Friday 21 August 2009

Is Lightroom the Rightroom to be in?

For sometime now I have been advising people who asked me, to use Adobe Lightroom to manage their workflow. This is because Lightrom offers a structured environment for you to manage your photos in and there are plenty of examples workflows available for you to follow.

But the thing is, I don't use Lightroom myself...so why not ? Well I have a workflow that is very organised already and uses a whole wedge of different software and tools to get the results I want. So Lightroom's all-in-one model doesn't particularly hold a great set of advantages for me. I tried Lightroom 1 and wasn't hugely impressed as it seemed to lock you into its ow view of the world and so didn't fit too easily into my workflow.

I have been meaning to take a look at Lightroom 2 for a long time, but it has been difficult to find the time until now. I recently was hit by the swine flu virus and consequently spent a lot of time laying exhausted around the house. Having bored myself senseless with daytime TV, I decided that it might be worth taking a look at Lightroom.

I spent the small amount of time I had between sleeping and coughing, watching the Adobe video guides to Lightroom and I have to say that it does look rather good. It still feels a bit "claustrophobic" to me and i have a feeling I will soon be learning LUA (The scripting language of Lightroom) to get round what i see as the limitations. But it does seem to be worth a play with now.

I have ordered a couple of books so I'll be reading them over the next few weeks and working out the best way to integrate it into my workflow. I'll let you know what I discover.

4 comments:

Dav Thomas said...

As someone who mainly uses film, I hadn't, until recently bothered with Lightroom. Having seen someone else using it I decided to give it a go and I have to say I'm hooked.

When using digital I can do a lot of my post production directly in Lightroom before doing final work in Photoshop.

It also works well with film once scanned, although it's not to happy about my 1gb+ drum scans!

I particularly like the ability to add keywords and organise my photos, I'm normally hopeless at organising my photos so it really helps.

I'd recommend the luminous-landscape.com tutorial videos, much easy to digest than books :0)

Chris Shepherd said...

Thanks for the comment Dav,

It does certainly seem to be a comprehensive package and a lot of things that annoyed me in v1 hve been fixed. So I'm pretty sure its the way forward.

Expect a lot of rambling posts about Lightroom over the next few months.

Chris

Kevin said...

Chris,
I've been trying LR2 for the past couple of months to catalog and archive, I have found it a pretty impressive intuitive program, once your images are keyworded the search facility is lightning ( lightroom ) fast, I can search my 10,000 for an image and the results are almost instantaneous. Very handy.
I've yet to get to grips with the over modules so look forward to seeing further blogs on the subject.

Chris Shepherd said...

Thanks for that Kevin, good to hear a testimonial from a satisfied user.

Plenty of lightroom bloogage comming soon.