Digital photography has come a long way in the last few years. Few today would argue that digital cannot stand as film's equal. In many cases the technology now surpasses film. Not only do we have a digital substitute for film, we also have digital substitutes for most physical filters. Between the built in tools in Lightroom and the many sets of plugins available there are really only two physical filters needed today.

The effects of a polarizing filter cannot be reproduced digitally. Yes, there are a few digital polarizing effects which attempt to approximate some aspects of a polarizer. But only a physical polarizer present between the subject and the sensor can remove reflections and deepen the sky's shade of blue. You can get close with digital effects but it's much more work that just putting that filter on the lens.

You know that sinking feeling you get when you go to open a file and it's not there or the entire hard drive just won't mount? Your mind races. You wonder where you put that backup. Wait! Did you back that up? It is usually an event like this that finally makes all those articles about backing up make so much sense. Well, if you haven't paid heed thus far perhaps this article will finally give you that extra push. At least as far as Lightroom is concerned. That's it. Start small and build up to full backups!

Before we look at what Lightroom provides for backing up we should touch on the general need for backing up your data overall. The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), with funding from the Library of Congress, has put together an amazing site that every digital photographer should visit regularly, dpBestFlow.org. For our purposes you should take a look at the backup sections for a complete discussion of backup philosophy. Develop the mindset that no file exists until it exists in three places (and one of those needs to be offsite!).

In Part 1 we examined how to use Publish Services to control target folders on the hard drive using the Hard Drive Publish Connection.

There's another Publish Service that comes with Lightroom 3 Beta. The Flickr Publish Service allows us to connect Lightroom to a Flickr account (or multiple Flickr accounts) and manage our photostream from within Lightroom. However, there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Remember, this is beta software, so as you come across issues or areas that can be improved please join the conversation over at the Adobe Forums and tell the Lightroom team about it. You can help make this a great release!

Prior to the release of Lightroom 3 Beta we had the ability to upload our images to various online sites via the Export dialog. Jeffrey Friedl provided several excellent plugins for the Export dialog making it easy to export to these online services. He is hard at work turning those into Publish Services. By the time the final release of Lightroom 3 is ready I'm sure we will have a lot to choose from! For now, let's take a deeper look into how this new features works!

You can find Publish Services in the left side panel of the Library module. When you first start install Lightroom there are two basic services provided: Hard Drive and Flickr. Hard Drive allows you to create folders to receive images via Publish Services. This can be very useful for adding to a folder that is synched to your iPod/iPhone. Perhaps your screensaver is based on a folder of images. Make this a target and you can easily add and manage that. Or perhaps you are compiling images for a client to view and you first want to collect them in a folder from which you can FTP up to your client viewing portal. Interested? Let's take a look.

Yes! It's here! Head on over to Adobe Labs and download the Lightroom 3 Beta! Adobe continues its laudable practice of releasing Lightroom as a public beta to get important feedback from its users! Thanks Adobe!

Lightroom has its first iPhone application! LRKeys from Baum Computer and Graphics helps you learn the many keyboard shortcuts Lightroom provides in order to make your workflow more efficient.

I had the opportunity to take LRKeys out for a test drive and was pleasantly surprised by its simple and enjoyable approach. It provides a preference pane that allows you to set it in either Windows or Mac mode as well as turn sounds on and off. The sounds are cheers when you answer correctly and groans of disappointment when you get a question wrong.

There are many resources on the web for learning about Lightroom. Sometimes it's good to go back to the source. Adobe has a few great resources for Lightroom users that you should add to your list of favorites. Here are a few.

An update to Lightroom version 2.4 is now available! To update your copy of Lightroom simply start the application and you should receive an dialog asking whether you want to update. To download the update directly from Adobe Mac user can click here, Windows users can click here.
The update to 2.4 adds support for cameras from Canon, Nikon, Hasselblad, and more.

On May 27th from 8pm to 10pm learn Photoshop retouching techniques from one of the best! Join Chris Tarantino online at a RetouchPRO live event. The cost is ONLY $10. If you are interested in enhancing your Photoshop skills I recommend you sign up NOW!!!

Chris calls Flower Mound home and is an expert at color management and retouching and has worked in the retouching and color correcting field since 1983. Chris has been described as someone who "breaks" Photoshop to make it work better.

Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate is now available at Adobe Labs! Go to http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Lightroom_2.3 for more information and to download the files. Support has been added for the Nikon D3X and the Olympus E-30.
Also added is language support for Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish. Adobe reports that the RC fixes the following bugs: