kaiyen said:
Yeah, I think the big change in lightroom recently is similar versioning to aperture - the original stays the same, and you make a series of "actions" that yield the edited version. The original is untouched. Not 100% sure, but I think that's true of Lightroom as well.
With Lightroom, as with Aperture, your original raw file remains intact. Settings you make in the "develop" panel (cropping, exposure, contrast, monochrome conversion, etc.) are stored either in the Lightroom database or in a separate XMP "sidecar" file, so you can undo or change them later.
You can't save several versions of the same image, though. Or if you can, I still haven't found out how to do it -- Adobe's actual how-to-use documentation of the beta is laughably sparse, although they've put plenty of effort into PR hype such as self-laudatory podcasts and "adventure tours."
Another big potential gotcha about using Lightroom is related to one of its plus points, the ability to manage raw files "in place" on your hard disk (rather than having to import the file data into the program itself, as Aperture does.) I learned the hard way that if you rename the raw files on the hard disk when Lightroom isn't running (I routinely do this after editing out "duds" so that the remaining files are numbered in sequence) then
all your editing changes will be lost -- frustrating if you've spent several hours cropping, exposure-adjusting and color-balancing a large shoot. In my limited experience (don't blame me if it doesn't work for you!) Lightroom DOES update itself properly if you change the filenames
while Lightroom is running.
Finally -- I just went through this last night -- if your internal hard disk fills up and you need to move your Lightroom-managed files to an external hard disk, Lightroom will lose track of the original file even if it IS running when you move the files. It will show this by displaying a question-mark icon in the upper-right corner of each thumbnail image. If you try to do anything to the image that requires access to the original data, you'll get a dialog box asking you to relocate the file. Once you've done that for one file, though, all the other files in the same shoot will update themselves.
I've mentioned these problems because they're things in the beta that can cause you to lose time you invested in prepping your collection of images -- if you're trying out the Lightroom beta, beware of them!
There are some other time-loss quirks as well, such as Lightroom's inability to read raw-file adjustment data you've made using Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, or other ACR-enabled software -- Lightroom, having started out with Macromedia before Adobe bought it, uses a different and incompatible data format for storing these settings. However, Adobe at least has acknowledged that this is a problem, which I hope suggests they'll find a way to make Lightroom recognize ACR data for the final release version.
(Oh, yeah, another nuisance about Lightroom's way of saving settings data is that it only lives in the database or XMP sidecar file -- even if you're using a format such as DNG, which is capable of storing the settings data internally. Working with DNG files, you can make ACR settings in Bridge on your laptop, transfer the files to your desktop computer when you get home, and then open the files in Photoshop with all your ACR settings intact. Lightroom can't do the same trick unless you go through the complicated runaround of exporting, transferring, and importing a matching XMP sidecar file for each image. Yuck.)
I'm devoting a lot of attention to this because this is a rangefinder camera forum, and at present Lightroom is the only choice for those of us who use the only extant digital rangefinder camera, the Epson R-D 1. Apparently, Aperture can't be used to manage R-D 1 raw files, even if you translate them to a supported format such as Adobe DNG. And with Epson seemingly content to let the R-D 1 fade into the marketing sunset, it's unlikely Apple will have any incentive to add support for it later in Aperture. So for R-D 1 users wanting a comprehensive raw-file-based management solution, it's likely to be Lightroom or nuthin', now and for the future.
It'll be interesting to see what these two products make of Leica M8 raw files...
