Prolost Burns

When I was creating the demo video for the Prolost Lightroom Presets, I wanted a quick way to create the classic zooming/dissolving photo montages known as the “Ken Burns effect.” And because sometimes your scaffolding needs scaffolding of its own, I decided to make an Animation Preset to speed the process.

Prolost Burns is an Animation Preset for Adobe After Effects CS6 and greater that automates the process of creating this type of animation. It’s so handy that I thought you might get some use out of it yourself.

• Set the start and end zoom values, and your layer will smoothly zoom over its entire duration. Changing the layer’s length automatically adjusts the animation.
• Use any comp size and any layer size.
• Layers automatically cross-dissolve based on how they overlap in the timeline.
• Set a custom center point for the zooming animation, to draw the viewer’s focus.
• Apply the preset to many layers at once for a near instantaneous setup.
• Works with Adobe After Effects CS6 and CC, Mac and Windows.

Prolost Burns makes it insanely easy to set up gorgeous photo montages. Get it now for only $3.99.

Prolost Presets for Lightroom

As those of you who watched my Lightroom User Group presentation learned, I use a system of graduated presets for processing my photos in Adobe Lightroom. I’ve essentially used these presets to redesign the Lightroom user interface—instead of using sliders to specify adjustments, the presets allow me to see and react to visual choices, tapping into some of the same instincts I’ve developed behind the lens.

I quietly offered the presets to early adopters, but now it’s time to properly release them. The set of over 400 presets is available now for only $19.99. They work on Mac and Windows, and require Lightroom 4 or higher.

This is version 1.5 of the presets. I’ve tweaked a few things and added some new presets, including 5 extremely useful Color Treatment presets, the Prolost Technical group, and a Red Scale preset in Prolost Creative. If you bought the presets before as an early adopter, you probably don’t need to upgrade, but doing so is a lovely way to support future offering like this.

Adobe Shows Off That Lightroom Thing I Described

Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty appeared on Scott Kelby’s show The Grid and showed a “technology preview” of Creative Cloud-synced raw photo editing on an iPad.

Sounds familiar!

And although Tom mostly showed visual editing, necessary for a sexy demo, he spent a good deal of time talking about the value of organizational tools such as sorting and reading, which is where I think the real value lies, as I wrote last year:

What I want from a mobile Lightroom companion is a way to utilize whatever idle time I might have here and there for productive work on my main Lightroom Catalog. I don’t want to send new photos to it. I don’t want to adjust exposure and color temperature. I just want to do what I never seem to have enough time to do at home: housekeeping.

Half the reason I use Lightroom over the other DAM/raw processing tools out there is that I like it better. The other half is that I love the way Adobe engages with the community. You can have a relationship with Adobe, and software is a relationship.

So thanks for the tease Tom! Looks great. Just please dodn’t get so wrapped up in the sexiness of mobile editing that you forget about the incredible value of sorting and tagging on the go.

Watch Me Light Up the Room

On Wednesday, December 5, I’ll be presenting at the SF Bay Area Lightroom User Group. I’ll be showing off my “Develop module workflow,” which means I’ll be dropping the science on making the pretty.

I have a rather crazy methodology of working in Lightroom’s Develop module that uses hundreds of custom-made presets (UPDATE: now available, see below). I’ve been wanting to share it with y’all for a while now, and this seemed like a great way to do it. I hope you can come!

Update on Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 11:13AM by Stu

The presentation was recorded is now available online! Thanks very much to Benjamin Warde and Adobe for having me, it was a lot of fun.

Update on Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 11:44AM by Stu

I’ve made the presets available at a special price for those of you “early adopters” who require no further documentation than the video of the presentation.

Update on Friday, July 5, 2013 at 1:37PM by Stu

The Prolost Lightroom Presets are temporarily unavailable while I prepare them for proper sale. Check back here for updates!

Update on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 at 8:50AM by Stu

The Prolost Presets are reborn, with new categories, new presets, and a handy tutorial video.