Technical advances for members of Outdoor Writers Association of America

Who needs Lightroom?

By Jim Low

Who needs Lightroom?

Adobe has a new product – Photoshop Lightroom – that can help you make more money.

First, a disclaimer. If you already are competent in Photoshop CS and have devised a quick, efficient workflow that incorporates downloading, editing, cataloging and archiving your digital images, you don’t need Lightroom.

For the other 90 percent of us, Lightroom is a godsend. It combines the most useful functions of Photoshop Bridge and Photoshop, plus some features found in neither of the other programs. Having all this capability in one place saves you time, and in the freelance business, time is money.

Here, briefly, is how it works. You pop a flash memory card or CD with photo files in your computer. It doesn’t matter what brand of camera or computer you own, nor does it matter if you shoot RAW or JPEGs. Lightroom handles them all.

It automatically finds the new images and asks you to assign names and key words to the files before adding them to your collection. You can view the whole lot – one photo or 10,000 – immediately and delete those that are not up to spec. Those you select are dropped into a window for development, printing or e-mailing or faxing. Finish by adding metadata (translation: “notes”) about the photo shoot, copyright information, etc. Then drop the images into folders and subfolders you create to suit your filing needs. At the same time, Lightroom backs up the images and data wherever you want – an external hard drive, CD, etc.

The “Develop” module has photo editing tools that are a dream come true for writers who are not digital photography geniuses. It makes advanced image manipulation remarkably easy. For example, the functions for adjusting shadow and highlight detail have sideboards that stop you before you do more harm than good.

Files are downloaded as digital negatives. That just means that they retain all the data from the original image, whatever its format. When you finish with an image in Lightroom, you can open it in Photoshop and manipulate it however you like. When you are done, save it as a digital negative, a JPEG, TIFF or whatever you need to please a given editor.

The new version of Lightroom – 1.1 – sells for $299. Students can buy it for less. When combined with Photoshop Elements, Lightroom does everything the average writer wants to do with her or his photos. 

Lightroom comes with a good 77-page users manual. The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (http://www.photoshopuser.com, dues $99 per year) gives its members a wealth of information about this and other Adobe products, plus discounts on software. A variety of online forums also cater to Lightroom users’ needs.

I hate learning new software, but Lightroom so intuitive and it has made my life so much easier, I actually enjoy delving deeper into its capabilities. To learn more, check out the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Lightroom. This entry includes links to several other online resources.

Jim Low is a recovering Luddite and lover of two blondes, one human and one canine. He’s also been an OWAA member since 1987.

TOP

Search engines drive traffic to your site

By Timothy Kusherets

Fledgling Web sites rely on search engines to direct much-needed traffic their way, so getting the attention of the search engines is a pivotal first step. Finding and arranging just the right words to feed to the search engines is the key to success.

Uploading information to search engines is relatively easy using catch phrases and words that mirror what the site is all about. Almost every page on the Web starts out with a header, in which the title of the site is listed, and then come meta tags. Meta tags are keywords and phrases that robotic search programs focus on. The listing and order of the words are then fed into a database that categorizes how each of them will pop up on any given search engine, so the order of these words, or key phrases, is paramount.

To figure out what words to use it’s critical to think in the same way commercial premises communicate on television. “Tastes great” is a phrase we all associate with beer, which is exactly how it works for anything on the Web. Think about your genre and then think about the single most important set of words that goes with it. There are literally hundreds of words and phrases for hunting, fishing, hiking and boating. All of them have subcategories that break down into even smaller categories, so this is how to start it all. When thinking about the kind of fishing or hunting, ask yourself what it is your site is specifically about. If you’re a bass angler, good meta tags would be “bass angling,” “bass fishing” and “bass boating.” Each phrase is categorized in order of importance and each word is done exactly the same.

The great thing about listing phrases and words is that they can be listed together or apart, depending on what query is typed into the search engine. If those phrases and words “match” the overall material on your site then your site will be listed higher in the order of the search engine. Don’t think that listing words willy-nilly will move your Web site higher on the list. Every one of a million sites strives to pop up at the top of the heap on a search engine – but beware. Search programmers have created a kind of cyber cop to ferret out those who try to trick the system. These “search bots” patrol the Web day and night. Search-bot programs are excellent at ferreting out those sites that just put a bunch of words on their meta-tags list in the hopes of gaining a better foothold in site ordering. Search-bots are programs that will look at your “template” HTML page and then read every single word on your site, extrapolating correlations and misrepresentations and list the site accordingly.

In the end, search engines are meant to make surfing the Web easier and to get some sites off the ground. I say “some” because it takes a certain dedication to keep a site up and running optimally, and few webmasters and authors have the stomach for all the protocols in the beginning, and that’s the payoff some never see. Eventually, if a site receives enough traffic word starts to spread word-of-mouth or via e-mail and visitors will begin typing in the exact URL to your Web site, circumventing all search engines, but that only comes with time and sincere effort. We live in a cyber-world of cut-and-paste so even long Web site names are incredibly easy to copy and paste into a browser, and then it’s just a click on the “enter” or “send” and poof, there are your visitors.

Like any good business there are rules that govern how Web sites are supposed to function, at least within the constraints of initial search engines. Search engines do not focus on legalities, morals, or ethics, which is why it’s critical to take essential steps to self-govern content. Match what you’d like to say in those meta-tags with the premise of your site and the traffic will come. Later, as your site matures, you can expect a good number of referrals from search engines and even more from direct traffic via your URL. Like it was said before, do it right and you can at the very least expect your traffic to grow at a geometric rate, and that’s good business for any site, store, or shop.

Timothy Kusherets is a book author and creator, editor and photographer of the Web site Top Fishing Secrets, www.topfishingsecrets.com.

TOP