Lightroom Guy | Expert Support for Digital Photography

Thailand Photo Tour Scouting

March 19, 2019 by Lightroom Guy Leave a Comment

This is a break from our usual blog posts about tech and Lightroom, as I’m currently in Thailand photo tour scouting. I will be traveling through Thailand and then in Qatar during March working on multiple projects. I’m helping my wife, who is working on a children’s book about elephant sanctuaries; I was asked by a client to put together a bespoke tour of Thailand and I have an upcoming series of Lightroom workshops and talks scheduled in Doha for the end of March and beginning of April. I wanted to share some of my photos. This trip is too much fun to keep to myself.

Thailand Photo Tour

The first part of this trip is in Chiang Mai, Thailand photo tour scouting for a client. This northern Thai city still retains ruins of ancient walls and moats and has hundreds of elaborate Buddhist temples. The sheer number of temples is overwhelming and, at times they can be both magical and bizarre. For example, the Suttichit Buddha Place Park, south of Chiang Mai. It’s a temple complex with curious array of hundreds of odd sculptures along with traditional ones. There’s a massive mountainside reclining Buddha and statues of Godzilla, a pterodactyl, three-headed elephants along with Buddha sculptures in a dragon’s mouth Buddhist and Disney characters. It’s quite challenging to shoot this place, as everything gets in the way of everything else. I guess that’s why I enjoyed trying to convey the oddness. I definitely have to include this place in my Thailand tour.

Thailand Photo Tour. Giant Reclining Buddha with two Buddhas — Giant reclining Buddha feet with two buddhas
Suttichit Buddha Place Park

Then there’s the Silver Temple in Chiang Mai’s old city. In contrast to the Suttichit Buddha Place Park, it’s hard to take a bad photo here. There are beautiful interior and exterior juxtapositions of light and dark of this nearly all silver temple.

With contrasts of gold, this is a stunning location. And yet there’s an undertone of wackiness here as well, with Marvel characters and UFOs. Another definite location for the tour.

And let’s not forget the monks.

Thailand Photo Tour — Merit monk statues at Wat Chedi Luang

Chiang Mai is an amazing city for any photographer. First, you can’t throw a rock here without hitting a temple.

Second, every temple is uniquely different and there are thousands of them, so it’s hard to run out of places and things to shoot.

And third, the people. Thailand is a country of kind and generous people. You’ll never get tired of that.

My next stops are Bangkok on March 24th and Doha, Qatar on March 28th. I’ll make sure you see more photos on upcoming posts.

RAID is Not Backup!

March 6, 2019 by David Mark Erickson Leave a Comment

At our new, quarterly “Tech Talk” event, co-sponsored by APA-NY and hosted at the NYC Hasselblad offices, one of the topics we covered in an in depth presentation was about RAID and backup systems. During the discussion we highlighted the very critical point that, RAID is NOT Backup. This caused some degree of confusion. We thought we’d use this blog post to dig in a little deeper and provide some more clarity.

Preparing for the Worst

As photographers in the digital age, most of us are storing our photos on some sort of hard drive system. And, as we all know, hard drives can fail. They can develop mechanical failures. Or, something can go wrong with the electronics that causes data to be lost or corrupted. Even worse, the drives themselves could be lost, stolen or destroyed.

To account for the possibility of data loss, we develop backup systems and workflow routines. In computer terms, a backup is an exact copy of digital data stored in a different location. This backed up data can be retrieved in case the working copy is damaged or lost. Usually this means corrupted data or hard drive failure.

There are many ways to achieve duplicating files and storing them securely. We’ve posted many times about the 3-2-1 strategy. As well as using Backblaze as a cloud based solution for keeping offsite copies of your images.

So here is where we draw the line between a RAID system and keeping a set of backup files.

What is a RAID?

A RAID (Redundant Array of Individual Disks) is where a bunch of hard drives can be cobbled together to form a single system. The features and capabilities of any give RAID system depend on the manufacturer and software involved. Suffice to say that, a RAID creates a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

By way of example, let’s assume that we have so many photographs that we have to store everything on five different, individual hard drives. In this example we have no redundancy or fault tolerance. That is to say that, if anything happens to any one of those drives the data on that individual drive would be lost. We also would have to contend with having a data cable and/or power cord to connected to each individual drive. This could lead to a problematic situation itself: we might not be able to access all of the data at the same time since we cannot connect all the drives at once to one computer.

This is where a RAID comes in. In this case, a RAID 5* cobbles together all five of our example drives into a single system contained within a specialized enclosure. In other words, they work as if they were one hard drive. It has one data connection and one power cord. The RAID system then sprinkles little bits of data across all five drives. That is, every photo is divided into smaller chunks and distributed across all of the drives. The power of the RAID is its massive capacity and if (when) one of the five individual drives fails.

Here's an example of how a RAID system works. — *RAID 5 distributes data across all drives with fault tolerance

Because data is distributed across five drives, only part of the data would be lost if one of the drives developed a fault. Using something called parity (think of parity like a mathematical map of any given file), the system is able to rebuild a file using the other four parts and the parity information.

What is a RAID Good For?

A question you might ask then, is: why use a RAID at all? Why can’t I just use a bunch of hard drives and keep them all backed up? The simple answer is, you could do that but it would be an awful lot of work!

The large storage capacity created by a RAID is not available as a single hard drive. RAID provides redundancy, that is the ability to recover from any given drive failing. One additional consideration I would add is, RAID systems are best used when your total storage needs exceed roughly 20TB of data.

The current size and price of hard disk drives today is such that it is inexpensive enough to purchase and manage a single large capacity hard drive (8-12TB). However, the advantage of a RAID comes in when you need two to three (or more) times as much storage capacity.

Why RAID is Not Backup

Let’s take the above example of five hard drives in a RAID. We have redundancy (the ability to recover from failure) but we do not have backup (a separate, wholly independent copy of the data). The RAID system does not make an additional copy of the data to another device. The RAID simply distributes little bits of data across all of the drives in the RAID system to account for the possibility of part of the system failing. Therefore, we can see that RAID is indeed NOT backup.

How do you Backup a RAID?

There are two basic strategies for backing up a RAID system. The simple option is to use a cloud based backup system like Backblaze. There are many volume storage services in the market, such as Amazon, iDrive, and Crashplan. We’re biased towards Backblaze for a number of reasons. However, the key issues are pricing and having a fast, stable internet connection. Using a cloud based service does double duty in keeping a second copy of your data “off site” in case of catastrophe.

The other option would be to copy all the data from the RAID to another RAID, of equal or greater size. Or, to copy all of the data to a number of non-RAID hard drives. The former would be much simpler to manage but, would have cost implications as RAID systems can get expensive very quickly. The latter option would entail a lot more work, both in terms of time and hands on management.

Conclusion

Purchasing and setting up a RAID system is something that needs to be carefully considered. Given the cost and technical details, it may not be the best solution for most people without some guidance. RAIDs are good for storing and accessing large volumes of data but are not backup systems themselves.

If you have any questions about this or would like help in choosing or setting up a RAID, please do contact us as this is part of our normal business offerings.

Technical Note
Just a quick note here to say that there are many deeper technical issues regarding RAID that I did not address in this post! RAID can be a complex subject and there are many ways to achieve solutions for creating redundancy and backup. The purpose of this post was to write a non-technical explanation of why RAID isn’t a backup solution. So, I intentionally left out a number of issues so as to stay focused on this one point.

When Dragging Lightroom Sliders Just Won’t Do

February 28, 2019 by Lightroom Guy Leave a Comment

Hovering over a slider highlights the number field allowing incremental changes with the up/down arrow keys.

Sometimes dragging Lightroom sliders make adjustments that are too big, too small or not at all. That’s why I like to hover my cursor over sliders until they highlight. Because when I leave the cursor in place instead of dragging, tapping the up/down arrow keys will make incremental slider adjustments. You can change the increment size with a couple modifier keys. Using the up/down arrow keys in this manner works on all the panel sliders in Lightroom Classic.

Adjusting Increment Amount

Holding down the Shift key during up/down arrow key tapping adds/decreases increment amount. And, holding down the Option key (Alt on PC) decreases the increment amount. Remember, your cursor needs to be hovering over the Lightroom slider.

As simple as this sounds, dragging Lightroom sliders vs. using the up/down arrow keys alone or adding the Shift and Option keys can change the way you work by giving you more control over your slider adjustments.

To get you started, we’ve made a chart for the Lightroom Classic Basic panel that shows what incremental changes happen with which modifier keys. Click here to download the PDF and stop dragging Lightroom Sliders!

February Lightroom Updates

February 20, 2019 by David Mark Erickson Leave a Comment

Last week, Adobe released updates for both Lightroom Classic (version 8.2) and Lightroom CC (version 2.2 – the cloud-based version). Along with the usual bug fixes and new camera and lens support, the big highlight for Classic is the new Enhance Details tool. And, for CC, Adobe has added a number of very useful developing tools.

Click through these links for details on the updates for camera and lens support. There are more details than we are going to cover in this post. Read about everything on the February Lightroom Releases post over at the Adobe Blog.

Enhance Details for Classic

The Enhance Details tool is yet another development that engages Adobe’s machine learning algorithms, called Sensei. Below, we’ve made a short demonstration video showing how Enhance Details works. In short, this is a tool that we recommend people use very sparingly. It creates huge files and can take a lot of processor time for not a lot of easily viewable results.

This tool is for anyone who makes very large prints of their work OR for people who care a lot about the fine details of their photos. Even in both of those cases, we suggest the tool be used sparingly given the relative size of the files that get created.

For more info, check the Adobe Help website pages regarding Enhance Details.

New Develop Tools for CC

Adobe has added five new developing tools in the update for Lightroom CC version 2.2. These are important updates that users have been asking for that demonstrate Adobe’s ongoing commitment to keep similar functionality between the two Lightroom versions.

The updates include:

HDR merge
Pano merge
HDR Pano merge
Target Adjustment Tool, and
Histogram clipping indicators.

The Adobe Blog post for February Lightroom Releases has more details on all of these tools.

More! Search in Lightroom Classic

February 13, 2019 by Lightroom Guy Leave a Comment

Using Metadata Search in Lightroom Revisited

Whatever you need to search in Lightroom, the Lightroom Classic Metadata filter panel should be the first place you go. It really does keep on amazing me. Recently I discovered that I can search in Lightroom by photo orientation. We know that you can search in Lightroom for more than filenames and keywords, but when a client asked if she could search just for verticals, I wasn’t sure. So, I immediately went to the Metadata filter. And, Aspect Ratio was on the list!

Oddly enough (for me anyway), Adobe doesn’t seem to know what to call the Metadata filter panel. Adobe calls it the Library Filter Bar in the Lightroom Classic online manual. But really, we’re filtering by metadata.

But then what is the filter bar at the bottom of the Lightroom Classic preview window? Lightroom just calls them “filters.” I’ve always called them the ratings filter bar. Makes more sense to me. It filters photos by the various flags, colors, stars and a few other features related to ratings.

My personal rant aside, I love the Metadata filter panel for all it can do. In the Lr:Short video below, you will learn how to open the metadata panel, create a new metadata column and select a search value.

USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 – What You Need to Know

February 6, 2019 by David Mark Erickson Leave a Comment

You may have heard or already encountered the new USB plug, called USB-C. At the same time, you may be less familiar with the Thunderbolt 3 (T3), a plug that looks exactly the same. Here we will outline the differences between them.

What’s the Situation?

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a standard introduced 20 years ago intended to simplify and improve the connections between computers and accessories. USB-C is the new standard for USB, and more and more devices will feature it. All of Apple’s desktops feature USB-C and the new laptops only have USB-C type connecters. It is currently not as prevalent on PC desktops, but Windows laptops are featuring it more and more.

Three identical cable connectors.
Which one is the real Thunderbolt 3?
(Answer: the middle cable)

At the same time, these new devices may not be Thunderbolt 3 enabled. T3 and USB-C share the same physical connector, so it is easy to be confused. Just because the physical connection looks the same does not mean it will work in the same way; it depends on the device and the data controller at the point of connection. You may get a “device not supported” error message when you plug a T3 into a USB-C. Some manufacturers are good about identifying the connection type, and others not so much.

USB-C vs. Thunderbolt 3

The differences between them are important. Generally speaking, the T3 does everything the USB-C does and more. Specifically, the USB-C connection type can support a number of different features, including:

Alternate modes for sending and receiving data, including running video signal;
Up to 100 watts of power (that’s up from 2.5 watts on older USB connectors); and,
It has a symmetrical connection, so it doesn’t matter which way the plug is facing when you insert it.

Meanwhile, the Thunderbolt 3 uses offers these same features plus a few additional ones:

A faster connection, up to 40 Gbs;
Support for bi-directional data transfer (rather than alternate modes for sending and receiving data); and
This allows you to daisy-chain up to six devices.

What You Need to Know

From the perspective of the casual end-user, there are a few key things you need to know. Going forward, you should pay attention to the whether the devices you purchase have USB-C or T3 connectors and be aware of these features and differences. For your existing devices, the good news is that USB-C is backwards compatible, so, as long as you have an adapter for your device, the data connection will be seamless and you will connect error-message free. There is no harm to your computer or accessories if you plug a T3 into a USB-C, as the smart data controller will make sure nothing bad happens. Hopefully, the new USB-C style connector will help reduce the number of different cables you need to keep on hand.

Additional Information

For additional information, we recommend the following sites:

Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?

January 30, 2019 by Lightroom Guy Leave a Comment

In the November 29^th issue of the New York Times, John Herrman wrote an article, “It’s Almost 2019. Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?” Of course, this story struck a note with us! We’ve been advocating digital asset management, printing and bookmaking to our clients for years in an effort to keep the ever-growing flood of digital files from falling through the proverbial cracks and lost forever.

In Mr. Herrman’s story, he outlines the history of failed digital photo and file sharing sites from Yahoo to Flickr, SmugMug, PhotoBucket, Picasa and others. This illustrates the frustration of keeping track of our photos and, sometimes, the catastrophe of losing some of our most precious assets as cloud storage sites shutter their doors.

So, do you know where your photos are?

Most casual digital photographers don’t. Searching and/or locating photos lost, missing or simply hidden in a virtual haystack is, more often than not, a Sisyphean task. Most of us are not up to it.

Even if you use Apple Photos (formerly iPhoto), which does a pretty good job, it’s important to keep a copy of your photos somewhere other than on Apple’s servers.

Apple has a very sordid history in suddenly abandoning their customers and and shutting down various services they have hooked us on. Case in point: On September 30^th, 2018, after nearly 16 years of being able to print books, novelties, calendars and prints, Apple, closed down this service.

Some of our clients have dozens of incomplete projects they planned on printing someday. Now they have to completely start over. It’s not the first time Apple has done something like this, nor will it be the last.

Be prepared, events like this will continue.

Add in the fact that hard drives fail, technology changes and file formats come and go. Remember Zip drives? Exabyte? 9 How about floppy disks? All history. Finding a working device to read any of that data is challenging and it’s pretty likely the data is damaged from years of storage. Consider most of those photos lost.

Your best bet is to start assembling all your photos onto one hard drive and creating a local backup and a cloud backup of your computer and your photos. So, that’s one hard drive and an account with Backblaze, or similar service; a modified 3-2-1 strategy. And, when we talk cloud backups, we don’t mean services like Dropbox, which are a file synchronization* — not backup! We recommend Backblaze because it’s a backup site. Dedicated to nothing but security of your files using multiple strategies and many layers of security.

File Synchronization: keeping files up-to-date and stored across several different physical locations, e.g. having the same file accessible on several different computers and mobile devices.

So, here’s our simple checklist for getting all your digital photos into one place. (Get in touch with us if you need help or want more info.)

1. Purchase a dedicated, external hard drive with sufficient disk space for what may become a large library. You may have more photos than you realize! We recommend the following drives:

Western Digital 4T, a traditional hard drive USB 3.0
U32 Shadow Solid State Drive (SSD) USB C (also referred to as USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3)

Check your computer’s specs to see which drive is right for you.

2. The big Kahuna:

Find your photos locally on your computer
Export your originals from Apple photos or whatever program you have them stored in
Export your photos from your iOS or Android devices (iPhone, Samsung, iPad, etc.)
Download your photos from all existing cloud storage (Dropbox, etc.). Look everywhere, in all possible (and impossible) locations on your computer and online.
Organize the original files into labeled folders identifying as much as possible in the folder name. Add dates (YYYY-MM-DD), locations when you can and avoid downloading duplicates whenever possible. But we understand that’s not always easy or time efficient. Do the best you can! Some things will sort out later.

3. Once you’ve started, setup Time Machine or Windows backup, making sure to include your new hard drive in the backups.

In Time Machine, open the System Preferences panel and remove the new hard drive from the “exclusion list.” This will include your new hard drive in all future Time Machine backups, when the drive is connected.

4. Now, this is optional, but we highly recommend installing Backblaze. We don’t recommend anything we haven’t tried or use ourselves and this is the case as well. You’ll have a local backup on your hard drive and a secure cloud backup of everything in case something happens here on earth.

As our libraries of photos grow, so do our responsibilities to our children, families and future generations. The casual sport of keeping track of digital captures, phone photos, photo file sharing sites and whatever else the virtual future holds, dooms us if we expect them to be there in 5, 10, 20 or more years. It’s more likely that prints and books will survive us. But it’s our digital files where the content from those books will come from. You could put those in an old shoebox.

So, do you know where your photos are?

Need help? Contact us!

Keyboard Shortcuts for Lightroom 2019

January 24, 2019 by David Mark Erickson Leave a Comment

Curating a Large Volumes of Photos

This week a regular client came back from Antarctica with over 3,000 photos! It was an amazing trip. They were excited to share the experience with friends and family and the plan was to curate things down to the best photos then design and create a printed book. However, my client was overwhelmed at the thought reviewing so many photos. Fortunately, Lightroom comes equipped with a whole host of keyboard shortcuts that can really make things a lot easier when dealing with large volumes of photos.

Without a doubt, Adobe Lightroom (Classic and CC) is one of the most sophisticated applications on the market today. The depth and complexity of Lightroom make keeping track of all the features no easy task. To that end, Adobe has built in keyboard shortcuts to make it easier to navigate, choose tools and manipulate photos and metadata much easier.

What Are Keyboard Shortcuts?

A “keyboard shortcut” means either simply pressing a key, or combination of keys, to invoke a feature or tool. And Lightroom has over 300 keyboard shortcuts!. To be clear, a few of those shortcuts are meant to work in only one module; they may do something else in a different module, giving a result we don’t expect.

Given the total number of shortcuts, unless you have a photographic memory (haha), it would be a near impossible task to memorize them all! So, we’ve made an easy to use PDF cheat sheet of the most useful shortcuts you can download to help. See below for a fully updated version, which is based on our previous post on the same topic.

Lightroom Guy Cheat Sheets

We’ve curated our cheat sheet to reflect only the most useful shortcuts, based on our years of experience using and teaching Lightroom. For a comprehensive list, Adobe maintains a searchable list here: Keyboard Shortcuts for Lightroom Classic CC. You can also find a comprehensive list in the last chapter of the official Reference Manual for Lightroom Classic CC. Check our previous blog post on that topic to download full, searchable PDF of the manual.

So why use keyboard shortcuts? Quite simply, they save monumental amounts of time and effort in your selection and developing processes. While it might be a bit daunting to learn which keys do what, the more you use them the more you will remember which keys do what.

PDF Download

We’ve made cheat sheets for both versions of Lightroom.
Click on the links below to download a PDF now!

**Lightroom Classic Keyboard Shortcuts [PDF]**

**Lightroom CC (Cloud) Keyboard Shortcuts [PDF]**

Lightroom Classic Spot Removal Tool is Slow

January 15, 2019 by Lightroom Guy Leave a Comment

Recently, we’ve had a number of Lightroom Classic 8 clients on older Macs complain that the Spot Removal tool is slow. Even on a 2015 iMac with decent specs, running on an i7 processor with 16GB RAM and Fusion drive, the Spot Removal tool is slow.

Previous Solutions

But before I get started with the solution, I want to point our readers to the Adobe site for general optimization of your hardware and operating system for Adobe Lightroom.

This URL has a list of ways you can do to generally get Lightroom running faster. Today’s blog post is for those of you who are seeing that the Spot Removal tool is slow. Lots of spinning rainbows and wasted time. Our solution may also help Lightroom speed up the other local adjustments as well, to perform better and faster.

The Spot Removal Tool is Slow

So, this is a new video tutorial update for speeding up Lightroom. We blogged about speeding up Lightroom 5 a number of years ago and recently in Lightroom 8, using third party software, Photo Mechanic. But now, we’re talking more specifically about speeding up what can be the dead slow, wait for the spinning rainbow, time killing spot removal tool. Especially if you’re spotting scans (prints and slides), which can be the worst culprits.

Lightroom Classic CC User Manual PDF Download

January 9, 2019 by David Mark Erickson Leave a Comment

A PDF version of the current Lightroom Classic CC User Manual can be a little tricky to find. The product no longer comes in a box with a user guide. So, we are posting a direct link to the Lightroom Classic CC User PDF Manual for our readers here. It’s a definitive source of information, plus it’s a searchable PDF, and written in simple and straightforward language.

A lot has changed since Adobe released Lightroom version 1 back in 2007. In 2017, Adobe decided to break Lightroom into two different versions: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC and the cloud-based Adobe Lightroom CC. This created (and still creates) a bit of confusion. For more on the differences between the two versions, read our previous blog post Lightroom CC vs Lightroom Classic: Should You Switch?

We each have 11 years of professional experience using, teaching and troubleshooting Lightroom. One of the single most important pieces of reference material that we regularly rely on for ourselves and our clients is Adobe’s help manual. It’s been four years since a Lightroom (now Lightroom Classic CC) User Manual was published by Adobe in PDF form, and yet it remains the best resource for Lightroom.

We know that Lightroom Classic CC is one of the more sophisticated pieces of camera raw processing software and from time to time we all need a little help. And while there are dozens of published how-to books and thousands of hours of instructional videos available online, navigating this morass can be time-consuming and bewildering. You’ll find that the Lightroom Classic CC User Manual’s table of Contents will take you right to where you need to search.

Download the entire 10/15/2018 update of the Lightroom Classic CC User PDF Manual. This is usually updated regularly, but is not directly related to new releases. When there is a new release, info on improvements, bug fixes and new features can be found on the Adobe site, online here.

Below is a summary of the Lightroom Classic CC User Manual chapters.

Lightroom Classic CC User Manual Chapters

Chapter 1: Introduction to Lightroom Classic CC
Chapter 2: Lightroom CC for Mobile, TV and the Web
Chapter 3: Import Photos
Chapter 4: Workspace
Chapter 5: Viewing Photos
Chapter 6: Manage catalogs and files
Chapter 7: Maps
Chapter 8: Organize photos in Lightroom Classic CC
Chapter 9: Process and develop photos
Chapter 10: Export Photos
Chapter 11: Work with external editors
Chapter 12: Slideshows
Chapter 13: Print photos
Chapter 14: Photo books
Chapter 15: Web galleries
Chapter 16: Keyboard shortcuts