When uploading the photos into Lightroom, the pictures don’t match in the slider. It’s necessary to get them in sync. This will help you to get them adjusted. It should be a no-brainer, but sometimes the frustration of forgetting can overpower the common sense on how to make the actual adjustment.

It’s important to know that there are three options for changing photo dates when using the Metadata | Edit Capture Time menu option:

1. Adjust to a specified date and time
2. Shift by set number of hours (time zone adjust)
3. Change to file’s creation date

Option #1 is the one which we’ll use to perform this adjustment. Important: When you select all photos in the Library module Grid view and make an adjustment to one photo, ALL selected photos will be adjusted by the same difference. Nice trick. Just wanted to let you know.

Changing Photo’s Date and Time

Here are the Mac Lightroom 2 steps to adjust all photos, using ONE photo as the master:

1. Start OpenOffice and create a new spreadsheet.
2. Cell A1: type a description of the first camera where the date is incorrect (example: D70s)
3. Cell A2: type a description of the second camera where the date is correct (example: D300)
4. Cell A3: type text “Date Difference”
5. Cell A4: type text “Photo Date”
6. Cell A5: type text “New Photo Date”
7. Cell B1: type the current date of the camera with the incorrect date (example: 11:54:58 PM)
8. Cell B2: type the current date of the camera with the correct date (example: 10:53:20 PM)
9. Cell B3: type formula “=B2-B1″ which will now represent the difference between the cameras. If the first camera date is older than camera two then this difference will be represented with a negative time. In our example the cell will read “-01:01:38″. (Hrs:Mins:Secs) This will be used to determine the New Photo Date.
10. In Lightroom, select a photo from the incorrect photo set
    1. Change to the Library Module in Grid View (press G as a shortcut)
    2. Show the filter bar: View | Show Filter bar (press \ as a shortcut)
    3. Click the “Metadata” filter
    4. Choose the camera model that has the incorrect date (example: D70s)
    5. Select all photos: Edit | Select All (press Command-A)
    6. With all photos selected, click on one photo, which becomes the master
11. Once a master photo is selected, select the menu option Metadata | Edit Capture Time… to open the dialog to make adjustments
12. Cell B4: type the date of the master photo from the Edit Capture Time dialog
13. Cell B5: type formula “=B4-ABS(B3)” to reveal the new photo date time; the ABS function produces an absolute value, which removes the negative sign and always makes the date time a positive value
14. Switch to the Lightroom Edit Capture Time dialog and type the new time and click Change All
15. Confirm the adjustment is correct
16. In the Library Filter adjust to NONE, which then closes the Library Filter

These steps will change not only the master photo but all the photos that have been selected using the Library filter. Save the OpenOffice Spreadsheet so in case you have to do this again, the template has been created.

OpenOffice Date Spreadsheet

Finally

Finally, set the correct date on both cameras to be exactly the same, or you’ll be right back here frustrated and need to walk through the steps to make your life easier.

The Five Rules

In Adobe’s Lightroom, there is a work environment that help make working on photos much easier. Sometimes, and all too often, do the toolbars or panels get in the way of working on photos. Well, adobe put together The Five Rules to help you understand the the environment better. I won’t go into those here because they’ve done a great job on their own. I will tell you though how to get to the tutorial in Lightroom, and then I’ll explain some Key Commands that they don’t cover.In Lightroom, you can access the tutorial from the Help menu and then select The Five Rules.

The main items in the environment are:

• The Module Picker – which is where you control what work flow module you are in.
• The Panels – which are the organizational, informational, and tool work areas.
• The Filmstrip – which is the photo filmstrip view offering filtering and designating working sets.

Sliding Panels

Auto Hide & Show

This option causes any of the panels to automatically slide in when the mouse is hovering over it or slide away when the mouse is off of the panel area.

Auto Hide

This is almost the same as above with the difference that the panel will slide out of the way when you move your mouse off the panel area to work on the photos, but when your mouse hovers over that area, it won’t appear unless you purposefully click your mouse and it slides back in to view. This is nice so that when you are moving the mouse around all the edges working, those panel don’t start sliding out when you don’t want them to.

Manual

This is the default and the panels will only slide in to view or out of view when you click on the arrows.

Sync with Opposite Panel

I wondered what this was and never got around to trying it out and now I have it on all the time. There are times when I want to hide the thumbnail filmstrip at the bottom of my window. And at the same time I would always want to hide the Module Picker on “the opposite side” as well. That’s two clicks, one at the top and one at the bottom to hide both panels. With this option set, both panels at the top and bottom will hide and show at the same time when either one of the arrows is clicked, thus they will be “synced”.

The top panel is only in sync with the bottom panel and the left panel is only in sync with the right panel. However, if you use any of the features above, like Auto Hide & Show or Auto Hide. This feature doesn’t seem to “sync” like it does in manual mode.

Aside from that, this is a great feature and I used it all the time now.

• Free
  • GIMP
  • Inkscape
  • VectorMagic (for tracing to Vector)
• Pay
  • Lightroom (photo management)
  • PS (Photoshop CS)

Forthcoming will be some tutorials in using these to help you in your use of them. If you have any other graphics suggestions or tutorials, let me know and I’ll post them.