Lightroom Adds Video Color Editing, with Prolost Presets

From the Lightroom Blog:

The same edit controls that you already use to make your photography shine can now be used with your videos as well! Not only can you use Lightroom’s editing capabilities to make your video clips look their best, you can also copy and paste edit settings between photos and videos, allowing you to achieve a consistent aesthetic across both your photos and videos. Presets, including Premium Presets and Lightroom’s AI-powered Recommended Presets, can also be used with videos. Lightroom also allows you to trim off the beginning or end of a video clip to highlight the part of the video that is most important.

Premium Presets in Lightroom for iPhone.

Not all of Lightroom’s color controls are working for video, but it’s enough to be useful. Not every video workflow requires a timeline and dedicated color tools, so I welcome these features.

In fact, I was graciously invited to contribute to them, in the form of a set of Premium Presets available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

Update Lightroom to the latest version to get the new video features, and find my presets under Video: Creative.

New Photography Shortcuts Using ToolBox Pro

My love affair with Apple’s Shortcuts took a bit of a hit during the transition to iOS 13, but my fascination with this on-device development environment has been rekindled thanks to a new app called ToolBox Pro.

ToolBox Pro is a free iOS/iPadOS app that adds powerful new actions to Apple Shortcuts. An in-app purchase unlocks even more functionality. For the definitive write-up on this amazing app, see Federico Vitici’s exhaustive review on MacStories.

What I love about Shortcuts is that it lets me make genuinely useful tools that probably couldn’t sustain the overhead and/or dubious business model of being actual apps. I’ve shared a few of these free Shortcuts at the Prolost Store, and today I’m adding two new ones that take advantage of free features in ToolBox Pro.

Burst Slice

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Burst Slice converts a photo burst from the iPhone/iPad camera into a tiled panorama. You control the size of the “slices,” which frames to use, and even the start and end crop of the slices.

I created Burst Slice before ToolBox Pro was available, but the experience wasn’t great, because Shortcuts can’t show you an image and a menu at the same time. ToolBoxPro allowed me to create a simple, visual interface to adjust the many parameters of this fun and useful tool.

Pano Man

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Pano Man creates tiled panoramas for Instagram that can include multiple images. It uses that same visual UI functionality to give you pushbutton control over the padding, spacing, and cropping of the tiles.

I hope you find these tools useful. I welcome any feedback on them, and am always happy to see examples of them in use!

How the Meta-work of Automation is the Real Work of Work

Note: The original title of this post was “Quadro is Dead, Long Live Stream Deck.”

In my making-of video for TANK, I heaped praise on an iOS app called Quadro, that I’d used to create a custom iPad control surface for my common After Effects tasks.

Mere Days later, Quadro announced that they were shutting down the app, having “not been able to build a solid business structure around it.” This saddened me on many levels — both as a dissapointed user, and also as yet another all-too-familar tale of a developer with a cool, niche product, unable to connect with a paying audience.

The Pursuit of Hardware Control

If you look closely at that video, you’ll see my fascination with specialized input devices expressed in desktop real-estate. Above my keyboard is Loupedeck, a hardware controller made specifically for Lightroom. To my right are the Tangent Element control panels for video color grading. An Apple Magic Trackpad actually functions as a control surface for Magic Bullet Looks. And right next to my iPad is a little box with 15 backlit buttons: the Stream Deck from Elgato.

How the Stream Deck Just Got Awesome

The Stream Deck is designed for live streamers, and automates things they care about, like switching feeds and snap-tweeting their insta-fam. Ninety-nine percent of what it does makes no sense to me. But you can configure those little buttons to perform keyboard shortcuts, so that was enough for me to try it out.

Assigning a single keystroke or chord to a button is not exactly the superpowers that Quadro provided though. The After Effects palette I built for TANK had many multi-sequence macros that performed several operations in sequence. Here are a few examples:

• Duplicate a group of layers, keeping them grouped together: ⌘D, ⌘]
• Set the Work Area to the duration of the selected layer: I, B, O, N, I
• Trim selected layer to match the below layer: ⌘↓, I, ⌘↑, ⌥[, ⌘↓, O, ⌘↑, ⌥]
• Create a new Null layer and trim it to the duration of the selected layer: ⌘⌥⇧Y, ⌘↓, I, ⌘↑, ⌥[, ⌘↓, O, ⌘↑, ⌥], I

(Those are Mac modifier keys — for Windows, replace Command ⌘ with Control, and Option ⌥ with Alt.)

Without this ability, the Stream Deck was a nice-to-have, but not essential for me. But Elgato recently released Stream Deck software update 3.1, with support for Multi-actions. I have begun porting my most-used Quadro macros to Stream Deck, and the results are great so far.

With this update, Stream Deck went from being a fun bonus to, I think, a must-have (and very affordable) add-on for power-users of any desktop software.

Stream Deck on Amazon

A Software-only Solution

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Another very cool option I have explored is Keyboard Maestro from Stairways Software. A powerful general-purpose automation tool for Mac, Keyboard Maestro lets you build very sophisticated macros that go well beyond what Quadro or even Stream Deck can do.

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Here’s a very simple example I created for TANK. Since I was often duplicating layers dozens if not hundreds of times to create particle effects, I created a simple macro that would ask me for a number, and then “press” ⌘D that many times.

I’ve only scratched the surface of Keyboard Maestro, but I have a feeling I’ll soon wonder how I ever lived without it.

Automation is the Work

Many years ago, in film school, I was up late with the brilliant filmmaker Jamie Caliri, helping him with an ambitious stop-motion film. We were sanding and assembling props that he had cast from resin. I asked him how many copies of something pushed him from just hand-making each one into the realm of building a jig, or making a mold, to automate the process. Without even a pause his answer was: Three.

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My father in his workshop in northern Minnesota, building a temporary pine countertop to test the fit of the actual hardwood countertop he's planning on making. I'm proud to think my computer is as organized as his workshop. Unfortunately for both of us, my workshop is as organized as his computer.

I used to think that the “work” of work was the creative mouse-moving or pencil-pushing or camera-clicking. I considered my dalliances into tool-making to be a distraction, and I was impatient with tasks like balancing a gimbal or leveling dolly track. But then I started watching how professionals in other fields work.

Most of the work of painting a room in a house is prep and masking. Much of the process of fine woodworking is creating jigs and rigs. And most of the work on a film set is before “action” and after “cut.”

Notice how brilliant creatives can’t help but build and share tools, like Andrew Kramer’s indispensable FX Console for After Effects, or Nick Campbell’s amazing Cinema 4D tools at Greyscalegorilla.

Professional chefs so celebrate the meta-work of their craft that they have a term for it: mise en place. French for “to put in place,” it means to have all your tools and ingredients prepped and ready to go before you begin the part that to the rest of the world looks like cooking.

When I make stuff, I inevitably wind up making things that help me make the stuff. Tools like Keyboard Maestro for Mac, Workflow for iOS (soon to be integrated into iOS 12), Hazel for Mac (more on that soon I hope), TextExpander, and even the After Effects expressions and scripting engine itself, help us artists build the custom jigs and rigs that make our work easier and more creative. But more than that, they create our artistic mise en place — the working environment unique to our needs that helps the creativity flow.

Slugline on iPhone and iPad

From the Slugline blog:

Today is a big day.

Ever since we released Slugline, the most frequent request we’ve had was to get Slugline on iOS.

It took a long time, because we wanted to do it right. We realized that we needed to re-write scrolling, so it would be fast and smooth. We knew we had to speed up pagination. We wanted to support fancy new iOS 11 things like split-screen and drag-and-drop.

We did all those things. And now Slugline for iOS is available in the App Store for $19.99.

One thing I’ve found interesting as we’ve been working on this: in the early days of Slugline, folks would often request an “iPad app.” We never really thought about Slugline for iPhone, just iPad. But, of course, that changed, with bigger and more capable phones, but also with the emerging collective sense that a phone really is a productivity power tool. I bet writers will use Slugline on iPhone more than on iPad.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me. Go get it!

The Return of Noir and Plastic Bullet for iOS

In the early days of the iPhone, I worked with Red Giant to bring you two photo apps, Plastic Bullet, and Noir.

Just press the button and pick the one you like.

In a world overpopulated with photo “filter” apps, Plastic Bullet is still unique in that it runs a complete photographic simulation on your images. The light leaks and vignettes feel like an organic part of your photos. And the secret formula is different every time, so you get infinite variety, all at the touch of just one button.

We waited long enough that skeuomorphism is cool again.

Noir transforms your photos into rich black and white, with beautiful, dramatic lighting that you control with a customizable vignette.

Each of these two apps was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. People liked them a whole lot.

Then a terrible thing happened. Despite their popularity, these apps became unwieldy and then impossible for Red Giant to sustain. New OS version and new device sizes came along and ultimately left us in the dust.

But we never forgot these apps, and we’ve finally figured out how to bring them back. Red Giant co-founder Drew Little has create a new company called Moment Park to rebuild these and other beloved apps in a smart, sustainable way. And today, they are both once again available on the iTunes App Store, as universal versions for iPhone and iPad.

If you already own them, these are free updates.

Share your results with hashtags #plasticbullet and #noirphoto, and we may contact you about featuring them!