Lightroom Tips.....

Thanks to everyone who emailed tips, here's one from Matthew Farrell on cropping in Lightroom, thanks Matthew!!

Lightroom lets you specify a custom aspect ratio to use while cropping. Since our images are 1600 x 2166, I made the aspect ratio 21.66 x 16. You can then apply, or “sync”, this aspect ratio to all the images in a folder. This aspect ratio will be maintained while using the cropping tool. When it comes time to output (or “export” in Lightroom lingo), I use the option, “Resize to fit…long edge” with the value 2166. Then, viola, all the images are exported at 1600 x 2166. One caveat though—every once in a while, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the aspect ratio doesn’t carry over properly, and one or two images might come out at 1595 x 2166 or 1604 x 2166 or something like that. To catch those, I just display the folder in Windows Explorer with the files sorted by dimension. It’s really easy then to pick out the oddballs and reapply the correct aspect ratio just to those files. I’d say that happens to about 1-2% of my images. Also, that was in Lightroom 1.3 so the bug may be fixed in version 2.0