Photogs: Use Adobe Lightroom?

[Por_sha911]

Any of you guys use Adobe Lightroom instead of Photoshop? What do you think?

[legion]

Hopefully TimothyFarrar will chime in.

He would be able to give you some insight.

[tubwreck]

I use it and like it, but it's not really an alternative to Photoshop. It has nice tools for whole-image adjustment, but you cannot make changes to specific regions of the image. It has a very nice interface for managing a large-volume workflow and for tagging and searching for images. It has good support for working with raw images using the full 12 or 16-bit pixel size.

[Steve Carlton]

What kind of camera are you using?

[tubwreck]

Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1

[nostatic]

I use Aperture 2. My images don't even see Photoshop unless I have to do some serious modifications like adding/subtracting people/things from shots, etc. My "art" shots just get tweaked with what is native to Aperture.

[Sapporo Guy]

Any big differences between Lightroom and Aperature?

[kstar]

You might also check out DxO Optics Pro. I use it to batch process almost all of my shots before I add them to Aperture.

http://www.dxo.com/intl/photo

It supports a large numbers of cameras and lenses and corrects optics and geometry problems of specific cam/lens combos, among other things. It's a powerful app, but I have honestly only scratched the surface of its features.

Best,

Kurt

[fxeditor]

I use Lightroom quite a lot for organizing my pictures and fine tuning RAW files. It's very handy for showing pictures to clients or making quicktimes to send to them ( I'm in the visual effects business and am always taking hi resolution plates with my Canon 5D). I really like the ability to alter metadata on files and make secure watermarks.

All in all I'd say I'm a pretty big fan of the program!

Good luck,
Michael

[TimothyFarrar]

Chris sorry I missed this, haven't been checking my older email during the week.

I currently mostly bypass the RAW converters and do all my development (contrast/exposure/dodge/burn) from inside Photoshop. I can never use just one development (ie one single contrast/brightness/exposure/tonecurve setting) which is applied to the entire photo, instead I need to use a tradition darkroom development like method and be able to dodge and burn, something which you simply cannot do in any RAW converter I know of.

However if you don't feel the desire to dodge and burn, and want just some simple settings then Lightroom is probably awesome for you. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not knocking having a reduced feature set, in fact some times it can be liberating because you can do lots of stuff fast and easy. Exactly the reason why my wife and I just purchased a JPEG only mini-point and shoot ... the work involved in developing RAW files of family snapshots and personal (non-business) photos just stopped being worth it to us..

For those interested in knowing more about Lightroom, check out these pages on the luminous-landscape.com,

http://www.google.com/custom?sitesearch=luminous-landscape.com&cof=GIMP%3Aff9900%3BT%3Acccccc%3BLW%3A469%3BALC%3A 993300%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fluminous-landscape.com%2Fimages%2FLL-logo.jpg%3BGFNT%3Affcc00%3BLC%3Acc0000%3BLH%3A81%3 BBGC%3A000000%3BAH%3Acenter%3BVLC%3Acc9900%3BGL%3A 2%3BS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fluminous-landscape.com%3BGALT%3A006600%3BAWFID%3A35f6ab491f b2b550%3B&domains=luminous-landscape.com&q=lightroom&searchbutton.x=0&searchbutton.y=0