You may be stuck in a photographic rut and not even know it. To the rescue comes Lightroom Analytics, a free plugin for Adobe’s Lightroom management/editing package that analyses the metadata in your library to spot trends.

As you might expect, the plugin collects basic information such as how often you use a particular camera and your tendencies with aperture, lens, ISO and shutter speed. But the granularity of the data is downright impressive. Aperture and focal length trends can be viewed as a whole, for instance, or for a particular lens.

See if you may be going a bit overboard in post-processing with detailed analysis of the extent to which you apply adjustments such as saturation, temperature, exposure, contrast, highlights, split-toning and more. You can even dial down not just to how much you adjust post-crop vignetting but the amount, midpoint, roundness and feathering of those adjustments.

Results are compiled as a CSV spreadsheet — which can be crunched and prettied up using any spreadsheet app — or a JSON raw data file to be processed by the Lightroom Analytics viewer. And did we mention that the whole shmear is free?

Yep, not a bad deal. To learn more or check out the plugin for yourself, head over to the Lightroom Analytics website by clicking here.

(via PopPhoto)