January 2006 Archives

It's satisfying to see that the Adobe Lightroom public beta is being well received by the user community. I'm especially happy for my friends and former teammates in the Arden Hills, MN, and San Jose, CA, offices and have been putting in a lot of hard work to get this product ready for public beta. Hats of to you!

Here are some links on Adobe Lightroom I found useful:

Training and Tutorials

• Lightroom Video Tutorial - by George Jardine
• Photoshop TV Episode 12 - by the NAPP Guys
• Adobe Lightroom Beta Learning Center - Photoshop User/NAPP

News and Reviews:

• Lightroom Intro and FAQ - from John Nack
• Lightroom "First Look" - from MacWorld by Derrick Story
• Announcing Lightroom - from Photoshop News by Jeff Schewe
• The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story - from Photoshop News by Jeff Schewe
• Lightroom Preview - from The Luminous Landscape by Michael Reichmann
• Adobe Lightroom A First-Look & Primer - by Ian Lyons
• Adobe Announces Lightroom & Adobe Lightroom beta: First Impressions - from ARS Technica

Some members of the Minnesota Lightroom development team will be on hand at the next Twin Cities Photoshop User Group meeting to give users a glimpse at the application.

Over my Holiday vacation, I received a somewhat frantic call from a friend who works at a prominent arts center. They had 1100 images for a book that was to go to press in the next few days that they had decided were of unacceptable color. The unacceptable color was introduced by an "aftermarket raw-to-tif converter" used by a contract worker, and they now wanted to redevelop all the files in Adobe Camera Raw.

The problem was, the resulting TIF files had been renamed and dropped into the layout already. They needed to match the renamed, off-color TIFs to the corresponding raw versions to rename and reprocess them.

To do this by hand, they figured they'd need no less than 20 hours of labor. Being familiar with scripting Photoshop through a free "Intro to Photoshop Scripting" class I had presented, he thought this would be a perfect opportunity to leverage scripting and called me.

We determined that the way we could match the images was by the Date Time Original EXIF metadata. Trouble is, the date format in developed versions of the TIFs was different as it had been modified by the "aftermarket raw-to-tif converter."

I sat down and pseudo-coded a script.

1) We needed to format the times so they were in the same format
2) We needed to build an array of the Date Time Original and the file names of the bad files through a for loop
3) We needed to process and rename the raw files using another for loop

The arrays were a little tricky for me, so enlisted the help of another one of my buddies. He also pointed me in the right direction for using "Regular Expressions" to touch up the Date Time Originals to match.

After spending the evening working up the script with my buddy, I headed over to the museum in the morning to try it out. The script ran perfectly in 52 minutes flat on a dual 2.7 G5.

It was another "Good Day."