Nov 8, 2009

Lightroom 3 Promotes Creative Writing


Lightroom 3 beta, Folders Panel

Did you know LR3 can make your writing more creative?
Windows folder and Lightroom catalog after writing an article for a new project. aWhitePocket contains images. DinosaurDanceFloor and LocalFlowCells are primary folders with relevant geology. Time’sIndelibleFootprint hosts articles evolving from this project.
PictureWindows hosts the final article…

Creative Writing
Any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes beyond bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature _Wikipedia.

Lightroom 3 significantly lowers writing’s technical bar. For me, creativity has two parts. First, I need to take that perfect picture. Second, looking at the picture creates a swift channel to the part of my brain where easy writing happens.
Now, I must say – Windows folders, available for nearly 15 years, have been unfriendly to this process; for the right image _too much search; _too little find. Yet, they are indelibly engraved in my finger tip consciousness. In creative mode, folders seem to grow with each new idea. There are image folders (full-size images for printing; small size images from manuscripts); writing folders; backup folders - pretty soon, old, tired ~ your mind sorta folds up and says 'enough of that…'!

Enter Lightroom 3!
With the new Folders Panel, photographers quickly create thumbnails of all images in evolving working folders. This works whether you’ve got one folder or several nested subfolder levels. Several nested folders are the inevitable result of creative writing.
But, Lightroom’s for Photographers, not Storytellers. So, it doesn't see Word documents, PDF files, anything else I create with Photoshop outside Lightroom, or all things created when you write and edit a story. I wish it did not take 6-10 diligent efforts to get feelings into good English…
Fortunately, Lightroom engineers got two very important steps right in Version 3. First, they automated bringing new images in, while ignoring dupes. Simply choose your working folder, press the Import button; Lightroom comes back with just those images you need to import, giving full view of only new images. Now choose Import again; bring them into Lightroom where you see them... Second, right click on working folder. When the dialog pops up, choose Show in Explorer. Bingo... now you in the correct Windows creative writing folder panel - working on all your other files.
You've gone from the left side of your brain, which sees images, to the right side, which writes English… Now, I really call that Creative Writing.

Lightroom let’s me see, has smoothed my technical obstacles path, and increased my productivity about 30%!
Don’t forget to tidy your Collections before archiving…

HUZZAH, Adobe Lightroom 3 Engineers!

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