Adobe Lightroom Impressions

[BBPhoto]

Hey guys. I have spent most of the past week familiarizing myself with Lightroom. I honestly can't say enough good things about this product. I finally have the product that I was looking for complete management of my RAW files from Import to printing. Organizing is extremely easy and the develop module is just great. It works seamlessly with Photoshop as well, though I need it much less now due the the great RAW editing features native to Lightroom. Anyone else been having fun with this software?

[Nickcanada]

Because of it I don't shoot RAW anymore! I only shot RAW so I could adjust exposure and WB easily but Lightroom lets me do it all with JPEGS. Makes things much quicker and easier!

[BBPhoto]

That's an interesting thought Nick. I was actually avoiding shooting RAW because my work flow was just too bogged down. Now I convert all my RAW files to digital negatives upon import. That way if I want to adjust photos using new techniques down the line I don't have to worry about corruption.

[zmikers]

I'm sure lightroom is great, but I need to sit down and familiarize myself with it. At the moment, I do use it for somethings, but I'm finding it hard to find the controls I need quickly so it's taking me longer than it should. But again, I'm sure all I need to do is spend an afternoon and really dig into it.

Nick that is a good idea about jpegs, but I would be woried because everytime you resave a jpeg file, it degrades the file where as RAW or TIFF can be saved and resaved as many times as you like. Any thoughts on that because I would love to shoot in jpeg again.

[fionndruinne]

You can just copy the original JPEG file to work on. I'm pretty sure Lightroom has an option of saving JPEGS with no additional compression, too.

[Nickcanada]

I'm sure lightroom is great, but I need to sit down and familiarize myself with it. At the moment, I do use it for somethings, but I'm finding it hard to find the controls I need quickly so it's taking me longer than it should. But again, I'm sure all I need to do is spend an afternoon and really dig into it.

Nick that is a good idea about jpegs, but I would be woried because everytime you resave a jpeg file, it degrades the file where as RAW or TIFF can be saved and resaved as many times as you like. Any thoughts on that because I would love to shoot in jpeg again.

Lightroom keeps the original file intact and only saves the adjustments so you can always go back to the original. You can see this by right clicking on an image and selecting view in explorer, what you will see is the untouched file.

JPEG will only degrade if you resize or change the quality of the copy. There is no reason a JPEG should degrade if you make a straight copy. This seems to be a myth that originated from that book everyone talks about.

I've never seen a difference in my JPEG and RAW files. Not to say there aren't any, I just don't look that close.

[FLiPMaRC]

I love Lighroom :cool: It's what I use 90% of the time right now ... Creating Virtual copies, make adjustments and then stacking them is my favorite feature so far. This eliminates the need to duplicate a file. I even use it to import files off of my memory cards.


I learned most of the Lightroom features from here:
http://www.photoshopuser.com/?page=lightroom/videos&video=sk_library_metastamping

[zmikers]

Nick - thanks, I'll look into lightroom more when I have a spare afternoon.

flipmarc - thanks for the tutorial, I've bookmarked it and I'll go through it soon:D