Technique Tuesday - Finding Lightroom's Best Kept Secret And More - The Hard Way

Good Morning Everybody,
Well, let's try this again today. Whew, what a day yesterday. I was ready to go with recording the tutorial yesterday, did a quick run through and found out for some weird reason that my image would not export into Photoshop from Lightroom 2 Beta. 90 minutes of "fussing" in the morning never resolved the problem. Time ran out on any further computer tweaking as I was running late for my shoot - hence yesterday's post.

I headed out for my shoot, called Lightroom guru, Matt Kloskowski, on the way, and was pretty bummed when he said he had never seen my particular problem before. I finally got back to debugging the issue about 8:00 p.m. last night and finally had it solved by 10:00 p.m. Whew!! What a day.

Here was the deal. In my work flow, I download my cards, get all the images in one folder, rename them, pop them into a folder with a certain prefix on the folder which alerts me that the files have not yet been backed up. I'm always anxious to see what I got, so I import them into Lightroom 2 Beta, my version choice these days.

Let me add here that I create a NEW Lightroom catalogue for each shoot. Why - because Lightroom starts bogging down with about 30, 000 images in it. For me that would be in about 8 weeks of shooting. It just makes more sense to me to create a new catalogue for each jog to avoid any future performance hassles. Anyway, no big deal, right?? Everything works just fine - I can go into Photoshop all day long from Lightroom 2 Beta. Until yesterday - no problem at all.

Well, after the folder is backed up, I drop the prefix from the folder name and mark it as backed up with a suffix in the folder file name (-bu). That's where the problems begin. In Lightroom 1.41 I'm easily able to rename the folder, search for my Lightroom catalogue in it's new location, and life is good. Read my lips, this is NOT the case for Lightroom 2 Beta! Sure Lightroom 2 Beta will open the job catalogue at the new location and all seems to work just fine. That is except everything EXCEPT the import over to Photoshop!

Re-syncing the folder doesn't help either. I discovered that if I renamed the job folder back to it's original name under which the images were originally imported, all worked fine. I just didn't want and interim folder file name in my work flow. Bottom line is this, I had to delete the old LR Cat file and re-import the images - what a hassle. I sure this will all be rectified when the new version comes out, but in the mean time, running the Beta turned into a time waisting sinkhole. The price we pay to be on the "bleeding edge" of technology ;~)


So gang, that's the rest of yesterday's story, so how about, "On with the show!"

I have to tell you that I'm becoming a really big fan of Lightroom, and more to the point - Lightroom 2 Beta (except for yesterday's giant hiccup.) There are a couple of features in the new version that simply make it one of the most remarkable pieces of software on the planet earth. Watch the video below and see if you don't agree with me. Lightroom 2 - How Great Thou Art!