gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_sc
Community Expert
Activity
‎Jan 22, 2018
05:12 PM
9 Upvotes
When one converts a piece of paper to an electronic document, all too often they are simply scanned at the "whatever" setting and saved as a JPEG. This is not surprising because JPEG is a format that most people have heard of so it's a "safe" format to select. Some scanners have an option to save as a PDF and that is preferable to a JPEG, but there are two areas this leaves off: a clean scan and a search-able PDF. First off, let me explain what I mean by a clean scan: our eyes are very forgiving. We look at a newspaper and see black text on paper and we pretty much ignore that the paper is non-white. The scanner doesn't know the paper is supposed to be white so it records it for what it is: not white. Since newspaper are a worse-case scenario, I will discus and demonstrate with newspaper but just be aware that all scans will display paper as being off-white unless you do something to make the paper white. Let me start with the dynamics of a clean scan and how to create a clean scan. The problems with newspapers start with the fact that the paper is not white and the thinness of the paper causes the text and anything else on the back side to show up through the page. Thus, if you just run the scanner on a section of newspaper you'd get something like this: One of the problems here is that there are some color images on the back side of this page and trying to deal with all of the colors is a waste of time. So, the first thing you can do here is to change your settings from Color scan to Black & White scan and that will give you this: While it's still bad shading, at least it's consistent-bad shading. At this point there are two options for the person doing the scanning: You can pre-clean the text prior to the final scan of the page. You can simply go with the gray background as above and get rid of that in a step further down in this article Needless to say, both of these have advantages and disadvantages but let's start with pre-cleaning the scan. Any time you are scanning, you need to first do a Prescan. This is done to verify that what you want to scan is on the scanning table and also allows you to crop the scan. This is also where you can make decisions on color or gray-scale scanning, resolution, final output size, create a name, where you are saving the image, etc. As a rule, I never save a scan as a JPEG, rather I always save it as a TIF image (for reasons that are beyond the focus of this blog). Yes, the TIF images will be large in storage size but do not worry, once you've converted them into PDFs (which will be considerably smaller), you can toss the TIF images you had just created. To fix the whiteness of the paper, bring up your scanner software's histogram. Most scanning software of merit has histograms and most of the software that comes with your scanner will have histograms. However, if you tend to use the "Full Auto mode" that some scanning software have, select the Professional mode that should also be available. [Important: Apple's Image Capture is absolutely dreadful for scanning and should be avoided at all cost. I do not know what's available as default on Windows machines but your first choice should be the software that came with your scanner. When first opened, it will probably come up with an Auto mode, do look for any options for Professional control.] When you first bring up the Histogram, it will probably look something like this (the red rectangle is my crop line): A histogram, if you are not familiar with them, is a bar graph of all 256 shades from black to white along the "X" (horizontal) axis where the far right is absolute white while the far left side is absolute black. The "Y" (vertical) axis is the count of pixels that have that specific shade of gray so that if any given shade has a whole bunch of pixels, it will be tall column, if fewer pixels are of any given shade, it will be shorter. In the case of this scan, we can see that there's a lot of light-medium gray pixels through to some medium dark pixels and no white or light gray and no black or dark gray pixels. What we can do is to tell the scanner that light gray pixels should be considered white and that the medium dark pixels should be considered black. To to this you mouse-down and slide the little arrows on the bottom of the histogram until we see what we want as shown below: If you look at the image above you can see that most of the light gray pixels were too dark for what I wanted, I wanted the pixels that made the page look white. The trick is to maintain the text remains black. Keep in mind this in entirely subjective. What you do not want to do is to make the gray so white as to cause the text to start losing its shape as shown below on the right side. The good news is that if you are scanning a number of pages, the controls of the histogram are sticky. That means that once you set everything for the first page, all subsequent pages from the same souce should be good to go. After setting the histogram, the final scan look pretty good as shown below: At this point you can either drag these TIFs into Acrobat icon or Open the TIF from the Acrobat's Open window. Acrobat will automatically convert these not only into PDFs but also "Searchable" PDFs. What that means is that Acrobat can "OCR" (Optical Character Recognition) all of the text and convert that into words so you can both search and copy and paste the text. Below is the TIF from above that has now been converted into a PDF and is also search-able You can see that it's search-able because I can select the text in the document. Had I not done that cleaning, Acrobat could still do the conversion to PDF and making it search-able as shown below. But is the text here any better or worse than the other? For those who do OCRing on a regular basis there are known issues that can come to bite you. For example if the letters "r" and "n" appear next to each other in a poor quality scan, they can be interpreted as an "m." One way to test this is to convert the PDF into a Word document and look for underlined text with red lines. The red lines indicate bad spelling that can either be A real word that Word doesn't know about (e.g., someone's surname) A word that was chopped in half (e.g., a hyphenated word, if Word didn't do the hyphenation so it doesn't know it's been hyphenated) A word that was originally misspelled in the document A word that was badly OCRd. So, here's the cleaned text after converting into Word: And here's the text that was not pre-cleaned and converted into Word: As you can see, there are a significantly greater amount of errors with the text that was not pre-cleaned in the scanner prior to converting to text via OCR. But admittedly, a lot of people do not want to bother pre-cleaning a document, they don't think about it or are unaware that it can be done. Now, I should point out one important thing here is that what you see in this PDF is not necessarily what the OCR text thinks it is. So for example, while in the PDF you may clearly see "It's raining.." as the first words in the story, the not pre-cleaned text is "It'sraining..." So if you copy and paste this, you may not get exactly what you are expecting. But I continue... However, there is ONE MORE way to clean a scan and make it into a nice looking PDF and that's to delete the background by editing out that background in Acrobat. OK, here's the deal: When text is OCRd in Acrobat, a new layer of text is created ON TOP of the original document. The original document is below and the text is removed from the original document, and any image remains in the lower layer. Any component of that PDF can be deleted at any time. Here's how: First open that original, non pre-cleaned scan in Acrobat, but this time after opening the document, click on "Edit PDF" in the Tools in the Right Hand Panel. If you do not see "Edit PDF..." in the Right Hand Panel, open Tools and click on the drop down below "Edit PDF" to add it to the Shortcuts on the Right Hand Panel. "Edit PDF" is such a valuable tool that if you do not already have it there, it should be for easy and quick access in the future. After adding it to the Right Hand Panel, the tool will default-land on the bottom. If you want to rearrange this you can move it to a higher location by simply dragging it to the location of your choice. Now that you have easy access to "Edit PDF...," click on it with your original scan. When you do so you will see Acrobat doing a variety of processing on the image. You will now see thin rectangle lines around all of the text. The text is now completely editable and if there were any words that the original article had misspelled, you can fix then. But the important thing here is that you can now click on the background and delete the background. As shown below: just click your cursor where there's no text: Now tap the Delete key and all the gray is gone. Then tap the Close Tool by clicking on the "X" in the upper right corner to get out of Edit mode: and you will see a very clean document as shown below [I want to thank Kelly Vaughn for introducing me to this great trick]: Keep in mind that the quality of this OCR is just as bad as it was before, the page just looks better. However, the actual quality of any scan will vary considerably all over the place so do not dismiss this approach out of hand. In addition, the value of an excellent OCR has more to do with the need for quality search-ability. The scan itself will be clean and easy to read and often, that's typically the most critical issue. One other issue is: what do you do if the background contains important images. As stated earlier, the background contains the background content: both poor scanning debris AND any images that the document may have. The text, after OCRing, resides on a layer above the background. But if you rely upon deleting the back areas of a scan, watch out if there are images on the page. Finally, here is the page above but as a pre-cleaned color image scan that has both the images on the page as well as the text. Scanning a page with the intent of creating a PDF and/or to access the text of that page, one has make choices based on many factors: how clean the original page is, how thin the paper is, how much time do you want to take with the scan, is the quality of the OCR critical, and all of the other issues touched upon in this article. There is software out that that can do an amazing amount in "Auto" mode and I do not think you should avoid those when available. However, if the specific document you have does not provide an acceptable result, this article should provide the information for you to know what went wrong and why, and more importantly, how to get the best possible document to keep for yourself or to send to someone else.
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‎Jan 01, 2018
01:15 PM
1 Upvote
On the upper right side of the image above her jean jacket and the maroon background I'm seeing a lot of jpeg degradation that cannot be there from the original image. When you compare that with the good image, you can easily see the jpeg degradation The ONLY way that that can be there is from either saving the image with a very low jpeg setting or multiple re-saves at a medium setting. LR or Photoshop, or Adobe Camera Raw does not process an image upon opening the image. There is something else going on here that you seem to be missing and/or not elaborating on. Like Just and Jim said, what/how did you create/view the original image? What application did you view the 2nd image?
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‎Dec 29, 2017
03:23 PM
1 Upvote
Hi Kevin, When I responded the other day I was very short on time and hoping that what I wrote made sense. I'm still not completely convinced that I'm wrong here so let me try again but this time with some screenshots. Forgive the vertically long message here but I wanted to show full sized screenshots to make this more like you might be seeing. (Get ready to scroll!) First I'm hoping that you can see some small dots/handles/not sure what the formal name for this is but see if you have them on the right side Now, see if you can mouse-down on that edge and drag left like below Now, even if those do not work, please do try this: While in the Output Workspace, go to Window (menu) and select Reset as shown below. Did that do anything???? Let me know.
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‎Dec 27, 2017
01:51 PM
Oh wait a minute. Try to move the mouse at the right edge (or rather the left side of the right edge) and drag to the left. See if that restores your panel space.
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‎Dec 26, 2017
04:20 PM
Hi Martin, OK, one last thought: As I understand a RAID system cross-checks itself and if a sector is beginning to be "fuzzy," it will write the data to another sector so the data is not lost. I'm very probably wrong in that in specifics but I hope on the general I'm within OK. What happens if you do a search for a file on a RAID disk? Does it show up as it would on a regular HD? Here's something I'd appreciate you trying: Take a file you want to delete, write down its name. Now go do a search for that file across your entire system. I normally use HoudaSpot for file finding but I tried this with Apple's Search (the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen), see if there are more than 1 copy of this file (note, if you've gone around more than once on your camera's auto-naming, there very likely will be more than 1 but use it's location to verify which is the one you're looking at). Overall, I'm wondering if you might be looking at a ghost image and therefore when deleting a ghost image, it can't be put into the trash because it only exists in the computer's cache. Again, I'm just completely guessing on this but thought I'd pass it on.
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‎Dec 26, 2017
01:32 PM
Oh, one small thing, some folks took over IPP from Russel Brown and did some updating, are you aware of: New Version: Russell Brown's Image Processor Pro #Photoshopscaresme That may help your other issue?
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‎Dec 26, 2017
01:29 PM
Hi Kevin, Unfortunately I cannot help beyond what I've done. I'm on a Mac (since 1985) so I do not know where or how to guide you. Hopefully a wise PC user will come upon this and provide assistance. FWIW, none of the attachment images show up in this forum, not sure how you attached them but it didn't work. And yes, I also am a fan of Image Processor Pro, great addition. Good luck
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‎Dec 26, 2017
01:06 PM
1 Upvote
Hi rkiaulehn, Since the vast majority of folks are not having the issues you are having there are two possibilities: either there is something wrong with your instillation OR there is something wrong with your machine. Of the former there could have been some glitch during instillation of the latter there is something corrupted in you OS over time. Plus, something of the latter could affect something of the former. The reason why 2017 is working and 2018 is not is because the applications are different and one may be going to sections within the OS that the other one does not. I am speculating here and do not know for sure but I've seen things like this in the past. I strongly suggest you get either Onyx (free) or (your os)* Cache Cleaner (small charge). Personally I like the Cache Cleaner application, I've had excellent results from that. Either way, run the maintenance operations and see what they do. I can very much appreciate how this is profoundly frustrating for you and a big time waster overall. But ignoring the problem will not make it go away and it does need to be dealt with eventually. I do wish you all speed and luck in your actions. * Yosemite Cache Cleaner, Sierra Cache Cleaner, High Sierra Cache Cleaner, (you get the deal).
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‎Dec 26, 2017
11:18 AM
2 Upvotes
Hi Martin, Beyond the following I do not have a clue to help you because I do not have your setup (raid). I do save all of my images to an external disk. As simplistic as this may sound, when you delete a file, do you simple "Remove Photo(s)" and then tap the Return or Enter key or do you tap the "Delete from Disk" button? When you said that the files are removed from your catalog but are still sitting on the hard drive it got me to thinking.... Let us know.
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‎Dec 26, 2017
11:01 AM
1 Upvote
Hi Eddie, Very sorry for all of the suggestions on can you save the files to your HD but that's only being suggested to try to pin down the problem/issue. One question and one suggestion: Are your files the original raw files or have you converted them to DNG? It shouldn't make a difference but I'm asking. I always save out to an external drive and have not had any issues or problems but I always convert my images to DNGs so if you do not, than I cannot compare. But again, this shouldn't make a difference. One thing that can happen is if the Preference settings for a specific folder on the external system got flipped. It's happened to me. Before you do the following, see if you can save a raw file settings to an earlier location in the external drive. For example, if your folder system is: A B C and you have been trying to save files in the C folder, try the B and then the A folder. If one of these works, go to the offending folder, select it, and do a Command-i (for info). This will bring up a long new window on the left side of the screen. Take a look at the bottom where it shows Sharing & Permissions. It should look like the following: but your name should be where mine is. If it doesn't show the same Privilege, than click on the lock, provide your system password and change the Privilege as shown. If you have folders within that folder, than click on the gear icon and select "Apply to enclosed items..." BIG WARNING: Never ever do that to a system folder or to your user folder on your computer. If you do you may need to reinstall your system (It'l work until you need to restart. Trust me, I did this early early on with Mac OS X and it was a nightmare day). This is perfectly safe however on folders that just contain files. Let us now if this works
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‎Dec 26, 2017
10:38 AM
1 Upvote
This appears to be a similar problem to a question asked earlier. Please see if this helps you: bridge cc 2018 today's update problem
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‎Dec 26, 2017
10:36 AM
1 Upvote
Hi Claustergov, To my knowledge, Bridge is a one Window application. While there have been MANY requests for the ability to move the various Bridge panels off to other screens, this is not a function that can be done with Bridge at this time. I add that last comment here in that MAYBE at some time, we will be able to do this, but not now. While this is NOT what you're asking for, may I suggest that you move your Panels around to a more functional array that may be beneficial to you. For example, what I've done is to move my Content Panel to the right side and typically have it three thumbnails wide. I then place the Preview Panel to the middle and make it very big so that I can see a good large preview. On the left I have most of the other Panels: Favorites, Folders and Metadata are on the top while Filter and Keywords are on the bottom. Within the limitations and confines of Bridge, I find this works for me very well. Perhaps some of the information in the following article may be of benefit for you: Bridge Part 1: Making Bridge Work for You - Customizing the Interface
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‎Dec 26, 2017
10:18 AM
Hi Kevin, Some quick questions: what's your OS and what version (and what platform). Adding these things always helps those who try to answer. Nonetheless, Bridge CC 2018 officially transitioned off of the earlier Output Panel that for many years had to be manually added. In 2018, Adobe officially added a PDF output panel that was part of the instillation. So, my first question is: did you try to do the manual install of the older Output Panel or not. I've not tried this but I'm guessing that trying to manually installing the old one might interfere with the new one. Also, FWIW, the new Panel is called "Output" and is located at the beginning (first) of your Workplace screens. Possibly have you looked past it? Hope some of this helps, please let us know.
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‎Nov 30, 2017
09:15 AM
1 Upvote
To everyone who's having problems with Bridge. First off, I am not having ANY issues of freezes, slowdowns, or any strange problems with Bridge 2018. While known problems do get released as "finished software," big issue such as crashes and freezes do not. [There is no such thing as bug-free software by ANY manufacturer.] But please think about this, you're having problems on something as basic as starting while others are not. Please review the following tips for getting better support from these forums. That notwithstanding, when you go onto a forum and say "My Bridge 2018/2017/whatever freezes" that doesn't mean much unless you add the following. 1) The the kind of system you were on (e.g., Mac or PC), 2) The approximate year your machine was made (if you are trying to run this on a 10 year old machine, that may illuminate one of the potential issues/problems) 3) What version of the OS are you using (if you are using that 10 year old machine mentioned above but are trying to use Windows 10, that also provides some important information). 4) Do you have a unique setup on your system (e.g., you have your applications on an external hard drive as opposed to on your computer's hard drive) and some other things to think about: when was the last time you did a system software update for your system? It's hard to selectively update your video drivers on a Mac as that is usually included on a system update but PCs typically do not do that and the user needs to be sure they have the latest driver update for that software. This is one of the few things I'm aware of about PCs but I can't provide much greater info since I'm a Mac user. I'm sure other PC users can fill in some other general maintenance tips here. On Macs you can go into your System Prefs and into Users and create a new User account. Give that test User complete Admin control and then restart into that test user (you can use your same password for this test user, makes it easier). Then try to run the same software. IF THERE IS NO PROBLEM, than there is something screwy in/on your system. Meanwhile, it's probably worth it to download either ONYX or (your system)* Cache Cleaner. The former is free, the latter requires a minor payment (I use the latter, it's worth it) and run the general maintenance repairs (on (your system) cache cleaner, I also to a medium cache cleaning of all parts of the system). There very likely is something that needs to be addressed on your system, Doing this level of general maintenance has work wonders for me. *(your system) Cache Cleaner (e.g., El Capitan Cache Cleaner, Sierra Cache Cleaner, High Sierra Cache Cleaner). Hopefully something here may helps some of you.
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‎Nov 16, 2017
02:27 PM
1 Upvote
I do not have an answer for anyone here other than to say that I have not had any of the freezes that you folks have found. I'm only mentioning this to let you know that there is something unique to your systems and/or my system that is causing or not causing the problem. I'm assuming that everyone has Bridge on their computer's hard drive and is not on a separate remote drive? I'm assuming that everyone has gone to their Preferences, selected "Cache" and tapped the Purge All Cache Now, button? I'm assuming that those who have had this problem have gone to that same Cache preference and moved the Cache Size slider over to the right? On a side note, for those of you using a Mac, I've had great success when trying to solve problems like this with (system) Cache Cleaner. Here, "System" refers to El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, etc. It does have a modest payment but when things like this come up I do the General Maintenance tab (all of them) and the Cache Tab (Medium Cleaning of all options). I'm pretty sure you can use it free for 10 days and then need to pay for it. It solved a problem I was having with Acrobat Pro years ago and have bought every upgrade ever since as a thanks. I can easily feel your pain on this, I know how hard it is to depend upon a vital piece of software and have it fail. Good luck, I hope something I've pointed to will help. p.s., FWIW, when I want delete the Prefs, I press the Shift-Option-Command keys as I double click the Bridge icon, NOT after Bridge starts.
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‎Nov 16, 2017
12:20 PM
1 Upvote
Hi Dizzybild, Can you provide a bit more information. Since you mention iCloud, I gather you are on a Mac. OK so far. But I'm unaware of any way that iCloud can store files that are not already ON your computer. However, to see (and/or verify) where files are ON your computer, try turning on the Path Bar. To do so, go to Windows and select Path Bar After doing this you'll see the Path (also known as a Bird's trail below Bridge's icon tools as shown below. You'll notice in the image above, this path does not show up but below it does. That way you can see right there where your files are being stored and/or where any given file exists on your computer. You can then add to that location, move it to a different location, or delete it if you chose. Let us know if this helps you,
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‎Nov 15, 2017
11:44 AM
Hi NuVuMedia, AOM, as it was before, is a dead addition to Bridge 2018. If you install it, it will not work. By default, Bridge does come with the PDF capabilities called the Output Layout (do not need to add to get this) but the Web thing is gone. It may return if enough people clamor for it but for now it's gone and the only way to get AOM to work is to use an older version of Bridge. If you do not care for what the new Output Layout provides, you can also check out DiapoSheet (available from the Mac App store, not available for the PC) as an alternative. HTH
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‎Nov 09, 2017
02:39 PM
Found it. I was looking for "Adobe Creative Cloud" and found it at "Creative Cloud." My visual handicap is the same one that you have when you can't find your phone that's right in front of you. Just like you I'm human. (And thanks for not picking on my typo-autocorrect of "except" instead of "expect!" It can be so cruel in these forums, but why???) and I'm going to assume that Nexahs1138 thinks that he has a fine sense of humor. Glad I do not go to the night clubs that he goes to.
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‎Nov 09, 2017
12:55 PM
Hi kglad I would except they do not have an option for the Adobe Creative Cloud application. So I put it in here on the chance that some PM might see it to send it onto the proper channels. So, any Adobe PMs around to do that? Thank you in advance.
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‎Nov 09, 2017
11:22 AM
Currently when we view our CC Apps we see the option to "Open" (in white) and "Update" as well as "Install" as blue. There are reasons why I have not installed all of the applications and am too busy to learn applications that I'm not likely to use. However, when there are updates to the applications that I do use, I wish to quickly notice them and act upon the update. Unfortunately it is impossible to simply scan for the update application because they are the same color as the Install applications, I have to spend a moment more of my time to see that it says Install instead of Update. The solution to this is simple: Please change the color of one of the two. I really do not care what the color is or which one gets the color change but perhaps "Green" for Update and "Blue" for Install. Again, I really do not care which is which or what color is used, just make it different. Thanks for considering this change And please add to this thread if you agree.
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‎Oct 31, 2017
09:22 AM
With all due respects to the Adobe rep, this release with the (too) similar names and widely overlapping abilities, it's very confusing for everyone. Eventually this will work out but admittedly, this is very complex and self-inflicted by Adobe.
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‎Oct 30, 2017
05:49 PM
1 Upvote
You do not say how many images you are dealing with but first and foremost DO NOT MOVE THE IMAGE'S FOLDERS IN EITHER THE FINDER OR THE EXPLORER. Sorry for the all caps but the best/only way to move images in folders is to do that within LR in the Folder's Panel while in Library mode. While I mostly agree with DJ above, I also rely upon folders for my basic image maneuvering so I do share your desire. Nonetheless, can you estimate how many images within how many folders you are talking about? There is a big difference between some 10,000 images and 100,000 images. The good news is that whatever you chose to do, your final folder setup will be logical to you now. By that I mean you will be intentionally setting up the order to a good system as opposed to whatevermaybewillbe system you had before. As an alternative to having your folders identified only by date, one other option might be to have the date AND the subject. Something like either Florida vacation May 2015 (or 2015-5 Florida vacation). The way I'd do this is to select all of the images you want to move, then click on your "Master folder" (the one that will hold all of your sub-folders) and right click on this folder, provide the name you want, and make sure that you have checked (Move all selected images into this folder). Then you do this again and again and again until done. Lastly, while doing this process, be sure to do a backup of your catalog at the end of every day. This is a "just in case" thing. Or you just do what DJ suggested. Let us know what you end up doing, I'm curious.
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‎Oct 30, 2017
05:31 PM
1 Upvote
There is no way to store images from Classic in the cloud and not have them also on your computer. You can do that with LR-CC (newly released a week ago) and set the controls to not store the images on your computer. With that you can access all your images on your phone and/or tablet but at the same time you will lose some of the editing/enhancement capabilities provided with LR-Classic. Is that the information you needed?
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‎Oct 30, 2017
05:28 PM
1 Upvote
Hi Marika, I'm going to assume that because you are in LR-Classic asking questions you are using LR-Classic forum and not the new Lightroom-CC. The easiest way to tell is if your Lightroom icon has square corners not rounded corners (former-Classic, latter-CC). I'm also gather that you are syncing your images from various Collections you have in the left-hand column located below your Folders. The one thing that confuses me is that you state you have removed "every synced collection from your latest 2 or 3 LR catalogs..." The reason why this confuses me is that (I also have multiple collections) and when I stop one collection and start up another, my synced images stop being synced. I only sync from one of my collections. When I start up a different collection, I make sure that my syncing is set to off so as to not confuse or conflict with my other catalogs. I also have nowhere near that many images in my synced collections so I may only provide limited support for you (but willing to try). also, while it probably doesn't make a difference, you might want to add your operating system so that we know what you're working with. Also, can you please verify which version of LR you are using (e.g., 7.0.1 release). Hope this will help you on your way to resolve your issue.
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‎Oct 30, 2017
04:52 PM
Hi Chada, Sorry for this simplistic question but which version of PS do you have on your computer? If you have an older version of PS with a newer version of Bridge, they may not be compatible. Also, when you answer, please let us know your operating system (Mac or PC), it'l help answer your question. The good news is that it should be there so it's not gone because Adobe eliminated it. They have not done that.
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‎Aug 24, 2017
11:03 AM
Hi Try67, That did work although it wasn't what I was expecting or hoping for. I was hoping for Acro to recognize that I had a whole bunch of cells and would create fields in each one. Apparently that can't happen. A bit more work but I got it done. Thanks
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‎Aug 23, 2017
11:42 AM
I have a PDF that I want to convert into a form. In this PDF is a grid for the days of the week so that people can fill out the number of hours that they worked. The individuals are on the left side as one column, the day (number) is along the the top row. People fill this out for who it was and the number of hours for that day. When we run the Form conversion process, we get one long field for each day as opposed to 31 separate fields for each row. Is there a way to do this automatically as opposed to brute force doing each field for 13 rows? Thanks,
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‎Aug 08, 2017
06:33 PM
Using LR CC-2015, latest version. I was hoping to use the keywords of my images as the caption(s) of my images in a Web Gallery. Is this possible? If so, how? Is there a Layout style that is better suited for this? Thanks for any suggestions and help. Shouldn't make a difference but I'm on a Mac OS X.11.6.
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‎Jul 31, 2017
08:38 AM
3 Upvotes
Introduction of the problem I've been scanning a lot of old family photos recently. One of the issues that I've had to deal with is that it was not uncommon for printers to use a textured or highly textured paper with some sort of pattern to provide some level of depth to the image. Admittedly, this did provide a nice appearance to the image, but if you are trying to scan that image for archival purposes, the texture can prove to be very problematic. If the surface had a flat (non-glossy) surface, you'd see small shadows in the region of the texture. If the surface were glossy, you'd see sharp reflections from the texture. Below are two samples of each. On the left is an image with texture. Because this is subtle when seen on the web, I've placed a closeup within the image. On the right is a glossy image that has a lot of highly textured points sticking out to provide depth. In this example I've held the image in the light in a way that fully exacerbates the problem as the reflected light overwhelms the image. With the flat textured image like the one on the left above, there are two potential approaches: digital and mechanical. The digital approach relies upon FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) applications. There used to be a variety of these applications out there but they are either fairly complicated to use (such as this software) or are no longer available. PC users may have better luck finding this kind of software. Because FFT requires a regular repeating pattern in the image, the software approach will not help the image on the right because there is no regular repeating pattern of artifacts. One common suggestion is to use a Gaussian blur to remove the textured lines (as in the above image on the left) by blurring the image. I recommend against this because it also blurs the image as well. If you have a good sharp image, why blur it unnecessarily? Another suggestion is to scan twice but rotate the second scan by 180 degrees. The images are stacked (into layers) above each other and the user needs to reduce Opacity until there is a happy medium between seeing the shadow and not seeing the shadow. An alternate approach is to do multiple scans but not just twice. Here's the deal: the texture you see from the scanner occurs because the light is not directly adjacent to the sensor and this creates shadow. Any variations on the orientation of the image will cause the shadow to change its position. You can align the scansas layers and then average them out. And here the more the merrier. With the image on the left above, four scans (at 90 degrees rotation each) gave good results. For the image on the right right above, four scans (at 90 degree rotation) was good but eight (at 45 degrees each scan) was much better. For my scanning I was using the Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner. For my software I was mostly using SilverFast 8 (by LaserSoft Imaging). Because this is a fairly monotonous process, it's easy to lose track of your progress. As such, I found that placing a Post-it note on the back of the image with an arrow pointing toward the top of the image and a circular arrow pointing the way I'm rotating the image helped considerably. (You can laugh, but if you're tired, this is really really handy.) You can see my system in the image below. When performing the scans, what you need to do is to: Prescan, make all of the cropping, adjustments, and any alterations you choose to make on the first scan. Then scan the image. Next open the scanner and rotate the image 45 or 90 degrees (as you so choose) [Read below for methods of capturing rotation with your scanning software.] Close the scanner lid, do a Prescan to locate the image, then move and/or rotate your cropping rectangle, close the lid and scan. Repeat as necessary for the four or eight images you desire. The thing here is that you do not want to make any subsequent adjustments to the quality of the scan; leave the adjustments alone. It's important to note that some scanning software allows you to rotate your crop rectangle while others cannot. Because of this I'll explain the process first for scanning software that can rotate the crop rectangle, and an alternate proceedure for scanning software that cannot rotate the crop rectangle. The end result will be no different. If your scanning software can rotate the crop region: Here I used Silverfast 8 scanning software which allows rotation of the crop region. This is fairly straightforward: you place your image on the scanning bed at the angle you want, then do a prescan to see the image and the crop region. With Silverfast you have four half-circles on all sides (see the image below), if you mouse down on these you can rotate the crop region. In each corner you can resize the crop region to fit your image, and if you place the mouse along a side, you can resize along that side. One annoyance is that the rotation axis is located at the middle of the image, which means that if you align the crop region with a corner of the image, the crop-corner is no longer near the image-corner once you rotate the image. Because of this you have to move the crop region to accommodate this movement. One problem that you may encounter is if your image is too tall (or wide). Your manual rotation of the crop region will stop if the opposite corners are wider than the scanner. The only option you have here is to shorten the rectangle, rotate, and then resize the rectangle as necessary. But I do encourage you to only change length OR width, not both. I also encourage you to name/number the scans as you do them. Once you load these images into Bridge, you cannot tell which one is which, as shown below. For the rest of the process it really will not make a difference, but if you miss one, this will help you determine which one you missed. At this point use Adobe Bridge's rotation tools to bring all of the images to an upright position. If your scanning software cannot rotate the crop region: Here I used Epson Scan (v. 3.9.4) scanning software, because it does not allow rotation of the crop region. Obviously this only affects your process if you chose to add 45 degree rotations of your image. Since you cannot rotate the images, you are left with crops that contact the corners of the image as shown below. Fortunately this is fairly straightforward to resolve. All you need to do is one extra step: bring the image into Photoshop and select the Crop Tool. As shown on the left, along the Options bar you can see the "Straighten" option. Select that and then drag across one of the straight edges (as shown below in the middle). PS will understand that this is either a horizontal or vertical axis and rotate the image accordingly. Finally, as shown in the third image, you'll need to set the formal crop lines against the image. Tap the Enter key when finished, Save it, and you're done with that image. This is obviously only necessary if you need to scan at 45 degrees and is not necessary at all if you are only doing 4 rotated scans. Finishing the process, two options: Method #1: Open all four (or eight) images into Photoshop. First Open all (four or eight) of the files. Then, from the File menu, go into scripts and select "Load Files into Stacks" as shown below When this opens, select "Add Open Files" Finally check both boxes below. Now, go to the Layer menu and choose Smart Objects -> Stack mode -> (and select either) Mean or Median. [Note that these are commonly used when taking a photo in a public place when you don't want all of the people in the final photo: You need to take many, many shots of thefountain (let's say) . As people wander around, not everyone will be in every photo in the same place. Median will remove all the people from the photo.] In this case, however, because the shadows are not in every photo (or at least not in the same place), they (like the people around the fountain) will be cancelled out from the final photo. Method #2: if you have Dr. Brown's Services: From Bridge you can select all 4 or 8 of the images and select Dr. Brown's Services and then Dr. Brown's Stack-A-Matic. [Dr. Brown's Services can be downloaded here and installed in Adobe Bridge.] Once at this window, be sure to check the boxes shown and click OK: Now go to the Layers menu and choose Smart Objects -> Stack mode -> (and select either) Mean or Median as you did in the first example. The Result So where does this get you? From the first photo at the top of this blog on the left above, you can see a detail on the left side, below. You can see the result after processing in that same detail on the right. For the other image, again in the detail on the left below is the first scan (this is not as bad as the first image I showed because this is from a single scan without holding the photograph to reflect the light, but it's still unacceptable). On the right is the result of going through this process. Very acceptable. The good news is that these textured photos are not as common as all the rest of your images. Out of over 700 images, I've only encountered 4. However, if you're going through the process of capturing your family's history, anything you can do to get the best possible image is worth the time and effort. I hope after reading this article you can recognize the vlaue of following this somewhat lengthy process. I'd like to add a big thanks to Cristen Gillespie for helping me proof this blog. Cristen provided wonderful help.
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‎Jun 30, 2017
04:52 PM
4 Upvotes
In Part 1 we talked about how to take hundreds or thousands of slides and quickly turn them into digital images. This was done by photographing the slides with a good camera and a macro lens. While you will not get as good a result as a proper scanning of the slides, you will process your slides significantly faster than if you scanned. The goal here is speed and if your setup is done properly, and you understand how to work with Lightroom, you can get OK to pretty good results. The problem with slides is that unless you can clearly see them, it's hard to see them well enough to know which images you want to keep or toss, like, or even cherish. Simply holding them up to a light is a very limited approach. By processing the images as presented below, you will quickly convert the photos of your slides into very viable digital images. However, speed is the operative word here. I'm presenting a lot of information below, some of which may not be relevant to you depending on your Lightroom knowledge and experience. If you're already pretty good at Lightroom, there's a lot to skim. If you're new to Lightroom, there's information below that will help you process your slides as well as any image you encounter in Lightroom. Plus, it's always easier to learn an application while doing a project that uses that application. As such, this hopefully will be a functionally useful educational experience. Also, as I stated in Part 1, I've processed over 5000 images at this point. I've tried a variety of approaches to speed up this process and the following techniques work for me. One of the advantages of Lightroom is how many ways there are to do the same thing. I find that I use many or all of some of these approaches to get the job done. That said, I'm sure there techniques that I'm not using because either I'm not aware of them or they do not work for me. As always, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Because of my approach here, this article on how to process your photographs of your slides is also a primer on how to use Lightroom. Lightroom is a wonderful application but very confusing to use because what you are looking at can change from one moment to another depending on what mode you're in or what you've clicked on recently. Because of this I will spend a few moments at appropriate times to make sure that what you are looking at on YOUR computer is what I'm showing on my screenshots. In this article we'll discuss: A global view of what you're doing here Some tips on tethering your camera to Lightroom What you can and cannot correct on these images Tips on selecting and de-selecting images in Lightroom Cropping a lot of slides uniformly using Auto Sync Some techniques to self-review your slides Removing and/or Deleting images Using "Previous" to duplicate a slides adjustments Using "Copy and Paste" to duplicate a slides adjustments Using "Sync" to duplicate a slides adjustments Using "Painter" to duplicate a slides adjustments Fine-tuning adjustments on your slides Digital Dust Removal A variety of ways to Keyword your images Fixing misspelled keywords Face Detection To Begin As stated, photographing your slides is a great opportunity to not only see your images, but to play Keep & Toss with your slides. If you have photos of nondescript mountains or nondescript people, they may have meant something at the time they were taken but now maybe not so much. You may chose to delete the photos of these slides from your hard drives or at least the image from your Lightroom collection. Because of the ability to better see your slides on your screen, what you do with these images is up to you. I will guide you on how to make these images as good as possible but you do not need to do ANYTHING from what I suggest. Just getting them into Lightroom might be sufficient. However, I found that since I can now see these images I might as well make the ones I like as good looking as possible. In addition, if there's any image that you particularly like, you can always pull out the original slide and do a proper scanning of the slide. Just about everything that we'll be doing with Lightroom in this writing can be done with just about any version of Lightroom—you do not need the latest version. There are a few techniques that can only be done with the newer releases but these are not critical to the objective: converting vast quantities of slides into a digital format. Part of processing the images can start as early as when you are setting up the tethering your camera and computer together. This set up can let you identify where the images will be placed in your catalog as well as start out with some keywords. [If you are not using tethering, you can do bulk Keywording during import from your camera's card as described in the Keywording section.] You can set your keywords to match the images' range you are processing. That is, if you've taken all of the images in one state (e.g., Florida), than that state can be placed in the keyword field. If in a specific location (e.g., Epcot), than I suggest you place both Florida and Epcot in the keyword list. Also note that I entered the slide box (or whatever location would suffice) that contained the slides. Again, this will help you find the slides at any future date. You'll note that I do not have much of any custom names (for the slides) at this point. I've tried various approaches to changing the name of the slides as I processed the images but l gave up as it was tortuous—too much stopping and starting. If you really wish to provide custom names to the images after they've been photographed, there is a MUCH easier way: when looking in the images in Library mode select all of the images that will share a name. Then from the Library menu select Rename Photos... Select option "Custom Name - Sequence" from the dropdown menu, provide the custom name, verify the Start Number, and tap OK and you're done. However, I honestly never found a strong advantage of customizing the names and often left the images with whatever name they received. Simply, Keywording is much more powerful and efficient than naming the images. As stated, the goal is to process the images as efficiently as one can. If there are individual images you wish to enhance, you can always spend time with them in Lightroom one at a time. However, any time you can alter and fix more than one image at a time, the better. Lightroom helps this considerably by providing many ways to alter many images at a time. What you can/can't correct on these images. These images were first slides, not digital images. Therefore, there is no lens information to take advantage of Adobe's lens corrections. And part of this is you cannot expect to get any help from the new Transform Options of selecting the "Vertical," "Horizontal," or other options to remove the perspective of an building. Fortunately, if you use the "Guided" option you can fix a distorted building, but most of the time I don't bother unless the image has some real issues and I want to take the time to fix the problem.) Even though you've taken these as raw images (hopefully), any option to change their white balance by selecting sunlight, shade, tungsten, etc. from the White Balance dropdown menu are doomed before you start. Despite that, you can get close to fixing the White Balance by clicking on something gray-ish in the image with the White Balance Tool (or press "w"). More on this later Another critical option that's not available is any grain correction—Photoshop and Lightroom do not know how to get rid of photographic film grain, that's a film issue, not a digital issue. If you have an image with noticeable photographic grain and you wish to fix that, your best option is to use a high-end scanning software such as SilverFast by LaserSoft Imaging. I've a sample of the benefits of this feature in the beginning of Part 1. If you've taken your images as raw images, you will have excellent success with the Highlight and Shadow sliders. Likewise, you can control the white and black regions on the histogram with either the White and Black Sliders or by going up to the histogram, mousing down in one of the five regions (as you mouse-over each region will slightly lighten up) and dragging left or right as shown below. Fortunately, one of the tools that IS available to enhancing the slides is the "Dehaze" tool. Unfortunately this also is a fairly new tool and is not available in earlier versions of Lightroom. Some basic info on selecting images in Lightroom So that you know what I'm looking at (and referring to), when I'm looking at image in the Library mode, I'm seeing the following view. Note, to get this you need to tap the Loupe View (e) seen just below the left side, below the image. I tend to not use the Grid view much (press the icon to the left of the Loupe View). However, there is one area where I do use Grid view and this will be brought up at a later time while I discuss Keywording. Also note that the tools provided in this region can change by your choices. This is done on the far right of the tool region. If an item is checked, it will show. Also be aware that if you switch to the Grid view, the various tools change and the selections below also change. Fortunately what you chose is sticky so set it once and you are done. But again, the options for Grid and Loupe are different, it's just that once set each view's options will be sticky for that view. Anyhow, if I'm showing tools that you do not see, that's why. Lastly, if you do not see this Tool region, press the "t" key and make it show or hide as you chose. Similarly, if you do not see the image thumbnails across the bottom, if you look at the bottom you see a small "up" pointing arrowhead as shown below. [Note: the contrast is dismal but it is there.] If the thumbnails are not showing and you mouse-over this arrowhead, the thumbnails will show, if you click on the arrowhead, the thumbnails will show and remain. The goal in this article is to process many images as fast as possible, it's important to know how to select a single image, many sequential images and/or many non-sequential images. You might already know this material but if you are weak on these details, it will bring you up to speed on processes that will be discussed later. All of the following is done on the thumbnails that line the bottom of the screen. Tips on Selecting and De-selecting images If you click ON the image, that image will be selected. If you click above or below an image, you can also select an image. Let's call this "off-image clicking." If you click on one image and then Shift click on an image many images away, all of the continuous row of images (from beginning of the selection to end) will be selected. And if you click on one image and Control/Command-click on any other images (regardless of order) they will be selected even if discontinuous. Now, notice above how one of the photos in the image above is a lighter gray than the others? THAT image will show up in the big Loupe view above. If you click ON any of the selected images (not off-image), then that image will be displayed in the Loupe view. This means that if you have more than one image selected but wish to change the view of which specific image is showing, you can. If you click off-image (on any of the images), that image will be selected and all of the other images will be deselected. If you press "Command/Control-a," all of the images will be selected. If you wish to deselect the images, you can either click any off-image clicking (and only that one image will be selected). Alternatively if you press Shift-Option-Command/Control-d, all images will be de-selected. As you process your images, your ability to select and deselect the images is critical and the above tips will become 2nd nature in no time. Processing the images: cropping off the slide's cardboard As you recall in Part 1, I was very insistent upon making sure that each image was properly registered to a specific consistent location as you took the photos. The better you did this, the easier this next section will be. Our first task is to crop the image so that none of the slide's cardboard is displayed. First, click on the Develop tab, or press Command/Control-Option-2 so that you are in the Develop tab (and not in Library mode). The first bulk processing technique to demonstrate is "Auto-sync." I start here because this is one of the most powerful and consequently, one of the most dangerous adjustment tool in Lightroom. It's also a good place to start because it's a handy place to crop all of the images at once to remove the slide's cardboard. [Note: the way Lightroom works you cannot make any permanent changes to an image. Thus, if you crop an image in Lightroom and for whatever reason did a bad crop, you can always go back to the original image and nothing has been permanently damaged.] Tap "Command/Control-a" to select all of the images. If you look at the bottom right of the screen you'll see a button called "Sync..." (More info on how to use Sync… a bit later.) On the left side of this you'll see a switch that's on the bottom. Tap that and it will flip to the top and now the button will say "Auto Sync." [Note, if you see nothing, than no images is selected and if the button says "Previous, that means you only have one photo selected.] Now tap the "r" key (for cRop), select Crop from the Tools menu, or tap the Crop icon on the left of the tools (see below) You'll now see crop lines on the image. The default crop lines are on the image's edges. Now you need to start bringing the crop down to the image. Because this image has a bit of rotation, there's no need to try to get accurate yet. So grab a corner handle and bring it down to the image, and then repeat with the other handle on the opposite corner. Now, if you mouse-over a corner, outside of the cropped region (see the bottom right in the image below), the cursor will turn into a double-arrow. Click on the arrow and drag up and down—this lets you rotate the image. To complete the cropping process, make any fine-tune adjustments for the sides of the crop to line up with the images' edges. Now click the Crop tool once again (or press "r" again) and everyone of your images will have been cropped all at once. Done! While you still have all of the images selected and you're still in Auto Sync, it's a good idea to move the Highlight slider to the left and the Shadow slider to the right. If nothing else this is why you took the images in raw mode, NOT JPEG. Your ability to make as much of an enhancement to each image as you can at this point is due to the extra information contained in raw images. The exact setting is not really critical here, just close to the settings shown below will be fine. This is just a starting point for any subsequent adjustments. Now, before you do ANYTHING else, press Shift-Option-Command/Control-d key to deselect all of the images (or click off-image on any one image to deselect all but that one image) and be sure that Auto Sync is turned off. It's important to get into the habit of this if you use Auto-Sync because if you start to make images adjustments with Auto-sync on, those adjustments will take place on ALL of your images, even the ones you just did a moment before. (And thereby undoing any fine-tuning you just did on any previous image(s)). Initial Reviewing your Slides Now that you can easily see your cropped images in full view in the Loupe view. Now is a great time to make sure that all images are properly cropped, which one's need to be rotated to Portrait view, and do a quick review of which images you want to spend time on and which images need to be tossed out. The probable reality is, as you took photos of your slides, you inadvertently bump your setup and suddenly all subsequent images from that "whoops" point are not properly cropped as the previous images were. No fear. Select the first slide you notice this issue and then move over to the last slide and Shift-click on that last photo. Now go back to the first slide of this set, set "Sync..." to "Auto Sync," adjust the crop on that image. Next, be sure Auto Sync is off and deselect the images and continue. Every time you notice that things are off, do this semi-global adjustment and continue. Eventually you'll reach the end of the images and all alignment adjustments have been made. As you look through your slides to make sure they are cropped, it is also a good time to quickly go through your slides to remove and/or delete photos that are just not worth saving. (If they are not worth saving, there's no need to spend any time correcting and/or enhancing the images.) As you progress through your images, you will find the occasional image that says nothing, means nothing, and/or isn't well taken in the first place. Time to play Keep & Toss. You can either delete the images as you look though your images or you can mark your image so that you can "Find" the images with that marking (see next paragraph) and delete all at once. Whichever one appeals to you is fine. In addition to deleting the images as you find them, you can be a bit more methodical and identify which images are either particularly good and/or particularly bad. This can be done by selecting an image and tapping the "P" or "X" key as you go through your images. If you look at the images below, in the upper left-hand corner you can see the white flag ("flagged") or black flag (rejected) icon identifying your choice. Besides using the Flag and Reject, you can also use Ratings (*) and Labels (colors) to do the same thing, Flag and Rejecting are just two more ways to identify images. The one advantage to flagging the good and bad images this way is that you've already identified which images deserve special attention. This might save you time later on. To delete an image, select one image, several continuous images, or discontinuous images. Then, either tap the "Delete" key, go to the Photo menu and select "Remove Photo," or right click (as shown below on the left) and select "Remove Photo(s)" (if you select have two or more photos, this becomes plural). If you do any of these things, a new window pops up (shown below on the right) verifying if you want the images Removed from the catalog (but will still remain on your computer), or "Delete from Disk" which places the images in your computer's Trash Can where, if weak in heart, you can retrieve them again so long as you've not emptied your computer's trash can. As stated, as you pan through your images it is a great time to find the portrait images you rotated to the landscape view to photograph. Here's something that's very cool: Lightroom remembers an images original orientation when making subsequent cropping operations. By this, let's say that the crops on the images were done in a side-to-side orientation. However, now that the slide has been rotated to a portrait position. If you select multiple images and make a side-to-side adjustment, all of the images that you rotated to portrait will automatically adjust in a top-to-bottom orientation. In other words, you do not need to do anything special to them after rotation, it all just works. By the way, the process of rotating the slides is to either go to the Photo menu and select "Rotate CCW" (Command/Control-[ ) or "Rotate CW (Command/Control-] )." Because I always rotate the slide CCW when processing the slides, I always do Command/Control-] to right them again. This can also be done from the Tool menu from the Library view but the key-command is available in any mode so I tend to use that approach. Next group process: Previous Now we will begin to do actual image correction. This approach "Previous," and the next correction ("Copy and Paste"), are for speeding up corrections one at a time. "Previous" is particularly good if you have multiple images that appear to need very similar correction. It doesn't make any difference if the images are near each other or not. Below you see an image that has a color-cast and the image has had some color degradation. I went ahead and adjust this image as well as I could in a fast fashion. (It's not a great image so I didn't spend much time on it.) Now, I clicked on the next image And simply tapped the Previous button All Lightroom did here was to take the settings of the previous image and place them on the selected image. The advantage here is that this is real simple: you adjust one image and then click on any image that appears similar. (You can always go back and fine-tune any subsequent image as necessary.) So, as you look across the images in the thumbnail strip on the bottom, you can tap Previous as you continue processing. The disadvantages include that you cannot save multiple "Previous" settings (e.g., Previous A, Previous B, etc.), nor can you select multiple images and tap "Previous." In addition, if there were any corrections that were very specific (e.g., some rotation) on the initial image, those corrections will be transferred to any other image you tap "Previous" whether the subsequent images need that adjustment or not. Next bulk process: "Copy" & "Paste." Copy & Paste is similar to Previous but is best when you want to Paste "almost" every attribute you corrected. To use this set of tools, it requires an extra step before the Paste button. You'll notice that the Copy button has an ellipse and that means that this will bring up a dialog box. When this window comes up you can accept all of the boxes being checked or un-checked (lower left in the image above). As needed, you can check or recheck the options you want maintained. Notice, for example, that you can turn off rotational dynamics so they do not affect subsequent images. To use this, you first select an image and make all of the adjustments you wish to make, then press Copy… Be sure that all of the attributes you wish to paste are selected. Then select an image and press the Paste button. All of the settings you copied will be pasted onto the new image. The advantage here is let's say that you had selected an image and made a bunch of corrections, including rotation. Assuming that you have other images that have the same problems but do not need rotation, by using Paste instead of Previous, you can pass on all of the adjustments but not rotation. Once you've copied the alterations you've made, you can then select new image and then press Copy and repeat until you've adjusted all of the images with similar issues. What you cannot do with Paste is to select a number of images and then tap the Paste button—it doesn't work. That's when you need to use the "Sync…" feature described next. The biggest limitation of Copy & Paste is that like Previous, you can only do it one image at-a-time. Next bulk process: Sync… The last option for bulk processing is the "Sync…" button (last seen when we were talking about "Auto Sync"). As before, if you select one image, this button says "Previous." If you select more than one image, the button now says "Sync…" The way to use this is to select a number of images, either continuous or discontinuous. Now click ON one of the images (not off-image because that will deselect your collection), that will be your master image for this process. Make any and all of the adjustments you want. Now tap the "Sync…" button. Up pops almost the same window as shown above. However, the button above that says "Copy" now says "Synchronize." Press the Synchronize button and you are done. This is safer than Auto Sync because you actively have to press the Sync… button each time you wish to alter a bunch of images. Sync is much faster than Copy and Paste for bulk operations because you do not have to select and then Paste on each image. Rather, you can select two or hundreds of images and boom, your done! Fine-Tuning Adjustments on your slides After making any bulk adjustments, you'll invariably need to do some fine-tuning on those same images. This is because it's extremely unlikely that the group of images you bulk-adjusted were exactly the same. What the bulk adjustments did was to get a group of images close to being finished, now you can finish them. Making the fine-tuning adjustments on photographs of slides is not much different from making adjustments of regular digital images but with some limitations. As stated, depending on the age of your slides, who the manufacturer was and/or the product type, and how they were stored, the amount of degradation may be nothing or significant. It's also a sad truth that the degradation is not going to be completely consistent from one image to the next (but there will likely be groups of images that are similarly, but not uniformly degraded). Probably the most common issue/problem is white balance caused by fading of one or more of the emulsion colors. Fortunately, using Lightroom's White Balance eyedropper (and if something in the image is probably gray), you can sneak fairly close to what the correct temperature and tint should be. At the top of the Basic panel, next to the Temperature and Tint controls for White Balance, is an eyedropper. You can either tap on that with your mouse or press the "w" key (for "White Balance"). Now, click on something in the image that you think is probably gray. As you can see on the left image below, I've chosen the sign. I have no idea if this is true gray but it's probably good enough to get close to what a balanced White Balance should be. On the right in the image below is the instant result of clicking that eye dropper on the sign. [Note: how does the White Balance Tool work? As you probably know, gray is an equal mix of red, blue, and green but the trick is that there must be the exact same amount of red, blue, and green. When you click on something that is (or might be) gray, Lightroom will adjust the colors in the image so that if they were not the same before, they are now. (A mid-gray is a better choice than light or dark gray.) In the image above I had nothing else better to click on so I opted to use the sign. Occasionally there's not enough information in "white" for Lightroom to make a correction as shown in the image below. Here, the white of the jonquils was too light and I could not get sufficient information for Lightroom to work with and could not use this technique to white balance the image. (Note: if you make the image temporarily darker, this approach will still will not work.) Your only recourse here is to "eyeball" it. While challenging to do when you first start trying to white balance by eye, the good news is that the more you do the faster it gets.] To finish up this image I noticed a tad of blue in the upper left corner meaning that even if this was Great Britain, it wasn't a completely overcast day. So I dropped the Exposure a tad, bumped up the Contrast a tad, dropped the Highlights as much as I could and pushed the Clarity up a bit. Below is the "before" these adjustments and below that is the "after" these adjustments. [Let me repeat, if this was a JPEG, the final results would not have been as good. A raw image contains significantly more information than a JPEG.] There will be times when the emulsions have faded to such a degree that doing a simple White Balance as above will not work. If this is so you'll probably have to manually tease the Temperature and Tint controls or in extreme condition, open the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance Panel and see if you can control the problem from here. Below is a great example where regular white balance completely failed but making adjustments in Saturation solved the problem. In Image #1, you can see the problem. I'm in a train station and the cement floor and walls appear moss-green. They probably are not this color. So in Image #2, I try to white balance the image off of the wall and this was a failure; you can see how in the distance everything is now bluish purple. The problem is probably the light source from the ceiling is giving the area a color-cast. So in Image #3 I go to the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance Panel and select Saturation. If you look in the right hand panel, you can see that I've circled the Targeted Adjustment Tool. If you click on that and go to a region that has color in the image, you can click and drag up and down on the image and that will increase (up) or decrease (down) the saturation. Using this approach you can see that it did a good job in removing the errant green from the cement. Obviously this will not work all the time but since cement shouldn't be green in most circumstances, here it worked fine. If the colors are really really bad due to the degradation of the film, I'll strongly consider converting the image into a Black & White image. If that fails, it's a true tosser. However, just keep in mind that anything you do to help the image is better than the image sitting in a box continually getting worse and worse. If the image is the only known image of Aunt Maude, you do what you can and be happy that you caught the image before it was completely totally gone. Dust Removal Despite dusting every slide prior to taking its photo, there will be an occasional bit of dust on the slides that will show up in the photograph. Fortunately the dust is as easy to remove in Lightroom as is sensor dust from a digital image. In image #1 below you can see the small spec of dust. [Note: The big difference between dust on a slide as opposed to dust on your sensor is that the dust on your slide will probably be sharper then sensor dust which will be fuzzy and out of focus.] To remove the dust from the image, select the "Spot Removal" tool shown in #2 (or press the "q" key) (you can vary the size of the tool's active circle by pressing the "[" or "]" keys to encompass just the speck), and click. You will see two circles with one having an arrow pointing to the original circle. This indicates where the new fill for the spot you clicked on will come from as shown in #3. [Note: if you think there's another region in the photo that would provide a better replacement to Lightroom's initial selection, just drag this second circle to that spot. For example, if the dust is on the edge of a cloud and Lightroom selected the middle of a cloud, move the second circle to the edge of a cloud somewhere else.] Image #4 shows the results of this spot removal. If you have a hair or a long thin item you wish to remove, rather than "click" with the Spot Removal tool, simply click and drag over the errant item. Otherwise the process is just the same.] Keywording Like the many approaches to moving image enhancements from one image to others, there are many ways to apply keywords to one or many images. Again, if you haven't been looking at these images in years and years and you want to see specific images in the future, you need to find them. So the last piece of the puzzle is to keyword the images. Important: you must be in the Library tab to do Keywording. You can either click on the Library tab, press Option-Command/Control-1, or go to Window (menu) and select Library and then continue with your Keywording. One of the advantages of Lightroom is that you can easily set keywords for single images as well as do global Keywording (apply keywords to a bunch of images at one time) and wherever you can do add Keywording, you should. When I photograph a new set of slides into Lightroom, the Keywords I always automatically enter include: the box # (the metal or cardboard box containing the slides (you do number or mark them, don't you?)), the country, and the date (slides always have the date of processing pressed into the slide's cardboard). This date will invariably NOT be the day you took the images but it's close enough if you do not know the date otherwise. If all of the group of slides are from one state or one city, I'll enter that in at this time as well. The very first image in this article shows where and how to automatically place keywords if you are tethering your camera to your computer. If you did not tether and will be importing the images from the camera's card. you can alternatively automatically enter the default keywords by setting up to import the images and before you tap the Import button, from the right hand side select the "Apply During Import" Panel. From there you can also set automatic Settings, Metadata, and Keywords. At this point you need to refer back to any notes you have from your storage box or whatever else you have and go through your slides in groups to narrow down the slides to your keywords. As you enter Keywords, you may have a group of photos that will all receive the same Keyword. You could enter the Keywords as a one-at-a-time process but that's a big time waster. Rather, you want to select a block of images and set any keywords at once whenever possible. If you are at the first image of a set, you then need to find the last image of that set to make the group of them all selected. But, while searching for the last image of the set you've very likely will have misplaced that first one. One way out of this problem is to mark the first image to make it easy to find. The way that I like to do this is to place a color label on the first image. After selecting that image, if you go up to the Photo menu, and select "Set Color Label," then select a color. You can also tap any of the 6 to 9 keys and get a color. Alternatively you can right-click on the image and find "Set Color Label" and set the color. Note that the color is neither profound nor in your face. As shown below, if the image is selected, there is a thin (color) border around the image and if the image is not selected there is a (color) tint to the region around the image. Not significant, but it is something to look for as you look for that first or last image to select. If you want to set the color so it's easier to see, you can change this by going into the View menu and select "View Options…" toward the bottom of the menu (or select Command/Control-j). Then select the Grid View (the results will show up in either view). As you can see, go to "Tint grid cells with label colors" The default is 20%, I've found that for my purposes here I like 40% or 50%. This makes it much easier to see the first in a set of images I wish to mark with specific keywords. So, you've colored the first image, gave it a color label, found the last image, select it and backtrack to find that first image. Now you can Shift-click on the first image and they are all now selected. Syncing Keywords Syncing keywords is a great way to tag a number of images at the same time. The screenshot below shows the right side of Lightroom's window in Library mode and shows the Keywording Panel. You can enter multiple Keywords (place a comma between each keyword). Once you have all of your words entered as you want, and you are ready to import, press the import button. Be aware that Lightroom tries to speed things up by doing a variety of automatic entries. For example, if you just entered the keyword piano, on the next image, when you click your cursor into this field, it will have "piano" ready to go. In addition, if you type "p," Lightroom will show that word and any other previously created keywords. So, it could display a list showing "painter," "piano,"Piccadilly." If the next letter you type is "i" than it will just show "piano" and "Piccadilly." As you continue to type, fewer options will present themselves and if the word is a new keyword, Lightroom will stop guessing waiting foryou to finish. That new word will now be a new word in the Keyword list. Also note that there is a field just below the one shown highlighted above where you can also enter keywords. (It is hard to see that it exists because the contrast for Lightroom's fields are not very good.) The advantage of this one is if you tap the Enter key after each submission, Lightroom automatically enters a comma, ready for the next word. You can also enter multiple keywords in this field as long as you place a comma between each keyword. Assuming you have multiple images selected, after you've entered in the Keyword(s) you want, notice that there are now two buttons on the bottom available to click on on the bottom as shown below. On the right is one called "Sync Settings" which does the same thing as when you are in Develop mode (and let's you sync the image enhancements from the primary selected image). The "Sync" on the left which provides a whole new window shown below. The very last row in this window is for keywords. This should display all of the keywords that were entered for the primary selected image. If you want, you can enter more keywords here. The good thing here is that if there are images with unique keywords (e.g., someone's name), when you Sync the unique Keyword will not be removed. Lightroom respects these unique Keywords and leaves them alone. At this point, be sure the check box on the left is checked, and then press "Synchronize" and those keywords are now entered for all the selected images. By the way, if you have a group of images selected and any of them have an asterisk "*" following the keyword, that means that one or more (but not all) of the images selected have that Keyword. As shown below, not all of the selected images have the "Farmer's Market" keyword, but all of the selected images have 1984 April, Box 5, and Great Britain as keywords. Let me show you one last way to set keywords: the Painter (aka the Spray Can). To use this you must be in the Grid view in the Library mode. Using Painter is kind of a mash-up of "Previous," "Copy & Paste," and Sync" for enhancing the images but cooler. Using Painter is a four-part process. Below I've found a set of images (between and including the images with the red label) that were taken in Sherwood Forest and I want to add "Nottingham" to their keywords. Notice in Tool region there's an image of a spray paint can. If you click on this you can see the word "Paint" and a dropdown menu. From here you can see the range of stuff you can "paint" with the Painter tool. Select Keywords. Next type in the word you wish to paint, I added "Nottingham." If you want to add more than one keyword, simply place a comma after each word (e.g., "England, Nottingham, Sherwood Forest") Now bring your cursor (shaped like the spray paint can and seen in the top-left image) up to one of the images you wish to add "Nottingham" to the Keyword list. It's important to place your cursor ON the image, not off the image. From here you can either simply click and/or drag on/across the images you wish to add the keyword to. This will not affect any keywords that are already assigned to the images, it only adds to the images. Also, notice the image below showing a white line around all of the images where the Painter successfully sprayed. If you inadvertently clicked or dragged over an image that should not have this keyword, simply press the Option key and re-click on that image and that (those) image(s) keywords will be removed. Fixing misspellings If you ever misspell or mistype a keyword, not too worry. Go to the Keyword List in the right hand Panel in Library view and find the misspelled word. Than right-click on that keyword and select "Edit Keyword Tag…" This brings up a new window where you can fix the word, click the "Save" button, and every reference to that keyword will be updated. Quick and slick. Face Detection Especially if you have photos of friends or family, turn on Face Detection. this is done by going up to your name in the upper left corner, clicking, and dropping down to the bottom of that menu as shown below. Please note that this will index (and look for) faces in your entire catalog, not just any specific folder. And, if you've created a large number of photos before starting this, it will take some time for all of the images to be indexed. Face Detection is very good for identifying full face or mostly full face images in your photos. Profiles and back of heads are not good for automatic face detection (but that doesn't prevent you from identifying who these heads are). If you want Lightroom to point out potential faces and if you've already selected Face Detection (above), in the tool region above the thumbnails you can see a face, click on this. and Lightroom will point out what Lightroom considers a face. This is shown in the image below where Lightroom says "Draw Face Region." I should point out that in the beginning Lightroom can be howelingly wrong in determining what's a face or even the sex of people, but as you teach it faces Lightroom not only gets better at determining what in an image is a face but also becomes very good at recognizing who's who. Also note the face image to the right of Survey View (circled in green) below, this gives you "People" (or tap "o"). If you click on that, you will get a grid of all of the faces that Lightroom thinks it sees. From there you can easily run though these images and identify who's who. AS you progress though this, Lightroom will get better and better. And for the images that are clearly not faces or people you do not care to know, simply tap the Delete key and not have to deal with them again. The difference between having a region drawn around faces (with Draw Face Region) is that you can see the whole image and can therefore see the images in context. If you select to view the People option, all you see are faces in a grid fashion and will not have the rest of the image to put the face in context. The advantages of facial recognition is pretty obvious: let's say your parents are having their 40th anniversary and you wish to prepare a book of their anniversaries though the years. Do a search on their name(s) and bingo, after some selection, you've got your gift. Using keywords to find images Although this has nothing to do with setting keywords, let me point out one of the easy ways to use keywords. Just below the keyword entry region mentioned above, look for the listing "Keyword List." In this section you will see every keyword you've assigned in alphabetical order. If the list is long you can search for specific keywords in the field at the top. [Note: I truncated this list at the purple line to show a sample and the top of the list.] If you mouse-over the keywords, you'll see an arrow pointing to the right on the right side of that keyword. If you click on that arrow, every image that has that keyword will be there immediately. In addition, you'll see a check mark on the left side letting you know that you're seeing all of the these images. You'll also note a shaded check mark just below that for California. This lets you know that for this example Calico Ghost Town are images that are also part of the images in California. In summary If you've read this far, you win an ice cream cone. The amount of actual process listed above is not all that much, but I've shown a considerable amount of extra attention to what's happening within Lightroom to help as much as possible. Lightroom is a fantastic program with the one annoying aspect that items you just finished observing are now gone or different because you just tapped on something in the window. It's kind of like when you put your keys down a moment ago and now your keys are gone for good (or so it seems). I hope you enjoy obtaining access to your slides as much as I have. It's been great seeing friends, family, and places I've been but haven't seen in many a year. It's also been very interesting to see how I've developed (or not) as a photographer in the 40+ years I've been taking photos.
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