Adobe Lightroom----Whats your opinion

[bob williams]

I am considering purchasing Lightroom, but wanted to hear your opinion before I indulge. I have downloaded the 30 day trial and it seems to offer the best of many worlds. Easy organization, healthy editing capabilities and printing and presentation. I already own PS 4 and Bridge, but workflow is difficult and cumbersome. So whats your opinion?

[Maleko]

I personally love CS4 and Bridge, but thats me :P

[quattrophinia]

I love it and so do many pros. If you get it, make sure you get Scott Kelby's Lightroom 2 book, it's a blast to read and a must to learn the program completely.

[hotsecretary]

I'm just learning how to use LR2.4 more and more.. and it's honestly an amazing little piece of software!



I'd highly recommend it, and there's many sources out there for tips/tricks/etc.


http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

[crosbyharbison]

If you have a pc there is no competition, if your on a mac aperture is at least as good. If you shoot RAW go buy it.

[Daniel Browning]

So whats your opinion?

When it comes to ease of use, speed, simplicity, and integration, Lightroom is the best thing out there. That's why I bought it. I can jet through a thousand photos in a single sitting, and that's very helpful for event photography. (I was a Bibble owner before Lightroom, and that was fast and easy too.)

The biggest drawbacks are the lack of control and poor quality from high ISO (underexposed) images. For example, Lightroom lacks a simple linear raw exposure compensation slider. The slider they do provide is not raw, not linear, and is not simple. It also activates the highlight recovery tool behind the scenes. Worst of all, the results just look terrible.

High ISO shots are rendered very poorly, with blotchy and smeared color, even when NR is completely disabled. Other converters render the image with full detail and no blotches, just fine, film-like grain.

If I want to put a little time into the image (e.g. 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds), I'll load it in a raw converter with higher quality and more control over the image, such as RPP or RawTherapee. But when I have 25 GB from a wedding to wade through, there's no time for that. Less than 1% of the photos will go through the quality treatment.

[lculpin]

High ISO shots are rendered very poorly, with blotchy and smeared color, even when NR is completely disabled. Other converters render the image with full detail and no blotches, just fine, film-like grain
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Sad but true. That aside, LR is a wicked tool and I spend way more time with it than with photoshop. Id also say that while I REALLY love a few things about Aperture over LR, LR's seamless integration w/ PS and bridge made it the choice for me :)

[Keith B]

Aperture.

[hotsecretary]

Aperture.
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Darn it, at times I wish I had a MAC to at least try these things :)

[Keith B]

Aperture.






Darn it, at times I wish I had a MAC to at least try these things :)






I have never used Lightroom. I would love to hear from another Mac person who has used both. I have rendered RAW file with "as near" settings as possible in Adobe Raw and Aperture and have definitely seen better results from Aperture. My biggest gripe with Aperture (maybe Lightroom is like this too) is that you have to create a project, import the images and then process them. You can't just open one image on the fly and process it.


I'd love to drop an image on the Aperture icon and just edit it lickity split.


Oh yeah and I like ACR's Orange channel in the color correction. Aperture just has Red and Yellow.

[WAFKT]

I too did the 30 day Lightroom trial (at least twice or so), and really liked it. There are plenty of great training resources on the web to help you get productive with it quickly. When I purchased a new MacBook Pro (about 4 months ago), they had a promotional offer on Aperture 2, so I got it (like a third the price of Lightroom). Having used Lightroom first I found it a bit frustrating to switch to Aperture. I had started to develop a particular workflow with Lightroom, and Aperture just didn't like me "flowing" the same way. I didn't find that there were nearly as many helpful training resources on the web. I've got the hang of Aperture now, and I think it has great potential to be a contender to Lightroom someday, but I'm not convinced that it's there yet. Still too many like irritants that I have with Aperture; how it handles certain camera metadata info, how you keynote photos (I like lightroom's approach much better), and I find printing in Lightroom a little more intuative too. I've purchased Lightroom - I've installed it, but haven't got around to transferring my library over yet. About 90% of my photo processing can be handled in Lightroom, for the other 10% I really like the seamless way I can move to Photoshop.

[Keith B]

I too did the 30 day Lightroom trial (at least twice or so), and really liked it. There are plenty of great training resources on the web to help you get productive with it quickly. When I purchased a new MacBook Pro (about 4 months ago), they had a promotional offer on Aperture 2, so I got it (like a third the price of Lightroom). Having used Lightroom first I found it a bit frustrating to switch to Aperture. I had started to develop a particular workflow with Lightroom, and Aperture just didn't like me "flowing" the same way. I didn't find that there were nearly as many helpful training resources on the web. I've got the hang of Aperture now, and I think it has great potential to be a contender to Lightroom someday, but I'm not convinced that it's there yet. Still too many like irritants that I have with Aperture; how it handles certain camera metadata info, how you keynote photos (I like lightroom's approach much better), and I find printing in Lightroom a little more intuative too. I've purchased Lightroom - I've installed it, but haven't got around to transferring my library over yet. About 90% of my photo processing can be handled in Lightroom, for the other 10% I really like the seamless way I can move to Photoshop.






Thanks for the insight.

[lculpin]

When they were both first introduced, I actually really preferred Aperture, but LR2 fixed a lot (though not all) of my gripes with one. Comparing the most recent releases, Aperture just isn't quite there for me... I actually prefer Aperture's workflow freedom (In Lightroom you have to work in modules, technically I think I get why they did it but I really prefer Aperture's ability to do whatever you want to a photo without dinkering (that would be my new word for that day ;) ) around in between modules. Once you know all the shortcut keys it's not as bad (some of them will kick you around to the different modules rather than clicking the dumb buttons at the top) but it still feels a little counter-intuitive. On the plus side, although I don't us the slideshow or print modules a whole lot in LR, the Web module can be useful and the export options are great. At the end of the day, the integration with PS, Photomatrix, etc, that LR has is a really nice feature.... I don't remember if you can do this with Aperture (I just did a trial of it, never bought the package) but with LR you can send an edit right to PS from inside of LR, make changes, and come back and they update in real time, which is great, and I did find that LR had a few more features in some important areas. I personally think that Aperture has less of a learning curve (with the interface primarily) but I think at the end of the day LR lets me work faster now that I know it well.


If you're gonna get LR I'd actually suggest The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening over SK's book... I have nothing against Scott (I have read his Digital Photography books, read his blog daily, am a NAPP member, did his photowalk, going to PS world in Sept, etc etc) but I flipped through his LR book (and his PS CS4 book for that matter) and liked this choice a bit better... Scott definitely has a LOT of knowledge, I just find that this book's more of what I personally was looking for... take a look on Amazon and compare reviews (for whatever that's worth, I usually look at all of the worst ratings and go from those :P) if you're curious.


That was a lot longer than I'd planned :P

[Keith B]

At the end of the day, the integration with PS, Photomatrix, etc, that LR has is a really nice feature.... I don't remember if you can do this with Aperture (I just did a trial of it, never bought the package) but with LR you can send an edit right to PS from inside of LR, make changes, and come back and they update in real time, which is great, and I did find that LR had a few more features in some important areas. I personally think that Aperture has less of a learning curve (with the interface primarily) but I think at the end of the day LR lets me work faster now that I know it well.


That was a lot longer than I'd planned :P






Aperture will send the file to PS as a .tiff and automatically replaces it in the RAW file after edits. You have the option of keeping the original embedded but it will double the file size. It is a very seamless process. I can't say if it is easier than LR but I expect it has to be very similar since it is very easy.


I'm actually excited to see where Aperture goes from here. In fact I'd love to see Apple make a full fledged photo editing app. I'd love to abandon Adobe all together. They has done some very Microsoft-esque things lately that are probably more apparent to folks using the whole CS suite. I think they have gotten cocky and manipulative since InDesign conquered Quark. The apps are not very innovative and they bloat them with a lot of function that most will never use.

[lculpin]

LR uses basically the same process.


I'm actually really excited for the next release of Aperture, and I too would be thoroughly thrilled if Apple made a dedicated PS-style program... they seem to have a knack for being excellent at pretty much everything they do lately, so we can hope.


I might have to dl an aperture trial again, all this talk has kinda got me missing the workflow style a little bit... :P

[bob williams]

Thanks to all for thier input, the reviews I read pretty much agreed with the concensus on this forum. Since I do own a PC, playing with Aperture isn't an option at this point. So, I think I will go ahead and take the plunge; I am very happy with what I have seen so far. That, combined with your feedback gives me a great deal of conifidence that I won't be wasting my money.





Thanks Again,


Bob

[bob williams]

OK, I have Lightroom ordered---man, got to love the education pricing.

[TheRoff]

Hmm, I just ordered Lightroom today also. No student discount however. It doesn't look like I am going to rely on it to process high ISO photos, which I don't do very often anyway. I am anxious to get started learning it. I have been using elements 7, but the more I read I wanted the finer tools available in Lilghtroom





Larry

[Jorundr-Jorgensen]

Lightroom is a wonderful little program, a real muscle for my workflow. Yesterday I was having a blast doing some tethered shooting in the studio.


Tho I have to say, it doese help (a lot) if you've got some power in you're pc, I have used it before on someone elses pc that had an old AMD processor, nothing fancy like those quad/dual core things we have nowadays and it was a nightmare, to illustrate a bit, it took way to much time to zoom, dragging any parameter sliders felt like pushing a rock uphill and while exporting we could have had lunch. Just a little warning.


One of my fav features has to be that while importing it imports an back-up straight away to my external disc, so no worries what I mess up with the once on my HDD.


Enjoy the software!
Jorundr.