Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorial - Part XIX - Graduated Filters

Part I - Index and Introduction
Part XX - Exposure vs. Brightness

The second Lightroom tool I'd like to talk about is the graduated filter.

Physical graduated filters are devices commonly used by photographers, usually to darken the filtered parts of an image whose luminance level wouldn't otherwise fall into the dynamic range of the film or the sensor.

Adobe Lightroom brings the same concept into the post-production domain and further enhances it. Lightroom's graduated filters are fully configurable and let you apply different kinds of adjustments:

• Color temperature and tint.
• Basic tone controls: Exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows.
• Clarity.
• Saturation.
• Sharpness.
• Noise.
• Moiré.
• Color.

Furthermore, they allow you to apply both positive and negative adjustments, contrary to what can usually be done with physical graduated filters which can only darken the filtered image.

To add a graduated filter to an image, or modify an existing one, you can use one of the following techniques:

• Select the Tools/Graduated Filter menu item.
• Select the graduated filter icon on the tool strip in the Develop module (described in the previous post).
• Use the 'M' keyboard shortcut.

The graduated filter panel will open as shown in the following screenshot.

Graduated Filter Panel

In the upper part of the panel (called Mask) you can choose whether you're adding a new filter (New, the default choice when you open the panel) or if you want to modify an existing one (Edit). Graduated filters are fully configurable using the adjustment sliders you can find on the main panel window.

You don't need to always start a filter configuration from scratch, though. You can choose an existing filter from the Effect drop-down menu (Lightroom bundles some of them) and even create your own saving the current configuration of a filter into a new preset, using the Save the current settings as a new preset menu item. That's a pretty handy feature if you use similar settings over and over again.
Also, since you will often need to fine tune the filter settings after applying it, you can safely add a configured filter, check the results and fine tune its adjustments according to your needs.

How a Graduated Filter Works

A graduated filter is defined not only by its effect settings, but also by the following parameters:

• Its position on the image and its inclination.
• Its direction, or its orientation.
• Its width.

The meaning of each of these terms is summarized in the following picture and is explained in detail in the following sections:

Characteristics of a Graduated Filter

The position of a filter just indicates where it's located on the image. Its "centre", indicated by the grey handle, is just a convenience for you to spot the existing filters on an image: as far as you move it along the filter axis (the middle line), the results won't change.

As most physical filters, a Lightroom's graduated filter applies effects whose intensity depends solely on the distance of a point from the filter axis (on other words, the intensity is the same along a line that is parallel to the filter axis). The inclination of the filter is the angle between its axis and the horizon and it's a critical parameter that determines how the chosen effect is applied to the image.

The width, determined by the distance between the filter axis and either of the other two lines that define the filter, is the width of the graduated zone of the filter. The larger the graduated zone, the softer the edges of the filter and the smoother degradation of the filter effect from one of its sides to the other.

In fact, a graduated filters applies its effect in three different ways on three different zones of the image that are determined by the its axis and its graduated zone of the filter. When you lie a filter on an image, its axis divides the image into two sides, that we will label inner and outer sides: the inner side is the side of the image that contains the point you started dragging the filter from, the other one being the outer. The filter behaviour outside the graduated zone is the following:

• In the inner side the effect is applied with full intensity. In the previous image, for example, this zone is identified by the blue arrow.
• In the outer side, the filter has no effect.

Inside the graduate zone, the intensity of the filter linearly falls off from 100% to 0% moving along the line perpendicular to the filter axis from the inner side to the outer side. This line, and the direction of the falloff, is indicated on the previous image with a yellow arrow.

Modifying a Graduated Filter

Any parameter of an existing graduated filter can be modified. To select a filter to modify, you've got to perform the following operations:

• Open the graduated filters panel as explained above.
• Select the filter you want to modify by clicking on its handle (the grey circle in its center).
• Apply any modification you want to the effect sliders.

Similarly, you can modify the geometric characteristics of a filter by clicking and dragging:

• Its handle, if you want to move it.
• Its axis, if you want to rotate it.
• Its graduated zone boundaries, if you want to change its width.

Common Uses

Historically, physical graduated filters have been used to reduce the light intensity in selected parts of an image so that all of it falls into the dynamic range of the film or the sensor being used and avoid burning it out. A common case is using a filter to reduce the intensity of the light coming from the sky. Since data from a  clipped channel cannot be recovered in post production, this type of filters is still widely used on camera. Nevertheless, it's often convenient to apply an exposure correction with a graduated filter in post production, provided your channel is not burnt out.

In the following image, I used two graduated filters: the first one was used to slightly darken the exposure of the sky and give it a soft gradient, the other one to recover detail in the shadows that were projected over the square by the building behind me:

Final Image

The first graduated filter is configured to increase the exposure by 1 f/stop and, as you can see in the following screenshot, its axis lays just along the border of the shadow and its graduated zone is very narrow.

Graduated Filter - Exposure: +1

The second graduated filter is configured to decrease the exposure of the sky only slightly, by approximately 1/3 f/stop and, as you can see in the following screenshot, its axis lays just along the border of the building in foreground and its graduated zone is very wide, so that the gradient in the sky is very smooth and soft.

Graduated Filter - Exposure: -0.3

The original picture without graduated filters is the following:

Original Image

As you can, the underexposure of the shadows couldn't have been corrected using the tones controls: since their effect is global, shadows on the other parts of the image, such as the foreground building, would have been compromised.

Please notice that there are two color temperatures on the image: the temperature of the sunny part and the temperature of the shady part. On one hand, the graduated filter I used to raise the exposure of the shadows has emphasized the details on that part of the image. On the other hand, however, it has also accentuated the difference between the two different temperatures and now you can clearly see a blue dominant in it. This problem, before Lightroom 4 was available, could only be corrected using an external image editing program. Instead, Lightroom 4 allow us to apply non global color temperature adjustments by means of both graduated filters and adjustment brushes.

Conclusion

Graduated filters are a very convenient way to apply an effect to a section of an image whose boundary is  a straight line, such as horizons, straight buildings, rectilinear shadows, and so on.

In this tutorial, we've explored how a graduated filter works and how it can be used to fix the exposure in part of an image. However, as stated in the previous sections, Lightroom will let you apply many kinds of adjustments through a graduated filter giving you a great flexibility when it comes to post processing your images.

In the cases in which a graduated filter isn't suitable, an adjustment brush can be used instead, as I will explain in the upcoming part of this tutorial.

If you want to help me keep on writing this blog, buy your Adobe Photoshop licenses at the best price on Amazon using the links below.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorial - Part XVIII - Tools - Effective Cropping, Straightening and Leveling

Part I - Index and Introduction
Part XIX - Graduated Filters

Lightroom provides some powerful yet easy to use tools that can be used during the development process to retouch, correct and improve your pictures. The tools can be accessed in the Develop module using either the Tools menu or the tool strip, found just below the image histogram and shown in the following screenshot:

Develop Module - Tool Strip

The available tools in Lightroom 3 are:

• The crop tool.
• The spot removal tool.
• The red eye correction tool.
• The graduated filter.
• The adjustment brush.

Crop Tool

Cropping is one of the most basic photographic adjustments ever performed: you remove parts of your image and reframe it. You may need to reframe it for a variety of reasons: it wasn't possible to do it on camera, you need to correct an error, or simply you need to change the image aspect ratio.

Although being a task frequently performed, many people fail to realize the real power and versatility of the cropping tool provided by Adobe Lightroom: that's why I'm dedicating an entire part of this Lightroom tutorial to cropping, straightening and leveling an image frame.

To open the crop tool, you can use one of the following ways:

• The Tools/Crop menu item.
• The crop tool icon on the tool strip.
• The 'R' keyboard shortcut.

The crop tool panel can be seen in the following screenshot:

Crop 

The cropping tool in Lightroom, very much alike other cropping tools, can simply be used by dragging the edges of your frame to define the new image frame:

Cropping Tool - Dragging the Frame Edges

Alternatively, you can choose the Crop Frame Tool from the Crop Overlay Panel to replace the existing frame with a newly selected one:

Crop Frame Tool

Just select the tool and click and drag the new frame over the image.

Although quick and intuitive, and suitable in many situations, a completely manually performed crop doesn't guarantee the precision you need in other situations. In case you need to perform a more controlled crop, here's what the cropping tool offers to you:

• The possibility of specifying and locking the aspect ratio to a chosen value.
• The possibility of specifying the crop angle either manually or using a leveling tool.

Setting and Locking an Aspect Ratio

To specify the desired aspect ratio of the image frame, you can choose a suitable one from the aspect ratio menu or specifying it manually selecting the Custom item:

Aspect Ratio Menu

If you want to lock the aspect ratio of the crop frame during manual adjustment, just use the lock icon:

Aspect Ratio Lock

Straightening a Frame

Sometimes the image is not leveled and you would like to straighten it. There are three ways to perform this operation:

• Manually rotating the frame.
• Manually specifying the angle the frame should be rotated by.
• Using the leveling tool

To manually rotate the frame, just click and drag outside its boundaries. The mouse pointer will change to a "curved arrow" and you will be able to change the angle by dragging the pointer around the frame.

Manual Frame Rotation

As you can see in the previous screenshot, Lightroom will show a denser frame grid during a manual rotation that you can use as a convenient reference frame to visually tune horizontal or vertical lines.

Alternatively, or as a mean to correct the inclination of the frame, you can change the rotation angle by specifying a value using the angle slider or by introducing a value into the angle input box:

Angle Selection

Leveling the Frame

The third way to specify the angle of inclination of a frame is using the leveling tool.

Leveling Tool

This tool simulates the behaviour of a physical leveling tool: Lightroom lets you draw a reference line over your picture and  it will change the angle of inclination of the frame so that the leveling line be perfectly horizontal (or vertical, depending on its angle of inclination). This is undoubtedly the more precise way you can level a frame in the cases you need to align it, either horizontally or vertically, with a reference line of your picture.

If you wanted to level the frame so that the cross in the following image be perfectly vertical, you could use the leveling tool and draw a line over the cross, as shown in the following screenshot:

Leveling Tool - Drawing a reference Line

As soon as you release the mouse button, Lightroom will realign the frame so that your reference line is perfectly vertical.

Constrain to Warp

Ligthroom includes a Lens Correction tool that lets you correct lens distortions either using manually or using a lens profile (more on this on a post to come). Depending on the type and amount of lens correction that's been applied, the edges of the frame could get filled up by the artificial grey color that Lightroom uses to indicate the "lack of available information".

Suppose you're correcting a strong barrel distortion by applying an "inverse" (pincushion-like) distortion matrix. As long as image contents are "squeezed" towards the center (keeping the corners fixed), you will lose information around the image edges and you'll end up with a result similar to the following:

Grey Artifacts Around a Lens Corrected Image

Although this situation is not very common, at least with so strong a distortion, Lightroom offers a very convenient option in the crop tool: Constrain To Warp.

Constrain To Warp

When selecting this option, Lightroom will ensure that the resulting image frame will always be inside the warped image, that is, it won't intersect with the grey information-lacking zone. For example, as soon as I select this option, Lightroom will resize and realign my image frame so that it is entirely contained inside the warp zone:

Frame Constrained to Warp

If you want to help me keep on writing this blog, buy your Adobe Photoshop licenses at the best price on Amazon using the links below.

Using XMP Metadata Effectively with Lightroom

Yesterday I had an interesting discussion about the upcoming Adobe Lightroom 4 with a reader of this blog. One of the questions that came up was: "What are XMP files?"

That's an interesting question about a subject that's often overlooked. Many Lightroom users, in fact, need not concern about this very often. However, they're a great tool you should know about since they can dramatically improve your user experience and also show the way to a more proficient use of Lightroom (as well as any other programs understanding this kind of files).

What Is XMP?

XMP stands for eXtensible Metadata Platform, a standard proposed by Adobe Systems, Inc. to define, create, store and process extensible file metadata.

Many file formats already contemplate some mechanisms to store metadata, even forms of extensible metadata. The advantage of being able to embed XMP data into a file is a huge leap towards standardization, since you will be able to take advantage of it in different applications. Also, compliant applications will simply ignore the content they can't handle.

At times, however, embedding XMP data into an existing file isn't an option: that is the case, for example, when dealing with proprietary RAW file formats (such as Nikon's NEF). You can obviously save XMP data for such a file too, but you'll have to use a so-called sidecar file, that is, a distinct XMP file provided alongside the original file. This solution is more cumbersome and error prone, but some people will argue that it has its own advantages such as leaving the original file unchanged, thus avoiding potential file corruption.

Why Is This Important to Me as a Photographer?

For all your practical purposes, Lightroom is able to save all the information provided by the user during the development process, including Adobe Camera RAW settings, in an XMP-compliant way, either embedded (when the file format allows it) or in a sidecar file.

If your workflow is performed in just one application and one machine, you won't probably benefit so much from this feature. However, as soon as you need to move your images to another application, you will probably face the problem of preserving adjustments (which can be thought of as metadata themselves).

Even a simple scenario such as test driving another program (such as the upcoming Lightroom 4) or moving the files to another machine will require you to migrate metadata as well. If your application isn't storing metadata in the source file itself, or if you choose not to do so, you will need to export it and make it available to the target application.

Migrating Images And Metadata

The simplest scenario is migrating an entire Lightroom catalog from a Lightroom instance to another, as in the case of a Lightroom upgrade. Since Lightroom stores the information of all your photos into the catalog itself, which act as a centralized database, it's sufficient to perform a copy of it and simply import it into another Lightroom instance. This operation is straightforward and no further option will be required for you to preserve all your metadata.

Even if you need to migrate only a subset of your catalog to another Lightroom instance there's an easy way to go. Select the images you want to migrate and choose the File/Export as Catalog menu item. Lightroom will generate a brand new catalog for you to migrate:

Export as Catalog Dialog Box

Things get slightly more complicated when you need to move images to a different application and metadata cannot be embedded into the original file. In this case, you have to tell Lightroom to generate the relevant XMP sidecar files for the images to be migrated and move them alongside the originals. You've got two choices:

• Have Lightroom alway save an XMP sidecar file for every photo.
• Have Lightroom generate on the fly XMP sidecar files only for the photos you need to migrate.

Unless your requirements justify the choice, I would always choose the second option since the first will introduce a significant, and often unnecessary, overhead.

To have Lightroom always generate XMP sidecar files, you need to select the Automatically write changes into XMP option in the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings window:

Catalog Settings Window

Since I always leave this option off, as you can see in the previous screenshot, Lightroom is warning me that "changes made in Lightroom will not automatically be visible in other applications". If you select it, Lightroom will generate a sidecar file for every photo you process and keep it in sync.

To generate an XMP sidecar file on the fly, all you need to do is using the Metadata/Save Metadata to Files menu item (or use the Command-S shortcut if you're on a Mac).

Either way, Lightroom will generate the relevant XMP files alongside your original images, as you can see in the following screenshot:

XMP Files Together With Their Originals

No matter how you decide to generate them, you can now take your images and use them into another application. All the metadata that the target application is able to understand will be processed and the corresponding changes reapplied.

This mechanism is interesting also in the case you're often working with more than one computer. You could keep the catalog in sync, as explained in another post, or just keep XMP files in sync. Once you move an XMP file, just put it alongside the original and have your application read the metadata from it. In the case of Lightroom, all you have to do is using the Metadata/Read Metadata from Files command.

You could argue XMP metadata is easier to backup than an entire Lightroom catalog. Well, I bet it is. However, you Lightroom catalog is more than that and chances are you're backing it up regularly as well, thus defeating this potential advantage. 

Is There a Simpler Way?

This procedure is pretty simple and many XMP compliant applications (such as Lightroom, Camera RAW and Photoshop) will do the heavy lifting for you. Provided the XMP file is distributed with the original, they won't even ask you anything: they'll just read the metadata and apply the relevant settings.

As explained in the previous sections, you rely on XMP files in two cases:

• You cannot modify the original image and embed metadata into it.
• You don't want to modify the original image.

If you want to preserve your original files, there's no other option but using sidecar XMP files. If you cannot modify the original image (probably because it's written in a proprietary RAW format) but would willingly have Lightroom modify it if it could, you should consider converting your images to the DNG format (either during the import phase or afterwards with a simple export operation).

DNG stands for Digital Negative and it's a file format from Adobe, Inc. whose purpose, amongst others, is standardizing a RAW format and enable multi-vendor interoperability. However, DNG is much more than that:

• It's based on TIFF.
• It's both a container of RAW images and processed images.
• Metadata can be embedded in a variety of formats, including XMP and EXIF.

Some camera manufacturers already support on-camera DNG. If your camera does not, you can use a converter (such as Lightroom) to generate a DNG file from a proprietary RAW file. You can even choose to embed the original RAW file into the DNG, which is something I would recommend you do since sometimes some proprietary RAW metadata might be lost during the conversion.

Since XMP metadata can be embedded into a DNG file and Lightroom will keep it in sync, you will need neither no sidecar XMP file to migrate your photos. To some extent, you won't even need to rely on the very Lightroom catalog itself.

If you want to help me keep on writing this blog, buy your Adobe Photoshop licenses at the best price on Amazon using the links below.

Fixing Mac OS X Lion's SSH UTF-8 Issues

After switching from Mac OS X v. 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to OS X v. 10.7 (Lion), I began experiencing some weird locale-related problems when using OS X as an SSH client. The issues I experienced include, amongst others:

• Having the terminal complain about invalid locale settings:

$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" 
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" 
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" 
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

• Being unable to correctly type some characters (such as accented characters).
• Having programs that tunnel their traffic over SSH, such as Subversion, complain about invalid locale settings during their operations:

$ svn co svn+ssh://user@repository/path
svnserve: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svnserve: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is UTF-8
svnserve: warning: please check that your locale name is correct
svnserve: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svnserve: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is UTF-8
svnserve: warning: please check that your locale name is correct


In fact, if you look for example at the output of the locale command seen previously, you can see how the LC_CTYPE variable is set UTF-8 while all other LC_* variables (excluding the empty LC_ALL), are set to en_US.UTF-8 (which are correct according to that server settings).

What is the SSH client shipped with Lion doing? Apparently sending incorrect values to the server. It's not just a nuisance having to fix them after logging in, provided you're able to do so: this behaviour is breaking other programs tunnelling their traffic over SSH, such as Subversion, that aren't establishing an interactive SSH tunnel for the user.

Fortunately, the fix is quick: just tell the SSH client not to send any LC_* variable:

• Open the SSH client configuration file (/etc/ssh_config).
• Comment out the line that instructs the SSH client to send those variables (SendEnv LANG LC_*) from the general host configuration section (Host *). You should end up with the following fragment:

Host *

# SendEnv LANG LC_*

The configuration change will be immediately applied to any SSH session opened from now on.

Hope this helps.

Book Review: JIRA Development Cookbook, by Jobin Kuruvilla

I just finished reading Jobin Kuruvilla's JIRA Development Cookbook and I'm pretty pleased with it. In my opinion, that's a book worth buying if you want to get serious about JIRA customization and plugin development. I admit there's plenty of information in the Internet about the subject, especially from Atlassian itself, and possibly no question of yours would remain unanswered. However, having a good book like this on your desk and using it as sort of a reference guide is a very good idea.

The Book's Structure

If you read about my first impressions, you'd realize that reading it took me more than a month. Beware: I read it in its entirety because I wanted to review it but this book, as many technical books out there, is not meant to be read from beginning to end as you'd do with a novel. Instead, you should read it diagonally to be aware of what it offers and to be able to quickly get the information you need.

The book is organized into 11 chapters, each of which is a walkthrough of the addressed subject. The typical chapter structure is "programmer friendly": it starts with a high level overview of the subject, analyzing JIRA architecture and internals when deemed necessary, after which it goes on exploring the subject making extensive use of task-lists and code examples. If you already master a subject, more often than not you will end up quickly scrolling the task list and jumping directly into the code. In the following screenshots you can see some excerpts of the book to familiarize with its structure.

A "Getting Ready" Task List

A Summary of What You're Going To Do

Explanatory Section

In Depth Discussion

The first two chapters, Plugin Development Process and Understanding Plugin Framework, offer an overview of the common tasks and procedures you'll undergo during your JIRA plugin development, including the installation of the development environment, the development, debugging and testing phases of your code and the deployment of your deliverable into a JIRA installation.

The third and the fourth chapters, Working with Custom Fields and Programming Workflows, explore some of the most important JIRA customizations you'll deal with when writing your plugins or even just extending the basic platform's functionality: custom fields and workflows.

The fifth chapter, Gadgets and Reporting in JIRA, is dedicated to gadget development and the extension of JIRA's reporting capabilities. The title is somewhat misleading, since this chapter also somewhat deals with JIRA's integration with other systems (at least from a gadget's standpoint), as a consumer of RESTful web services. Another chapter is entirely dedicated to this subject (Chapter 9) and the inclusion of this material in Chapter 5 could pass unnoticed, if not somewhat misleading.

The sixth chapter, The Power of JIRA Searching, examines the techniques you can use to deal with and extend the JIRA query language, JQL, and how to take advantage of it in your plugins.

The seventh chapter, Programming Issues, describes how issues can be managed programmatically. Issue management is extensively covered, discussing subjects such as issue creation and lifecycle management, issue operations, time tracking, issue linking and validation.

The eighth chapter, Customizing the UI, explores how the developer can customize the user interface of JIRA, including customizing and extending the default JIRA pages or creating your own web sections and items.

The ninth chapter, Remote Access to JIRA, is devoted to JIRA integration with external systems using SOAP web services, RESTful web services and, to a lesser extent, JAX-RPC web services. The first part of the chapter introduces the JIRA web service API and how to build a SOAP client. The second part describes how you develop your own web services and deploy them as part of your JIRA installation.

The tenth chapter, Dealing with a Database, instructs the developer in the available tools and how to use them to interact with the database JIRA is connected to. The chapter teaches developers how to programmatically retrieve important JIRA data from the database, such as issue, field and workflow information, and how to extend its schema to hold plugin-specific data.

The eleventh and last chapter, Useful Recipes, gathers interesting information and additional code samples to fulfill common tasks not strictly related with the content of the other chapters.

A Book for Programmers

I defined this book as "programmer friendly" because source code examples are often used as the mean to exemplify how JIRA works internally. Explanations are indeed placed after task lists and code samples, instead of before. In fact, to cite the very author, the book seems to be organized as a cookbook: every section is a recipe with ingredients (prerequisites and task lists), a quick procedure (the how-tos) and, only then, in depth discussions and explanations of the JIRA internals. I'm not a big fan of this kind of content organization but I do admit that, in such a case and for such a subject, it's an effective mean to organize and clarify the content, undoubtedly at the advantage of the reader himself.

Likewise, the book covers a great portion of a plugin development workflow. It's not, and probably cannot be, exhaustive, but rest assured that it will effectively guide you through your development of most, if not all, your plugins, since the vast majority of the APIs and the technologies that you're going to need are covered.

The contents are clearly exposed and are well detailed and I think it's a valuable addition to the official JIRA documentation that's worth having if you're developing on JIRA as a platform. Some subjects that are somewhat less covered in the official JIRA documentation (at least so far), such as UI customization and JQL function customizations, are extensively detailed and are, on their own, a valid reason to own this book.

The only thing I'm missing is a better typesetting: a book should be judged by its contents, and this is what I'm doing, but it's important to recognize that an effective presentation is a key factor to take into account. As a reader, I find the quality of the book typesetting (title formats, paragraph styles, etc.) to stand below the quality of its contents. Of course, it's better like this than the other way round, but I'd appreciate some redesign should this book be revised in the future.

Conclusion

I felt compelled to write a review of this book because I think it deserves it, it's a must-have for a JIRA plugin programmer. Before writing this, I thought I'd write a more in-depth review. Surprisingly, I discovered that enumerating each and every subject this book covers was not necessary: it's a homogeneous, extensive and well organized book.

From a developer standpoint, it's an effective and efficient mean to learn the subject and get the job done, much better than any tutorial I've seen so far. Together with the official Atlassian JIRA documentation, this book is pretty much all you need.

Title: JIRA Development Cookbook
Author: Jobin Kuruvilla

Pages: 476

Publisher: Packt Publishing

ISBN-10: 1849681805

ISBN-13: 978-1849681803