Black Diamond Productions

Some good changes in the past couple versions. Download via the Lightroom 2 Plug-Ins Console – It should prompt you.

Change Log

Version 4.11, 1st October 2009

• PNG watermarks weren’t always working on Mac.

Version 4.00, 30th September 2009

• There’s a new "Canvas" section for placing the (resized) image onto a fixed size canvas. Useful when images have to have a fixed size but you don’t with to crop them.
• Multiple different watermarks may now be added to an image.
• PNG watermarks may now be scaled proportionally.
• Watermarks can now be specified as a percentage of the width or height of the image while preserving the aspect ratio.
• Horizontal/Vertical insets now work in each of the nine watermark positions.
• The limit of 3 text annotations has been removed.
• Fixed a recent bug that stopped TIFF’s being exported in 8-bit mode.
• Fixed a recent bug that stopped borders having no width or height.

Version 2.20, 14th July 2009

• Border widths can now be a percentage of the longest/shortest side.
• Problems related to the saving of presets containing multiple borders have now been solved (I hope!).

Author’s Site: http://timothyarmes.com/lr2mogrify.php

Update is available from your Lightroom Plugins page

The Fractalius plugin creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lightings and high realistic pencil sketches.

This is definitely one of the more fun plugins for photoshop – and I even paid for it because the results can be so cool and fun to play with… Sometimes a plugin should just really mess with pixels and this one does just that.

No details of what has changed yet – but there seems to have been a few fixes lately:

Version 2.12, July 2009

• No Changes listed yet

Version 2.11, 4th July 2009

• The export was being disabled unnecessarily when the watermark height field was empty, even though watermark resizing option was not turned on.

Version 2.00, 2th July 2009

• New JPEG compression option will compress JPEGs to the highest quality that’ll be smaller than the requested file size.
• Text annotations can now include accented characters and other such things.
• Unnecessary punctuation resulting from empty tokens in a text annotation is now removed.
• Text can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so that it’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Watermarks can now be scaled as a percentage of the shortest or longest side of the image so they’ll be the same size on both landscape or portrait images.
• Estoteric errors that resulted from leaving width and height fields blank are now trapped.

For those that use lightroom here are the details of this great export plugin – actually something worth donating money to the author for:

LR2/Mogrify is a Lightroom 2 post-process plug-in that can embellish your images as they are exported from Lightroom. It’s flexible interface allows you to add borders, watermarks and text annotations to your images.

It’s also capable of exporting optimum JPEG images that are no larger than your requested size; great for uploading to web sites that limit the file size.

LR2/Mogrify uses ImageMagick to process the images. ImageMagick is a collection of powerful, freeware command line utilities for processing images.

In contrast to the original LR/Mogrify for Lightroom 1.3 and above, LR2/Mogrify is implemented as a "post-process" plug-in (new to Lightroom 2.0), allowing it to work in tandem with any export plug-in. This allows you to process your images using LR2/Mogrify and still have them sent to your final destination using the export plug-in of your choice.

LR/Mogrify and LR2/Mogrify are donationware plug-ins and are distributed via the Photograper’s Toolbox. The trial version limits the number of images that can be exported in one go to ten. Donating towards one of the projects removes this restriction and will give you a serial number that works with both.

You may also be interested in my LR/Enfuse plug-in to blend multiple exposures together.

I have not been a major user of Presets for Lightroom and i have to say that was a point of contention with me and Lightroom. I have a pretty decent amount of experience with Photoshop and both actions and plug-in applications yet I never investigated the world of presets for lightroom.

That all said I was given an opportunity to test the latest set of soon to be released presets from www.CameraDojo.com – The latest set is for B&W work and really produces some great results. Here are a couple examples:

Now you say – Wait a minute that’s a color photo – Well here is where presets become very interesting… Much like those plug-in’s and actions in Photoshop, presets can be combined or stacked to deliver literally 1000’s of combinations and the beauty of Lightroom is the History palette actually lets you understand what you have done and allows for immediate undo’s if you mess up your masterpiece.

I have also (because of the kindness of Kerry Garrison of CameraDojo.com) been provided their other set of presets to test out. You should see more shots and testing and impressions posted about those in the next few weeks.

Highly recommended for those that want to more easily experiment in B&W work in Adobe Lightroom.

Please feel free to post up or email me with any questions.

“I don’t use Photoshop and am debating whether I need to take the time to learn. I would much rather learn to take great photos from the start.”

My opinion on this would be there is no question if you need to learn it – the question is should you learn it or pay someone who is already great at it… To properly learn PS will take a huge outlay of time and effort – I know many that have pushed aside that learning to better their business and photo skills to hire a pro Photoshop user to get done what is needed.

I think in the future you will see a significant change in who uses Photoshop vs.. Lightroom style applications.

I think you will see the photographer use Lightroom – and their "editor" using Photoshop. Or whatever workflow application you use for small adjustments etc – vs.. pixel editing of images.

If you are going to try to learn Photoshop – take my advice and before you do anything sign up with an online learning source like lynda.com and check out some of the courses first – then you can look at the initial expenditure – and the time of learning etc – and compare your bottom line…

You can get allot of Photoshop work done these days for the amount you will outlay in PS software, and most importantly your time… many never take into consideration their personal time and more should as that is time that should be spent working on the thing you really want to be best at.. not all the support role items.

That all said you should always strive for the best out of camera image you can first – do not shoot to edit… rather shoot to edit less…