Wasted Continuum

Adobe has always been good about releasing betas for Lightroom. Today they released Lightroom 5 beta. The three new features that they are highlighting are an advanced healing brush, a radial filter, and a perspective transforming tool the call Upright. From the video demos, the all three new tools seem great and I would definitely make use of them.

I have been using Lightroom 4 since the first day they released it in beta. One of the features I was excited about was the new Map module. I am fairly meticulous about organizing and tagging all my photos. This is a major reason why I love Lightroom. It excels at that. The thing that I have had to do manually (since both my Canon 5D2 and Canon S95 don’t have GPS logging) is geotag my photos when I upload them to Flickr. It is tedious and at times very difficult when I can’t remember the exact spot I was at when I shot the photo.

Since Lightroom 4 has made it easier to geotag your photos, I decided to give it a try. In order to make this work, I had to find a way to track and import my GPS data for my photos. I should note that Lightroom only supports GPX files. After trying a bunch of GPS tracking apps on my phone and testing a bunch of desktop that exported to GPX when it was necessary, I was disappointed that most of the software out there did not work well with Lightroom. The last app I tried was My Tracks by Google. I forgot that they made one. I wish I tried it first because it works perfectly with Lightroom.

I tested it out yesterday when I was shooting along the Mississippi River. There is only one thing to remember before you start using My Tracks. You should make sure your phone has an accurate reading from your GPS signal. Acquiring your location takes time if it’s a cold start. I turned on my GPS a few minutes before I got to my destination to give my phone plenty of time to lock onto my location. After My Tracks has a good read on you, just start recording and then begin taking photos. One last thing to be aware of, you should check to see if your camera’s time is set correctly. Lightroom syncs your photos to the GPS data with that time. You can correct this by setting a time offset after you imported everything, but you’ll save yourself a possible headache if you just check the time beforehand. After everything your GPS data and your photos are in Lightroom, it can sync them up with a few clicks. It saves the location data into your photos as metadata so when you upload them to Flickr, Flickr will recognize and map them for you. You can check out the photos that I tested it with on my Flickr.

If you have any questions about this whole process, leave a comment below or you can ask me at @JavaJunky.

Adobe just released their Lightroom 3.6 update and as not surprising, also released Camera Raw 6.6 update. You can get them on their software update page. It doesn’t seem to be a major update, just some support for new cameras like the Canon Powershot S100, which looks pretty sweet. I have the Canon S95 and I love it. By the way, if you’re looking for a really good deal on a high end compact, the S95 is one to look at. Its price dropped a lot since the S100 came out.

Adobe just released their 3.5 update to Lightroom 3. It adds support for 20 new cameras including the Nikon Coolpix P7100, Olympus E-PL3 and Sony SLT-A77. This does not seem to be a major update. You can download it here. As usual, Adobe Camera Raw got an update too and is now at 6.5.

Last week, I decided to process some photos that I took a few months back at Como Zoo. They were taken with my Canon 5D using a 24-105mm. When I first looked through the photos, I was disappointed that a lot of them were flat, lacking contrast. I was not surprised by this being that a lot of the shots were taken indoors with low florescent lighting. Instead of not publishing these shots or even just publishing boring photos, I decided to take this opportunity to push Lightroom a little further than I usually do.

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I finally received my T-Mobile G1 on Wednesday. I have been waiting to get a good smartphone for the longest time. I had my Motorola Razr for roughly four years. It finally broke down on me in January and I have been using an old Samsung slider to hold me over until now. I have used it for two full days now, but I haven’t fallen into a normal day with it yet. I still find myself playing with it on and off all day long which affects the battery life a lot. I will talk about that a little later.

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