Finally Seeing the Light(room)

jmphotocraft

I had been resisting for too long. Sorry for the old news for the LR experienced, but I'm just blown away.

Here's a little test I did:

http://www.jmphotocraft.com/lrdr/seeingthelightroom.htm

pathfinder

Nice demonstrations of the ability of LR4 to regain highlight and shadow detail,Jack,

I haven't written much about this for some time, but that was, and still is, my impression when I began learning Lightroom 4. I was pretty comfortable with LR3, and did not like learning the new sliders, but after a few sessions and seeing what one can do with highlights and shadows in Process 2012, I was totally blown away, and havn't looked back.

I have even had folks ask me how I processed my HDR settings for an image, and just told them it was routine highlight and shadow sliders for a single image only, in LR4.

Today my main use for PS is selections and even most of my local editing is now done in LR4, not PS.

LR4 has delivered a major improvement in image editing capabilities, such that I am re-editing many of my images done previously in PS or LR3 or earlier, because I can get such better images from RAW files shot 5 or 6 years ago now.

I have been derelict about ordering PS CS6, because I use PS so rarely now. Not good for Adobe, as I suspect I am not alone, too.

jmphotocraft

Thanks. I feel like I have a new camera. However I have to admit I'm spoiled by the simplicity of DPP, it's going to take some growing pains to get used to the workflow of LR. I don't get the whole "importing" business. Why can't I just browse the file system as usual?

Art Scott

Glad you like LR. It is a great software... ... i saw a huge difference when I processed out some MRW's in the Software that Konica Minolta was delivering with their cameras then did a comparison of that and LR1... I did not believe their could be huge difference, but their was... that was over 7 yrs ago and I have never looked back...I only had a few thousand MRW's at the time and I totally re-processed all of them before I got 10's of thousands of them to re-process.

arodney

Great free video on PV2012:

http://mulita.com/training/hns-r/

jww

jmphotocraft wrote: »

Thanks. I feel like I have a new camera. However I have to admit I'm spoiled by the simplicity of DPP, it's going to take some growing pains to get used to the workflow of LR. I don't get the whole "importing" business. Why can't I just browse the file system as usual?

Congrats! ..and you are just scratching the surface. It is an awesome program for sure!

You need to pull them in, but my advice especially if you are used to managing your own folders, import with the option of NOT MOVING THEM.

The reason you need to pull them in is to create a database which is a series of pointers to the orig photos along with all the adjustments, metatags, collections, flags, color coding, ratings, etc... Then when you export them, they take on all those attributes to a new set of photos. LR doesn't make changes to the originals. Basically you are just building a database of where your photos are and what all you did to them.

My basic workflow after a shoot or event is import, add master set of keywords, break into catalogs, add more keywords relevant to the catalog, develop, then export to a sub folder for the event. Then I upload to smugmug. (I don't bother with the internal upload in LR as I feel I am wasting its time while I can use more of it's power towards my tasks at hand.)

There is really more that I do, but that is the basic flow.. hope it makes sense!

Hope that makes more sense!

jmphotocraft

Thanks Andrew and jww!