First off, I hope you had a Merry Christmas weekend. I had a great time with my family and, of course, my kids got way too much stuff. Anyone else have in-laws that, even though you try to moderate how much you buy your kids (sorry, that Santa brings your kids), they still go out and buy crazy amounts of gifts for them? Its all good though and they had a blast which is what counts.

Anyway, its a vacation week for me but I had an idea for a quick article so I wanted to write about it. Its about stealing. Yep, I said it. Stealing! A while back there was a bit of controversy about a little program that let people see what Lightroom settings were applied to your photo on Flickr. If you followed back then, you may remember that my position on it is that its not stealing. So how can you actually steal a Lightroom preset? Its really not hard and I encourage you to try it. Lets look at mine for example (skip to Step 4 for the real education in this whole thing):

1) First install the preset just as you normally would. We’ll take the Develop module as an example. Let’s say you’ve installed my Fairytale Glow preset from this past November.

2) Now what happens when most people install some one elses preset is that they apply it and it looks cool, but not quite what they imagined. Maybe its too bright. And maybe the vignetting is too strong.

3) Then they apply it to another photo and ya know what? Its too bright again and they’re not crazy about the vignetting.

4) That’s your cue that its time for your own preset. All you have to do is change the Exposure setting and/or change the Vignetting setting to something that seems to work better for you.

5) Then right-click on the preset name in the Presets panel and choose Update with Current Settings. First, give it a cool name – you’re stealing remember, so you don’t want the same name as I use. If you haven’t made any other changes to the preset then its fine to just check everything and click OK. If you have made changes then just turn on those checkboxes and click OK.

That’s it. You’re now a thief You’ve taken something that wasn’t yours and made it your own. I’m joking of course. You didn’t steal crap did you? You’ve merely taken a recipe that I use and modified it to fit your own needs. Happy Thievery!

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Many Canon s90 digital cameras have an Achilles’ heel: the free-wheeling control dial. Here’s what reviewers say about the dial.

The other week I wrote about my all time favorite plug-in of 2009 and asked for your opinions as well. As I read through the comments I saw a lot of questions pop up so I figured I’d cover them today. Here goes:

Q. Lightroom has plug-ins? Did I miss this because I’m still on version 1?
A. Yup! And I gotta tell you. There is not an upgrade of software that I know of in our field that is a no-brainer more than Lightroom 2 over 1. So if you’re still holding out, get it!

Q. Matt, will you do a plug-in workflow video?
A. That’s actually a pretty good idea. Its not going to be revolutionary though. My plug-in workflow is simple. I process the photo in Lightroom, then I jump to Photoshop and do whatever edits I need to there, then I run whatever plug-in on the image, and finally save and jump back to Lightroom. I fit it in when I fit my Photoshop stuff in.

While I have a general order in which I do things (retouching first, and usually sharpening last), I’m not a real stickler for the order in which I do things. If I use, say Nik’s sharpening plug-in, and then decide I want to retouch more or convert to a black and white after, I’m cool with that. I’ve personally never seen it affect my photo negatively. All that said, it would be cool to see it all demonstrated so look for a video on the topic some time soon.

Q. I noticed most plug-ins have Lightroom versions and Photoshop versions. Which one do you use?A. I rarely (almost never) use the Lightroom version of a plug-in. Since all of my photos hit Photoshop at some point I find it easier to just do the plug-in stuff there.

Q. All plug-ins seem to have to work on an exported (JPG, PSD, or TIFF) version of the original raw file. Doesn’t that mean you lose the whole non-destructive-ness aspect of working in Lightroom?
A. Yep! And to the whole non-destructive thing I say Bah Humbug!
Actually, I’m not really a non-destructive purist so it doesn’t bother me to work on an exported copy. Check out a guest blog post I wrote a while back if you want to see my take on the whole non-destructive thing.

I hoped these Q&A’s helped clear a few things up. Feel free to drop a comment if you have any more questions and I’ll try to cover them in the upcoming video. Thanks!

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Just a quick FYI. Adobe has released Lightroom 2.6 and Adobe Camera Raw 5.6 today. They’re basically updates for new camera so if you fall into that category (Nikon D3s, Canon 7D, etc…) then you’ll want to check it out. Also, a quick note for all the Lightroom 3 beta users out there. This update does not update the Lightroom 3 beta. Its only for Lightroom 2. You can find out more and download the update over at Adobe’s website.

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Most photographs of decisive moments are made, not born. Here’s how to increase your chances of creating photographs that stop people in their tracks.

Whether scanning photos, documents with detail or line art, the Canon LiDE 200 does an admirable job. It’s done automatically or you can select scan settings manually.