Skyrocket.be

If you are anything like me you probably have a huge amount of digital photographs piling up in some folder on your harddrive, together with 10+ backup DVD’s and a bunch of pictures drifting around somewhere on flickr.

I’ve found a pretty decent solution in Google’s Picasa which offers good functionality for it’s price (it’s free) but it has it’s limitations too. The other option I had was purchasing a better tool like ACDSee 8 or ThumbsPlus 7 but they either are too bloathed or too simple.

But! Today Adobe released a first beta of Lightroom, their new photomanager. My guess Adobe is trying to get some marketshare from Aperture and they probably think, the sooner the better. The list of known bugs is extensive but it’s a beta so who’s complaining.

If you want to give it a try you’ll need to be using a Mac since they only released a demo for Mac OS X. Check Adobe’s website (or macromedia’s if you will) for the beta and give it a try.

There even are some first looks and reviews popping up here and there, one of them can be found at http://www.luminous-landscape.com and another one at http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1109600/

Photoshop TV has a nice review on Lightroom in issue 12 of their videocast, just skip past Scott Kelby’s and Dave Cross’ boring jokes and take a look at how Lightroom works. It really looks damn nice!

There are some of those days when you just feel like you own the world because you found out something cool. And most of the times those things you just found out, are things you wonder how you couldn’t have known about.

Hiding multiple layers in Photoshop

If you are like me you probably like your graphics all nice and tidy, each on it’s own layer. Several of them grouped together in layer sets. The amount of layers can add up pretty fast if you are heavy on detail and graphics and hiding or unhiding several layers can be a timeconsuming and annoying task.

By accident i found out that you can easily hide or show several layers with only clicking once. Just click and hold on the eye icon of the first layer you want to hide and then drag down or up, over the eye icons of the other layers and they’ll automagically will hide or show too. Pretty fast and easy if you ask me.

If anybody has some of these small tips you think nobody knows about, please share them. Some of them are lifesavers!

Edit: This also works for linking layers, just click and drag on the chain icons. Thanks to Bart from Percept.be for this tip!