I’ve not downloaded the beta version of Lightroom 4 now available from Adobe, because I’m getting on pretty well with Lightroom 3.6 and I’d prefer to let others discover any problems – and hope that Adobe will sort them out by the time of the official release “in early 2012.” It does sound like they have made a number of significant improvements, particularly for me to the “basic tonal adjustment controls” which they claim “extract the entire dynamic range from cameras for stunning shadow details and highlights” as well as “additional local adjustment controls, including Noise Reduction, Moire and White Balance.”
Some will also find the new abilities with video useful, though I’m still trying hard to avoid working with video; though I do recognise it has its uses, I find it rather frustrating and limiting, perhaps because I’m so used to thinking in terms of still images.
I don’t make a great many prints, though I have just started making the occasional one from Lightroom, and the new ability to ‘soft-proof’ should help, though I’ve never found it entirely satisfactory in Photoshop.
But if there are any photographers using digital out there who haven’t yet discovered what Lightroom can do for you, this is a good opportunity to work with the software for a decent length of time for free. Photoshop is still useful, particularly for working with the scans I’m still making from film, but Lightroom does much more for my digital images, and does it much faster and more intuitively than Photoshop ever did.
Almost the only thing I still need Photoshop for when working with digital images are one or two plugins, particularly one I like for sorting out fisheye images. Lightroom can convert them to rectilinear perspective (which is very seldom what you want) or do a partial conversion which is generally more useful, but I often prefer the Fisheye Hemi conversion.
Lightroom takes a little getting used to, and I still find myself having to look at the help at times, but mostly I find it more intuitive than Photoshop. You can work on images with the local tools and not have to bother with layers. Lightroom stores your original files and doesn’t mess with them, and when you work with files you are creating lists of commands to be performed on the original. When you need actual files to be output, these commands are run and the resulting files produced, and you can set up presets with the file size, quality, profile etc you need for different purposes – full size high quality jpegs SdobeRGB to send to libraries, medium size sRGB files for projection, small sRGB jpegs for the web, with or without watermarks etc.
Presets are simple to understand and greatly cut down the time it takes to do what you need. They also make sure you get things right and don’t forget things. Much of what we have to do is repetitive and presets will do it for us.
Lightroom works best for photographers who don’t mind getting their files organised. So Lightroom automatically backs up my work as I bring it from card to computer, and automatically changes file names to give every image a unique name. I think the best way to keep track of stuff is to use the date as the first part of every file name, so this image, taken last Saturday, gets a name that starts 20120107.
Using the date ‘backwards’, yyyymmdd means that files will sort in proper order in any folder. Its full filename is 20120107-d0528 and the original RAW file has filetype .NEF while this version is a .jpg file.
Lightroom lets you store images in a systematic way – ordered by year, month and day – and then set up collections that order them in ways that make sense for you. So this particular image might be in a collection called ‘gestures’ and it could also be in another collection called ‘Iranian’ and another called ‘Trafalgar Square’ or whatever that represents how you want to classify images. You can also use keywords or any metadata to find groups of images.
And as you may be able to see, you can also put a watermark with the wrong year in it on your images. I did make a watermark file for 2012, but I’d changed back to the earlier one to write out some files from last November and had forgotten to change back.
There are some useful plugins for Lightroom, though these are different to Photoshop plugins. One cheap and useful one that I wouldn’t be without is Jeffrey Friedl’s Metadata Wrangler, strictly a ‘post-process filter’, a donation-ware program. And I’m pleased to read that this still works with Lightroom Beta 4, though it may cost a cent (or more if you wish) to upgrade.