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Author Topic: LIghtroom, do you need it?  (Read 11545 times)

kevs

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LIghtroom, do you need it?
« on: May 07, 2007, 10:34:50 am »

It took so long to learn Bridge and PS, that I was never going to bother with Aperture or LIghtroom, but well know photographer was praising Lightroom at seminar, look dazzling, so I got it.
But with CS3 incorporating much of it, what the point of having it? Are there indispensible things that Lightroom does for you that CS3 will not? I'd like to hear.
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digitaldog

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« Reply #1 on: May 07, 2007, 11:59:44 am »

I don't use Bridge (or ACR) anymore thanks to LR and my use inside of Photoshop is greatly diminished thanks to LR. Whether that's a compelling advantage to you, I can't say. But it is to me. I get a lot more work done in a far more efficient fashion using LR. I'd say 90% of my work is now done there with trips into Photoshop for the tools it provides best (pixel polishing).
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Phuong

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« Reply #2 on: May 07, 2007, 12:17:16 pm »

good thing is that it's not as sophiscated like PS, so it won't take much time to learn. the tools and options are pretty much self-explanatory anyways. i too thought it was redundant because  ACR+BR+PS combination could do the same thing. obviously i was wrong. LR can do much more than just a Raw processor (ACR) so yeah, i am 99% sure you'll need it - sooner or later.

and you can always try it for free for 3 months.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2007, 12:24:53 pm by Phuong »
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The View

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« Reply #3 on: May 07, 2007, 01:39:59 pm »

Either Aperture, or Lightroom: less time fiddling with software, more behind the camera.
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kevs

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« Reply #4 on: May 07, 2007, 02:03:46 pm »

Thanks Andrew, not much specifics there...
Is it something then, I guess, about liking the interface more?

My thing is once I get comfortable with an interface, as I am totally with Bridge and CS, I hate having to move to another one unless LR is offering lots of things the other apps don't.  

Thanks Phuong: Well I bought the software and am reading Tim GReys' book on it, but now that I'm reading that CS3 is incorporating much of LR, I wondering why bother continuing learning another software.  In fact, I'm reading that the new Bridge will have much better features on importing images to you hardrive with metadata and copyright and converting to DNG, and the CS3 will have the Loupe, and lots of LR stuff -- just playing devils advocate here. Maybe there is a chart somewhere showing what LR does for you that others don't
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digitaldog

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« Reply #5 on: May 07, 2007, 02:08:59 pm »

Quote
Thanks Andrew, not much specifics there...
Is it something then, I guess, about liking the interface more?

It's all about the workflow! LR is a metadata editor and a lot more. Photoshop is a pixel polisher. One that you use one image at a time. For that, its great but I don't have a lot of need for that. I do have the need to find, sort, rank, edit 1000's of images. Then apply global corrections quickly using unlimited variations that are described by metadata, not burning edits into pixels. Then there's the amazing Print module. Worth the price of admission alone.

Get Michael's (and Jeff's) DVD download, spend a mere four hours watching it. You'll get the idea.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2007, 02:09:27 pm by digitaldog »
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The View

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« Reply #6 on: May 07, 2007, 06:57:54 pm »

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Get Michael's (and Jeff's) DVD download, spend a mere four hours watching it. You'll get the idea.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=116190\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Hi, digitaldog. Could you please give an url to this download? If there isn't any, the source for this LR info? Thanks.
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digitaldog

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« Reply #7 on: May 07, 2007, 07:02:46 pm »

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Hi, digitaldog. Could you please give an url to this download? If there isn't any, the source for this LR info? Thanks.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


[a href=\"http://www.luminous-landscape.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=126]http://www.luminous-landscape.com/zencart/...products_id=126[/url]
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kevs

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« Reply #8 on: May 07, 2007, 11:32:49 pm »

Andrew that's interesting, but can't I get most of that in Bridge really? -- sort, rank, edit etc.
even apply global corrections, albeit on Raws. (although I read in CS3, you can do jpegs too)

And printing -- you are printing with Colorbytes Imageprint right? Not through Photoshop. thanks.
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digitaldog

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« Reply #9 on: May 08, 2007, 08:36:00 am »

In a nutshell. Bridge is a browser. LR is a database.
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DavidW

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« Reply #10 on: May 08, 2007, 03:39:47 pm »

I'm going to digress a little first to talk about my CS3 suite choice and upgrade experience - as that puts my comments into context. If you want to get directly to the Lightroom stuff, skip to the line of ****.


I deliberately didn't start to evaluate Lightroom until I'd bought, installed and got to grips with my Creative Suite 3 Design Premium upgrade from Creative Suite 2 Premium. From the Adobe site, it was clear that there were significant workflow and workspace enhancements likely to boost my productivity. For that reason, I pre-ordered my CS3 Design Premium upgrade 'sight unseen', and I'm not disappointed at all, especially not with the workflow and workspace enhancements.

Indeed, overall, I'm very happy with the CS3 upgrade - the improvements in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop make it well worthwhile for me in my various uses (not just photography) and I'm much more productive.

Having Flash is a bonus as I'd thought about buying it a few times but couldn't justify purchasing it as a standalone, and I already prefer Dreamweaver over GoLive. Once I got used to the new UI (mainly cosmetic changes, but it takes a bit of getting used to), there's some worthwhile improvements in Acrobat as well.


One query I had with the CS3 bundles is why is there no "Creative Suite 3 Design and Web Premium" offering. Master Collection is significantly more expensive, especially in the UK, and I, for one, have no use for After Effects and Premiere, the two significant extra applications in the Production Premium strand that I don't have in Design Premium. I don't own a video camera and I already have Audition, so I don't need Soundbooth.

As it is, you have to choose between InDesign (Design Premium) or Fireworks and Contribute (Web Premium). InDesign is a key application for me, so I was always likely to go for Design Premium. In truth, I'd probably barely use Fireworks and Contribute - I don't do much web work, and with me being so familiar with Illustrator and Photoshop, I'd probably use those tools when I could alongside Dreamweaver in preference to Fireworks even if I had Fireworks.

Whilst not having Fireworks and Contribute is no great loss to me, I would have happily paid a bit more to have a suite that included them. I've heard of people buying Web Premium and InDesign CS3 as a standalone to get round this (it's less messy and probably cheaper for future upgrades to have one standalone application, rather than the two standalone applications you get by buying Design Premium, Fireworks CS3 and Contribute CS3).


With the former Macromedia applications, I expected Adobe to prefer Dreamweaver over GoLive, and the Macromedia application I really wanted was Flash, which was an unexpected bonus for me in CS3 Design Premium.



Lightroom is not included in any of the CS3 suites - I thought it might make its way into the Master Collection and possibly Design Premium, but Adobe seem to have decided, for whatever reason, that it has no place in the suites.

The same is true of GoLive (though I expect GoLive to disappear into something of a quiet backwater, joining Pagemaker as a product that has essentially been superseded, and even, arguably, Framemaker - though Framemaker is a powerful tool for certain tasks and is slated for an upgrade as, indeed, is GoLive). Many loyal Audition users fear that Audition will equally go into a quiet backwater.

Some question why InCopy doesn't appear in the suites, though it's arguably a specialist product and most of the core functionality is already available in InDesign itself. I guess including or excluding Lightroom and InCopy are similar arguments.


Lightroom and InCopy are different to the other applications that have been omitted from the suites - they're powerful tools for particular people, but they're probably not of interest to the majority of Creative Suite users.


**********************************************************************


Lightroom is a new product that Adobe have promoted quite aggressively. If you buy now you'll probably still find boxed product at the introductory pricing, but that is soon to disappear. Having set myself the task of not evaluating Lightroom until I was used to working with photos in Bridge CS3, ACR 4 and Photoshop CS3 Extended, it left me a tight timescale of 48 hours to be sure of being able to order Lightroom at the promotional price before supplies disappeared.


I spend quite a bit of time working in the Creative Suite, and yes - there are worthwhile improvements in Bridge CS3 when used with ACR 4. My expectation was that at my relatively modest picture taking rate, Lightroom would have little to offer me over Bridge CS3 and Photoshop CS3 which were already licensed and sitting on my machine. Meanwhile, another thought that sat loosely in the back of my mind was opting for a fairly heavyweight DAM solution, such as iView MediaPro (soon to become Microsoft Expression Media).

I couldn't have been more wrong in my assessment of Lightroom. I think I've done my best with Bridge, but there are some things that Bridge doesn't make easy. After all, Bridge is a general tool, not one specifically aimed at photographers.


One specific thing comes to mind to show how Lightroom is different. To get round the lack of collections in Bridge, I've been using some keywords that are workflow related - which, of course, make their way into the final files. With Lightroom, I can keep workflow related matters out of my keywords, and use collections instead. I intend to go across my files, make the appropriate use of collections in Lightroom and remove the keywords that aren't really keywords.

That's just one example of the use of collections. There's many more things that you can do with them. The big picture is, as has been said, that Lightroom is database driven - so you can rapidly search amongst files in many folders (the search functionality could be more powerful, but I think it'll get there in future versions). Further, you can have pictures in your database that aren't actually online - Lightroom becomes a sort of lightweight DAM offering.


For example, say a friend is coming to visit, and you want a collection of pictures of him for your digital photo frame. It would be much easier to find these files and export them as the appropriately sized JPEGs on a memory card in Lightroom than it would in Bridge.


I find the limitations in Lightroom's card downloader frustrating - so like quite a few others, I use Breeze Downloader Pro instead. Once I've got the files into Lightroom, the task of sorting, classifying, renaming, discarding rejects, titling and setting metadata, keywords and Camera Raw options is much faster in Lightroom than in Bridge - the workflow is much more optimised. Even with my very limited experience in Lightroom I'm probably three to four times faster doing these tasks than I am in Bridge CS3. Bridge CS3 is improved over Bridge 1.0 (the CS2 version), but it's not as good a tool for photographers as Lightroom is.

My particular joy in Lightroom is comparing similar shots to choose the best. The loupe in Bridge CS3 is a welcome addition (the best you could do in Bridge 1.0 was move rapidly between shots or use large thumbnails next to each other), but is rudimentary by comparison to the corresponding features in Lightroom. Having done this in Lightroom, I never want to go back to doing this in Bridge. Lightroom makes it quick to stack the images, discard the obvious rejects, then put the best image at the top of the stack. It's much more awkward to do the same task in Bridge CS3.


Most metadata can be shared between Bridge and Lightroom by turning on the XMP option (which is not the default in Lightroom, but which I'd recommend). There are some frustrating deficiencies in interoperability which I hope are addressed soon - the most notable of which is that Bridge CS3 and Lightroom don't share stacks when they could so long as the stack doesn't span a folder. On Windows Bridge stores the stacks in the hidden .BridgeSort file in the folder, whilst Lightroom stores them in the database. I hope Adobe fix this deficiency in a future point release of Lightroom - I find it very annoying.

There's also a couple of features that are in Bridge CS3 / ACR 4 that aren't in Lightroom. (I had originally written "An excellent new CS3 feature, which Lightroom doesn't have, is the ability to use Camera Raw to adjust JPEGs and TIFFs. I shoot almost exclusively RAW, that's not as much a bother to me as it is to some, though my compact is JPEG only." here - I'm happy to withdraw this comment as mistaken, with thanks to Jeff Schewe for pointing this out). Further, Lightroom doesn't have 'full' curves, unlike ACR 3 or 4 in a 'full' version of Photoshop - it only has the Shadows / Darks / Lights / Highlights variety. The Shadows / Darks / Lights / Highlights variety of curves is implemented so well in Lightroom that 'full' curves often aren't needed - but it's still an omission. I'm not sure whether Lightroom will get either of these capabilities.

A further misfeature when using Lightroom with Photoshop CS3 is that you can't open a file from Lightroom in Photoshop CS3 with the Camera Raw object as a Smart Object. The Smart Object / Smart Filters functionality in Photoshop CS3 is very powerful when teamed up with the existing Adjustment Layers. In Photoshop CS2 there's no way of returning to Camera Raw to change the options there whilst keeping other edits - but if you've opened a file using ACR 4 as a Smart Object in Photoshop CS3, you can change the Camera Raw options later on.

Indeed, the whole way that Lightroom hands files off to Photoshop is messy - I'd rather be able to save with my own filename and Lightroom notice the file being saved than Lightroom create the PSD for me and name it according to built in (and unconfigurable) rules. My way around all this is to drop to Bridge CS3 when I want to open files in Photoshop - but I have to remember to import the files to Lightroom afterwards. I think Adobe have some fixing to do here now that Creative Suite 3 has shipped.


The next big thing in Lightroom is the range of (non destructive) processing and toning options available, together with the ability to make virtual copies (that is, references to the same underlying file with different settings). You can, for example, have a black and white and a colour version of the same image stored in Lightroom, or several different crops of the same image.

Again, this is a powerful tool in terms of time (because settings can be reused) and disk space for images that don't need individual attention in Photoshop. It doesn't take many layers and masks in a 8-12 megapixel 16-bit document for you to have a 300MByte Photoshop file.


The other area that I've used (I've only really dabbled with the slide show, and I have my own PHP / MySQL based web gallery system that works from the metadata in the images) is the print functionality. It's not going to set the world on fire - it's not a match for Qimage or similar, but it will allow you to print your images, create layouts, resize to the printer resolution and print using a profile fairly easily. Soft proofing would be a nice enhancement here - I think that's something that others have already wished for.



All in all, everything that Lightroom does can be done better by specialist tools, and there is a definite "version 1.0" feeling about some of it, in that it feels a little incomplete and as if some options are missing. The often wished for synchronisation facilities between a desktop and a laptop, and the current unavailability of the promised SDK to allow plugins to be written are part of this.

Downloading is done better by Breeze Downloader Pro (no question about this - the Lightroom downloader is inflexible and poorly featured). DAM could probably be done better by Extensis Portfolio or iView MediaPro / Microsoft Expression Media. For developing, there are more options in ACR 4 accessed via Bridge CS3 or Photoshop CS3, and obviously you can do more with an image when you take it into Photoshop CS3 - at the moment, some tools, such as sharpening, are pretty rudimentary in Lightroom. Printing could probably be done better by Qimage. I've not really got into the web functionality, but I'm sure I could create something far richer using Flash CS3 Professional and Dreamweaver CS3. Meanwhile, the slideshow functionality could probably be bettered using Flash CS3 Professional as well.

However, that misses the point. The value of Lightroom is as a central workflow component, with functionality that handles most of your standard workflow in one place. It's an application that gets quality results quickly and is well designed for working with a client sitting alongside you if that's your chosen workflow. You can undoubtedly do more by using some of the other applications I mentioned - but Lightroom may well be all you need for many pictures and you'll likely be more productive using it.

Lightroom can probably deal with 90-95% of most people's photographs, whilst laying the foundations for working on the remainder in Photoshop. When you turn the XMP option on, the vast majority of what you do in Lightroom is also available via Bridge CS3 / Photoshop CS3 (or the CS2 versions if you're still on CS2 - though there are more limits as Photoshop CS2 won't get Camera Raw 4) for those images that need more individual attention.

I find Lightroom 1.0 to be well worthwhile.


If Adobe fix some of the interoperability glitches with Lightroom and Creative Suite 3, also the promised SDK is made available, Lightroom will become a very powerful tool. Even as it is, I wouldn't want to be without it - and I'm glad I managed to evaluate it quickly enough after getting CS3 to buy at the promotional price. At the regular price, I would have found it harder to justify bearing in mind that photography is my hobby, not my job.

In future versions (hopefully along the journey to Lightroom 2, rather than paying for incremental upgrades) I hope for synchronisation between a desktop and a laptop, soft proofing, and more fully featured sharpening facilities. A better downloader (or more complete support for external downloaders) is also needed in my opinion. Overall, though, they're relatively minor things, though.


In the end, I bought Lightroom, and I bought Breeze Downloader Pro (I was thinking about it for a while, just for the geotagging functionality - it's an excellent little utility).

I realised that I just don't need a heavyweight DAM solution - especially as Extensis Portfolio never really appealed for reasons I can't fully quantify, and some of the limitations with iView MediaPro (particularly if you don't want to convert everything to DNG) and the seeming confusion over the upcoming re-release as Microsoft Expression Media switched me off to this seemingly promising feature.

I may well add a copy of Qimage to my software arsenal - though for most prints I think I'll be printing directly from Lightroom.


Lightroom cost me the same as iView MediaPro would have - and I think it's the tool I really wanted and needed, even though I thought otherwise!

If you're not sure, I'd evaluate Lightroom and see what you think - you'll lose nothing if you decide to uninstall it at the end of your trial so long as you remember to enable the XMP option in preferences. Some of the Camera Raw functionality requires Camera Raw 4, which will mean upgrading to Photoshop CS3 (or a Creative Suite 3 product that includes Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop CS3 Extended) - but you can work, with some loss of functionality, against Camera Raw 3.7 and Photoshop CS2.


Apologies for the very long post - but I hope this is helpful.



David
« Last Edit: May 08, 2007, 11:03:57 pm by DavidW »
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Schewe

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« Reply #11 on: May 08, 2007, 05:48:33 pm »

Quote
An excellent new CS3 feature, which Lightroom doesn't have, is the ability to use Camera Raw to adjust JPEGs and TIFFs.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=116430\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Uh, well, considering you can import jpgs, tiffs & psds in Lightroom, I think you got that wrong...in fact, the ONLY reason Camera Raw 4 CAN work on jpgs & tiffs is cause Lightroom started that whole slippery slope when Hamburg (LR's originator) figured out how to do a color space encoded to linear conversion where tiffs and jpgs _CAN_ be edited via Camera Raw controls.

So, yes, Lightroom and Camera Raw 4 can both work on raw, jpgs & tiffs...

And I think you overstate the general usefulness of actually having a point editor in the curves. Some people "claim" they need point editing...until you actually pin them doen on HOW they use curves and then it comes out that it's only because that's the way they learned how to use curves and they're reluctant to re-learn how to use curves with a parametric interface-even if it's easier, faster and arguable produces better results. About the only time you really need points is if you are doing a very tight point edits in the highlights. For the rest of normal curve work, parametric is better.

Pretty sure you're on Win? That's the reason you don't really like LR's downloading from cards...it sucks because it's using the Windows downloading API's. Image Capture API's on Mac are a lot better...but downloading itself must get better as a function of the OS-apps shouldn't be burdened with in. You don't say if you're on Vista...it's better on Vista (a bit).

And to be honest, Lightroom 1.0's goal was more in the 80/20 rule scheme in terms of what it was trying to accomplish for photographers. It's the developer's goal to keep moving that up, but at a certain point if you need to edit pixels, you'll need a pixel editor-Photoshop's pretty good at that already :~)
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DavidW

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« Reply #12 on: May 08, 2007, 06:55:00 pm »

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the feedback.


OK - I'm flat wrong on the inability to do Camera Raw type stuff on JPEGs. I don't know why I couldn't get it to work when I tried it initially in Lightroom - I simply haven't got a clue. Call it brain fade or something - in all seriousness I think it was my unfamiliarity with the Lightroom UI the only time I tried it previously. You're quite right - it works just as well in Lightroom as in Photoshop CS3 / Bridge CS3. It's another great feature to have in Lightroom and one that now you've pointed it out to me, I intend to use pretty much straight away working with my parents' recent holiday photos taken on a JPEG only camera. (Life will be even better when HP get me a working B9180 printer; I'm waiting for my second replacement at the moment after the first warranty replacement lasted all of two prints).


Point editor in curves - occasionally useful, usually not needed - we agree. I have one or two photos that have awkward tonality and I finished up with a curve with about six points on in ACR 3 to get to where I wanted - but that was never a usual case (and it usually meant the photo was shot in bad lighting). I did my best to say in my previous post how well I think Lightroom handles curves, and the Shadows / Darks / Lights / Highlights curves that Lightroom has are excellent - the UI is very photographer friendly and it's a rapid way of getting to where you need to be in most cases.

As an aside, there's a great video about how to use the Curves functionality in Lightroom on the Adobe web site. Overall, the video tutorials for the CS3 products and Lightroom are a wonderful resource.


Windows XP here - I won't run Vista for a while for a whole bunch of compatibility reasons. My machines aren't just used for Adobe stuff and upgrading to Vista now would break a great deal of things. Some of my peripherals are still awaiting definitive Vista drivers and one program I use every day is still being fixed to work reliably on Vista. Indeed, Acrobat 8 isn't properly Vista compatible - there's a sticker on my CS3 box pointing this out.

I'm likely to hold fire on Vista for at least another 8 months or so, possibly until SP1 has shipped and almost certainly until I replace my main workstation which is aging but far from creaking. I'll let others take the early adopter pain on Vista, thanks very much.

For now, jumping to Vista would mean sinking a whole pile of money on consequential software and hardware upgrades for no real benefit, so I'm not doing it. Having just sunk £1500 into things that have made a difference to my productivity - CS3 Design Premium upgrade, Lightroom, a new office chair (not a cheap one, either - a Therapod), more RAM for my server, another hard disk and a couple of DVD-RAM drives - I could do with limiting expenditure for a while!


I'm afraid I don't entirely buy the downloader / OS thing. Sorry. Camera cards are filesystems, and there's nothing wrong with treating them as filesystems in the OS - which is exactly what Windows XP (and, for that matter, the other OS I use daily - FreeBSD) does. Is it really up to the OS to provide a layer on top of that to handle removable drives that may or may not be a card reader? I leave that as something of a rhetorical question - it easily becomes a pointless Mac versus Windows argument, when the truth is that both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. The Lightroom authors have taken the decision to implement things as they have.

Breeze Downloader Pro does all the trickery I want from a downloader, including geocoding my photos from a GPS log, and the Custom button functionality to fire up Lightroom keeps things pretty seamless. It's a cheap piece of software - so this is no disaster. If there could be more seamless integration into Lightroom in the future for alternative file acquisition systems, be it the FTP servers often used for Canon cameras with Wi-Fi hardware, third party card downloaders such as Breeze Downloader Pro, or simply beefed up folder watching functionality, that would be great. This is another area where I expect Lightroom to mature in the future.


I quite agree on the "if you need pixels, you need an editor" thing too - and I just happen to have Photoshop CS3 Extended on this machine as well. My photographic workflow these days is to use Lightroom to get as far as I can, then go to Photoshop if I have to. I suspect the same is true for most Lightroom users. Very few will get away without having Photoshop or similar on their machine unless their photography is limited in scope to tasks where Lightroom is always sufficient. My photography is way too mixed to get away without Photoshop.


Your overarching 80/20 comment is what I was expecting - there comes a point where you have to say "ship it". I've worked in software engineering - I know the dangers of feature creep both in terms of failure to get the product out of the door, and in more subtle ways such as annoying bugs getting written into the product along with a feature that gets added very late in the development and testing cycle.

What Lightroom does it does well - though I find the integration glitches with CS3 that I mentioned annoying and hope they're sorted in a Lightroom point release sooner rather than later (at least the stacks round-tripping correctly - that can't be too hard to sort and it bothers me intensely). Right click "Show folder in Bridge CS3" would be good as well, for that matter.

The SDK will come when it's ready - you know more than I do, but I realise you're constrained on what you can say. It will ship when it's ready, and that will be an exciting day for Lightroom users everywhere. I hope we can agree that the now of Lightroom is great, and the future is exciting.


I hope with the correction over JPEG / TIFF functionality that I'm delighted to make, my previous post is a useful and fairly well structured piece on why the various Lightroom modules make sense even for my modest requirements. Lightroom is a version 1.0 product - but a jolly useful one.



David
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« Reply #13 on: May 08, 2007, 07:09:32 pm »

I think the way ACR handles raw's and JPEGs will lead to confusion. This isn't the case in LR and here's why. In ACR, (Photoshop and Bridge) you have preferences to either handle or not handle JPEGs. Once set, that's it and if you do decide to handle them in ACR, every time you open a JPEG, you get a differing interface (ACR). That was OK for Raw's, we really had no options here. But now we have a format that can be viewed and edited either in ACR or Photoshop and once you do open and mess with a JPEG, it will forever open in ACR. I think that's kind of odd.

In LR, the interface treats all supported files the same way. You're not in one UI for one type of file depending on what touched it today, in a different UI tomorrow. Frankly, I think ACR (the name IS Adobe Camera Raw) should have stuck with JUST Raws. And why Raws and JPEG's but not TIFFs and PSD's? LR can do that. Its just messy IMHO. Then, if someone wanted to do metadata editing on existing rendered images like JPEG (which IS cool), they got Lightroom for that task.

There's just too many tacked on UI experiences in Photoshop. Vanishing Point, ACR, Filter Gallery, Liquify, Automate Contact Sheet... its like Plug-in UI on top of Plug-in UI which I guess after nearly 17 years, one would expect. But this gives Photoshop that big, hummer look and feel where LR is a smooth, fast little sports car. Time will tell how the general market reacts to both.
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« Reply #14 on: May 08, 2007, 07:34:51 pm »

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There's just too many tacked on UI experiences in Photoshop. Vanishing Point, ACR, Filter Gallery, Liquify, Automate Contact Sheet... its like Plug-in UI on top of Plug-in UI which I guess after nearly 17 years, one would expect. But this gives Photoshop that big, hummer look and feel where LR is a smooth, fast little sports car. Time will tell how the general market reacts to both.
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Both will take you A to B, but I prefer the one that uses less gas, Lightroom
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Sid Jervis

kevs

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LIghtroom, do you need it?
« Reply #15 on: May 08, 2007, 11:41:56 pm »

Excellent David! awesome info, if may take me a week to digest.

question:

Digital Dog mentioned printing. But I have Imageprint which blows away quality I get from printing through PS, so why would I print through LR, and what does printing in LR do that CS3 can't do? ( don't do proof sheets much anymore also)

What is SDK?

Wouldn't it be better is LR was just part of CS3?
Talk to me about database, I've never fully grasped why I need one (even though I have I view media pro), I seem to know where my images are -- they are carefully place in carefully named folders-- I just go to them, I don't need to search for stuff.

I'm on Mac. (I've already bought LR, just wondering if I should continue to learn it--will be getting CS3 next week)

thanks Jeff S. for good info, do you think LR is worth learning/using -- or are you staying with PS/Bridge.
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Schewe

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« Reply #16 on: May 09, 2007, 12:52:08 am »

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thanks Jeff S. for good info, do you think LR is worth learning/using -- or are you staying with PS/Bridge.
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OLO. . .well, you obviously don't know my history...

See: [a href=\"http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story/]The Lightroom/Shadowland Development Story[/url]
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digitaldog

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LIghtroom, do you need it?
« Reply #17 on: May 09, 2007, 08:40:54 am »

IP used to blow away the print drivers but recent drivers (aka 3800), the differences are getting difficult to see without a loupe.

But that's a moot point. You can still use IP and LR using the Print Through Application option (PTA).

What printing through LP does is provide an amazingly fast and efficient way of producing ganged up images with all kinds of possible metadta text and it does it FAST (you don't have to open the files, they are printed on the fly from the raw data). Once we get a print history, it will be even better.

LR can't be part of PS. One's a pixel editor. One's a metdata editor. Its like asking why InDesign can't be in Photoshop.
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Author "Color Management for Photographers".

kevs

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« Reply #18 on: May 09, 2007, 10:18:00 pm »

thanks Jeff for that cool article.

and thanks D Dog for that final info on the print question and why LR can't be in PS.

Again, I can't give give praises yet (as not worked with LR enough -- just being honest), so sorry for focusing on the negative, but 2 things:
today, I did stopwatch test on what to use while a client is over you shoulder:
photo mechanic- fast,  i view fast but previews not good and large previews slow to come up.
Bridge: nicest look and fluidity from thumbnail to preview, but quite slow to generate, and then LR -- slow just like Bridge.  Is this about right?  and LR, unlike Bridge can't show all thumbs on one monitor and huge preview on other. (maybe this will fix in future?)   again, I'm just fixating on these things but am I off mark on this?
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The View

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« Reply #19 on: May 10, 2007, 02:36:45 pm »

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http://www.luminous-landscape.com/zencart/...products_id=126
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Thank you!
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The View of deserts, forests, mountains. Not the TV show that I have never watched.
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