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Here Come the Plug-ins
Ever since Adobe announced an SDK for making Lightroom plug-ins I've been curious to see how third parties might expand the program's capabilities and efficiency. So I've been keeping a list of the plug-ins I've been hearing about. I haven't had the time to test most of these, but it still may be helpful to you if I share my list and perhaps we can share our experiences and knowledge as we move along.
The first plug-in that I became aware of was for a program that I'd already been using for some time: LightZone. It's a program that is able to make localized non-destructive adjustments. You can check it out at Lightcrafts, Inc.
DxO Optics Pro version 4.5 is now available as a plug-in for Lightroom. If you’re not familiar with what the program does and you’re a serious digital photographer who owns a Canon or Nikon, you will do well to inform yourself about all the enhancements that this program is capable of automating as regards the digital output from those camera and lens combination that the company supports. Some of these are non-Canon or Nikon models, but the conversion algorithms are very complex and are very specific to the characteristics of each camera model’s firmware, sensor, and lens optics. So DxO says it’s improbable that they’ll be able to support every new camera lens combination that appears until it has been proven to them that the camera’s sales have been worth their efforts. To find out more, go here.
Geotagging for Lightroom is a beta plug-in written by Jeff Barnes. Its aim is to make it possible to sync photos in Lightroom’s catalog to a GPS after adding the GPS tags to specific photos within Lightroom. There’s no charge for the plug-in, just go here.
SlideShowPro is another program that supports a built-in Lightroom plug-in. It allows you to create incredibly professional and versatile Flash websites from within Lightroom. It costs only $25 - or $10 for an upgrade if you already own the program for Flash. If you’re familiar with the Flash program, the Lightroom version has all the same capabilities…but from within Lightroom’s Web module. You’ll find lots of examples of the very versatile photo sites that can be built with this program. Michael Clark has written a least a couple of posts on this program and they’re well worth taking a look at if you haven’t seen them already.
There are several plug-in that allow you to directly share your images on the web from Lightroom. Yahoo already has a downloadable plug-in for exporting your files to Flickr. The plug-in comes with the Lightroom SDK, which is a free download. So even if you don’t want to use the SDK to make your own plug-ins, you can get the plug-in for downloading your files to Flickr.
A Lightroom consultant, Jeffrey Fried, has also written plug-ins for Zenfolio , SmugMug, Flickr and Picasa Web. You can get them for free at his site. Of course, in order to use any of these, you will have to set up an account with the service you want to use. I don’t use any of them at the moment, but I understand that it’s easy and affordable to set up an account. Mr. Fried recommends testing all of them because the one you pick is most likely going to be for reasons of personal taste or because one or the other seems more appropriate to your photography style’s market place. Fried makes it quite plain on his site that these plug-ins may require some experimentation and may not be entirely error-free. His site also has complete instructions for installing the plug-ins.
LightStock is a Lightroom plug-in that lets you make bulk uploads to iStockphoto. You can get it at http://www.slm-tech.com/lightstock/installer.zip for free. The program can be used as either a standalone or as a Lightroom plug-in. It really has my curiousity aroused because it claims to “disambiguate” keywords automatically as they’re uploaded with an image. Let me know what you find out if you try this.
The Mogrify plug-in is said to be useful If your stock agency or client demands that your images be resized to a certain size by a certain method. Timothy Ames has written the plug-in and says he’s willing to work on extending it. You can download it from his site.
Comments (8)
The DxO link doesn't work as it's missing the protocol ("http://") part from the beginning. The LightStock url should be made link as well.
The Mogrify plugin is useful even if you don't send images to stock agencies. It can be used with Flickr export plugin to make borders, watermarks etc to your uploaded images.
Oh and yes, it's Jeffrey Friedl. Not Fried.
Thanks for this. There is also a plug-in to upload images to the open source Gallery (version 2). You can find it here http://moritzpost.de/photography/2007/11/23/lightroom-to-gallery-export-plugin.
Also, I went to the Lightcrafts site. I don't see a Lightzone plug-in for Lightroom, just for Photoshop.
As Esko kindly pointed out, my family name has an "L" at the end.
Many of the items you mention are not plugins, but just programs that you invoke from Lightroom in the same way you can invoke Photoshop (or any other program) on an image. They offer no special integration that the word "plugin" is supposed to evoke.
The Flickr plugin that comes with the SDK is not by Yahoo; it's by Adobe, and it's just meant to illustrate the basics of a plugin for developers. My Flickr plugin is much more advanced/mature, as are my other plugins. The "not error free" issue you mention is, I assume, the upload error that some users see with Windows. Those are a general Lightroom issue that are not specific to my plugins; any plugin that does uploading can experience them.
Besides his LR/Mogrify plugin/piglet, Tim Armes has "LR/Transporter", which allows you to automate some image metadata handling. http://timothyarmes.com/lrtransporter.php
Love your "Expert Techniques" book, Ken.
Jeffrey
Thank you all for your helpful comments. As I stated at the beginning, I have not tested most of these programs, only discovered that they were there and thought it worth mentioning. One-at-a-time, I hope to write a blog about them. So these comments are helping to get me and you more info sooner. Thanks.
The DxO address is http://www.dxo.com
Jeffrey is also technically correct when he says that LightZone and DxO Optics are not, strictly speaking, plug-ins but programs that can be accessed from Lightroom. I have used both of those programs and find them very valuable and useful additions to my post-processing arsenal.
Tim also has another plugin called LR/Enfuse which allows you to blend images HDR style, but automatically. It allows you to send the final file to another program, including Lightroom, meaning you can automatically import the finished file. It works really well.
http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php
Thanks.
I found Enfuse right after I posted the blog. This is one I'm especially interested in and plan to devote a blog to once I've experimented with it a bit and taken some shots that are especially appropriate for testing its talents.
Maybe I'm missing something but I can't find any info on LightZone being a plugin. The only thing I can find is setting LightZone as an external editor, which is quite different than a plug-in. no?
Now, if I could just burn a slideshow to DVD in Lightroom, all would be right in the world.