I'm a professional editorial people shooter and I use a Nikon D300. Which one do you guys think would be the best for me. Right now I do everything in Photoshop.

Scott

Try the demo(s) and decide what feels/works best for you, otherwise LR.

I really like lightroom. I hardly use photoshop at all now.

If you have a reasonably current copy of Photoshop and you are proficient with it, I'd get Lightroom. Lightroom + Photoshop = Awesome.

M

Hi all.

Been reading/lurking here on PDN for a while, glad to see where a lot of the exGalbraith folks landed.

In the FWIW dept. regarding trying the demo(s): A caution that needs to be said -

There's no such thing as a clean/virgin uninstall, unless you're religious about taking a snapshot just before the install, and restoring immediately after.

Having worked for years as a software dev at places like MS, and Aldus, and specifically with installers - you just can't go back. Crap accumulates, and that's where the equivalent of arterial plaque for the OS comes from.

It's either that or installing into a virtual machine that doesn't leave a trace.

Demo's are great - but need to be cautious, even with trusted products/providers.

Cheers,

Stick with CS3/Bridge for now, maybe give Lightroom v2 or whatever a look. The current version is junque, in my very humble opinion.

Bridge is kind of immaterial here, its just a browser. Lightroom is a database.

Lightroom, at least on a PC, has been unstable for me. Might be better on the Mac. I would not trust it in it's current form on a PC.

junque. Is that photographer's French? haha!

If you do 'everything' in Photoshop, consider Photo Mechanic as your initial editing/browser from which you can launch into tweaking in PS.

I did buy Lightroom and intend to spend more time with it but I'm not ready to abandon Nikon Capture for my initial RAW processing needs.

Although Lightroom seems to offer many processing capabilities, it's a big departure from my workflow and Mr. Rodney's comment "Lightroom is a database." has me wondering.

Technically, he's quite correct - LR is a database which stores pictures and information about operations which are to be applied to those pictures. It's totally nondestructive - even its crops are nondestructive. (You can undo a crop in LR at will even after performing an unlimited number of other transformations on the cropped image.) Unless you export a new file, LR never changes any pixel information in an image.

If you do a lot of model or portrait photography, LR is not a good solo solution because you can't do really effective skin retouching with it. It also has little ability to perform operations on limited areas of an image. But for handling large numbers of images which don't need a lot of pixel-level manipulation, it's amazing. I've never used Aperture: for all I know, Aperture is far superior. But I'm very happy with LR.

The other night, for instance, I used LR to go through about fifteen hundred pictures I took while I was in Hawai'i, pick out about a hundred and fifty I wanted to look at more closely, do curves/color correction/cropping, and re-export the final pick images (about a hundred and twenty) in the proper format for my stock photography site. Total work time, probably two hours. (I don't grind and do things at one go - if for no other reason than the kid and the dog are constantly demanding food or whatever. They have no respect for Ze Art.)

These images were all CR2 format, captured with my Rebel XT and XTi dSLR's. (The XT was my backup body and I kept the big zoom on it while I was in Hawai'i.) I have never fooled with Canon's RAW applications, either. I've always used either Photoshop with Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom to import RAW images from my cameras. (I already knew Photoshop when I bought my first dSLR.) I find Lightroom plus Photoshop a combination with more power than I could ever need - Lightroom for image cataloging, review, and RAW processing, and Photoshop for pixel manipulation (both retouching and outright manipulations) and masking techniques.

If you do a lot of stock work, Lightroom also allows you to do batch and/or singular captioning and keywording (its "info painter" tool, while not very intuitive, works really well once you figure it out.) This was really nice when I uploaded to my stock site - it saved me a lot of work. You can do that kind of thing in Photoshop, but it's not nearly as convenient.

If I could only have one, I'd take Photoshop, because you can't fix bad skin with Lightroom in a realistic sense, nor can you mask with it. Also, Lightroom's cataloging system, while it's not bad, still needs some work. It's not the be-all-and-end-all of solutions. But it works quite well. Unlike the prior posters, I've used LR on both Windows XP and Mac platforms with absolutely no technical issues.

M

quote:

Bridge is kind of immaterial here, its just a browser. Lightroom is a database.

True enough, I just don't think it's a very good database at this point in it's development.

Then again, I don't really need a database because I work with relatively few images, which affects my opinion of it. There's enough sorting and tagging options in Bridge for my needs, and I I greatly prefer working directly on the images instead of LR's import/export library paradigm.

I do think LR has potential even for my needs but in it's current form I don't like it at all. Mostly it's the UI that bugs me. Oh, and the bugs, the PC version is a little unpredictable.

I would give Aperture a try. I used Lightroom extensively until Aperture 1.5 arrived. After trying it, I never used Lightroom again. Version 2 of Aperture is even better. Aperture is a much more mature product and great for both managing images and raw conversions. I truly cannot imagine running my commercial photo business without it.

If Apple made a Windows version I'd give it a try, especially since v2 is out now.

I did try what was iView Media Pro, now Microsoft Expression Media. Pretty good asset manager, but with no raw converter it's a bit limited. And it also does the import/export thing which bothers me. Not sure why they all do this, and why they can't just read your folders directly without jumping through hoops. Seems like it would take less time overall and not use so much disc space.

In any case I'm pretty good about managing my media the old fashioned way, using folders and file names, which combined with a relatively small catalog of images (I don't shoot people very often)...eh, Bridge is enough for now.

quote:

Originally posted by David Harpe:
[qb] Might be better on the Mac. [/qb]

Everything is better on a Mac.


And I love Lightroom!