Eric,
Reading your "heretic" work flow ;-) In choosing for a DAM and workflow it is proprietary which ever concept you choose.
Just a question regarding your workflow and DAM out of curiosity: why not entirely in PS using ACR like you use LR?
In other words, what is so special to you about LR to use it to generate tiff's instead of using ACR within PS?
I am curious to know as i resent having to "steeple chase" through multiple applications (and the OS tools such as explorer in windows) to achieve delivery.
Therefore i concentrate my DAM and workflow entirely within LR, and only when really needed do a round trip into PS or some other pixel based editor. I even try to avoid using my explorer (windows) or Finder (Mac) as much as possible, as i do not want to use two different DAM concept in a mixe fashion.
Don't know if this can be referred to as an "heretic" approach, but it works for me.
Jan,
Most of the reasons I do things the way I do are the results of historical accidents rather than a careful plan.
I started using Lightroom because I got version 1 for free, as an owner of Pixmantic's Raw Shooter. I never really warmed up to LR until I saw Jeff Schewe, Andrew Rodney and John Paul Caponigro using it at the Epson Print Academy in Boston. I then got the LL video and found LR quite nice to use, as far as I currently go with it.
I had once tried a much earlier version of ACR and found it very clunky. My main raw converters have been Capture 1, and then DxO (which I still use some), and now mainly LR. I suppose I could probably do much the same stuff in ACR, but I haven't bothered to try. LR's presets are very powerful, all along the way (I don't even know if ACR has presets. Does it?). I look forward eventually to printing from LR, because the presets will let me save a whole bunch of settings that I have to set each time in PS (but I'm used to that now, so I usually get them set right).
As for my present DAM system, it depends on Windows' file structure and a bunch of very nice utilities that make it very easy for me to find what I'm looking for.
I download everything through Chris Breeze's Downloader Pro, which asks me for a "Job Code" when I run it. This job code is inserted into the filename, which also includes the date and a sequence number. The file is downloaded to a directory for the given date, as a subdirectory of the directory for a given camera, which is a subdirectory of a directory for the current year. So, a photo I shot today with my G10 at the local Edamnds Park ends up in D:\Photos10\G10\2010-04-05\edmands_20100405_0013.cr2.
I use BreezBrowser Pro to select the ones I wish to process and copy them into a subdirectory (of ...\2010-04-05 in my example) called "do". These I then import into LR (or run in DxO if I'm in the mood for it), and play around until I like what I see. Because I am a "soft-proof" junkie (I wasted so much paper on test strips and bad prints in my wet photography days that I prefer to get my image close before I waste any paper on it), these days I do export tiffs to a subdirectory (called LRtiffs for LR2, or LRB3tiffs for LR Beta 3), and than soft-proof and print in PS.
Once LR has soft-proofing, I expect to stay within LR for the entire trip in many photos. For some I will still detour through PS for some modifications that I can't do in LR. At that point I expect that I will start to make use of LR's library more directly. But I still want to keep my raw files where i can find them easily, as I do now. I'll also have to set up multiple automatic backups of the LR library to different hard drives just as I do with my raw files now.
It works for me, and LR's user interface is much smoother than anything in PS, once you get to know it (for which the LL video is absolutely essential, IMHO.)
-Eric