Weekly Discussion Thread: Lightroom vs Photoshop vs Aperture / or do you combine??

Agnieszka

Let's talk about our different processing approaches. I'm wondering what YOU are using; Lightroom / Photoshop or Aperture, or do you use all 3 of them? :ear

Moogle Pepper

Agnieszka wrote:

Let's talk about our different processing approaches. I'm wondering what YOU are using; Lightroom / Photoshop, or do you use them both?

Both!

wadesworld

Don't forget the Aperture users.

(though I'm not a wedding photographer, so I don't count)

l.k.madison

wadesworld wrote:

Don't forget the Aperture users.

(though I'm not a wedding photographer, so I don't count)

Yes, we love our Macs!!!

Between the two of us, we use all three, depending on what needs to be done. I favor Photoshop, my husband favors Lightroom (mainly for the workflow) and Aperture comes in every once in a while. We've used Bibble a few times, too.

Agnieszka

wadesworld wrote:

Don't forget the Aperture users.

(though I'm not a wedding photographer, so I don't count)

Ha!! You are right .... sorry for that & great point!!

Blurmore

LR 3 Beta 2 and the day it is released in final I will buy the upgrade from 2. LR is badass, only stuff with heavy masking/diffusion/layers/layout/text sees photoshop (CS 2) and I'd say that amounts to maybe 5% of my total photography output.

heatherfeather

Blurmore wrote:

LR 3 Beta 2 and the day it is released in final I will buy the upgrade from 2. LR is badass, only stuff with heavy masking/diffusion/layers/layout/text sees photoshop (CS 2) and I'd say that amounts to maybe 5% of my total photography output.

What he said.

mmmatt

I use bridge > camera raw > (sometimes) ps cs3

I can do 90% of what I need to do in ACR, and then just do bigger cloning jobs and run actions in ps. Sometimes I use curves but even that is rare. I like the concept of bridge although I'm sure lightroom would speed me up some. ACR is more powerful than people give it credit for...

CS3 is showing minor quirks on windows 7, so I'm going to have to make some changes soon. CS4 didn't float my boat but cs5 is looking interesting... I may go LR though, I guess I'll be watching this one closely!


Matt

zoomer

I never do any serious processing, just the basics.
A little cloning here and there but not much, that is serious processing for me .

Depending on how busy I am.
Busy season 95% Lightroom 5% Photoshop.

Slow season where I have more time to play with processing.
70 percent Lightroom 30 percent Photoshop.

Kinkajou

Poor people unite! Gimp all the way!

Although it makes for a slow, slow, slow workflow, it does the job. Well, mostly. I'll be upgrading to a new computer soon and plan to get LR and PS for it.

I have to say that Gimp has been a great tool thus far and I definitely recommend it for someone just starting out in photo editing who can't afford LR and/or PS. You can do much of the same stuff, but there is no batch processing. Theoretically you can create something similar to PS actions, but I haven't really sat down and tried to work through that in detail.

Jean Levasseur

I'm using F-Spot for my basic management (tags, smugmug uploads, etc), UFRaw to develop my NEF files and GIMP for extensive editing. I've tried Hugin as a panorama stitcher, but it is not quite user friendly though. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with my workflow, but I don't know much about PS / Aperture / Lightroom, so I can hardly compare.

angevin1

Kinkajou wrote:

Poor people unite! Gimp all the way!

Although it makes for a slow, slow, slow workflow, it does the job. Well, mostly. I'll be upgrading to a new computer soon and plan to get LR and PS for it.

G I M P ~

GIMP is totally c00L, at least with me, and any folks that like open source.

Everything I do , goes through LR2....I go to newly acquired CS4 for different corrections and to learn...I turn back to GIMP when I need something quick! But 98% of my stuff only sees LR2~

cheers,

Snowgirl

Mac Mac Mac
Yes, I am a MAC

I use the new and trés cool Aperture 3 now for the bulk of my processing. For close-up portraits etc. I then go to PS for finishing touches, masking etc. Aperture 3 HAS curves - yehaw!

mutti_wilson

Fastone for gleaning through the images - Capture NX for most of the work - PSPX2 for the little things.

glengoffin

LR Rules! Well ... mostly ...
I'm your basic LR for most stuff but PS for those special items kind of guy

I'm wondering if anyone has used (or is using) Photo Mechanic? Zack Arias has a video where he shows his workflow which starts with Photo Mechanic ... and it is quite impressive! I'm planning to give the PM demo a try.

Shima

heatherfeather wrote: »

What he said.

Yup, Lightroom 3 Beta 2 with plans to buy it as soon as it's out.

Swartzy

LR & PS......Doing more in LR these days and less in PS for weddings..except for the "Ooooh Baby" shots...then they get special PS treatment.

david_h

I used to use CaptureOne/Photoshop now it's Lightroom/Photoshop

My workflow is pretty simple.

Copy NEF files to hard drive.

Back up to external drive and to LiveDrive (in cloud)

Import to Lightroom - applying an import preset to get the starting point I want

Tag files I want to keep

Correct the keepers for white balance and exposure as needed

Export to jpg

Re-name files so no gaps in sequence

In Photoshop run a little action for colour and sharpness that also ads my logo and resizes for webproofs.

Run similar action (without resize and logo) for proofs to deliver

Upload webproofs to SmugMug

Relax with a nice beer!!

Jeremy Winterberg

Dont Forget Bridge!!

My workflow:

Shoot wedding in RAW
Download images using Bridge CS5 to my pc desktop
Backup to Smugmug using StarExplorer Pro - our own Nikolai made this program and its amazing!
Backup to external Hard Drive
Backup to DVD
Backup to MacBook Pro
Go through the countless images in bridge giving a star rating to the images I like
Fine tune those images down to the final cull
Edit the "keepers" in Camera RAW 6.0 (its such an amazing update to the old 5.7 or whatever it was in CS4)
Do any major touch-up work in Photoshop CS5 (the new Content Aware fill is amazing.. everything about CS5 is amazing)
Upload edited images to SmugMug using StarExplorer Pro
Make another backup DVD of edited images
Blog images from the wedding
Make Album in InDesign CS5
Format Memory Cards

sleep.

This workflow works well for me. It will be even easier once I get a fancy firewire CF card reader. Hopefully will be getting that before my next wedding. I used to use Lightroom 2 but its too similar to bridge, and there is more control in ACR. And, bridge is extremely integrated in Photoshop CS5 (they have a mini-bridge tab now that lets you do almost everything you can in regular bridge from within photoshop), so it makes my workflow easier.

Oh and matt, CS4 and 5 work wonderfully well on Windows 7. 5 is by far worth getting over 4. (I dont even think you can get 4 anymore)

PhotoLasVegas

david_h wrote: »

I used to use CaptureOne/Photoshop now it's Lightroom/Photoshop

My workflow is pretty simple.

Copy NEF files to hard drive.

Back up to external drive and to LiveDrive (in cloud)

Import to Lightroom - applying an import preset to get the starting point I want

Tag files I want to keep

Correct the keepers for white balance and exposure as needed

Export to jpg

Re-name files so no gaps in sequence

In Photoshop run a little action for colour and sharpness that also ads my logo and resizes for webproofs.

Run similar action (without resize and logo) for proofs to deliver

Upload webproofs to SmugMug

Relax with a nice beer!!

Suggestion:
Re-name the files in LR, you can name them based on time shot..
we have names for our files as follows:
YYMMDDHHMMSS-originalfilenumberprefix

When sorting by filename, they arrange right down to the second.

JC

Digikam-UFRaw-Gimp
Another open source user here, but i don't do pro work, so YMMV.

I absolutely love Digikam. I do a lot of mundane work shots with my point and shoot, and I use Digikam to organize, tag and geocode them, and basic photo-editing, which for documentary work shots can only consists of adjusting basic exposure and levels, no fancy image manipulation.

Digikam is also great for my hobby art shots.

I'm not as happy with UFRaw- you can do everything with it, it's really versatile but I have a hard time matching the embedded JPG/Raw preview look, and a lot of time I'm pretty happy with the out of the camera processing in the jpg preview. I wish UFRaw had a default setting that would match whatever Canon does in the camera.

Gimp is fine for me, I wish batch processing were easier, the script coding in Gimp is pretty incomprehensible to me, but you can do basic GIMP batch processing in Digikam.

(edited)
Whoops, i didn't realize this thread was in weddings, i did a search for UFRaw and found it. I definitely don't shoot weddings!

Komal

I love Lightroom! It really does the trick for me. I use Photoshop Elements for canvasing images to get them ready for the blog.

ShepsMom

Mostly LR and some CS for a special touch. I've downloaded trial of Aperture a long time ago, but just couldn't get my head around it.

Matthew Saville

I preferred Bridge over Lightroom for a very long time, and I still do enjoy the ease of browsing with a properly configured Bridge CS3-CS5 program. Bridge is great for browsing old archives that you don't really care to bother creating a Lightroom catalog for...

Moving forward, I do usually use Lightroom for all high-volume processing, any job more than 100 images or so gets it's own Lightroom catalog. Most everything, including color correction etc. of course but also even burning and dodging, minor blemish removal and skin smoothing, happens in Lightroom.

I only really use Photoshop for seriously advanced stuff, which maybe only happens a few times per job...

For any new buyer, I can highly recommend starting with a copy of Photoshop Elements and Lightroom; Photoshop Elements comes with Bridge CS5 these days, so for a pretty decent price you can do pretty much everything...

=Matt=
=Matt=

Ed911

For my last wedding... Viewed, culled, and Processed in LR3 with less than 10% additional post processing in CS5.