Value of Lightroom??

[Mark]

Hi All,
I would like to hear opinions regarding the value of Lightroom for non-professional photographers. Is that a replacement for PS or are both packages needed? I never process multiple images concurrently ans somewhere I got the idea that LR excels in that area. What does everyone think? Thanks for the help.


Mark

[brian.austin]

A forum search for "lightroom" (minus the quotes) in here and Image Editing and Color Management - PhotoCamel - Your Friendly Photo Community will give you a wealth of information to go through.

[swampler]

Depends on what you do. If you use layers and do extensive cloning, etc, then you will still need PS. If you just do exposure, color, sharpening, i.e. the basics, then LR will be enough, IMO (that's all I use 99% of the time). Only time I use PS is for selective noise reduction with Neat Image. Starting with LR 2.0, you can now do selective adjustments which was a huge improvement over LR 1.x.

FYI...there is a 30 day trial of LR you can download from Adobe and try it for yourself to see if it will fully meet your needs.

[saclunch]

Sometimes I use both. and sometimes I use PSP, PS and lightroom in one photo. I love what all the programs have to offer me

[PhotoshopAbuser]

Lightroom and Photoshop are at the heart of my workflow. LR is always the 1st and sometimes the only program I use in my workflow. It keeps me organized and has some great develop tools. There are plenty of tutorials and information on the web that will help you get the most out of it.

While Lightroom doesn't come close to doing all that PS is capable of it is a very nice organizing and editing tool. I would consider it to be a wise investment.

[matthewlrigdon]

Lightroom (and Aperture, which I use most of the time) are a great mixture of Photoshop and organization programs like Portfolio or iViewMedia. You can think of either as iPhoto on steroids.

With the amount of photos you can take these days, I think you really need to have a program that helps you organize and keyword those pictures. Figure ten years from now, when you want to look at photos from a vacation, will you be able to find it on your hard drive? If you're organized, yes, but even beyond that, keywording will allow you to expose that much more information.

Bridge does allow you to keyword, but it mainly works as a replacement for the Finder or Windows Explorer.

One of the powerful tools you have with Lightroom is the ability to create Collections. You can have the same photo in multiple collections, without duplicating the image every time. You can keyword a bird photo from a vacation and have it appear in both the collection for that vacation, as well as in your collection of bird photos. It gives you more (and more flexible) ways to locate an image later.

If you shoot entirely RAW, the tools in Lightroom give you a lot of global control. There's a limited amount of amount of local fixes (compared to Photoshop), but most hobbyist photographers don't do a whole lot of retouching. If the choice is Lightroom or Photoshop, I'd say just get Lightroom.

Of course, having both is ideal. They really make a great combination. But there are many other options for image editors these days that you could get by with.

[jbrooksga]

One of the biggest values of Lightroom to me is the way it handles RAW files. If you shoot in RAW most of the time, you already know that generating JPG is part of the workflow process. With most workflow tools, you end up with at least 2 versions of each image floating around on your hard drive. Not real efficient.

With Lightroom, you generate JPG only when you need it for exporting and in most cases you will not keep them permanently. For example, if you upload to Flickr the JPG files are generated and put in a temp directory which is removed after uploading. Even if you burn a CD for someone, the JPG files you produced for that can be erased afterward. Your RAW files are similar to digital negatives, which are kept permanently.

And if you store your photos on different devices in your home such as multiple computers or external drives, Lightroom can keep all of those files referenced in the same library.

[moggi1964]

Exactly what the last poster said.

I find that, being new to Lightroom, I rename folders occasionally as it makes more sense in the workflow. This is easy to do and automatically updates the folder structure on your drive.

I also have two catalogues; one for pictures taken with my new camera (almost all in RAW) and the other for all the pictures I took before. I can switch between the two catalogues very easily.

[jbrooksga]

Originally Posted by moggi1964

Exactly what the last poster said.

I find that, being new to Lightroom, I rename folders occasionally as it makes more sense in the workflow. This is easy to do and automatically updates the folder structure on your drive.

I also have two catalogues; one for pictures taken with my new camera (almost all in RAW) and the other for all the pictures I took before. I can switch between the two catalogues very easily.

I actually started using 2 catalogs. One that I call Working, which is for new sets that are still in the process of being rated and edited. When through working on the set, I move them to the Main catalog where everything is organized in folders by the type of shoot (Portraits, Sports, etc.)

The advantage to using a Working catalog is to make Lightroom run faster while going through your normal workflow process. Your Working catalog will always be rather small compared to the others.

[moggi1964]

I like that idea.

It's partly encapsulated in my splitting of the old stuff and new stuff (17gb versus 105gb) but of course the new stuff catalog is going to grow quite quickly so I need to have a plan and 'working catalog' seems like a good one.

Thanks.

[jbrooksga]

Originally Posted by moggi1964

I like that idea.

It's partly encapsulated in my splitting of the old stuff and new stuff (17gb versus 105gb) but of course the new stuff catalog is going to grow quite quickly so I need to have a plan and 'working catalog' seems like a good one.

Thanks.

My working catalog usually has only a few sets at any given time. Once the finished products are done, I just move the folder to the Main catalog. Just make that a standard part of your workflow process.

Of course the size of the Main (finished work) catalog is different for everyone. There are many ways to handle that such as by year, by shoot type, etc. I will need to address that as my catalog grows over time. Even with a large catalog, there are tweaks you can make to Lightroom preferences such as not automatically including files from subfolders.

[form]

If I was just a casual shooter lightroom would still be great for batch processing photos, identifying good from bad shots, and making quick general adjustments. It is a volume-oriented program, and since version 2 it has a few extremely helpful fine controls like brushes, healing brush, and gradients.

[ohtoberich]

I use Lightroom for 90% of my editing, I only go into Photoshop for compositing or plugins. Lightroom fits my workflow... it's very quick to scan presets and copy adjustments from one photo to another. You can quickly change the style of a set of photos, such as from high contrast black and white to a soft saturated color style.

[jonpaul]

Originally Posted by Mark

Hi All,
I would like to hear opinions regarding the value of Lightroom for non-professional photographers. Is that a replacement for PS or are both packages needed? I never process multiple images concurrently ans somewhere I got the idea that LR excels in that area. What does everyone think? Thanks for the help.


Mark

I use LR 1.4.1 on my computer almost daily for editing my photos; I also have LR 2.2 installed, BUT, LR 2.2 has bugs that need to be fixed. It's dissapointing; it seems that Adobe releases updates to LR that have problems (bugs).