Big thanks to Scott Bourne for providing the platform for my 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell Every New Lightroom  User blog post and big thanks to Scott Kelby for making it twice as good with his own 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users list! I love it!

Well, not wanting this to just be a blog post about a blog post about a blog post here’s a few 5 new tips for you:

1. To quickly find where all your presets and templates are stored go to Lightroom > Preferences > Presets (Win: Edit > Preferences > Presets) and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder button. They are all in there. Windows users will even find the Lightroom preference file in there.
2. If your presets should all vanish one day, check to make sure the Store Presets with Catalog box is unchecked.
3. If your photos appear to be getting overly brightened on import and you don’t know why, check to make sure Apply auto tone adjustments is not checked. The auto tone function is much improved in Lightroom 2, but I don’t think applying it to all imported photos is a good idea. Just use Auto Tone button in the Basic panel or the General – Auto Tone preset on a case-by-case basis.
4. While you have the Preferences dialog open click the File Handling tab and set your Camera Raw cache to 20GB and see if that gives you a speed boost in the Develop module (especially with the Adjustment Brush).
5. Now click on the Import tab and check the box next to Treat JPEG files next to raw files as separate photos so you will see both the raw and JPEG side by side in Lightroom after import.

Hope you find that helpful!

Late edit: I just saw that Matt Kloskowski did a blog post where he added 3 more Lightroom tips, so there’s at least 28 tips all bundled up for the taking.

This is a Beta version, which means it is not the finished product. Beta software is usually stable, but not necessarily bug free. Before you import, please start out by creating a copy of a few folders of photos (already safely backed up) and treat these copies as expendable test files. I don’t expect anything bad to happen to them, but with Beta software there is no reason to take any chances. Think of the Beta release as a way to get a taste for what Adobe has in mind for Lightroom 3, give it a test drive and see what you think. They really want your feedback to incorporate into the final release.

What I’m Most Excited About So Far

1. Improved rendering. The engineer-elves have added some new magic into LR3 to improve the rendering of our raw photos in regards to noise reduction and capture sharpening. Not finished yet (no Luminance noise reduction right now), but any effort to develop better looking photos gets my vote.
2. Improved watermarking. OK this may seem like a small thing, but it has been on my list for a very long time. I’m working on a LR3 Beta Watermarking tutorial that should be posted this week. Stay tuned! I’m not quite ready to give up LRMogrify yet though!
3. Custom Print Packages! Gone will be the days when I have to explain to people why they can’t print 3 different 4×6 photos on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Woot!

There is a lot more to love and a lot more to learn! I’ve got several LR3 Beta tutorials in the pipeline so stay tuned, but let me leave you with some valuable resources:

1. Go to Lightroom Journal and read all about the Lightroom 3 Beta.
2. Head over to Scott Kelby’s Blog and see what his top 10 list is all about.
3. Visit the NAPP Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center to dive into some tutorials.
4. Check in with Lightroom plugin developer Jeffrey Friedl about using plugins with LR3 Beta.

OK, you are probably really itching to download the Beta … but please please please take a few minutes to read the Release Notes before you do. No, seriously, just give them a go over for known issues. I’m only trying to help!

OK, this Beta is free to everyone for the length of the Beta program so head over to Adobe Labs and take it for a spin. Check back here for more tutorials and resources in the coming days!

By default Lightroom always chooses the most current version of Photoshop you have installed as the primary external editor, but you can configure other applications to be used in the Additional External Editor section.

The File Format, Color Space and Bit Depth options are the same as the previous version of Lightroom, and choosing the default settings is recommended. The external editor video tutorial Matt Kloskowski created for Lightroom 1 is still valid in that regard if you want to learn more.

Read  Configuring External Editors over at peachpit.com.

After seeing so many people run into the same problems over and over again I came up with my top 10 things I wish I could tell every new Lightroom user. If it helps just one person avoid a moment of hair-pulling frustration it will have been worth it!

There’s certainly more I could have added, more problems (press H if the Adjustment Brush goes missing), more resources (like lightroom-blog’s web galleries – for you Sean!) and plenty more tutorials, so please don’t hesitate to tell me your favorites and any I missed!

Many thanks to Scott Bourne for the opportunity!

The only way Windows users could successfully export multiple photos directly to an email attachment from Lightroom was using a (free) third-party app called MAPI Mailer created by Steve Sutherland. Well, I just learned (thanks to Lightroom-News.com) that Steve has upgraded MAPI to a full fledged Export Plugin, which removes the previous limitation on how many photos could be attached at a time.

Steve has even created a set of instructions on how to upgrade your old MAPI Mailer export presets (if you have them) to work with the new plugin. Thanks Steve!

Here are the details:

10/26/2009

Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

10 am – 5pm

Read the full scoop here. Hope to see you there!

I finally had the chance to sit down with the latest issue of my favorite magazine Photoshop User. In this issue my Under the Loupe column covers how to control what metadata is included in your exported copies using Jeffrey’s Metadata Wrangler export plugin. This is the plugin you want to have in your toolkit if you want to have any level of control over what is or isn’t in your exported files.

Also in this issue … Matt Kloskowski covers how to set new raw defaults, Victoria Bampton has some great Lightroom tips, RC answers Lightroom questions and Sean McCormack has a kick butt feature article on sharpening. Oh, and there is all that Photoshop content in the beginning part of the magazine (kind of like the opening band for the headliner).

You can still jump to the Crop Tool from anywhere in Lightroom by selecting a photo and pressing R.

Once you are in the Crop Tool you can choose between different crop overlays to help you find the strongest composition by pressing O to cycle through them, or look under the View > Crop Guide Overlay menu.

Read Advanced Cropping over at peachpit.com.

The Vignette panel in Lightroom 2 contains two sets of Vignette controls:

Lens Correction: This section works just like the controls in Lightroom 1, which are intended to correct an actual vignette problem. The effect is only applied to the outer edge of the original photo, but not the cropped version.

Post-Crop: This is a new set of controls that are strictly for creative purposes and will automatically be reapplied after any subsequent cropping is performed.

In this tutorial I’d like to specifically focus on the new set of sliders in the Post-Crop section.

Read  Working with the Vignette Panel over at peachpit.com.