I saw no mention of Adobe Lightroom, which a $199 photography software program developed by Adobe Systems, designed to assist professional photographers in managing thousands of digital images and doing post production work. It is an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing and managing digital photos.
I find it very useful, since it is fast, produces good results, and allows me to look through my raw files. I love the simplicity of this program, yet how much can be achieved with so little. I especially love the presets I can apply to my photos, which can eliminate much wasted time.
Has anyone had experience with Lightroom? How do you like it? What are your thoughts?
I most definitely think Adobe is the way to go. It is the industry standard and I know it's good quality. Besides, if most professionals use it, then that says something.
I can understand that you think Photoshop and Bridge are the same thing, cause they are, in my opinion. The major difference is that Lightroom can make the changes easier and quicker. Also, Lightroom has presets which can be very valuable when dealing with many pictures shot at the same location.
One downside to Lightroom is that you can't mask and selectively edit certain specific areas. You can only edit colors and tones, but most of the time that is all I need. If I need to clean up a pic even further, I take it into Photoshop.
The CS3 Workshop does sound very cool too. I personally would prefer the Workshop, cause I could use some more training in Photoshop. If you are very knowledgable with Photoshop, you don't even really need Lightroom, although Lightroom can still save a lot of time.
The thing to be aware, regarding both of these tools is that Lightroom is a *Work flow-based* application, designed to assist the photographer from Image acquisition, all the way to output of either web or print media in structured way.
PhotoShop, on the other hand is your swiss-army knife, allowing you to perform major edits on your photos that may not fall under the umbrella of Lightroom's fixed set up tweaks (fortunately, you can round-trip your photo's into Photoshop in the same session!).
Permalink Reply by joz on March 26, 2008 at 6:29am
yeah i tried Light room but its kinda not so satisfying yet especially when it comes to HDR photography...have u tried photomatix?
man its jus cool...i personally use aperture ,photoshop and photomatix...man u could have a blast...check out my teams latest pix..
they are a composition of various shots i did and was coming up with different states and compositions...
I was one of the closed beta testers of Lightroom before Adobe purchased Macromedia. I still use it today but I also use Apple Aperture which is now becoming my main library.
I don't use it to make any major edits of my images as I trust PS for that, but both Lightroom and Aperture are useful tools as part of my workflow.
Quick suggestion: Lightroom just upped to version 2. IMHO, it's MUCH better than 1.X, and has features you may be looking for. Check out Adobe's site for further info.