Lightroom

Just a few thoughts about Adobe's recently-released (in beta) Lightroom application.

Positioned as a competitor to Apple's Aperture, Lightroom has a similar look-and-feel. Because its features overlap somewhat with Adobe's bridge, comparisons between the two Adobe products are valid, too. Where both Bridge and Lightroom attempt to organize and display groups of photos, Lightroom has some of Potoshop's Adobe Camera RAW plugin functionality: basic adjustment of exposure, white balance, black point, contrast, etc...

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I like the neutral colors in the browser, and, as reported, scrolling around the images is generally quick and smooth. Importing photos is a different story.

My super high-tech workflow involves making a folder for the RAW images from each "shoot," dropping the folder into an "Edit" folder, then doing a basic pass of editing. The photos that pass the basic editing step get dropped into a "Post" folder. There are currently 10.1 gigabytes of images in that folder, a combination of RAW and PSD files.

Importing the "Post" folder took about sixty minutes. The initial import was done in under a minute, but Lightroom spent the rest of the hour churning through the files' metadata and generating thumbnails. This points out one thing I haven't seen others mention; Lightroom does just fine with Photoshop format files. Lightroom allows for two ways to manage photos: let it manage photos internally or manage files in external folders. I elected to have Lightroom manage my existing folders. Note that Lightroom will manage downloading images from portable storage, like a CF or SD card.

Once the files were imported, they appeared in Lightroom's browser, a thumbnail display. Lightroom allows you to change the size of the thumbnail, add metadata individually or to a set of photos, organize into "Collections," and rotate the photos. One thing I couldn't find, however, was a way to change the sort order of the browser window. It seems to sort images by date taken, as pulled from the image metadata. It would be nice to sort by name, etc... Maybe this is in there and I missed it.

Light room, like Apple's Aperture, seems to have the idea of a single, grand library. I was hoping that Lightroom would let me have multiple libraries: one of images to be edited, one of images waiting for post-processing, and one of images archived to external storage. This doesn't seem to be possible. Lightroom dumps all imported images into a single library.

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Removing an image from a folder doesn't make Lightroom explode, but it also doesn't seem terribly comfortable with it. The software preserves the thumbnail and tells you where the image used to be. If managed folders are moved, however, Lightroom tracks them seamlessly. Nice touch.

Once you have located an image, the "Develop" function lets you adjust basic image settings on both RAW and Photoshop files. These controls should look familiar to anyone who has used the editing tools in iPhoto, Adobe Camera RAW, or Aperture. The controls are smooth and appear to be high quality. Note that Lightroom doesn't appear to have tools for croping, rotating or skewing / transforming images. Seems a strange omission; maybe I missed this one, too.

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Like aperture, Lightroom has a "Loupe" tool, but Lightroom's isn't nearly as cool as Aperture's. Basically a 100% zoom.

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Still, good for marveling at the detail captured by your snappy digital camera.

I like Lightbox's printing tools. They are particularly nice for making contact sheets.

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There is a "Repeat One Photo Per Page" feature that I really like.

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This repeats the same photo in whatever layout you have chosen. Great for redlining in cropping instructions or making a dodge/burn plan. Good stuff.

Most of Lightbox's features are unsurprising. As with Aperture, I'm left wondering, "who will buy this?" Depending on the price, it would be a cheaper way to get Adobe's camera RAW plugin into your workflow if you didn't want to buy the full version of Photoshop and didn't want to use Photoshop elements. And like Aperture, it would be sufficient if one only wanted to do basic image editing. Allowing multiple, disconnected libraries or enabling multiple computers to share a library would push the software upstream. Enhancing the basic image editing features would push it down market.

It will be interesting to see where Lightroom goes.