionally excel) to produce summaries of that data. Why? Data offers some insight into the kinds of photos I take. Mostly, though, it’s fun. I’d be happy to expand on the actual code that goes into these plots, if there’s interest. ]

Below is a set of plots that summarize some of this year’s data. Click through to flickr to see the larger version.

What’s interesting this year? Well, crop ratios looked pretty similar to last year, so this year, for the first time (suggested in a post by Keitha, whose photos I admire tremendously, and whose Pentax lens set I envy with the fire of a million anti-glare-coated nine-aperture-bladed all-metal suns) I pulled out some information about aperture for each of the prime lenses that I shoot with. You can see these four frequency plots (for each of the Pentax DA 70mm F2.4 ltd, FA 50mm F1.4, FA 35mm F2.0 and DA 21mm F3.2 ltd lenses) in the left hand column of the image. Right off the bat you can see that I shot a lot with the FA 35mm this year (which is confirmed by the “overall lens use” plot on the right column). In fact, I took that lens along as my sole lens on a few long weekend trips to Ventura, CA, and the San Juan Islands, and really loved its performance. It does great at large apertures, but I also used it a lot for street shooting at f/8 and smaller apertures.

Runner-up in frequency this year is the FA 50mm F/1.4, which ordinarily I would say is my favorite lens (and it very much still is; it just wasn’t as convenient a focal length to take as my only lens on those vacations). Its sweet spot [where it’s sharpest but still has a nice narrow depth of field] is about F/4, which is where I primarily use it.

Neither the DA 70mm F/2.4 or the DA 21mm F/3.2 got as much use this year, but I really love some of the photos I took with those lenses. In fact, I carried these two lenses specifically for their light weight and trim size on the Flagstaff photowalk I organized in July.

How did 2009 stack up to 2008? In terms of absolute frequency, nearly identical! I kept 1308 frames last year, compared to keeping 1340 in 2008. Far fewer of those are picks, or posted to flickr — though a good number are waiting for me to come back to, to finish workup or to make a print.

And that’s it for the 2009 photo stats! I did re-work my keyword network code, so perhaps can follow up this post with a little more about keyword relationships.

If you’d like to know more about extracting and summarizing info from your own Lightroom catalog, please let me know (and check out my other lightroom-related posts)

And, as last year, I hope soon to follow up with a report on my 2009 photo goals, and to set a few for 2010.

Selected again by capricious point and click, these are a few of my favorite photos from 2009.

Click over to flickr for the full set!

It would be great if Lightroom could string export presets together, to perform operations sequentially or simply to perform several processes on one image to produce several different outputs.

The first use I’d put to this functionality would be generating thumbnails of exported images right along-side the full-sized image — a common task when producing images to upload to a blog, for example.

Absent that kind of flexible functionality, here’s a nice solution for generating thumbnails of images and full-size exports at the same time. Use Jeffrey Friedl’s Run Any Command plugin in conjunction with mogrify: Just insert “run any command” to an existing export preset, and then add the following as the Command to Run (assumes you have LR2/Mogrify installed, which of course you do):

The command makes a copy of your original image (which is available to “run any command” plugin via the {FILE} token), with “-small” appended to the filename, and then uses mogrify to resize the copy to 50%. You can optionally adjust the percent to scale or add a “-quality” option to the mogrify command.

You could perform this command more cleanly, without the copy step, if you have ImageMagick installed independently of LR2/Mogrify: The full IM package includes the “convert” command, which allows for output to a new filename. Since I didn’t want to separately install ImageMagick, I just make a copy of the file and then invoke mogrify via the path to the plugin.

Presto! Instant thumbnails, appropriately named, to accompany your export. Pretty good stuff, made possible by the great work of Jeffrey Friedl. Check out all his lightroom goodies.

Between Scott Kelby and John Beardsworth, these two lists of Lightroom tips provide lots of useful pointers:

• 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users (Kelby)
• 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell A Slightly Less New Lightroom User (Beardsworth)

Kelby’s tip about “solo mode” is pure gold. I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s a super way to work. I’m not sure about the keywords tips, though: Both Scott and John caution against keywords and nesting keywords; while I agree that finding a way to use consistently use keywords (and metadata in general) is important, I haven’t run into problems of too many of them, quite yet. Periodically taking a keyword inventory and identifying duplicates has helped keep my catalog relatively clean (and me relatively sane).

It’s nice to keep learning things about Lightroom. It tends to have solutions for problems long before I realize that I need them, and so I was happy to find this morning that it has handy shortcuts for all the targeted adjustment brushes.

• shift-alt-cmd-N: None (cancel adjustment)
• shift-alt-cmd-T: Tone adjustment
• shift-alt-cmd-H: Hue adjustment
• shift-alt-cmd-S: Saturation adjustment
• shift-alt-cmd-L: Luminance adjustment
• shift-alt-cmd-G: Grayscale mix

Activating any shortcut will jump your develop panel to the appropriate controller, so you can keep your cursor focused on the image and still see the effects of your adjustments in the sliders or levels. It’s a nice, efficient way to minimize extra mouse movement and make quick modifications.

 

Check out the rest of my Lightroom posts for much, much more, including more database tinkering, keywording, and workflow.

A question recently came up over in the Flickr Lightroom group about generating a list of all filenames or selected filenames in a catalog. There’s a pretty nice straightforward bit of SQL that will produce just such a list.

My new favorite tool for poking around in the Lightroom database is the SQLite Manager extension for Firefox. It plugs seamlessly into Firefox and is a very good tool—faster than the old sqlite3 browser, and with the added bonus of not requiring Rosetta to be installed under Snow Leopard. Plug the following code into the “Execute SQL” box (or kick it old school via the command line sqlite3 tool):

You can do even better by using the sqlite3 concatenate operate in the select statement:

That will produce a nicely-formatted list of files:

	2007-02-19/IMGP1609.PEF
	2007-02-19/IMGP1610.PEF
	2007-02-19/IMGP1611.PEF
	2007-02-19/IMGP1612.PEF
	2007-02-19/IMGP1613.PEF
	2007-02-19/IMGP1614.PEF

Still building, we can add in the absolutePath field to get a complete path — very useful for when you have files stored in multiple locations, such as offline storage or backup locations.

And, finally, because how often do you really need to see the paths for all of the files in your library, really?, we can limit the query to just files in a quick collection. This takes a couple of extra steps, because we can’t directly get to the keyword data from the path data:

And there you have it. One more fun trick you can pull thanks to the sqlite3 database that underlies your Lightroom 2 catalog.

 

Check out the rest of my Lightroom posts for much, much more, including more database tinkering, keywording, and workflow.

The monsoons aren’t just an annual event for southern Arizona — they hit us up north, too, and after a couple of dry weeks we had a nice storm today.

Today was free admission day at the Grand Canyon, so after coffee and bagels downtown, we looked at one another, said, “What the hell?” and hit the road. The day started out hot, but the clouds moved in over the south rim and kept us cool. On the way home, the storm kicked properly into gear and we followed it most of the way back to Flagstaff.

Nice end to the weekend!

I’ve been reading the comments thread of this great post at Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider blog. It’s absolutely chock full of concise tips for getting more out of Lightroom, and it drives home to me that there’s always lots, lots more to learn.

Here’s my favorite new-to-me tip (Thanks, Scott!): Did you know Lightroom 2 has a ‘solo mode’? It’s a really fantastic way to eliminate scrolling up and down through the set of side panels. Ctrl-click beside a panel’s name and select ‘solo mode’ to turn it on, and then only the currently-selected panel will be expanded. Select any other panel’s name to auto-expand it while collapsing the prior panel. In conjunction with using cmd-1 through cmd-7 to toggle panels, it’s (to me) a nearly unbeatable way to navigate the panels with minimal mousing. (Note this works in both Library and Develop modes.)

Hey Flagstaff-area readers: This year Flagstaff has a slot on the Worldwide Photo Walk. We’ll be strolling from downtown Flagstaff, toward the NAU campus and back again on the evening of July 18.

So come visit the photowalk site, sign up, and join us. No experience necessary — just a desire to meet some friendly neighbors, go for a walk, and take some pictures.

A couple of years ago I came across Camiel Schoonen’s very well-done set of antique presets for Lightroom/Lightroom 2 (link to flickr discussion page for the presets). They achieve some nice effects, as in my example below from a ride on the Grand Canyon Railway. The modified photo is on top, original beneath:

(link is to flickr photo)

After a laptop transition gone awry, Camiel lost his copies of the presets, but I still have a copy. I’ve forwarded these back to Camiel so he can resume their distribution over at his own site.

Thanks for the great work, Camiel!

I’m sure the rest of you figured this out ages ago, but it was a new realization to me. In addition to supporting multiple, different borders per image, the LR2/Mogrify border options for Lightroom 2 allow for borders to be applied on three metrics: pixel size, percent of height, and percent of width. That allow, for example, for easy application of letterbox-style top and bottom borders without needing to pay any attention to the cropped dimension of your image.

The plugin default is in pixels; just switch to percent and you’re off. Something in the range of 10-12% of height seems to suit my eye pretty well.

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