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Adobe Lightroom V2.0 Beta — Killer Photo workflow
Carol Haynes:
Lightroom seems fine, very slick and all - but i dont really see that many advantages over acdsee.
-iphigenie (April 05, 2008, 01:48 PM)
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Main thing for me is a good RAW engine - I always had issues with ACDSee and their colour profiles suck!
Although with the beta I had lots of errors and crashes so I will wait and see. Not using photoshop or any adobe tool (I was on the macromedia side of that divide) I probably dont get the full benefit of the integration
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They do advertise it as an 'early beta' so crashes and problems are likely and par for the course. The production version 1.3 is rock solid.
iphigenie:
I wasnt holding the crashes against the app - just makes it hard to figure out for a lazy user like me - ads to the confusion
I dont have the benefit of photoshop to inform how the tools in lightroom work - I have tended to use other photo editing tools in the past, and my last photoshop course was v6... so I feel lost. I know from reading reviews that people used to photoshop are often lost in front of some other tool, because the sliders arent the same and dont have the same effect etc. Well i have this the other way at the moment.
I am trying to like it, since all the tutorials and books anywhere only ever mention lightroom, if i can get myself to be able to use it and justify its cost, then I will have an easier time improving (same goes for photoshop but heck if I am going to spend the price of a good lens on a piece of software)
Slowly figuring it out - but I think it is overkill for me to have a tool like this especially if i dont have photoshop to integrate with - i dont understand the different tools enough
nontroppo:
Hm, I took to the Lightroom interface like a duck to water, probably because it was similar to Bibble Pro much more than it is to Photoshop (PS and LR are not similar design wise at all, and you certainly don't need PS to benefit greatly from LR). I find Lightzone more difficult to use than Lightroom, and that is even when they are quite similar UI wise.
The very good thing with Lightroom is that there are tons of tutorials (inc. many free from Adobe) and tips out there for many aspects of its functionality:
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/lightroom/tutorials.html
or just search Google.
The critical thing for me are the keyboard shortcuts and transparent UI, learn those and you fly through the interface: D - develop, G - grid view, C - compare view, TAB - toggle left/right panels, SHIFT+TAB - toggle all panels, L - lights out, F - full-screen mode, J - show highlight/shadow clipping, I - show info, R - crop (in develop module), 1-5 - rate image, X - mark for deletion, B - add to quick collection.
And there doesnt seem to be a way to say "i didnt like what i did DO NOT save it"
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You have many options:
1) UNDO/REDO as in any other app.
2) History in the Left panel (F7 toggles it).
3) Left panel > Snapshots > Import reverts back to the original. I save several snapshots as I work to give me different ideas. Each snaphot has its own history, amazingly flexible. If I really like two snapshots, then i create a virtual copy of the image (CTRL+')
It seems that every time I move a slider in a tool it adds it to the history. I dont want to apply sharpening 22 times, i want to find the right setting.
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I don't see why you think saving the history of your edits is wrong? I may want to try two different sharpen settings, and simply toggle back/forth in the history. If, as you said, all sharpen operations were collapsed into one, i'd lose that flexibility.
And through all of this the image does not sharpen one bit.
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You need to be zoomed in 1:1 i.e. 100% (Z - zoom tool, D - loupe and click image) for sharpening/detail to be observed. There is a ! exclamation point in the interface of the sharpen panel when you are not at 1:1 zoom warning you you will not see your edits.
Here is a useful (critical) key when sharpening in Lightroom: ALT — zoom to 1:1 and first hold ALT and drag the mask slider. This is limit your sharpening to higher contrast edges. Second, hold ALT and drag amount, radius and detail to taste.
If you want to see what effect any edit has in a particular module, you can toggle its effect on and off, so for sharpening:
That gives you very quick way to see exactly what you are doing in that domain.
Hope some of that makes sense ;-)
nontroppo:
Lightroom seems fine, very slick and all - but i dont really see that many advantages over acdsee.
-iphigenie (April 05, 2008, 01:48 PM)
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Main thing for me is a good RAW engine - I always had issues with ACDSee and their colour profiles suck!
-Carol Haynes (April 05, 2008, 03:20 PM)
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This is of course a critical point; what RAW engine are they using, what are its weaknesses or strengths?
nontroppo:
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest ACDSee Pro 2.0.238. Got it to import about 50 RAWs and some JPGs into it. The browser is fairly clean and logically ordered. But metadata and keywording is clunky.
I find it quite disorienting when you "view" an image from thumbnails, the browser just disappears, one can only really use the filmstrip. I very much miss having a Loupe to examine photos quickly from the browser. So I tried using the film strip, then using the context menu to go to full size; it zooms in on the JPEG thumbnail and doesn't render a real preview! So the browser is not really able to show you your photos.
OK, so I have to live with a modal interface, View is the only way to "view", and one has to accept the management interface cannot be used if you want to actually see your image as it is.
So then I "edit my image", only to find this is destructive editing (and again modal). So out i go and go to RAW processing. There are two overlapping interfaces which doesn't make sense to me. And lots of the tools are actually destructive for editing.
RAW processing is pretty basic. Exposure, color, detail and cropping. Playing with sharpening I wanted to go back to see my previous edit - but there is no undo! You can reset everything but not step through changes, thus cannot do quick before after comparisons, cannot get back to a previous setting if your cat jumps on the mouse etc.
But the capital offense is indeed the RAW converter:
As far as i can tell, there is substantial image detail lost. Trying to recover with sharpening causes pretty noticeable artifacts. I tried to get the two apps as close as possible in terms of look (unsientific I know, but as algorithms are different there is no way to clearly equalise them). In Lightroom, look for the detail of the skin reflections, and the more subtle gradations on the fabric. With ACDsee there are weird black holes probably caused by the poorer sharpening algorithm. The skin color is flat and grey, and I couldn't get it any better.
Then there are whole important aspects of image control just not available in ACDSee. In Lightroom there are very cool mouse-adjustment tools for hue saturation and luminance for 8 color channels; this is important for more careful color control. Click on the little circle in the HSL panel and drag on a region of your image; you are intuitively adjusting that local color region the color information (same works for tones in the tone curve panel). These adjustments give you fantastic immediate control of color and tone, and are nowhere available in ACDSee. You may say well that sort of stuff is only good for preofessional, but it is not. I now consider solid management of color channels just as important as exposure and tone control.
I also miss the clarity tool, before/after comparison, great BW conversion, vignettes etc. And the whole benefit of non-destructive editing is flexibility. Lightroom gives you Snapshots and history of all your edits. You can spawn out virtual copies and stack them together with ease. And a direct interface to processing presets, applicable to batch import makes complex processing trivial even for large groups of images. ACDSee is much less flexible, I can't even undo settings changes during RAW processing!
The local enhancements are destructive in ACDSee, so I won't try comparing them. Lightroom is just too far ahead here. I can't emphasise how sensational it is to do local adjustment, then tweak it however i want later, save sets of different adjustments. It is all metadata, no pixels are being harmed. In the screenshot above my previous post, my eye is locally enhanced (one set is exposure, another is tint), i can toggle these setting around, tweak parameters without ever having to "undo".
I think as a browser ACDSee is OK, though I dislike its modal nature and inability to see my image properly in the browser. But as a RAW processor, I would never use it. Detail being lost (or at least cannot be recovered) is the killer, but the feature set is weak, and the flexibility to very limited. I personally wouldn't pay $130 for it.
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