Dove released during 2008 Memorial Day ceremonies in Westlake Village.

No, I am not moving, just taking better advantage of my flickr pro account. Over the weekend I moved all my galleries over to flickr.

With flash not supported on the Apple iPhone and iPad, I needed to have the option of both flash and non-flash galleries. For now, the quickest workflow is to post images directly from Lightroom to a new flickr set. Then post a link to the flickr set and then add a second link to the corresponding slideshow. The slideshow feature automatically turns the flickr set into a flash slideshow gallery.

I was able to post a good list of links in one session. Gallery page.

Last week I downloaded a copy of Topaz Detail, a new photoshop plugin for High Dynamic Range (HDR) type post processing of images, but without the halos. So far the results look impressive. Here are a couple before and after versions from photos shot in March, 2009, in downtown Los Angeles.



Theater photo before Topaz Detail, above, and afterwards below.



For this Victor Clothing mural photo, I first did a set white and black in Lightroom, exported a copy to photoshop and applied Topaz Detail color jump preset. Before leaving Topaz Detail, I increased the detail settings for small, medium and large. After leaving Topaz Detail, I used the sponge tool to desaturate the parking lot and sky. Then used a quick curve to increase mid-tone contrast. The original image is above, final one below.


Topaz detail looks like a winner for my use. The main drawback is the filter does its major processing work on an image before opening the Detail menu. It took a couple minutes on my intel chip mac-mini to open 36 meg files. This is unlike Topaz Simplify which does its major processing work after the menu. So to save time, experiment with smaller files.

Robert Lachman, at Photography and the Mac, has posted a review of Topaz Detail. The program sells for $39.99. There is a 50% discount if purchased before end of August. Information on the discount is in Lachman's review.

Here is the link to Topaz Detail page.

A year ago I signed up for Flickr but was informed that "harrysonpics" was taken. I chose "harrysonpics32," signed up and posted some images. But frankly, I was way too busy to keep up a good Flickr presence - lost interest.

But recently I was given a pleasant surprise. While checking out postings at Dan Margulis yahoo group colortheory@yahoo.com, I opened a page to Flickr. Instead of asking for my signon, the Flickr page said welcome harrysonpics!

Huh? What??

Turns out I had harrysonpics on Flickr. Yahoo owns Flickr and I had been harrysonpics on the yahoo message group for years.

So a couple weeks ago, I grabbed two Lightroom plug-ins from the Adobe Lightroom Exchange and started a quick workflow to upload images to Flickr.


This photo of nearly completed Los Angeles Police Administration Building I just uploaded to my Flickr photostream. Using LR/Mogrify I added an inner 2 pixel gray inner border and 15 pixel outer border. The watermark is the default Lightroom one.

The first decision was size of image. Just as with any wide open photo site open to search engines, online Image quality and presentation needs to be balanced with the reality of unauthorized use of images.

The best advice is to add copyright watermarks and keep image size to about 5 by 7 inches at 72 dpi. This limits the possible reuse of the image, but gives to good size image for web viewing. I settled on 500 pixels for my large width.

At the Adobe Lightroom Exchange I downloaded the plugins: Export-to-Flickr and LR/Mogrify.

The Export-to-Flickr Plugin allows me to directly export from Lightroom to my FlickR photostream. It includes additional features like direct upload to any photoset and making copies to local hard drive.

LR/Mogrify adds additional features to your export. My interest was in its ability to add borders and custom watermarks.

Export-to-Flickr has worked flawlessly. So has the border feature of LR/Mogrify, but I ran into error messages when trying to add the custom watermark I made in a previous post. I could add the watermark, but all attempts to resize the watermark would crash my export.

The watermark crash looks like a bug that needs a fix. I tried different file formats and other tricks, my nothing worked. Online, I found other users have had the same problem. So for now, my work around is to use the default Lightroom watermark.

Both plugins are donationware. LR/Mogrify has a limit of ten images per upload till a paypal donation is made.

Links: Export-to-Flickr LR/Mogrify

Hey check out my Flickr images - Harrysonpics!

Thanks

Last week on the This Week in Photography web site I checked out a video by Scott Bourne and Nicole Young on making and adding a copyright notice to your images in photoshop. Link to Video, Link to TWIPPhoto.com.

White following the instructions, I was able to make this basic watermark symbol and add it two photos from last weekend in San Diego.

The key is making a vector graphic that is very flexible. In photoshop, I simply drag the watermark layers onto an image and then can resize, change blend modes and change opacity. For example, if the color of my watermark conflicts with the image, I can change the blend-mode to Luminosity which will allow the colors of the original image to be used.


After resizing the watermark, I changed to blend-mode to luminosity so the blue color would not distract from the image.

No more shooting Raw plus Jpeg. A new free software Utility "Instant JPEG from Raw" makes it possible. This last weekend I changed to Raw only. Once back at the computer, this Utility pulls hundreds of jpegs from my raw images in thirty seconds or less!

Benefits from his little utility includes, more space on compact flash cards, additional camera buffer space, faster downloads to tethered computer - just a faster shooting session. And you can still make instant jpegs for those nasty quick deadlines. For me, I was able to shoot and entire soccer match on one card!

I am sold on this utility. For a really good demo, check out Michael Tapes guest blog entry at www.ScottKelby.com


You access the IJFR utility with a right click on the folder.


I was able to pull 256 jpegs from my raw images in 11 seconds.

Instant Jpeg from Raw works on both Macs and Windows. It comes with a pdf Manual. To obtain the software go to www.rawworkflow.com.