Adobe Lightroom – Plugins
Various plugins that I have either used or at least tried:
Export
- Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools) — Very nice set of plugins and tools. I have found this tools more useful but that’s because I don’t export to any of the photosharing sites.
- LR2/Mogrify — Very powerful manipulation tool. This is actually something that should come with Lightroom. LR’s watermarking is just plane horrible. With LR2/Mogrify though you can just about do anything you want.
External Editors
- Noise Ninja – This has been my go to tool for noise reduction for almost as long as I’ve been doing digital photography. With sports and bad field lights, I’m almost always at 3200 ISO and with the 1D Mark IIN’s noise is always an issue. It’s cheap, fast and good. Photoshop and Lightroom filter/plugin are both included in the purchase.
- Nik Software – I’m really starting to get more and more impressed with their entire suite, currently I’m really impressed with Viveza. I’ve been a proponent of Noise Ninja and onStep but Nik is winning me more. The Good: Very easy to use, very powerful – seconds to do anything which can take hours in photoshop. The Bad: 1) Lightroom and Photoshop plugins are two separate products (2 things to buy). 2) It’s relatively expensive compared to other plugins.
- PTLens is a great tool if you do a lot of lens corrections. If you don’t have or use photoshop, this is a replacement for the Lens Correction Filter right from Lightroom.
- Photomatix as always is the one tool you need if you do HDR (or semi-HDR). I use this almost on every landscape shoot that I do. You don’t have to go crazy and produce one of those overly contrasty HDR images, you can simply use it to capture some more detail in the shadows and reduce the blown out portions. I find this a very useful tool for landscapes.
There are various slide show and web plugins but I really don’t like any of them. The freebie that comes with Lightroom is great, and you can get the source code for it cheap, which means you can modify it and make it whatever you want.
