Lightroom your thoughts (1 Viewer)

Anyone using lightroom? what are it's good and bad points.

It has a very nice bit of innovation in the develop module - I like their thinking-outside-the-square interface - but it is mega-slow and wants to take over your whole computer. Some people love it, but I want to do my own organising and sorting. The biggest, indeed a truly massive, flaw is that you can't just open one file that you want to work on. No, you have to stuff about for ages with libraries and imports and other time-consuming nonsense. Makes the whole thing unusable, IMO. YMMV.

I don't like it either (caveat: I tried a relatively early Beta release): even though it has the RawShooter RAW conversion engine, the images were noisier and less detailed than what RSE could do, in every single case.

I agree with Tannin's misgivings too - but if the IQ had been there I'd have given it more of a chance than I did.

I'd say it depends what you want to do. It's way better at organising, storage, lookup etc than iPhoto and similar programs, although many think Aperture is better.

In terms of developing, early betas were shaky with regard to sharpening, noise reduction and the like. The V1.0 release was better, and the V1.1 is a significant step forward in many areas, updating camera raw to include clarity control, adding much improved sharpening etc.

I personally really like it. No, it won't do everything CS3 can do, nor is it as good as noise-ninja at noise-reduction, but it does give you 90+% of what those products can do, and all in one package. And with management, filing, web output, slideshows etc thrown in.

It can be resource hungry if not set up properly, or if computer is older, but I run it fine on my old 12" powerbook, which is not the greatest in terms of CPU, GPU or RAM.

Best bet is to download the demo and give it a try - I believe it's fully featured for thirty days. If you have any questions though, I can try to answer them.

Improved noise reduction is all well and good, but LR seemed to add noise that wasn't there in the first place when compared to RSE, Bibble and Cap One..!



I might have another crack at it though.

I have only used the betas too, Keith, up to (I think) the final version pre-release. I understand that some of my complaints have been at least partially addressed since then.

But I don't think I'll trouble with another download trial at this stage. I only upgraded from Elements 2 to Photoshop CS3 yesterday, so that is more than enough money to throw at Adobe for the time being. And I already have Bibble, together with a few nice plugins for it. The next think I need to buy is a few more clues about how to use all this stuff effectively!

I'm slowly coming to like it. I got a free copy as an RSP user, so I thought I'd give ity a go - and I hated it. However, I persevered, read some stuff on the Net, bought a book and spent some time playing about. Now I can see how useful it can be.

I love the easy way I can step though all my photos from one event and sort them into those I want to a)Process, b)Delete and c)Keep but not process. I find the control over exposure easy to use and the NR and sharpening on 1.1 has improved enough so that I no longer use Noise Ninja except in cases of extreme need.

Must admit, I'm starting to warm to v 1.1...

I still think I get more detail when I convert in RSE (I can work on that), but LR seems to do something very nice with colours "out of the box".

I know I could recreate the look of the attachment with RSE/PSP X, but this just fell out of LR with me just playing, and I think it looks better than the version I posted to the gallery: http://www.birdforum.net/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/150208/ppuser/4913.