Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom 6 Mobile Badlands

Adobe Lightroom has been a mainstay of my post processing workflow for many years. Along with Aperture and more recently DXO Optics Pro, OnOne Perfect Photo Suite, Tonality Pro and Nik Software, Lightroom has been up until now a steady and reliable workhorse and it still is as long as you are retrieving images from SD / CF cards. However with the 2015 release came some issues that were less than user-friendly for mobile users. I’m not sure what others are experiencing in this area but the current bugbear for me with the 2015.3 release is the inability for Lightroom to import images from Apples iPhone6.

Below is a screen shot from a short bout of solution hunting, you can see it’s not an isolated issue.

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So what’s the fuss? Can’t I just import them into Photos for OSX and then import them into Lightroom from there or run them upstream via Flickr and then download them into a folder and then import into Lightroom. Well yes I can. But why should I as a Lightroom user have to resort to such convoluted workarounds.

Fortunately I’m still running Aperture so I can import them into there and export as required.

However at the moment any attempt to get images off the phone into Lightroom results in the following ;

It’s just a dead end. I’ve even tried syncing from Lightroom Mobile to Lightroom and while this works the synced file is not full resolution so it’s useless for me.

Surprisingly it’s not the post processing workflow for mobile images that’s the issue because for the most part most people can process images  satisfactorily on the phone as is. The Achilles heel here is the file naming and file size conventions that are commonly applied when uploading images to various competitions. On the phone you can’t alter the file name or fine tune the output resolution and to upload to any of the major iPhone comps you need to be able to do both and to do that you have to be able to get the images off your device. You might well say at this point “but you can and you’ve already said how”, I hear you, but I don’t like the way Photos for Mac organizes things, nor the demosaicing algorithm it applies to imported images, plus it’s clumsy and Aperture could disappear with any future update to El Capitan.

So Adobe need to get this issue straightened out soon……there have been too many stuff ups. Lightroom is good but it’s not GOD.

Read some of the backstory here

 

Aperture alive on OSX Yosemite

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Apple plays the wild card and Aperture is still supported, updated and working well on OSX Yosemite. Is this a lifeline for Aperture users. I was initially hesitant but ran the 10.10 install on my laptop knowing full well that if Aperture was replaced or removed I’d still have it on my iMac.

But as you can see, alive and kicking. So if this means that OSX users will have the option to keep Aperture at the current updated version or move over to the proposed new apps in 2015 I for one will be happy to keep it in my stable of photo processing software.

Fix for Lightroom 5 and Aperture under OSX 10.9 Mavericks

If you are experiencing difficulties with Lightroom 5 not opening and Aperture not exporting images on OSX 10.9 here’s the fix if you have your Catalogs and Projects on external drives. Because of the new security measures / protocols you need to ensure that your external drives have read and write permissions for all users. After a lengthy discussion with a tech genius friend of mine this was the solution he offered and everything is fine now. Go to it. Screen Shot 2013-12-12 at 6.17.45 pm

OSX 10.9 …. a Lightroom killer?

This news won’t be new. But Mavericks has shot holes in Adobe Lightroom 5 and Apple Aperture. Both were initially working for me after the update but recently things have gone astray. Lightroom 5 is dead. Booting up the application just launches the splash screen and then its just dead calm. Aperture boots, reads the libraries and allows external editing, but cannot export images; just the eternal wheel of death and today folders began graying out. Likewise Snapseed can’t export to the iPhoto library and can’t ‘save as’. The forums are alive with the sounds of disgruntled users. Today I had to resort to importing images from phone and card into iPhoto, exporting to the desktop and editing in Photoshop. I hope Santa has a fix by Xmas.

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Adobe Lightroom 5 Beta

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Adobe Lightroom 5 splash screen courtesy of Adobe.com

There’s a lot of talk about some of the new features in Lightroom 5 that are available for preview in the current Beta version. However what’s impressed me the most is the inclusion of editable book templates. Of the features in Lightroom 4, the inability to edit templates when creating books is the biggest drawback and one that constantly sends me back to the Blurb App on my desktop. While the ability to soft proof inside Lightroom 4 using Blurb’s profile is a nicer option than having to install the Blurb ICC profile in Photoshop and soft proof from there when using Blurb’s installed software, it wasn’t enough to win my loyalty in that area. So I look forward to having a true Blurb workflow inside Lightroom 5.

Read the Beta release notes here.

And at the Lightroom Journal here