Sean McCormack has just released LRB Exhibition a new Web Gallery based on his own website. It is in the form of a Website within a Lightroom Web Gallery. It features:

As Sean says “From the Portfolio family, it allows the user to create home, about, contact and general use pages, along with 6 galleries and 2 external links.”

The main image area in the gallery is based around a single image preview in an enclosed space. Using jQuery, each slide can be navigated to either using the navigation arrows, or numbered links to the relevant slide. LRB Exhibition is far more mature that LRB Portfolio was at version 1.0, in fact it’s almost par with LRB Portfolio 2.51, and probably equal to 2.4. It does however have features not available to LRB Portfolio, such as per page image and text placement and a floating text box.”

A sample is available here. And it is available now for €15

While I have been away a few Lightroom Plug-ins/Galleries have been updated.

Mark Wilson has released Nature Data LR, a Lightroom 2 Plug-in for adding species data fields on your photos.

The fields provide a formal and structured approach to organising your images of natural subjects such as birds and mammals.

The plug-in adds a new metadata panel to the library module, a new dialog to manage the additonal data and an export action to add the data to keywords on exported images. Updates are available through an RSS feed or via Twitter.

Mark’s other Plug-ins are available on his site.

John Beardsworth has just updated BeardyReplace to a Release Candidate which Searches and replaces metadata text; appends text to metadata fields and transfers text between metadata fields

Sean McCormack’s LRB Portfolio has now been updated to version 2.51. There are a lot of plumbing changes which should help efficiency. Some new features include:

• A Text Width slider that allows the user to set the width of the text in the Home, About, Contact and Blank pages.
• An ID Plate Offset Slider that allows the user to nudge the ID Plate for better alignment
• The non Gallery pages now use a separate header file to prevent an error in IE.
• The code is now W3C valid. For the record, it’s possible to have useless valid code, but as some people are bothered by this, it’s done.
• Fixed an IE bug where the ID plate could be hidden by the menu

Adobe have released a minor update to Lightroom containing one important fix that is only relevant for Leica M9 users which caused Lightroom 2.6 to crash when processing certain M9 images

There is no need to update to 2.6.1 if you aren’t a Leica M9 user.

Lightroom 2.6, Mac and Win and Adobe Camera Raw 5.6 Mac and Win have been released after spending some time as public betas on Adobe Labs.

The following new cameras are supported in this release:

Canon
Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, Canon EOS 7D, Canon PowerShot G11, Canon PowerShot S90

Medium Format
Leaf Aptus-II 5, Mamiya DM22, Mamiya DM28, Mamiya DM33, Mamiya DM56, Mamiya M18, Mamiya M22, Mamiya M31

Nikon
Nikon D3s

Olympus
Olympus E-P2

Panasonic
Panasonic DMC-FZ38

Pentax
Pentax K-x

Sigma
Sigma DP1s

Sony
Sony A500, Sony A550, Sony A850

Release Notes
1) Camera Raw 5.6 and Lightroom 2.6 provide a fix for an issue affecting PowerPC customers using the final Lightroom 2.5, Camera Raw 5.5 and DNG Converter 5.5 updates on the Mac. The issue, introduced in the demosaic change to address sensors with unequal green response, has the potential to create artifacts in highlight areas when processing raw files from Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and various medium format digital camera backs.

2) The Lightroom 3 beta has not been updated with this new camera support. If you’re working with one of these newer cameras and the Lightroom 3 beta, please use the DNG Converter 5.6 to convert proprietary formats to DNG files that can be used in the Lightroom 3 beta.

3) This release includes improved camera profiles for the Leica M9 and Ricoh GXR.

The X-Rite ColorChecker Passport offers a stand-alone camera DNG profiling and RAW workflow solution for use within a RAW file editor. It consists of a pack of Creative Enhancement Targets, Classic Targets and White Balance Targets.

It comes with a Lightroom plug-in. The process allows you to shoot a color target, convert/save as a DNG, drop it on to the ColorChecker Passport software and create a DNG profile. This can then be applied to an image, a preset created and then applied to many images within Lightroom. (That is the quickest and simplest description of it!)

This seriously useful piece of kit has already been reviewed by Michael Reichmann on both his Luminous Landscape site and in the latest Luminous Landscape Video Journal and a video is available on the X-Rite site describing how to use it.

What is really nice is that you can register for, download the software and use it with existing Gretag Macbeth charts all for free. You will, of course, benefit from far more by buying the whole package, but as a try before you buy it is well worth it.

Lightroom 3 Beta help is now available on the Adobe Community Help AIR viewer. As a moderator this should prove a useful addition, and hopefully of benefit to you the users!
Commenting is now available on the forum and via the AIR viewer as well.

For more info check out the Adobe Phosphors blog.

BragIt HTML Slideshow Plug-in for Lightroom is a Lightroom plug-in that makes it possible to publish a slideshow-like collection of photos directly from Lightroom to the web. The resulting slideshow has a scrolling index page of all photo thumbnails, an identity plate, an introductory description, and annotations with each large photo. The slideshows do not require Flash or any browser plug-ins for viewing. HTML Slideshow is 10 Euro for Mac OS X or Windows with Adobe Lightroom 2 or later.

Adobe Labs is now hosting Lightroom 2.6 and Camera Raw 5.6 for you to try out before they are officially released.

The following new cameras are supported:

• Canon EOS 7D
• Canon PowerShot G11
• Canon PowerShot S90
• Leaf Aptus II 5
• Mamiya DM22, DM28, DM33, DM56, M18, M22, M31
• Nikon D3s
• Olympus E-P2
• Pentax K-x
• Panasonic FZ38
• Sigma DP1s
• Sony A500,  A550,  A850

There are extra release notes which can be found on Lightroom Journal.

The online community help resource for Lightroom 3 Beta has been made live.

From Lightroom 3 Beta, choose Help > Lightroom Help… (F1). Or you can use the direct link http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/index.html

You will find a variety of topics relating to LR 3, including What’s New, Import, Publish Services, Watermarking, FilmGrain, Process Versions, Postcrop Vignette’s, Video Slideshows and Custom Print Packages.

It is pre-release, so the usual commenting features are not available, but the intention is that they will be there soon.

As a novice devotee of timelapse photography, I was intrigued when I first saw the ability to Slideshow > Export to Video in the Lightroom 3 builds, and recent work by Sean McCormack, Andy Rahn, Lee Jay Fingersh and Matt Dawson has shown how versatile it is.

Sean has written Direct Timelapse Video Export from Lightroom for Lightroom News and it is well worth a read.