Smart Objects in Adobe CS4

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I'm working on another book project that involves editing a lot of photos in Lightroom and importing them into InDesign.   There are lots of cycles of importing into InDesign, looking at the images, deciding on an edit, making the edit in Lightroom (brightness, contrast, etc.), reimporting into InDesign, etc.   It would be really cool if you could export a photo from Lightroom  as a Smart Object into InDesign. You can export as a smart object into Photoshop.  Why not InDesign?

After playing around more, it looks like the Smart Object communication between Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop doesn't exactly work the way I was expecting.  I've got some learning to do here but I think this could be really cool.

Thinking of buying a photo printer

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I'm finally thinking of getting around to buying a photo printer.  I do most of my printing at Mpix.com but I'm getting frustrated with the slow cycle time of the print - ship - see results - adjust colors - reprint cycle.  I think it's time to bite the bullet and bring printing of small images (probably only as large as 8x10) in-house.  I look forward to tweaking colors and printing endless 4x6's until it looks right and then taking the resulting file over to Picture Element and saying "make me a big one like this". I've heard such great things about Epsons and such horrible things about Canons that I think I'm going to go with an Epson.  After shooting a Canon SLR for a couple years I can only imagine the anti-photographer workflow their printers must have, and the original experience of Michael Reichman over at The Luminous Landscape seems to bear this out.  (Note:  He did have a much better experience with the newer iPF6100, but still...)

So the next questions are:

1) How big?  8x10?  11x17?  16x20?

2) What quality?  Each brand seems to have at least two choices in each size.

3) Is Epson going to announce anything for PMA next month?

I'm currently thinking of an R1900, a 2800, or maybe something as extravagant as a 3800.  I'm doing all sorts of spreadsheet calculations to figure out what the break-even point on each of these printers is (based on usage) and trying to do as much research as I can.

One nice little nugget of web info is Eric Chan's excellent Epson 3800 FAQ.

How some people use flickr...

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It has come to my attention that some people use flickr as the primary repository for their pictures.  Then, for some reason or another (warranted or unwarranted) flickr closes their account and they apparently lose access to all of their photos.  And then they blog about how flickr closed their account and they have no other copies of these photos. People use flickr to store their only copies of a photo? Why would you do this?   Come on people, get some self-reliance...

New Year's and magazines: Renewal and a parting gift

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Happy New Year's everyone!  New Year's is a time to look back at the previous year and look forward to the coming year.  Lots of people set goals and vow that this year will be better than the last year, etc. etc. etc...   New Year's celebrates the annual cycle of life, much like magazine subscriptions. Speaking of magazine subscriptions, I've got a small pile of renewal notices that need to be answered.  I'll be renewing National Geographic and Digital Photo Pro again this year, but apparently there will be no need to renew the most interesting magazine I'm subscribed to: JPG.   I just got mail from them saying that despite their best efforts they can't manage to make the numbers work out and will be folding January 5th.  :-(

The parting gift:  As they point out, they have their full issues available in PDF form (PDFs of JPG???  How ironic!) on their website and you can download them all for free until their website goes away.  Go here:  http://jpgmag.com/downloads/archives.html

So there you have it - A new year brings opportunity for growth and personal improvement, as well as a little bit of death.

Happy New Year!