lightroom Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Craig Rogers Photography

Adobe Lightroom Mobile 2.0 for Android Review

2nd March 20163rd March 2016Craig Rogers

Crop Tool with Auto Straight — Lightroom Mobile 2.0 (Android)

Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile has been around for sometime now and gave photographers the ability to syncronise their Lightroom edits on their PC or Mac to the Adobe Cloud and then continue to edit them a mobile device through a Smart Preview file rather than the original RAW.

Personally, I have never had the need to use this although can see it as a useful tool for some photographers.

Now, Adobe have released version 2.0 on the Android platform which allows you to edit your RAW files (DNG format) captured on your Android device (providing the camera is capable of capturing RAW files).

Adobe Lightroom Mobile 2.0 is completely free, you don’t require a CC subscription to use it. The only function that you need a subscription is to synchronise photos back through Adobe’s Cloud to your desktop version. If all you want to do is take a photo and make some edits and share them, it’s totally free. I think you have to sign up for an Adobe ID, but there is no charge.

You can get the app on Google Play. At time of writing, this new feature is not available on the IOS platform due to what I believe to be Apple restrictions.

RAW, JPEG and why Lightroom isn’t Cheating

7th November 20158th November 2015Craig Rogers

(Left to Right) Camera RAW, Camera JPEG, Lightroom Post Edit

Many non-photographers (and indeed some photographers) don’t understand photo editing and assume it’s cheating. The most widely used photo editing tool is Adobe’s Lightroom, not to be confused with Photoshop which is far more powerful and more of a manipulation tool. Do I use both? Yes I do, although Photoshop is not used that often.

{Click on any image to view a higher resolution}

So let’s start at the beginning and look at what a digital camera actually sees. It see’s light, nothing more than that, just light and different levels of light. Our eyes are the same, they see just light that we use our brain to convert into images. Our brains are far more intelligent than any camera can ever be in that we can process a very high dynamic range and effectively edit the image we see in real-time.

No matter how advanced our cameras are, they very rarely capture what we actually remember seeing with our own eyes and this is why we have the option to post edit using a tool such as Lightroom.

Automatically Back Up Lightroom Catalogues When You Logoff From Windows (Video)

26th September 20153rd November 2017Craig Rogers

If like me you have many different catalogues within Lightroom then you might get lazy when it comes to backing up your Lightroom Catalogues. As you may know, the catalogue stores all of the non-destructive editing carried out on your photos. Lose the catalogue and you lose the edits. Catalogues have to be stored locally and therefore is not easy to have them stored on resilent network storage such as a NAS.

I was getting concerned that I didn’t backup my catalogues often enough and decided to fix it once and for all and even turn off the backup notifications in Lightroom. I created a simple method to automatically backup any changes to my catalogues each time I log off or shut down my PC, please note, it doesn’t run if you just sleep or hibernate. As I’ve got an SSD in my PC it boots so quickly that I always shut it down when not using it.

Yes, this is important, I said “my PC”, I’m not a MAC user so this is not relevant to MACs but I suspect there is something similar available. Although I’m using Windows 10, this method should still work for 7 and 8. Please note, you require access to the Group Policy Editor, this is not available in “Home” versions of Windows and requires you are running a “Pro” version of Windows.

I’ve recorded a How To Video complete with written instructions below