Welcome to PhotoTech

What is PhotoTech, I hear you ask?  If you are receiving this by email, you are probably familiar with the “Photography Newsletter” that I send out on an ad-hoc basis.   That newsletter contains details of events I’m running, news and information relevant to photographers.  It also contains the the very popular hints and tips section.  The big problem with it, however, is that newsletter does take a while to put together and there are times when there is news and information I would like to share quickly.  PhotoTech is designed to enable me to do just that.

I’ve created a blog at http://blog.imb.biz – the blog gives me the ability to quickly write posts and to email them out to subscribers.  When a post is about techniques and technology relevant to photographers I will send them out to PhotoTech subscribers.   I won’t be sending posts to you every day so I’m not going to flood your mail box.   To start things going I’ve added all my newsletter subscribers to the mailing list for PhotoTech.  If you don’t want to receive it, please use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of the PhotoTech emails.  However, I hope you’ll try it out for a little while and see if these mailings are useful to you.

Lightroom v3.2 Released

Lightroom 3 Splash Screen

The big news today is that Adobe have released the latest version of Lightroom, version 3.2.  This version is a free upgrade for anyone who has purchased Lightroom v3.

You can download the upgrade from here: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

So what’s new with this version?  Well there’s a whole host of new lens profiles for lens corrections.  Of course there is new camera support, which is a kind of given with every Lightroom release.  The biggie is disguised under the following statement on the Adobe website: “Numerous corrections for issues introduced in Lightroom 3.0“.  The main one is performance related.  In v3.0 the adjustment brushes were slow… very slow.  There has been some significant improvement here.  Also “lost” in v3.0 were sticky filters – these are now back.  To learn more about sticky filters please take a look at this recent blog post:  http://blog.imb.biz/2010/08/11/l-sticky-filters/

Is v3.2 all good news?  Well, from my brief testing of it, there are still some memory problems of v3.0 in the develop module.  How bad they are depends on the system you are running.  In my case I’m still seeing “Unknown error occurred” messages, due to memory not being released at the right time, however, unlike the release candidate for v3.2 these errors aren’t terminal.

Overall – if you have bought Lightroom 3, you should download this upgrade.  It does fix many problems and unlike the release candidate it doesn’t appear to have any detrimental effects – ie nothing is worse than it was in v3.0 and lots of things are better.

Also released today and available via the same link – is the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw v6.2 for Photoshop CS5

Lightroom Training

For those who aren’t aware, I’m running a Lightroom training day at Calumet in Manchester on the 11th September.  You can find more details of the event and what is covered here: http://www.imb.biz/page.php?pg=lightroom.  The day will be an intensive and extensive look at Lightroom.  The cost of the day is £65 and this includes training materials and lunch.

I need to finalise numbers by the end of this week so if you are interested in coming please let me know by Friday.

Recent Lightroom Blog Entries

I’d like to draw your attention to some recent Lightroom related blog entries.  These are the sorts of things that I would have sent out to PhotoTech subscribers…. if I had had PhotoTech set up at that time.

http://blog.imb.biz/2010/08/10/lr32rc-thoughts/ – News about Lightroom v3.2 when it became available as a release candidate.

http://blog.imb.biz/2010/08/11/l-sticky-filters/ – Sticky filters are back – this post looks at what they are and how to use them in your workflow.

http://blog.imb.biz/2010/08/22/lightroom-keyword-hierarchies/ – A feature on how to organise keywords in Lightroom to easily identify who is in an image.