Years ago I was complaining to a fellow photographer about the complexity of Adobe's Photoshop program. He told me, "It's not that hard. A friend of mine learned it in two months. He never left his office the entire time. He came out pasty white and divorced." I never learned Photoshop very well. Then along came Lightroom.
Lightroom doesn't quite replace Photoshop as a digital processing tool because there are some things that it can't do. But it makes up for this by the fact that it's an amazing tool, specifically designed for professional photographers, for getting large numbers of digital images processed, organized, looking good and delivered to the client in record amounts of time. Of course, Adobe has now come out with Lightroom 2, which is even better.
The adjustment tools that are available to the photographer really make it easy to work on batches of images that have similar lighting situations. I enjoy the creative process. It's almost like being able to shoot the images again. The cataloging system in Lightroom also makes it easy to add keywords and to find images later.
The Web Gallery option is nearly automatic, saves amazing amounts of time, and looks professional when I need to show a group of images to a client. It's a valuable service for the client because it allows them to see proofs immediately and share the images within their company as well.
The one thing about Lightroom that I have a problem with is that somewhere between 6000 and 10,000 images, a catalog will crash. This means that I need to make multiple catalogs, and Lightroom has no function to easily share image collections between catalogs. Since Lightroom has to restart every time I open a different catalog, the process of combining collections is tedious.
No comments:
Post a Comment