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Adobe Lightroom V2.0 Beta — Killer Photo workflow
sunil_gupta20801:
Here is the announcement-
http://feedshub.blogspot.com/2008/04/adobe-photoshop-lightroom-20-beta.html
nontroppo:
iphigenie: thanks for your nice writeup.
* I agree on some of the cool tools in lightroom such as the per color adjustment - although lightroom is way below lightzone on that front where you can limit any effect to a color (or range) automagically
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The colour-manipulation tools are not intended to be used for masking. I agree that Lightzone (LZ) has more editing power in some ways than LR. Masking in LR can only be painted on at the moment, no automatic masks. However I found the general bezier masking tools in LZ pretty clunky to use. And the sluggishness of LZ as the edit becomes more detailed gets on my nerves.
* there *is* partial undo in acdsee RAW - its the little arrow next to the reset button. By default undo only undoes the work on the tab you are on, not everything, but you can undo everything or what has been done on other tabs.
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Not very intuitive or flexible though...
* lightroom has a good workflow, although it seems aimed at printing not exporting/uploading. I work mostly digital only, no printing, and exporting seems a long winded process even after you save standard settings.
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Once you've saved export settings, you can just select that in the File menu and it does it all automatically, how is that long-winded? Oh, and there is a great Flickr plugin I use all the time here:
http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/lightroom-flickr/
I've done exports of 100s of photos with ease.
* lightroom seems far less able to cope with moving images - i move images every couple days to my external drive and this seems to puzzle lightroom
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I never move my images so don't know about this, but how should a program know where you put them?
* i dont have the quality issues in acdsee that you have - most likely because it is a different camera and format, so the default settings are different. I noticed that lightroom does apply some automated fixes based on my camera model, which acdsee does not - so they look possibly a bit better on opening. But once I do the same kind of work, I have equivalent images
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Even if you check for very subtle gradations in the shadows? Not all the images I tested showed clear differences, but in most of them ACDSee was never able to match LR for the Canon RAW images I tested. Perhaps it is only Canon images, but if they haven'ttuned their engine for such a dominant manufacturer, it doesn't give me confidence for their other camera formats.
* in both those tools I miss the flexibility that photoshop offers, as even with my limited knowledge i know how to do stuff in photoshop that i havent found how to do in other tools - such as different color casts for shadows/highlights, more clever sharpening (although lightzone had a way to achieve some of this, and in acdsee normal edit the channel mix allows some).
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Split-tone in LR develop module does seperate colour-cast for shadow/hightlights. As for sharpening, I find that, apart from tilt-shift type effects, I never use my powerful photoshop plugins anymore... I still would welcome more photoshop-like editing power, or even some of the masking options from LZ in LR of course!
iphigenie:
Thanks for the information - Theres clearly things that lightroom does that I havent figured out yet. I suspected as much.
I am a tricky customer since I am used to acdsee for some aspects and i dont even think of clever things LR could do for me - and without manual or docs how could i?
I'll just add to some of the points
Exporting: It always comes up with the menu for exporting, and it means an export takes a lot of times. I have saved settings profiles and everything but it just doesnt seem to remember them or want to use them, up comes the popup window, then another confirmation window etc.
Color: I'll have to check the color cast thing - I didnt notice it had dark/light options.
Undo in acdsee: I wouldnt say its unintuitive, if I am on the "color" tab then reset will reset my color settings but not my shadow/highlight or crop settings. If I want to reset these I can switch to that tab, or there is this quick shortcut option. I will agree there is a *way* more powerful undo/redo in lightroom, since you always see the whole list including incremental steps whereas acdsee just shows the previous step. But even in LR i tend to reset everything and start again. The killer feature is to be able to undo one step in the past without reverting all of the other steps since. But that's a full blown editor thing.
Moving: Acdsee can figure out duplicates/moved images, probably by file names and content. It also makes it easy to organise/backup files. It has some leeway expecting you might use other tools to do things with the files. I find lightroom far more difficult to understand from that point, it just expects you just put the files in one place once, and never do anything outside lightroom... Well I dont do that - I move my images in directories and to separate drives (my notebook has limited space).
I cannot even figure out how to tell LR to remove from its database files which I have deleted, it just errors when i even hover over those thumbnails. I found the "delete" and "find missing folder" options so this will help
Lightroom/Lightzone: i totally agree that they are differently aimed, but when I am considering where to spend money since i already have all the tagging/searching/management tools they do compete :)
RAW format: if there was 1 canon RAW format you would have a point, but almost every new camera has a different format. Although the website has additional profiles to download if yours is missing.
I am lucky since my camera was created to shoot in DNG, so there is no conversion involved - yet acdsee still has a profile for it. And not many have bothered, I can tell you!
Anyway to me lightroom's strength are in the adjust/develop workflow, it is much quicker and easier to do adjustments to images, even in groups. I had no problems figuring out how to do most things in the develop mode. The library mode on the other hand is not inutitive, without any manual or help (none in the beta) I could not figure out a lot of the management/organisation tasks, so I keep going back to acdsee to do basic things. Watching some videos of LR1 helped some, and I can see how impressive it must be used right - there are a lot of things behind keyboard shortcuts that are not visible in menus and buttons (hows a new tester to know?)
Acdsee's strengths are in the file management, tagging and searching, and their (destructive) editor is surprisingly powerful. The whole RAW management and manipulation is still a very rough and primitive tool - and slow. WHich is why I am looking at other options for playing with RAW, since PSP and photoimpact arent any better. Maybe I should see what came with the camera CD after all...
As it is I would love to get this 30% of LR features I have started using, but at £300 it is just not going to happen, not unless I really really can learn to use 80% of the features...
iphigenie:
thanks for the flickr plugin, might play with that - although stretching my flickr allowance as it is
nontroppo:
UPDATE: Lightroom 2 has gone gold. The final version rocks even more than the beta. Here are the changes since the beta:
[*]Hierarchical Dates and locations in the Library Filter. (Including days of the week for the date)
[*]The Volume Browser in the folder panel.
[*]Improved iconography for folders, collections, collection sets and output collections.
[*]Dedicated keyword input field in the keywording pane.
[*]Ability to add or remove metadata filter columns.
[*]Improved Keyword List interface. (Including filter by keyword to manage and organize keywords)
[*]Repositioned and refined dual monitor support location and experience. (Moved from right to left and the ultimate dual monitor experience is much more polished in terms of performance and stability
[*]Ability to set target collection for quick collection shortcut(b). (Target any collection as the target when you hit the B key)
[*]Lightroom Web, Metadata and Export SDK available on the Adobe Dev Center
[*]Local control improvements
[*]Complete list of local controls including, Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, Clarity and a color toning option available for the brush or gradient adjustment tool
[*]Additional gradient adjustment tool
[*]Improved auto-mask functionality
[*]Improved brush performance
[*]Additional post crop vignette options: roundness, feather
[*]DNG Profiles Concept
[*]DNG Profile Editor available on Labs
[*]Profiles for our current raw support list available
[*]Match camera JPEG looks in the Calibration tab by selection Camera Standard profile
[*]Export to JPEG functionality in the Slideshow Module. (Intermediate format for additional authoring tools)
[*]Enhanced output sharpening
[*]64-bit memory handling improvement
Read the full changes post here: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2008/07/lightroom_2_now_available.html
The local editing is faster and far more refined than beta, and the graduated filter simply rocks.
And Adobe have released an übercool profile editor, to allow LR to mimic camera-specific profiles more closely to the JPG/default vendor processing:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles
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