badboy

For those of you who own this product and have used it, please share your impressions.

Do you like using this product?
Does it make your photography workflow quicker?
What are some things that are lacking in this product?

Thanks

srika

I'll write more later, but for now, I just have to say that I can't live without it. Kickass program.

oVerBoost

i'd like to hear some reviews on this product as well. i've been using CS to edit photos but i wanna know how much better light room is.

guia x

I have been using it for about a week. All I can say is I LOVE IT! I have been using Photoshop CS2 for all my post processing before. Now Lightroom takes care of that. It is so much easier to use. I find that I process my files quite faster. I'm still slow but with Lightroom I don't take as long. Tweeking the white balance and colors are alot easier to do in Lightroom than CS2. I also love having the capability to go through thousands of photos without waiting forever. I only have a Pentium 4 with 2GHz processor and it goes pretty fast. I just added 2Gigs of RAM so I have a total of 3Gigs but I think it would go even faster with a better processor. Using Bridge before with CS2 would take a long time to open even just one folder up. With Lightroom, I can go through my entire collection in seconds.

There is just so much to love about it. I can print out to any size I want. I can export to different resolutions and file sizes at anytime with out having to opening and resizing the photos. It keeps track of all the changes you have made to the photo, so if you want to go back a few steps you can do it. There are so many other things I have still yet to discover and use. I just think it's great.

That said. It is not Photoshop. If you need to manipulate your photos, you still need Photoshop to do that. Lightroom has a clone/heal tool but it is very simple and if you need to really get rid of something more than a spot, you will need Photoshop. It's not for retouching photos. It pretty much just for browsing your photo library, correcting the colors, making your photos look their best the quickest and easiest way possible, and showing off your photos. It really is a great tool. It compliments Photoshop really well. I have not had the need to use Photoshop alot since I got Lightroom. Only times I needed PS was for some major photo manipulation. It can't take the place of PS, but it is a very nice tool to have with it. I highly recommend Lightroom.

I was thinking of creating a thread for Lightroom where we can discuss and share links, tips and tricks. Maybe we can use this thread.

Here's a great Lightroom site: LightroomKillerTips.com

badboy

I'd like to know why you love that program so much. I'll be waiting.

badboy

Nice post, just want I was looking for.

I was viewing a bunch of video tutorials on the Adobe website. Most of them were by the guy who owns the lightroomkillertips.com website.

badboy

I know a couple of more people are using Lightroom. Let's hear your opinions too.

ChodTheWacko

A big factor of course is, what are you comparing lightroom to?

Note on april 30th, lightroom price jumps from $200 to $300.
Photoshop academic version costs $300 (get a student to buy it for you - this is legal, and upgradable!)
Full priced upgrade to CS3 should also cost about $165.


The bigger question is, what editing features may you need that Lightroom doesn't support.
One thing I use quite a bit is photoshop's Lens correction -> Remove Distortion, which I use
to 'defish' my ultrawide-angle pictures a bit. (Mainly so people don't look so fat or look like aliens)

I'm also curious what layering tools Lightroom has - I'm too lazy for a tripod right now, but I
imagine layering abilities is quite important for merging images for HDR.

I have a bunch of photos to post so I'll download LR and give it a spin today.

jupitersolo

Is this sold as a MAC/PC hybrid disc?

I'd like to buy now while price is low. But I'll be getting a MacBook Pro later this year.

ChodTheWacko

I haven't decided if I should reply to this post, or start a new 'discuss your workflow' thread. I'll start here though.

In the end, I think any postprocessor has their own workflow, which is slowed down by bottlenecks in the process. For me, adjusting white balance can be a major headache with Camera Raw without a reference white point in the picture.

This comment I find odd - how many pictures is your typical shoot?
How are they organized, and why do you have to go through them all at once?
If I go on a trip, I will at least separate folders by day, so each folder isn't totally out of control. I might have Bridge poking at one folder while I work on another.

One big benefit of Adobe Bridge (comparing CS2 vs CS) is that after setting each pic the way I want, I can have it processing them while I browse pictures in another folder.

It always pissed me off with CS that you can only have one instance of photoshop
running at once, which meant that if I used Automate->Batch to post pictures,
I couldn't work on other pics. With Bridge, while Photoshop is grinding away, I can at least use Bridge to look at other pics.


Can you elaborate on the 1st comment, or at least how Lightroom and photoshop
differ in this? I thought you could do both with photoshop. (certainly the latter you can)


I will be happy if you can do, with lightroom, any manipulation you could do if you had a film camera and was working with film.

ChodTheWacko

No. But it doesn't matter.

Your license allows you to run two copies of lightroom at the same time, cross platform. I think most common would be one on your desktop, and one on
your laptop. But there's no reason you couldn't have one running on your PC and
one running on your mac at the same time.

How do you get the other version? I'm sure there's a way to download it.
Many demos are full products, triggered by the activation code you enter.

jupitersolo

^^^ Sounds good, glad to see them allowing two licenses. I hope more software makers start doing this. I know it would stop me from bootlegging.

guia x

I think it is. The box says Windows and Macintosh. It also has system requirements for both. When I ordered it, they did not give me an option.


I think the white balance tool in Lightroom is alot easier and in some ways alittle more powerful than Camera Raw. You can use the presets (ie As Shot, Auto, Daylight, etc.), adjust the temperature, adjust the tint, or use the white balance eyedropper tool. All these are pretty much in Camera Raw, but the white balance eyedropper tool is alot more powerful in the sense it allows to find the neutral grey area without really needing a grey card. There is this color grid that you drag around with the eyedropper tool that shows you the values of the color you are hovering over on your photo. You pretty much look for the area where all rgb values are similar and neutral. You can also see how the selection will affect the photo before you click and select the color on the navigation window on the top left of the program.

Check out this video. It will pretty much explain what I'm try to say.

As for a workflow, I'm still pretty much trying to find a set workflow that works best. I don't have too much time to work on my photos and I am by no means a professional photographer. When I upload my photos, I may not have time to go through them that same day. I spend alot of time adjusting the colors. Before when I was using PS, I would end up editing each photo in PS from Camera Raw because I need to adjust the colors using curves. This may just be inexperience on my part. It just took way too much time to postprocess my pictures. With Lightroom, I can go through all the photos I've uploaded in the same amount of time it use to take me to go through one photo in PS. I'm sure if I had been using PS for years, I would be able to do the same things in the same amount of time. I wouldn't know though. Lightroom just allows me to do it alot easier without the steep learning curve.

Yeah I don't go through my photos at once all the time and I do have them broken out in different folders by subject and date. Still, each folder could contain a hundred or so pictures. Going through them from Bridge would still take a long time. Each time I switch folders, it takes a while to load all the photos even if I have it cached. Lightroom just seems to load them alot quicker and if I do want to go through all my photos, I like to know I can do it. I have thousands of photos of my little boy and if I want to see them all, I just click on his folder or his keyword and I can go through them all. With Bridge I would do a seach and go do something else. Lightroom is "almost" instantaneous.

You can do it on both but I find the export option on Lightroom alot easier to use because you just click on the photo and export it to the resolution and size that you want. In photoshop you have to open up the file, wait for it to load, resize, then save. Forget about resizing and saving several files. I guess you can use File processor or something. Again, probably inexperience on my part.

As for the stepping back to a previous adjustment, in Lightroom the history stays with the photo. So you can go back months from now and see the changes you have made and revert back to any step. Once you close the file in Photoshop, that is it. In Lightroom you can click on a previous step, if you don't like it, you just click back or you can just hover your mouse over the step and you can see how the photo will look on the Navigation window before clicking.


It probably similar but I wouldn't know. I have worked with only digital. Anyway, I hope I have help alittle. I'm not the greatest when it comes to articulating my thoughts and my Photoshop experience may not be the best as well. Lightroom just allows me to get on my feet and start running and get my photos to look their best with the little amount of time I have. How it works with more advance photographers is another question. It seems though they are really into it. I guess the best thing to do is to dowload the trial.

ChodTheWacko

Okay, had time to post a couple of albums.
My thoughts:

Overall, it's very nice. I will probably buy it.

The only major thing it's missing for me is lens distortion correction for wide angle lenses/fisheye lenses. I didn't see, but didn't look for, image merging for HDR type of stuff. I doubt it's there though because I don't recall seeing any blending tools.
No big deal for me, since I already have CS2.

Pros:
As guia x said, the white balance preview tool kicks ass. I don't quite understand how the sliders translate into 'real values' so I used to play wak-a-rat to fix white balance. Sucks.

The curves tool is much less annoying. See:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photos...ab:uniqueid3=1
In photoshop, to move a control point, you click on it and try to slide it along a curved line without moving it off the line. If you move it off the line, the curve changes, like that was intentional. Good luck.

It's barely even mentioned in that video but there are 'sliders' on top for adjusting:
Shadows, Fill light, Exposure, and highlight correction. This should be enough
for regular usage. It's pretty intuitive and quick.

I missed the part about stored history, that's pretty cool.

I like the before/after preview mode - particularly one picture, left side before, right side after.


Now, the cons:
Lightroom is databased based, not file-folder based.
You import folders into the database and play with them.

So be -very- careful if you start playing with pics in explorer.
For example, I imported folder 06-03-01-party.
Then I realized I should have called the folder 07-03-01-party, so I
renamed it.

Lightroom then started freaking a bit because the folder was gone.
OK, no problem, just import the new folder. Lightroom complains that it
has already imported the pictures in that folder! You can tell it to import
them anyway. It would be pretty annoying to try to find/eliminate the duplicates though. There's no way to compare the contents
of two folders (This would be avoided if you'd let me start two lightrooms!!!!).

Any file/folder goofing should be done within lightroom to avoid confusing the program. I'm not sure how this is going to work if I decide to archive pictures to dvd, and then restore them later. I'll probably just always override the warning.


One weird quirk is that for the most part Lightroom is pretty fast. But if you tell it to use explorer (to make/delete/find a directory on disk), it will GRIND with disk access for 15 seconds or so. Not a big deal once you know it's coming.

One big annoyance - Undoing settings for a picture is as easy as clicking on the prior entry in the history window. But I misunderstood how 'sync pictures' worked, and accidentally applied one picture's settings to all pictures.
I could not find away to undo this mass-sync, and I had to go to each picture and click on it's history entry.

I don't know if this is a bug, but you can't peform an operation on multiple pictures in Loupe mode. I suspect because if you do this:
In Loupe mode: select 5 pictures, hit delete - deletes current picture only.
But:
In loupe mode: select 5 pictures, switch to grid mode, and hit delete
(without reselecting) - deletes all 5 pictures.


Anyway, the pros are big pros.
The cons are quirks or stuff easily avoided.
I recommend checking it out, at the very least.

Billiam

Regarding the Mac/Windows thing, the official answer can be found in the Lightroom FAQ on Adobe's site.

I installed the software just fine on my Windows desktop and my Macbook Pro. Hopefully some point this week I'll have enough time to write jot down my overall thoughts.

jupitersolo

Thanks, for the Mac/PC information, guys.

Coco-bun

the price jump is ridiculous. ill have to download the trial version sometime and see for myself after reading all your posts.

badboy

If you are a student, or a parent of a kid who goes to school, you can get lightroom for 95 bucks right now.

Billiam

The price jump has also been known since the official product announcement in early February.

guia x

Great. I'm glad you like it. I don't think there is HDR stuff. I tried looking. There was a stacking option and I thought is was going to merge the photos but all it does is group them together so that you don't have to look at a bunch of photos that are similar. I took some shots for HDR and used the stacking to group them together. It cleans up my filmstrip below nicely. When I want to see the whole group, I just click on it to expand it.


When I first got Lightroom, all I did was use the Auto setting. Now I'm starting to use the white balance eyedropper. It gives me great results from the start and I don't have to mess with the temperature and tint sliders too much.

I also just started using the curves tool. I was scared to use it at first but after discovering how it shows you the different sections when you hover over the curve, it is less intimidating. I also love clicking on the little circle on the left corner of the adjustment panel that lets me make adjustments by dragging on the photo itself. It automatically adjusts the correct sliders. It makes it so much easier getting the right result without spending hours experimenting. It's probably the best thing about Lightroom.

So far all I have used most are the Exposure, Recovery, the Saturation and Luminance section, and sharpening. The have pretty much been enough to get the job done. I have yet touched the Split Toning and Camera Calibration panels. I'll have to read up on those as they probably will come in handy.


I ran into the same problem. I renamed a few folders from windows explorer and went into Lightroom with a bunch of red folder names. Renamed them back from Explorer and renamed then from Lightroom and everything is okay. Now I know better to move and rename folders and files in Lightroom. It's not that big of problem if you are using Lightroom exclusively. I think it was alot worse before in beta. When you move folders around in Lightroom, they did not move physically on your hard drive. I'm glad they fixed it.

One good thing about having it database driven is being able to create virtual copies of photos without taking up major hard drive space. You can create hundreds of virtual copies and all Lightroom stores are the adjustments you have made. It does not really make physical copies of the photo on your hard drive. It's a great feature as I like to play around with black & white and sepia tones for my photos. Having to save them as different files was a pain in the butt. Now it's painless with Lightroom's virtual copies. Plus Lightroom automatically stacks them together so your filmstrip stays nice and neat.


You can click Ctrl-Z and undo the last thing you did. I've sync and unsync a bunch of times using Undo. I also had to do it the hard way until I figured it out. Ofcourse, once you do something else, you can't undo the sync anymore. Just the last adjustment.

I don't know if it's a bug. I think it because in Loupe mode you are only seeing one photo and it thinks that when you hit delete, you only want to delete just that one photo. If you have the filmstrip hidden, you are basically deleting blindly. You can't tell how many photos you are going to delete. In grid mode, you see all the photos you have selected so it makes sense that when you hit delete that you really want to delete all the photos you selected.

I have not ran it any cons that I can remember other than a Healing brush would come in really handy. The spot healing is too limited. The distortion correction would be nice. I guess they have to save something for Photoshop. Adobe is smart to not cannibalize Photoshop sales with Lightroom.


It's not really ridiculous as Aperture is the same price. Considering it's a new product and that some say it's better than Aperture the price is just right. Should just get it before the price jump.

h2o-pr00f

wow this looks pretty cool... the sync feature looks sweet, so do the black/white controls

Im gonna have to check this out

jupitersolo

Where? Thanks

ChodTheWacko

Do a search for photoshop lightroom academic.

Check what that sites requires for academic proof. Some are pickier than others, which can be a real pain if you get someone to purchase it for you.
Wow, only $87 at Provantage.com.

jupitersolo

Thanks, I finally found Adobe's Education site. My wife's taking a few classes at a local CC, plus my kid is in elementary school. If just have to get proof to fax to them.

badboy

Costcentral.com has it for 90.87 shipped to your door for students

Coco-bun

sweetness.

Billiam

Overall, I think Lightroom is a hell of a tool and I'd purchase it again. That said, I can easily see where people who are already users of Bibble, one of the Capture One products, or Lightroom’s "parent" Raw Shooter Professional might view the program as immature. If you've never used this type of software before, however, you'll probably fall in love with Lightroom.

I think the interface and how the various controls function are fairly straight forward. I can, however, see how committing to doing pretty much everything within one database-driven application might induce some feelings of Lightroom being a "wierd" or "foreign" way of working.

Now here's where I'll start really editorializing and probably sound like a snob. You've heard it before, but I'll say it as well: Lightroom is not Photoshop. As a matter of fact, I would personally encourage anyone that was considering getting/learning Photoshop to still go ahead and do just that and forget about Lightroom.

"But Billiam, aren't a lot of the things in Lightroom and Photoshop the same?" Yes, that's definitely true. However, the very nature of how Lightroom works limits the ways in which you can use some of the functions like curves, levels, and hue/saturation adjustments. If you learn to apply these things in Photoshop, you'll have the potential knowledge of how to apply them to all of your images. You may very well end up using Lightroom down the road and realizing that it works just fine for 75% of your images. If you learn and become comfortable with those same things in only Lightroom, you’ll never know what’s fully possible.

The main motivation behind what I’m saying is the notion of “selective editing”. I’m reading a good bit about, and slowly putting to practice, the idea that subtle adjustments to very specific areas of an image can really make or break a photo. You simply can’t do editing like this in Lightroom. If you know about Lightroom, you may be asking “What about the targeted adjustment tool?” The TAT is a wonderful tool that does indeed restrict the adjustments you make to only pixels that match the tonal range or H/S/L values you click on. The shortcoming of the TAT is that it still changes all of the pixels in the image that match the target you clicked. There is no way to “make only that person’s shirt a bit more red” or “darken the shadows under just the plants on the edge.” These are the sorts of adjustments that can only be done with adjustment layers and layer masks in Photoshop.

Overall, I’m already finding that I’m using Lightroom primarily as an organizational tool. When it comes to editing though, I’m basically using Lightroom to just do quick “rough drafts” in order to see what possibilities an image may hold. For any full-fledged editing, I always end up back in Photoshop. As with everything in photography though, this may just be a result of the way I’ve learned to work, what I shoot, or a combination of both. Your mileage may vary.

srika

It really comes down to time and effort for me. If I'm processing 300 pics in one weekend, it's Lightroom. If I am doing a few pics for a specific purpose (say like, one photoshoot) - I will pick the best pics and edit those with a fine comb in PSP. But if I'm doing 2-3 club shoots per weekend (as I have been doing) - it's Lightroom, hands down. And definitely, Lightroom is not Photoshop. It just makes it very easy to do PP on a large number of images.

Crazy88

WOW. Thank you so much for giving us the heads up. I immediatley went to provantage and purchased it for $93 including shipping. Now all i gotta do is email them a copy of my student ID. Again, thanx for that helpful info.

badboy

Good info in this thread. I got my hands on lightroom yesterday and started working on it today. So far so good. I did read about the program before I got it, so I didn't have to waste any time clicking things to find out what they did.

I still haven't figured out all the features, since I got the product yesterday, and I may not be able to for a while since this program is jam packed with features.

I was able to pp some pics and create a quick web gallery. It took me half an hour to do that, which is a great improvement, and I am only starting out. I can see there is a whole lot of potential time to gain from this application.

Here is the gallery I put up if anyone is interested in looking. I didn't have to do anything besides hit the upload button inside lightroom. To me that is amazing. It will be a great help to people not very web savy, as well as the web savy people who are just lazy to do it.

http://www.bboyhp.com/photos/sling

svtmike

How does Lightroom compare to Elements for cataloging photos? I really like the chronological sorting and the ability to assign tags to photos that is now in Photoshop Elements.

guia x

The web gallery is great. I have been wanting to put up a web gallery for a while but I just didn't have the time to do it. Having Lightroom just makes it so easy to do. I just simply put my photos in a collection and export to a web gallery. I just wish there were more presets to choose from. Hopefully they will add more to it.


I do not have any experience with Elements so I can't say for sure. I'm sure Lightroom is much more capable than Elements in cataloging photos. Afterall, that is what it's main purpose is. Lightroom can sort by capture time, import time, rating, file name, file type, aspect ratio, edit time, and more. It even allows you to move around your pictures in any order you want.

As far as tagging, it allows you to do it in many different ways. You can use a keyword stamper and stamp all the photos with that keyword, you can drag the selected photos to the corresponding keyword in the keywords panel, you can edit the keywords list by just typing into it, you can select the photos and click on a keyword from the recent keywords list or from one of the presets, or you can do it when you import the photos. It is so easy to add keywords to your photos in Lightroom and Lightrooms knows every keyword used for your photos in your library that finiding a photo using a keyword only takes one click.

Also, just want to add that you can find your images in so many ways as well. You can even find them based on what lens or camera you used from the Metadata browser.

Coco-bun

im playing with the trial version.
my impression so far?

I NEED MORE RAM (i have 1GB RAM, Pen4 3.0GHz)!!!

Billiam

I'm running Lightroom just fine on a machine with similar specs. If you're not aware, LR does a whole lot of background processing to generate preview images after you import your files. If you imported a decent number of images right off the bat, the program will seem sluggish until it's finished all the background work.

My advice would be to import all the images you're going to then leave Lightroom running and walk away from the computer for several hours. Remember, even at a moderate pace of two seconds per image, the program will be processing at a pace of 1,800 images per hour.

Coco-bun

I just went to Kyoto and Kobe (Japan), and was processing was a few hundred images...whoops, thats probably why

I like the UI, but I definitely need to get used to it...looks promising though.

ChodTheWacko

I accidentally hit L which put it into some sort of lightbox mode (show the picture on a black screen). I was incredibly suprised when it blacked out everything except the picture.
It not only blacked out the Start bar, but also my secondary monitor! Cool!

guia x

Just in case you didn't know, you can set the percentage amount the screen will dim when you hit L for the first time and also change the color other than black (to different shades of grey or white) from Edit>Preference menu under the Interface tab and Lights Out section.

Another cool thing is hitting Tab to hide the side panels or Shift+Tab to hide all the panels.

svtmike

Getting ready to answer my own question - Lightroom is importing my Elements catalog as I type this.

srika

(I'm posting this in here because I dont wanna clutter the HDR thread...)

Like anything else, the more you do PP, the better (and faster) you get at it. And, of course its possible to make a picture worse with PP. That's what makes it challenging. I was totally anti-PP until I actually tried it, as you may remember. Here's an example of a PP I did 5 months ago (without Lightroom), compared with the original and the same image PP'ed yesterday (with Lightroom and NeatImage). One of the big problems with the original 2 is the skin tone is uneven. Was able to get it more uniform. Also, this was the day after I got the 5D, I was still learning . This is JPG and you can see the EXIF on the 2nd pic. Now, it's best to get the original shot to come out as well as you can - but fwiw I was at f/4 and did not use flash.. I could have probably gone slower than 1/80 though. But again, it was my 2nd day of ownership of the cam. I just think this is a good example of what PP can do for you.

1. original (5 months ago)


2. PP (5 months ago - Paint Shop Pro)


3. PP (yesterday - Lightroom, NeatImage)

guia x

Good idea to move the conversation here. It seems like there is like three threads that are somewhat leading into the same topic of post processing.

Anyway, I like it that you showed an example. See here in this case, to me I prefer the middle photo. It's more dramatic than the last one and the man is more the central focus. I like that the background is a little darker. His face is a little more red but here is a case where I would not know if it would be acceptable. It seems his face is more red that his arms in real life. So the question is, do you really need to even out his face to his skin? I probably would leave his face alone but then that is probably not the right thing to do. I guess it is subjective when it comes to PP. I just hope I'm doing things the right way. I'll try to post an example myself later to show you what I do with my photos and have you critique it.