I would like to think the switch from ACR to LR would be seamless & uneventful. Is there anything you good folks think I should be aware of?
I used LR1.4 with Photoshop 6 - the latter because the punitive costs of CS in NZ make it a difficult investment if images don't earn money. I then went to Photoshop Elements 7, which provided access to ACR and most of the photoshop tools I needed. For workflow reasons, I stopped using LR and so didn't upgrade to LR2.
I have now upgraded to LR3 and so have many images previously converted in PSE/ACR. LR3 reads the cr2 and xmp files and the RAW settings (e.g. recovery, etc.) are included in the RAW conversion. LR3 also gives the option of updating to the 2010 settings in ACR6.1 in LR. This can be done automatically for entire collections. My initial, rather superficial analysis doesn't show much difference when using the 2010 conversion. This is distinct from the improvements in image quality between ACR5 and 6 (as well as the lens correction feature, among others) which swung me towards an upgrade. I understand that the conversion option only relates to how the xmp file is interpreted by ACR6.1, not the algorithms that decode the RAW file (but I could well be wrong).
The conversion is all rather seamless and painless. I can't comment on speed as I am running a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, which is pretty slow (but still acceptable).
Cheers
