Since I'm busy, busy with client work and writing a book, thought I'd at least post a colorful photo I took a few weeks ago while on a road trip to North Carolina.  Any interest of viewing more of these types of photos, visit my Picasa gallery of Saturated North Carolina.

If you care about how the photo was made: I use a Canon 20D, a Sigma 24-70 2.8 lens, tripod, a neutral density filter (3 grad, soft), and some fun with color saturation in Photoshop CS3.

I just installed the Flickr Upload Demo plugin for the Adobe Lightoom SDK to quickly see how the integration with Lightroom looks.  I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed.  While, I'll admit I'm not a massive power user of Flickr, and the Flickr plugin included in the SDK is only for demo purposes (it requires you're personal Flickr API key), it does seem to work well.

Here's what the main dialog looks like (for those of you who haven't installed Lightroom 1.3, the Export dialog has changed quite a bit, probably to support the SDK):

As you can see, it supports a lot of what you'd expect: The resizing of images, the managing of the Flickr account, the naming of files, the inclusion of Metadata, whether the upload should be public/private.  What looks really appealing is the ability to include metadata from Lightroom and adding other tags just for the flickr upload.

Something I'd like to see on a Flickr upload plugin, is the ability to map tags.  For example, if I have an image tagged bob_smith, I'd like to have a mapping file that changes all my bob_smith tags in Lightroom it to just Bob tags in Flickr. 

Here's a shot of what Lightroom looks like during the image upload:

As you can see, the integration is top notch.

Adobe released the beginnings of the Lightroom SDK today in conjunction with Lightroom 1.3.  I eagerly downloaded the 1.3 meg SDK as I've been waiting for this for awhile.  The manual is 96 pages.  There's an API document (html based), and three sample plug-ins, including the programmer favorite, Hello World.  For now, the SDK only supports extending the Export module, but at least it's a start.

Now, Lightroom can play nice with other programs and workflows.  It won't be long until someone has a PicasaWeb uploader and I won't need to use Picasa anymore to manage this.

I'm hoping in the future the SDK will grow so we can create other types of modules allowing companies to create plug-ins that modify image data.  Maybe in future versions, they'll open up and expose some Actionscript/FLEX APIs for modifying/adding to the UI!  That would be sweet.

To prepare for Lightroom SDK development, though, it looks like the developer is going to need to learn the LUA programming language.  According to the LUA website, it's a dynamic scripting language.  Those of you familiar with Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. will easily be able to learn this.  I wonder what kind of code libraries exist in LUA to aid in creating these plugins?  Time for me to dig in.

Quickly looking at the API, it looks like Adobe does a good job of including a lot of useful functionality, from LRFtp, LRHttp, Localization, Logging, etc.  So while we can only build Export plugins for now, it looks like there's a good base to expand upon for future development.

Start creating those Lightroom Export plugins! 

Worked late last night to solidify the functionality of FOTOBlendr, my entry into the Adobe AIR Derby.  It's an application for quickly building photo collages with community shared templates (in progress), as well as a free form tool using custom borders and slapping images on a Collage Canvas.

Currently, it supports the ability to grab images from Flickr, or your filesystem (there's thumbnail generation going on, so it'll take some time to import your local files, but they will be cached for next time).  Then the user can either throw all the images onto a Collage Canvas and then save it, or email it to their friends, or they can enter the Collage Builder mode where their taken to a screen that allows for custom layout.

Here's the 3 minute guided tour

The Main Screen

This is where you get started:

1. Import images from the file system (this takes time as a thumbnail is being rendered for each image in a directory, it's cached for future use, though).  Start with only a directory of 20 or so images, to see how it performs on your computer.
2. Adjust the size of the thumbnail (just like Adobe Lightroom).
3. Select the photos you want to build into a collage.  To select photos, press and hold the ctrl-key and select images.  Those selected will have a white border.  (Shift-selecting ranges of images works, too.)
4. After image selection, press either "I'm Lazy" for a jumbled mess of photos, or "Build Collage" to build your own custom collage.

The Custom Collage Building Screen with Templates

1. You come to this screen after pressing the "Build Collage" button on the main screen.  Here you can apply pre-build templates, or free-form layout your images.
2. Try selecting a template and watch your images fly onto the Collage Canvas.  Then try another template.  If you don't have enough images selected, you'll be warned when you try applying a template designed for more images
3. There's lots of good stuff coming with templates: Background images, B&W backgrounds, etc...it's going to be sexy.

The Custom Collage Screen with Custom Layout and Border Selection

1. If you don't like the templates, create your own.
2. Press "Clear Collage" button to get a blank canvas.
3. Drag your mouse around, the image will be dropped on the canvas when you click.
4. Change the borders, by pressing either the "Choose Border" button which will bring up a menu of borders, or select "Shadow Border", or "Sloppy Border".
5. Resize your images by pressing the "["  or "]" keys.
6. Rotate your images with "," and "."
7. Cycle through available border with "K" and "L"
8. Press "H" for help.  (See below for a screen shot of all the keyboard shortcuts.)

The Border Selector

1. By pressing the "Choose Border" button, or the keyboard shortcut "B", you'll be presented with a preview of borders.  Select the border you like. 
2. In the future, there will be the ability for community members to create border-packs to share.  And the application will be able to filter from the web.

The Help Screen

1. Pressing "H" or the "Help" button will bring up the keyboard shortcuts available.

Email or Save the Collage 

After you are done with your collage save it to your local disk, or email it of to a friend (the resulting file isn't very large).

Thanks for looking.

I'll figure out a way to post the .AIR file soon.