Compatibility with Adobe Products

[mgsylvestre]

I am a Nikon user using NX more and more to process NEF files and I am looking for a decent compatible browser (or DAM software) to handle browsing, selection of files, ratings and metadata with NEF files.  PM seems to be a good product, but documentation is close to non-existent (any other suggestions by the way?).

I am a bit confused with the options regarding XMP/IPTC.

I want the ratings and metadata to be useable both by PM and Adobe products.  This is very important to me.

When I change the ratings with Adobe products, PM picks it up without any problem, but the reverse is not always true, especially with jpegs.  What am I doing wrong?

Also the IPTC encoding defaults to something like "Mac Roman".  Latin characters (I am French speaking) encoded as such are garbled in Adobe products.  What encoding should I use?  Unicode seems to be working, but 7 days is not a long time to test it.


Regards,

Michel

[Hayo Baan]

Hi there back, Michel.

I am a Nikon user using NX more and more to process NEF files and I am looking for a decent compatible browser (or DAM software) to handle browsing, selection of files, ratings and metadata with NEF files.  PM seems to be a good product, but documentation is close to non-existent (any other suggestions by the way?).

As I said at nikonians: download the manual from the download section (http://camerabits.fileburst.com/Photo%20Mechanic%204%20Manual.pdf)
you'll find it contains more than enough information!

I am a bit confused with the options regarding XMP/IPTC.

I want the ratings and metadata to be useable both by PM and Adobe products.  This is very important to me.

When I change the ratings with Adobe products, PM picks it up without any problem, but the reverse is not always true, especially with jpegs.  What am I doing wrong?

Are you updating and writing both the XMP as well as the IPTC information in the files?  Check your preferences in Tools|Preferences, IPTC/XMP tab.

Also the IPTC encoding defaults to something like "Mac Roman".  Latin characters (I am French speaking) encoded as such are garbled in Adobe products.  What encoding should I use?  Unicode seems to be working, but 7 days is not a long time to test it.

You're on windows: use Windows Latin1+Euro, that should get you through

Hope this helps.

[Kirk Baker]

I am a Nikon user using NX more and more to process NEF files and I am looking for a decent compatible browser (or DAM software) to handle browsing, selection of files, ratings and metadata with NEF files.  PM seems to be a good product, but documentation is close to non-existent (any other suggestions by the way?).

I am a bit confused with the options regarding XMP/IPTC.

I want the ratings and metadata to be useable both by PM and Adobe products.  This is very important to me.

When I change the ratings with Adobe products, PM picks it up without any problem, but the reverse is not always true, especially with jpegs.  What am I doing wrong?

You'll want to setup your IPTC/XMP preferences to look something like this:



[attachment deleted by admin]

[mgsylvestre]

For some reason, I am still having problems with having ratings in jpegs show in other applications.  Any idea why?

Regards,

[Kirk Baker]

For some reason, I am still having problems with having ratings in jpegs show in other applications.  Any idea why?

Make sure that under the Files tab of the Preferences dialog you have PM set to "Add tag, color class, and rating to IPTC/XMP:" set to "For all photos" or at least just for JPEGs.

-Kirk

[marktantrum]

With the latest update of Lightroom, I can now browse the derivative files I create in PM and see the star ratings! This is huge, as Photo Mechanic remains my hub of operations and Lightroom is just a good tool for image processing. I find the email/ copy to different location/ upload to PhotoShelter/ functions in PM very powerfull.

Now that the ratings are showing up in the derivative files (JPEG's I create from Lightroom), the workflow is so completely seamless! I can upload the edited and processed derivative files to PhotoShelter (Archive backup copies), then view only the 2-3 star images that I want to send in to my editors and ftp only those final selects to that server.

I am very happy with the compatibility with the two products- even though Lightroom is trying to do a lot of what Photo Mechanic does, I think that the speed and flexibility of PM being a browser and not a database driven product is always going to give it an edge for photojournalists and busy photographers.

Mark