Lightroom

RoryW

I am currently using an evaluation (30 day free trial) of Adoebe Lightroom.

I would welcome the comments of everyone on this package.

Also is this sufficient ie what does cs3 (which costs megabucks) do that makes it worth the money that Lightroom does not do

thanks

Paulw

I have Lightroom. Sometimes I find it great, at other times I find it lacking. For the price, it's good at what it does. I do find it lacks some control in some areas.

conzy

You cant even compare Lightroom to Photoshop...

They are both great at what they do...

I think Lightroom is more suited to the photographer than Photoshop, it imports your photos, keeps them organised, allows you to browse by, date, camera, lens keywords.... and gives you most of the relevant tools, crop, straighten, spot removal, red eye removal, powerful colour correction.....

With lightroom you can remove red-eye, add a vignete and non-destructively colour correct an image in a minute, the same job would be a lot more complicated in photoshop...

On the other hand the things you can do with photoshop are limitless!

So buy both! and if you cant afford both get Lightroom first

JMcL

As conzymaher said, Lightroom is great for organising photos and working on photos which are fairly well exposed, and as a raw converter (though PS will produce exactly the same results with Camera Raw). If you need to do anything creative which alters the image significantly (stacking exposures to produce HDRs, cloning beyond basic dust removal, corrections to a particular part of the image etc), then you need something more.

If you're on a budget and can't afford both, get Lightroom, and consider Elements, or GIMP as an external editor. They'll do most of what you'll need for not much money and free respectively.

Cabaal

Lightroom is pretty good, it does a decent job without all the learning of photoshop...even though I have the latest patch it still feels really buggy to me

positron

Lightroom is brilliant, IMHO! Its a very powerful tool to help your workflow - to import, to review, pick or discard, label, arrange in collections, locate with keywords, locate based on camera metadata.. and so on..!

Its not a photo manipulation tool, but even then its extremely good for the quick tweaks - levels, contrast, sharpness etc, and to crop, spot removals etc.

Very good tool, IMHO!

Zombrex

roryw wrote:

Also is this sufficient ie what does cs3 (which costs megabucks) do that makes it worth the money that Lightroom does not do

Photoshop is a full featured and powerful image editing package. Lightroom isn't, but then it doesn't pretend it is. Lightroom is a package for organising, cataloging, and manipulating digital photos, particularly RAW files. The editing features it has are designed towards this, for example altering exposure, maniplating levels etc.

Lightroom would come first in a professional "workflow" setup, cataloging and manipulating your library, and Photoshop would come near the end, for doing extensive editing to a particular picture.

You can certainly get away without having Photoshop. Lightroom provides all the tools you would need to get your photos reading for printing or the web.

mikeanywhere

Wicknight wrote:

You can certainly get away without having Photoshop. Lightroom provides all the tools you would need to get your photos reading for printing or the web.

To a degree but having both will defo be worth it in the long run

elven

It depends what kind of processing you like to do. There's no point in having photoshop if all you ever do is a bit of contrast/colour adjustment, cropping and straightening. LR is good for the organising side of things - although I use bridge (which is a part of photoshop) for most of that stuff like importing, rating etc.

If you want to start having local control over your images - even down to selective sharpening techniques, that's when you need photoshop - or something at that level. Even Elements may do the job. lightroom seems fairly ample for most of the guys round here, who don't focus so much on the processing and just want to go from camera to web/print as simply as possible. For that purpose, though, I'm not even sure if LR is the best choice...

nilhg

elven wrote:

lightroom seems fairly ample for most of the guys round here, who don't focus so much on the processing and just want to go from camera to web/print as simply as possible.

As a guy who has used Lightroom for 99% of my PP for the last year or more I don't know whether to smile or run away and hide:D

Adobe has always said that Lightroom is an image editor, while PS is a pixel editor. I also think that LR is still a work in progress and when the SDK is released that many of the weaknesses will be addressed.

Valentia

I find myself using LR less and less. ACR does most of what I need and, like Elven, I tend to use PS and Bridge in combo more these days.

As a cataloguer it a complete pain in the Boxxxx. Way too slow on an average machine. I see people on the Adobe Forums talking about cataloguing 25,000 images. They must have quad core machines. Drawing 100% previews is like the Gospel on Palm Sunday (when I used to go). I keep deleting my catalogues to get some peace. My machine is a P4 3.4MHz so it's not like totally ancient.

nilhg is right in a way, it is work in progress, but that's little consolation if you pay 300 hard earned euro for it. I got it free as I had bought Pixmantic Rawshooter.

I haven't used GIMP but by all accounts, once you get over it's quirks, it's pretty useful. Adobe did a great job of killing off any real free alternative RAW processing competition by buying Pixmantic. Clever hoors. I don't really like they way they operate, as if you didn't guess. :cool:

elven

Oooh Danny that's a surprise to hear, I remember you telling me how much more you were using LR than PS a few months ago

Have you moved away from it because of functionality, or just the shlowness issues? I can't handle the way that if I want to export it to photoshop I have to save a tiff or psd version - I can't just export the file as it is then save straight to jpg, grrr. It also doesn't give me the preset adjustments as layers, it just flattens them into the file so I have to export twice and use the layer opacity if i want to dial the effect down a bit.

And when you're working on files in LR, organising them, I can never tell where the damn things actually are because of the way that it uses a database rather than just showing your actual filing system. It's a pernickety little fella.

Nilhg, wouldn't you say your life is improved without having spent hours in front of photoshop though? Some people are heavy on processing, others aren't... one isn't better than the other. maybe

RoryW

nilhg wrote:

"....LR is still a work in progress and when the SDK is released that many of the weaknesses will be addressed."

Idiot question - what does SDK mean/stand for as it is a TLA I dont recognise

nilhg

elven wrote:

Nilhg, wouldn't you say your life is improved without having spent hours in front of photoshop though? Some people are heavy on processing, others aren't... one isn't better than the other. maybe

All depends what you do with the hours, plotting to relieve the bookies at Newbridge dog track of a few quid might or might not be a good alternative use.............

Roen

I use it almost exclusively these days. But you seriously need a good machine to get the best out of it.

I only export to PS CS3 when I absolutely must for the odd few things that I can't do in LR.

Valentia

elven wrote:

Oooh Danny that's a surprise to hear, I remember you telling me how much more you were using LR than PS a few months ago

Have you moved away from it because of functionality, or just the shlowness issues? I can't handle the way that if I want to export it to photoshop I have to save a tiff or psd version - I can't just export the file as it is then save straight to jpg, grrr. It also doesn't give me the preset adjustments as layers, it just flattens them into the file so I have to export twice and use the layer opacity if i want to dial the effect down a bit.

And when you're working on files in LR, organising them, I can never tell where the damn things actually are because of the way that it uses a database rather than just showing your actual filing system. It's a pernickety little fella.

All of the above really. The LR brigade over on the Adobe Forums remind me of the management of the Irish rugby team and the programme is like the team itself. Instead of being agile and nimble as well as powerful it is yards behind the play. Labouring away while you try to get on with it. That whole idea of making a psd while exporting and SAVING it is just plain silly, if you don't want it to do that. Ah! don't get me started. LR has certainly helped me see what Adobe are really like as an organisation. It's terrible at my age to be so naive as to think that any large company actually gives a **** about their customers.

BTW did you see my thread on Russel Browne's place-a-matic? If not it can't be too far away. Try it, it's fantastically useful.

JMcL

roryw wrote:

Idiot question - what does SDK mean/stand for as it is a TLA I dont recognise

Software development kit. Once that comes out, third parties can start to produce plugins.

Fajitas!

I find LR more and more useful really. It minimises the amount of time I have to spend in PS, I have loads of presets for what I need, and it really cuts down my workflow for when I have a big job to go through.

It has it's flaws... but hey, Photoshop CS3 ain't know angel...

CONMIKE12

I'll have to agree with Al.If you get into lightroom and know how to use it properly , it is a photographers dream.Insert your card into the reader and if you've set it up right, it will launch a dialong adding your own personalised metadata to each shot,you can add keywords and custom names and then hit go and lightroom imports and organises all your stuff. i would say a must for wedding photographers especially it's capacity to stack shots according to time.It'll even convert them to DNG while importing them if you want it to.
I agree with Julie that for more creative touches on a shot,CS3 is needed but LR was designed to work in conjuction with photshop.And if you have the printing module set up correctly then it's a dream to print with. You can print multiple photo's at once just by clicking on them, way easier than Photoshop. I find it an extremely powerful piece of software and it has really streamlined the way i work with shots.Maybe people are just sticking to what they know and understand, without making the effort to learn it..... ??

Hugh_C

I Like LR a lot, and do virtually ALL of my PP on it with the exception of stuff that's too complicated, when I move over to CS3 which is well integrated with LR (on Mac anyway - I don't do that other OS whatever it's called now)



My only bugbear is continuity from what I see on screen through to the internet and print. I'm always a little dissatisfied with saturation despite being anal about colour profiles etc etc. Of course it also depends on monitor calibration but that's also a ferociously subjective matter.

Huge

evilhomer

hughchal wrote:

My only bugbear is continuity from what I see on screen through to the internet and print. I'm always a little dissatisfied with saturation despite being anal about colour profiles etc etc. Of course it also depends on monitor calibration but that's also a ferociously subjective matter.

I tend to get annoyed about this too, I look at a photo in Lightroom or even in PS2 and they look identical, but the conversion from 16bit color to 8bit color for jpeg really kills the subtle tones.

Nothing much I can do about that unless I can find a printing company that will print 16bit tiffs for me as cheap as photobox.

nilhg

For anyone interested in LR there is a pretty comprehensive review/primer of it in this weeks Amateur Photographer. There's plenty of tips if you are only starting off and even a few for those who thought they were well used to it.:o