All users of Adobe’s Lightroom software need to read Jeff Friedl’s post about JPEG settings in the application. In a nutshell, his own experiments with the quality “slider” reveal that its 0-100 range really amounts to 13 actual outputs, which may or may not match Photoshop’s same number of outputs when saving for the web. More importantly, he noticed that if you save a file as compressed, you do not really gain anything in terms of visual quality if you save above “75″ on the slider. Files get bigger, but images do not get (noticeably) better. Great results from a great guy.

(For the record, I use, and paid for, his Flickr plug-in which allows me to upload directly to my Flickr Pro account from Lightroom. As I consider using Zenfolio, I will also likely use his Zenfolio plug-in.)

Chase Jarvis is the author of the popular Best Camera blog and book. (His argument is/was the best camera is the one you have with you, and so the book is a collection of photographs taken with his iPhone camera. The subtext is that one should focus on such abilities as composition, lighting, and framing rather than worry about the gear/gadgets in your hand.)

Also on his website is a nice video that details his workflow. Jarvis is a professional photographer with not only a serious staff who accompany him everywhere but also a pretty serious collection of gear. Essentially, he runs all his images and video through Aperture and onto hard drives — Adobe, are you paying attention? Video! — the hard drives escalate from portable drives in the field, to small RAID drives in hotel rooms, to a serious XServe set up back at his office/studio.

The takeaway here? Backup, backup, backup. And an important corollary is many, many copies in diverse locations. (Offsite, offsite, offsite.)

A tidbit within all this is the file naming convention they use:

year/project/day/camera/shot

Example:

20100630_ProjectHere_1_S900123.Cr2

Japan’s Soichi Noguchi is currently in residence aboard the International Space Station and is sending, somehow, a stream of images taken from a viewport there. Fantastic photos of Earth, moonsets, and space.

Adobe’s John Nack posted the following video on his blog revealing a new “Context Aware” healing/deletion functionality in PhotoShop CS5. I don’t do that much with PS that I typically need to upgrade — I only went from CS1 to CS3 for the Intel compatibility — but this new functionality, no, this new magic is amazing:

This past spring Pravina Shukla asked me what a JPEG file was and what was the best way to interact with them (if that was the format that your fieldwork data was in). I asked on Mahalo and got an answer, but I continue to read around in hopes of finding better answers to her questions and to the many folks who ask me:

• There’s a detailed explanation of RAW files over at Luminous Landscape. It’s part of their “Understanding …” series.

I’ve seen these photographs a half dozen times over the years, but every time I see them, I am impressed not only by the richness of the color but also by the view into late nineteenth-century life in Europe. (Obviously, Russia, but I imagine the images of peasant life reflect larger patterns.)

And here’s the header note:

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire

Macworld has a review of three iPhone apps that allow you to work with your Flickr account. I don’t see anything that transforms my current workflow, but it’s nice to know they are there. Here’s the review.