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Former O'Reilly web producer Justin Watt just made a surprisingly cool video by combining still photos with a soundtrack made in Looptastic, a $5 iPhone app. (There are also free and 99-cent versions.) Justin used FFmpeg (also free) to sequence the still images, overlay the soundtrack, and render the movie.

Last week, Matt Kloskowski on his blog Lightroom Killer Tips (which, by the way, is an excellent Lightroom resource. If you haven't been there yet ... What are you waiting for?) posted an article Is it wrong to steal Lightroom presets? discussing the ethics/legality/morality of copying someone else's presets and applying that to your own work. With the exception of Matt's drug company argument (drug companies use patents to protect their drugs. It's only when the patents expire that others can produce generic copies) I have to agree with him. To equate the process with the final product is not something copyright law contemplates. It's ludicrous to think that Michaelangelo could sue because you happened to sculpt using marble because he used marble! You could give me all the marble you want and there's no way you'll get a David or a Pieta out of me! LOL

There is an interesting, but sometimes confusing, issue when you create a virtual copy while you are working in the Develop module. Here's the scenario: You are working on an image and before you travel down an alternate creative path you decide to make a virtual copy before proceeding. So you use the menu command or the keyboard shortcut and... poof ...a different image is sitting there instead of your virtual copy! You go back to the Library module or look in the filmstrip and notice your virtual copy did get created. You've done this before and it worked. So what's going on?

Photography on the iPhone can be more than just snapping 2-megapixel pictures. You can also process and transfer the images from the same device that you used to record. For this to work reasonable well, you need a basic...

Earlier versions of Apple's iPhoto stored its library information in a regular folder structure. Around version 7 Apple changed that approach and iPhoto began hiding its folder structure inside a package file. While this makes the applications presence on the drive neater and theoretically more portable, it does hide the images in iPhoto's library from Lightroom.

If you want to migrate your iPhoto library to Lightroom I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that it is relatively easy to import the files. The bad news? Your edits will not migrate easily. Unlike Lightroom, files that you edit in iPhoto are saved as a separate file. You can import these edited files but you will have both an original and the edit without any connection between them. Essentially, you wind up with two separate images. If you're still game here is how you do it.

As we've seen, there are many preferences that can be adjusted in Lightroom to make it work the way you like. But that's not all! Each catalog has its own settings to allow you to further customize your Lightroom experience! Let's take a look at Catalog Settings.

In Part 1 we took a look at the options available on the first three tabs of the Preferences dialog. In Part 2 we'll tackle the remaining three tabs. So let's get started!

Recently, I had some trouble synchronizing images shot from with three different digital cameras when I imported them into Lightroom. As it turned out one of my cameras was not set to the correct time or time zone and this...