Lr as all in one processor

I took the following series of photos of Fawn Lillies with my D2X, 85/4 and closeup extension tubes this afternoon. Thanks to Andreas for selling me the 85/4 - a gorgeous lens ideal for this type of photography.

Returning home, I completed the processing, including the web preparation, entirely in Lightroom - mainly to see if I encountered any problems. Here are the steps I took.

1. I ingested into the Lr library, renaming my files to a YYYY-MM-DD_####.NEF format and applying a develop preset that sets sharpening, noise reduction and CA for ISO 200, which is what I used for most of the shots. I also added keywords, copyright, IPTC data (including a default title) at ingest. At the same time, I copied the NEF files to a second, backup drive.
2. I made a global WB adjustment based on a shot of a WhiBal card in the field. I also made a global adjustment to remove one dust spot from all the files using the clone/heal tool.
3. I reviewed the images, pressing X, U or P with the caps on (auto proceed to next photo), to select the picks and rejects. I deleted the rejects (X) and then ranked the remaining as either 2 or 3. I filtered on the 3 and higher.
4. I adjusted exposure and the tone curve for a few of the shots. Most shots I just left the way they defaulted in Lr.
5. I cropped some of the shots.
6. I made a final selection of 6 shots for export by pressing 6 to set a red color label for each selected photo. I then filtered on red and selected all the reds.
7. I exported to jpg, using a Lr post processing directive to run Ditto. I have created a photoshop droplet that runs my Ditto photoshop script. I placed the Ditto droplet in the Lr Export Presets folder, which resides in the docs and settings application data > adobe > lightroom area.
8. The Ditto script created two subfolders (desktop and pbase) where the jpgs were processed for desktop size (max dimensions 1500 high and 2500 wide) and for pbase at a maximum dimension of 800 pixels.
9. I zipped the resultant Ditto formatted web jpgs and uploaded to my web site.

So, what did I sacrifice by staying in Lr the entire time? I would have liked to run a mild noise reduction on a couple of the photos - that is about it. It certainly is a pretty painless workflow. When Lr gets improved sharpening and noise reduction and localized editing this will really rock.

If you are unfamiliar with Ditto, you can find out more at http://members.shaw.ca/hillrg/ditto/. Please note that Ditto is not ready for CS3 yet. I will be putting documentation on my site in the near future on how to use Ditto with Lr.

So, here are the results:



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I think it is great that Aperture and Lr are going head to head on this. Competition is a wonderful thing for us consumers :smile:

 

The part of Ditto that does the actual work is a photoshop script. The Bridge component of the script lets you create a selection of images and batches it to photoshop. The Bridge part of the script also looks after the template management, so that part is missing from the Lr implementation at this time. The Lr implementation runs whatever templates were last selected for execution in Ditto (from Bridge).

So, I modified the photoshop script slightly, and created a droplet to run this script.

Clear as mud - right :biggrin:

 

Sorry, it isn't ready yet, and there too many instructions on how to make it work. I'm off on vacation in another week. When I get back I will take a look, but I will likely wait until the Lr SDK is released and see what can be done that way.

My priority is going to be getting the script to work when both CS2 and CS3 are installed. Adobe sure has a lot of bugs in their BridgeTalk process.

Nothing stopping you from taking a peek at the code and doing it yourself :biggrin: