In addition to a little hiking, I spent a good deal of the long holiday weekend getting (back) up-to-speed on Lightroom. I’ve been using version 1 since it was first released. The first week of June I finally upgraded to version 2—approximately one week before version 3 was released! Adobe was good about it and sent me a free upgrade to 3.
In the process of learning what’s new, I’ve watched a couple dozen vodcasts. I highly recommend the Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips series from Matt Kloskowski. The casts are brief, to the point, and useful.
One of my favorite features of Lightroom 3 is the ability to publish directly to Flickr. It may seem like a small thing, but I’m convinced it will save me a lot of time. This isn’t like an uploader app. What’s unique about Lightroom’s functionality is the ability to take my adjusted RAW photo, convert it to jpg, connect with my Flickr account, and upload all in one step—taking my meta data with it. In the past I made my adjustments in Lightroom, then exported a jpg, uploaded to Flickr, and then deleted the jpg version from my hard drive. Lightroom 3 lets me bypass the jpg part, performing those steps automatically, behind the scenes. (I set preferences for quality, file size, etc. when I established my connection to the service.)
Further, Lightroom keeps track of which photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. If I alter them later, Lightroom will republish the new version (replacing the old version on Flickr). One caveat: some data travels back to Lightroom from Flickr (tags, for example), but the description does not. So, if you change your description in Flickr and then republish, your description will be wiped out.
I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…
Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!
Here’s how it works:
- open a pdf document
- from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
- choose the page range you want to read and click OK
You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.
- go to File > Export > Word Document
- save the file
Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.
I have to admit I haven’t yet spent much time looking into the new features of Adobe CS4 products—that’s on my things-to-do list for next month, when I’m planning to attend Adobe Max 2008. As a preview, however, I’m particularly intrigued by the new features that allow InDesign to export working swf files as well as xfl files (ready to import natively into the Flash authoring environment). This clip from Adobe TV gives a demo. It’s about 30 minutes long, and you have to persevere through a bit of cheesiness at the beginning. (The part where he speaks to plush stuffed toys only lasts for seconds…resist the urge to turn it off there! Seriously.) It’s really a fascinating idea, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further.