Topic: Lightroom?

[Sanjay]

Anyone here using lightroom?

What would be my advantage if any from switching from Bridge/CS3 to Lightroom.  Keeping in mind concert photography is my main concern.

Thanks.



Edited for rambling...

[phanophish]

They (Photoshop/Lightroom) are really complimentary.  Lightroom is like bridge on steroids with a lot of batch editing and management settings built in.  I really like it, but there are things that you still really must have Photoshop for.  If you shoot a lot of photos making the move to Lightroom will be money well spent.  If you don't shoot quite as much then Bridge will probably still get you by.  You can download a 30 day trial of Lightroom from Adobe to give it a whirl.  I could see living without Lightroom although I love it, but I couldn't get by without Photoshop.

[Sanjay]

For a shoot I'll have around 2,000 frames so I see this as something I should maybe look into.  I really only need quick editing and paring down > some actions (sharpen, noise reduction), > resize > save as. 

It would be fantastic to be able to open a file in PS, edit something out and close it and still process it in the batch and not have to save it as a Tiff or something to come back to later.

[Ed.]

get lightroom, it will do exactly what you want to do.  I use it for everything now and hardly ever open a photo up in photoshop anymore.  It'll get rid of red eye, dust spots, you can adjust everything if you shoot raw, and if you have a whole batch of photos that are similar, you can just click the previous button and it'll replicate everything you did in the previous photo.  All you'll have to worry about is tweaking the settings a little.

You can automate things so they do them to every picture, for example I have mine set up to apply more contrast to photos.

it has noise reduction sliders, curves, and a good black and white converter that allows you to tweak the photo for optimal contrast.

and the frosting on the cake - you can set it up to put metadata watermarks on all your photos as well as your name or signature.

I love it, I can take 200 photos in a day, come home and be done editing in 15 minutes.

edit to add:  I've never used it for resizing though, but there are actions for photoshop that will do that quickly.  I always upload my originals to smugmug, that way if my hdd crashes, I'll still have all my jpegs, even if I lose my raw.

[phanophish]

get lightroom, it will do exactly what you want to do.  I use it for everything now and hardly ever open a photo up in photoshop anymore.  It'll get rid of red eye, dust spots, you can adjust everything if you shoot raw, and if you have a whole batch of photos that are similar, you can just click the previous button and it'll replicate everything you did in the previous photo.  All you'll have to worry about is tweaking the settings a little.

You can automate things so they do them to every picture, for example I have mine set up to apply more contrast to photos.

it has noise reduction sliders, curves, and a good black and white converter that allows you to tweak the photo for optimal contrast.

and the frosting on the cake - you can set it up to put metadata watermarks on all your photos as well as your name or signature.

I love it, I can take 200 photos in a day, come home and be done editing in 15 minutes.

edit to add:  I've never used it for resizing though, but there are actions for photoshop that will do that quickly.  I always upload my originals to smugmug, that way if my hdd crashes, I'll still have all my jpegs, even if I lose my raw.

Yep, I'd say I'm about 90% in Lightroom for post processing.  The NR in Lightroom is not as good as things such as Noiseware.  I also still used Photoshop for dodging, burning, retouching, things of that nature.  Even for stuff that needs some PS work I still find Lightroom saves me time overall.  If you are shooting those kind of volumes Lightroom is a no brainer.  You'll be very happy you have it.  Also, this podcast is a great introduction and has lots of great tips as you might guess from the name....

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

[gearscout]

Lightroom is everything I need.  I have almost stopped going into Photoshop CS3.  DxO Optics Pro rarely gets used unless I'm dealing with pronounced noise that LR doesn't handle.  It's only when I want to add layers that I end up back in CS3.

Readers of this thread can download a new beta edition of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ver. 2 here:

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/

I'm sure that will be for a limited time, so it's a good chance to try it out.  I don't THINK you would need a serial number, but I have no way of knowing since I already have the licensed version on my machines.  1 price buys both the Mac and Windows versions.