Lightroom 4

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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I know a lot of you using digital cameras started using Lightroom 4 when it was still in a beta version. Now that it's final form, a lot of useful instructional material will appear on the web and in book form. Here are two of the folks from Adobe itself that always provide good info.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/features.html?

http://jkost.com/lightroom.html

Any other LR information sources you've found valuable including your own discoveries as you've become familiar with it.
 
Bill: please share if you have ever found anything about using Lightroom for experienced Photoshop users. Everything I find basically requires you to throw away everything you learned in the last 12 years and start over in Lightroom. Ideal would be a simply chart that says "if you do XXX in Photoshop, the equivalent in Lightroom is YYY"

I own Lightroom but seldom use it because I know Photoshop.

FYI, I shoot film. Output digitally. I have 12 years of files stored in my own methodology, not about to change to what Lightroom wants me to change to.
 
Let me add there are few things that Photoshop has for the photographer that you cannot find in Elements. But LR is a great organizer.
 
The developing controls seem more robust, but it lags a bit, even though I'm on a i7 iMac w/ 12GB RAM.

Kind of wondering if I should take all my Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro-edited TIFF files out of the Lightroom library.
 
Bob Michaels said:
Bill: please share if you have ever found anything about using Lightroom for experienced Photoshop users. Everything I find basically requires you to throw away everything you learned in the last 12 years and start over in Lightroom. Ideal would be a simply chart that says "if you do XXX in Photoshop, the equivalent in Lightroom is YYY"

I own Lightroom but seldom use it because I know Photoshop.

FYI, I shoot film. Output digitally. I have 12 years of files stored in my own methodology, not about to change to what Lightroom wants me to change to.
Click to expand...

Bob -

In general, Lightroom is a simpler program, pretty much designed for photographers. Photoshop is a much more elaborate and complex program, probably the one program used by everybody who has to deal with photographic images.

Indeed, most folks who do the majority of their work in Lightroom will still occasionally bounce into Photoshop for specific tasks. For example, if I've scanned a particularly filthy old negative, I find it a lot easier to take out the dust and scratches in Photoshop than Lightroom. Ditto something like object removal, although my retouching rarely reaches that degree.

If you are knowledgable and satisfied with Photoshop, the only significant advantage would be Lightroom acting as a database or catalog for all of your images. But even on a fast computer, it would take you a good many hoursto transfer all your images into a Lightroom catalog. LR has a few other nice features like its ability to "bookify" your pictures or run up a slide show. But these features are available in other programs. If you want to watch your computer catalog all your images into LR, it might provide a simpler workflow for many of your images. But it's not going to do anything you can't do now. It's just simpler for the basic imaging tasks. And the image quality it provides with those tasks is excellent.
 
I use LR... mind you I'm still on 2.1 :)
I wonder if I should upgrade at all though - 2.1 does all I need right now...unless of course I get a new digital camera and LR no longer supports the RAW conversion... then again.. there's Adobe's free DNG converter.. hmmm

Cheers,
Dave
 
celluloidprop said:
The developing controls seem more robust, but it lags a bit, even though I'm on a i7 iMac w/ 12GB RAM.

Kind of wondering if I should take all my Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro-edited TIFF files out of the Lightroom library.
Click to expand...

I have a lot of tiffs on my Lightroom files, but I have whole subsections that are nothing but raw files, and I still experience that slight slow down dealing with those files. My clueless, unexpert opinion is that dumping the tiffs isn't going to accomplish that much. Wait until you have to watch a giant RAID system come up to speed; that's a slow down.
 
The new develop tools don't look like they've changed much, but the overall level of control is MUCH higher/better. Huge improvement.
 
Bob Michaels said:
FYI, I shoot film. Output digitally. I have 12 years of files stored in my own methodology, not about to change to what Lightroom wants me to change to.
Click to expand...
See, this is what I've always loved about Lightroom, as opposed to Aperture etc.—it lets you keep your own filing system. I came up with my own concept for folder structure etc. and Lightroom makes it really easy for me to access my images in whatever order I wish to.
Also, others have said that importing your entire catalog into Lightroom takes ages. I don't think this is true at all, at least if you don't want to tag images while importing.
 
funkpilz said:
See, this is what I've always loved about Lightroom, as opposed to Aperture etc.—it lets you keep your own filing system. I came up with my own concept for folder structure etc. and Lightroom makes it really easy for me to access my images in whatever order I wish to.
Click to expand...

Aperture does exactly the same.
 
The development module in LR is almost exactly the same as the raw converter in PS. If you can work with the PS raw converter you can switch to LR without any problem.
 
Other changes in LR4:
-local moire correction and noise reduction
-lens correction profiles for leica lenses
-replacement of recovery and fill light sliders w/highlight, shadow, and light sliders (black slider unchanged)
 
For the cost of an upgrade ($79 I think) I'm sold.

I only started using lightroom last year and have to say it is a brilliant piece of software IMHO. (Note that I've been using a wide range of graphics software for some 15 years now). Lightroom is just fantastic. I love working with it.
 
Agree with the sentiment above, that as a Lightroom 3 user, I do not see a lot in this release to encourage me to upgrade. A lot of incremental upgrades, not doing much for the 'Adobe tax' reputation that seems to have developed.

Re: resources and tutorials, I find George Jardines paid videos great, but have not looked at them since LR4 to see if George has updated them to cover any changes in the new version. http://mulita.com/
 
whitecat said:
Let me add there are few things that Photoshop has for the photographer that you cannot find in Elements. But LR is a great organizer.
Click to expand...

As someone who is new to both digital and to LR, I'd like to get started early on a rational filing/organizing system before things get out of hand.

Can someone offer suggestions for a digital newbie?

Harry
 
I find Lightroom much more intuitive to use than Aperture. I have read most of Martin Evening's book (Kindle iPad version) for LR 3 and his LR4 version was available from day 1 of LR4. There's a lot of detail in his books. Basically I am getting a lot of my developing the way I like it quite quickly. The strategy of just running down the various controls from top of the list to bottom is easy enough. I'll do some more study this weekend. The black slider goes the other way in LR4.
 
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