[Dave]

It's been said you can tell if a potential partner is right for you within the first minute of meeting. Well add another 179 minutes on to that & it's safe to say I've fallen for Adobe Lightroom big time,

To date I've used Adobe Bridge for managing RAW shots & then processing them through Camera Raw in Photoshop CS2. With CS3, Bridge became that bit faster & Camera Raw offered that bit more function. Never been happy with the overall speed of my processing with these offerings though. This was further backed up by an article in "processing" in Pro Photography mag this month. Conclusion was Lightroom halved the processing time vs CS3

Well after a visit to Steve & watching his workflow via RAWshooter, I became intrigued to try out its succesor, Lightroom.

Now for me, a good test of how well a product has been developed, is how far you can get without looking at the menu or help panel. RTFM is a swear word you know !! Well male machoness has me saying I have not looked at the manual or help panel & I've managed to process a set of shots. All tosh of course, because if I bothered to swallow my pride & actually follow the manual I may fine a hundred other options to simplify my workflow. MMmmm, maybe one day

So after 3 hrs use in total, hands up , I really have fallen for Lightroom. I love the look of the product, the releative ease to process shots & quickly move on to the next. Hey, for the 1st time ever I actually posted shots that have been purely processed in Lightroom & only batch added a border in PS with slight sharpen for sharing on the web. Now that's a 1st for me, so hopefully a vindication of the product itself.

Ah well, let's see how I get on with next 3 hrs. I might even find sometime to read the manual & find it can actually make me a cup of Tea

[Charlotte]

Completely agree Dave, I am getting on extremely well with Lightroom. It really does as the box says, i.e. process start to finish. You can process - and it even has a clone tool - then print or publish to web, and even create a web photo gallery. It has many tricks up its sleeve along the way, some of which you'll discover as you go along Dave, but those who do RTFM will discover even more There's an excellent tutorial online, Graham gave me the link ... hold on, I'll get it ... Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorials by Michael Tapes have a look see

Edit ... And it's not just for RAW files either, it will happily process jpeg's too
I think Adobe has slipped up here, as I can foresee a decline in CS sales in favour of this much cheaper product which will suit most photographers' needs for a much better price

[stepheno]

Totally agree with Dave and Charlotte. I've had about two months at it after one false start and I have found answers to about 99% of my problems. Now if it could only do actions

[P-E]

Originally Posted by stepheno

Now if it could only do actions

So you can't do actions in L/R?

[stepheno]

No....they have got to hold back some things or they would never sell CS.

[lcraft]

One thing these raw workflow apps have going for them is they gently force you to think about organization.. If you use the facilities they provide it becomes pretty simple to weed through a few hundred shots, cull the bad ones and rank/give metadata to them all which would take forever (as in I'd never do it) if I was just processing in Photoshop or Bridge.

Since I use Macs, I drank the kool-aid and went with Aperture. At first I was about 80% pleased with it and as time has gone on I've become more and more happy with it.. I suspect a lot of my happiness with it has also happened since doubling my system ram and buying a new video card - since Aperture uses CoreImage, and that will use the GPU on the vidoe card for rendering graphics.

I also did a stint with Bibble Pro.. I love its engine, highlight recovery and fill light are extremely good but the UI on it really stinks and it drives me nuts - so it only gets used on those images I really think would benefit from it. Then the original RAW goes in Aperture's library along with the TIFF copy that I created in Bibble. And then the bibble settings file has to be stashed somewhere safe in case I ever want to revisit i.

I've also spent some time with Light Room. I think if I was to ever abandon Macs I'd probably switch over to that. No way I'd opt for using Bridge/Camera Raw unless that was my absolute only option - say at a job..

I could seriously get buy easily with Photoshop 7. Adobe probably doesn't like that idea too much.

[stepheno]

Originally Posted by lcraft

I could seriously get buy easily with Photoshop 7. Adobe probably doesn't like that idea too much.

[Charlotte]

One thing Lightroom is good at is auto tone (where other prog's fail miserably). It's not always perfect, but it's a good starting point. I normally hit auto tone + then fine tune it to my liking

I don't go by the auto WB tho', as I haven't liked any of the results + ended up reverting to "as shot" to fine tune from there.

Another area that Lightroom shines is batch processing. This is handy for a shoot where the WB and/or exposure is consistently out, + saves having to process each pic one at a time. Obviously each one may need individual fine tuning, but it does the bulk of the work for you. This is great for a big shoot

[lcraft]

Originally Posted by Charlotte

One thing Lightroom is good at is auto tone (where other prog's fail miserably). It's not always perfect, but it's a good starting point. I normally hit auto tone + then fine tune it to my liking

Yep, I came to a similar conclusion with Aperture's auto exposure and Auto Level tool. They usually do far better and is much faster at getting it close than me.

There's too many sliders and I end up with slider and buttonpoken syndrome when I do it all manually

[Soupdragon]

You still retain cognative thought after three hours in front of a computer! wow! what a guy!

[Dave]

lol ....even better after all day in front of one for main work

[Charlotte]

Try 24 hours I've been sat internetting etc. all through the night + carried on the next day, I just never went to bed that night Done it quite a few times, but not on the trot

[Dabhand16]

Originally Posted by Charlotte

Try 24 hours I've been sat internetting etc. all through the night + carried on the next day, I just never went to bed that night Done it quite a few times, but not on the trot

That makes me feel better! Not done an all-nighter, but do spend far too much time on editing and Pixalo.

[lcraft]

Originally Posted by Soupdragon

You still retain cognative thought after three hours in front of a computer! wow! what a guy!

Now you see, I wouldn't actually want to be in a position of needing to prove that I had cognitive thoughts before, during or after sitting there..