Review - Adobe Lightroom beta
Andy
Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
Review – Adobe Lightroom beta - January 9, 2006
Today, Adobe announced Adobe® Lightroom™ beta. Adobe hopes this product “will be the complete, elegant environment for the art and craft of digital photography, from raw capture to creative output.”
I’ve had the opportunity to work with Lightroom for the past several days. Will it? Let’s find out.
Adobe hopes this will be what pros and serious amateurs have been waiting for – an application that will allow them to easily sort, cull, rate, keyword, caption, show, print and edit large volumes of photos. What’s that you say? You already have that with CS2 and Bridge? For some folks, this application will replace them – for others, it will augment – used as the first step in the post-processing workflow.
Photoshop will still be required for detailed image editing. However, Lightroom is a great tool for many photographers – who quickly want to review a shoot, rate, keyword and make image edits – singly or as a batch – from simple white balance to complex color and exposure adjustments.
First and foremost, this is beta software – something which Adobe hasn’t really done much of, this public beta thing. This product is not yet “feature complete” which means that Adobe will continue to fine tune it, and improve it based on beta user feedback.
INSTALLATION – couldn’t be easier. Drag Lightroom to your Applications folder and click on the Lightroom icon to launch. Currently, Lightroom is Mac only, but Adobe intends to have both Mac and PC versions available. The system requirements are not overwhelming: G4 or G5 processor (PowerBooks are OK!), Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher, 512Mb RAM (more is better) and 1Gb of disk space. Adobe states that the final shipping version of Lightroom will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, as well as PCs.
STARTUP – fast. You’ll get a splash screen, which Adobe hopes you’ll read – and you probably will, even though reading is hard – it’s called “Five Rules.” Lightroom’s interface is very intuitive though, so you can blow this off for later, if you wish. You will want to come back to it, to quickly learn the few keystroke commands that you’ll find yourself using all the time.
IMPORT – The very first thing I did was simply to drag and drop a folder into the Lightroom area – hoping it would work! Adobe didn’t disappoint, this is, in fact, a very easy way to import files into Lightroom. You can, of course, use the familiar menu bar at the top of your screen, or the nicely-positioned “Import” button in the Lightroom app itself. File formats? Plenty. Over 100 native camera RAW formats, plut TIFF, DNG, and JPG.
Above, the main view when you startup Lightroom, and import some photos into the "Library." On your left, menus that you easily show/hide by clicking on the menu titles. Search, Browse (by shoot, collections, or keywords), Keywords, Options (to set how much info is displayed on-screen for you). On your right, a larger thumbnail view of the selected photo, RGB histogram, and some "quick develop" settings (apply a preset, white balance, adjust basic exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation). You can also go right from here to "Develop." On the bottom of your screen is a filmstrip of the photos in your current library. You can easily adjust the size of this filmstrip (bottom right) and also show/hide it with by moving your cursor to bottom of the screen.
Lightroom is setup with four main functional areas, to closely mimic what photographers need to do in their workflow:
Library (review the shots); Develop (fine tune exposure, white balance, color, and more); Slideshow (see your proofs, show off to clients); Print (contact sheets or final output)
LIBRARY
There are very easy to use tools now, to work on images singly or as a batch. You can rate the photos, either by hitting a number key 1-5 or by clicking on the ratings dots beneath the thumbnail. Once rated, you can then easily adjust your view of the shoot by ratings: only the 4 and 5 star photos, for example. Keywords? Easy – type them in the box. Once they are there, easily apply them to multiple images or the whole library.
Adding captions is a simple task. Ditto for copyright info, if your camera does not already record it.
OK I confess now, I went and hit the help button, to review the “Five Rules” again. And I was glad I did, the keyboard shortcuts are very cool. Easy to toggle between full screen mode and normal mode, “dim the lights” (which is a very cool way to view your images – dims all the clutter around your photo, so you can see your photo clearly – I really dig this feature. The interface and usability of Lightroom is very good. Unlike Photoshop, there are only a few menus, and most everything is slider-driven. Doing (and, un-Doing) is really quite simple.
Still in “Library” mode, you can apply basic exposure, white balance, color adjustments and more. You can stop with Lightroom right now, if you wish, and further edit (singly or the whole lot) in Photoshop CS2, Photoshop Elements, or the external image editor of your choice.
The Loupe tool is very easy to use. You simply click on the pic once, and it goes to 100% mode. You can then use the hand tool (which, is nicely automagic when you do this) and left click, move the photo - or - you can use the magnifyer on the thumbnail, upper right. Here in this capture you also see some of the other features of the "Library" view, on the right: Caption, Keywords, Rating, EXIF, etc. Rating is very easy - you can either just type the number of the rating (1 to 5) by hitting the number key on your keyboard, or you can use your mouse and drag the cursor or click on the dots in the rating area underneath the pic when in grid mode in "Library" view.
You can move from “Library” to “Develop” now, as well – for further image adjustments right in Lightroom.
DEVELOP
The basic edits in “Library” mode are fine, for many uses, but I wanted to see if I could get the same result with Lightroom as I could with Photoshop – and the answer is – yes. “Develop” gives you complete control, slider-drive, of white balance, exposure, color, lens aberrations, sharpening, noise reduction. Now I’ve grown very accustomed to doing all this in Photoshop – but let me tell you – doing it in Lightroom is a breeze, and I can see that this will appeal to many photographers who think that the curves dialog box in Photoshop is too daunting.
You can really fine tune a lot with Lightroom. The controls are all just "there" right at your fingertips. Undos are easy - keystroke or menu command. The sliders are very responsive. Speed is not an issue as the software is very fast. Here, you see the full screen mode, left pane is tucked away.
The white balance controls are similar to what is in most RAW converters. But the rest of the adjustments – totally slider-driven – are a fresh change from the multi-step multi-dialog box approach in Photoshop. You can set the exposure range, blackpoint, brightess and contrast; on the tone curve, you have sliders for the highlights, midtones and shadows. The histogram and the image onscreen will show you when you’ve clipped.
You can split-tone adjust, and then have total control over hue, saturation, and luminosity of all the color channels: reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. You made a mistake? No problem, “reset” to the rescue and you can start anew. Finally, you also have the ability here to sharpen, de-noise, and adjust color fringing and lens vignetting.
Presets – here is a nice feature, that again required no help… I was working up a Black and White conversion, using the Greyscale Mixer in “Develop” mode. I got the channels just the way I wanted, adjusted the exposure, and saved this as a custom preset. Now, it’s available to me in the presets browser, on my left pane, in “Library” or “Develop” modes.
Any or all of these adjustments can be applied singly or to the whole batch. Once you are done with “Develop” you can export these photos, to a new location, with the following choices: destination, file format (JPG, DNG, TIFF), Color Space (sRGB, Adobe 1998, ProPhoto RGB). You can even export/downsize at the same time, making the photos, or you can leave them full-size. Exporting to JPG was very fast.
SLIDESHOW
Well, now you’ve got the best shots out of 500 from that wedding, you’ve applied some basic adjustments to all of them, fine tuned a few, and are now ready to sit with your client and review some shots. Or, in the case of a fashion or product shoot, perhaps it’s your editor. Or maybe your wife! Perhaps you want to put the slideshow up on your website. Lightroom’s slideshow to the rescue. Full-screen, with your captions/exif or without, and you can set various parameters as to drop shadows, zooming, speed, background, transitions, and more. You can export the slideshow to PDF, HTML, or Flash.
PRINT
What you’d expect, and then some. Easily make contact sheets or single prints. Set the margins, paper size, bleed, color management. If you are making printed proofs, easily apply your proof mark (customizable). Assign info to be printed on the contact sheets, too. Easy to understand, use, and it works.
CONCLUSION
Adobe has come out with a product that will appeal to many photographers. It’s easy to use, intuitive, and fun to work with. It makes quick work of sorting, culling, keywording, and adjusting your photos. Edits are done to RAW files in a non-destructive manner. It can be used by itself, to create final output for web or print. It can be used in conjunction with Photoshop CS2 or Elements, or your image editor of choice. For my work, it suits my style and workflow. Does it have a place in yours?
More examples in Reviews You Can Use on dgrin.smugmug.com
Some key resources you may find useful:
Adobe’s discussion forum on Lightroom
Release Notes
Today, Adobe announced Adobe® Lightroom™ beta. Adobe hopes this product “will be the complete, elegant environment for the art and craft of digital photography, from raw capture to creative output.”
I’ve had the opportunity to work with Lightroom for the past several days. Will it? Let’s find out.
Adobe hopes this will be what pros and serious amateurs have been waiting for – an application that will allow them to easily sort, cull, rate, keyword, caption, show, print and edit large volumes of photos. What’s that you say? You already have that with CS2 and Bridge? For some folks, this application will replace them – for others, it will augment – used as the first step in the post-processing workflow.
Photoshop will still be required for detailed image editing. However, Lightroom is a great tool for many photographers – who quickly want to review a shoot, rate, keyword and make image edits – singly or as a batch – from simple white balance to complex color and exposure adjustments.
First and foremost, this is beta software – something which Adobe hasn’t really done much of, this public beta thing. This product is not yet “feature complete” which means that Adobe will continue to fine tune it, and improve it based on beta user feedback.
INSTALLATION – couldn’t be easier. Drag Lightroom to your Applications folder and click on the Lightroom icon to launch. Currently, Lightroom is Mac only, but Adobe intends to have both Mac and PC versions available. The system requirements are not overwhelming: G4 or G5 processor (PowerBooks are OK!), Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher, 512Mb RAM (more is better) and 1Gb of disk space. Adobe states that the final shipping version of Lightroom will run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, as well as PCs.
STARTUP – fast. You’ll get a splash screen, which Adobe hopes you’ll read – and you probably will, even though reading is hard – it’s called “Five Rules.” Lightroom’s interface is very intuitive though, so you can blow this off for later, if you wish. You will want to come back to it, to quickly learn the few keystroke commands that you’ll find yourself using all the time.
IMPORT – The very first thing I did was simply to drag and drop a folder into the Lightroom area – hoping it would work! Adobe didn’t disappoint, this is, in fact, a very easy way to import files into Lightroom. You can, of course, use the familiar menu bar at the top of your screen, or the nicely-positioned “Import” button in the Lightroom app itself. File formats? Plenty. Over 100 native camera RAW formats, plut TIFF, DNG, and JPG.
Above, the main view when you startup Lightroom, and import some photos into the "Library." On your left, menus that you easily show/hide by clicking on the menu titles. Search, Browse (by shoot, collections, or keywords), Keywords, Options (to set how much info is displayed on-screen for you). On your right, a larger thumbnail view of the selected photo, RGB histogram, and some "quick develop" settings (apply a preset, white balance, adjust basic exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation). You can also go right from here to "Develop." On the bottom of your screen is a filmstrip of the photos in your current library. You can easily adjust the size of this filmstrip (bottom right) and also show/hide it with by moving your cursor to bottom of the screen.
Lightroom is setup with four main functional areas, to closely mimic what photographers need to do in their workflow:
Library (review the shots); Develop (fine tune exposure, white balance, color, and more); Slideshow (see your proofs, show off to clients); Print (contact sheets or final output)
LIBRARY
There are very easy to use tools now, to work on images singly or as a batch. You can rate the photos, either by hitting a number key 1-5 or by clicking on the ratings dots beneath the thumbnail. Once rated, you can then easily adjust your view of the shoot by ratings: only the 4 and 5 star photos, for example. Keywords? Easy – type them in the box. Once they are there, easily apply them to multiple images or the whole library.
Adding captions is a simple task. Ditto for copyright info, if your camera does not already record it.
OK I confess now, I went and hit the help button, to review the “Five Rules” again. And I was glad I did, the keyboard shortcuts are very cool. Easy to toggle between full screen mode and normal mode, “dim the lights” (which is a very cool way to view your images – dims all the clutter around your photo, so you can see your photo clearly – I really dig this feature. The interface and usability of Lightroom is very good. Unlike Photoshop, there are only a few menus, and most everything is slider-driven. Doing (and, un-Doing) is really quite simple.
Still in “Library” mode, you can apply basic exposure, white balance, color adjustments and more. You can stop with Lightroom right now, if you wish, and further edit (singly or the whole lot) in Photoshop CS2, Photoshop Elements, or the external image editor of your choice.
The Loupe tool is very easy to use. You simply click on the pic once, and it goes to 100% mode. You can then use the hand tool (which, is nicely automagic when you do this) and left click, move the photo - or - you can use the magnifyer on the thumbnail, upper right. Here in this capture you also see some of the other features of the "Library" view, on the right: Caption, Keywords, Rating, EXIF, etc. Rating is very easy - you can either just type the number of the rating (1 to 5) by hitting the number key on your keyboard, or you can use your mouse and drag the cursor or click on the dots in the rating area underneath the pic when in grid mode in "Library" view.
You can move from “Library” to “Develop” now, as well – for further image adjustments right in Lightroom.
DEVELOP
The basic edits in “Library” mode are fine, for many uses, but I wanted to see if I could get the same result with Lightroom as I could with Photoshop – and the answer is – yes. “Develop” gives you complete control, slider-drive, of white balance, exposure, color, lens aberrations, sharpening, noise reduction. Now I’ve grown very accustomed to doing all this in Photoshop – but let me tell you – doing it in Lightroom is a breeze, and I can see that this will appeal to many photographers who think that the curves dialog box in Photoshop is too daunting.
You can really fine tune a lot with Lightroom. The controls are all just "there" right at your fingertips. Undos are easy - keystroke or menu command. The sliders are very responsive. Speed is not an issue as the software is very fast. Here, you see the full screen mode, left pane is tucked away.
The white balance controls are similar to what is in most RAW converters. But the rest of the adjustments – totally slider-driven – are a fresh change from the multi-step multi-dialog box approach in Photoshop. You can set the exposure range, blackpoint, brightess and contrast; on the tone curve, you have sliders for the highlights, midtones and shadows. The histogram and the image onscreen will show you when you’ve clipped.
You can split-tone adjust, and then have total control over hue, saturation, and luminosity of all the color channels: reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. You made a mistake? No problem, “reset” to the rescue and you can start anew. Finally, you also have the ability here to sharpen, de-noise, and adjust color fringing and lens vignetting.
Presets – here is a nice feature, that again required no help… I was working up a Black and White conversion, using the Greyscale Mixer in “Develop” mode. I got the channels just the way I wanted, adjusted the exposure, and saved this as a custom preset. Now, it’s available to me in the presets browser, on my left pane, in “Library” or “Develop” modes.
Any or all of these adjustments can be applied singly or to the whole batch. Once you are done with “Develop” you can export these photos, to a new location, with the following choices: destination, file format (JPG, DNG, TIFF), Color Space (sRGB, Adobe 1998, ProPhoto RGB). You can even export/downsize at the same time, making the photos, or you can leave them full-size. Exporting to JPG was very fast.
SLIDESHOW
Well, now you’ve got the best shots out of 500 from that wedding, you’ve applied some basic adjustments to all of them, fine tuned a few, and are now ready to sit with your client and review some shots. Or, in the case of a fashion or product shoot, perhaps it’s your editor. Or maybe your wife! Perhaps you want to put the slideshow up on your website. Lightroom’s slideshow to the rescue. Full-screen, with your captions/exif or without, and you can set various parameters as to drop shadows, zooming, speed, background, transitions, and more. You can export the slideshow to PDF, HTML, or Flash.
What you’d expect, and then some. Easily make contact sheets or single prints. Set the margins, paper size, bleed, color management. If you are making printed proofs, easily apply your proof mark (customizable). Assign info to be printed on the contact sheets, too. Easy to understand, use, and it works.
CONCLUSION
Adobe has come out with a product that will appeal to many photographers. It’s easy to use, intuitive, and fun to work with. It makes quick work of sorting, culling, keywording, and adjusting your photos. Edits are done to RAW files in a non-destructive manner. It can be used by itself, to create final output for web or print. It can be used in conjunction with Photoshop CS2 or Elements, or your image editor of choice. For my work, it suits my style and workflow. Does it have a place in yours?
More examples in Reviews You Can Use on dgrin.smugmug.com
Some key resources you may find useful:
Adobe’s discussion forum on Lightroom
Release Notes
0
Comments
http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlandlightroom-development-story/
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Pretty simple, eh? But never really found it. First I wrote something myself, then I found CocoViewX which is close, but not as FAST as possible and needs 2 key strokes to delete and go to the next shot.
Can Lightbox do this?
Does Lightroom have a light table feature where you can temporarily organize a group of photos across many directories This is something that Bridge is horrible at and it sounds like Aperture is great at and even Photoshop Elements is OK at.
Here's a classic example. I've got 10 directories of soccer photos (several hundred photos each). I want to be able to browse through the 10 directories collecting candidate photos for a particular output (holiday card, poster, collage, to put in a family gallery, etc...). In Photoshop Elements, I can assign all the candidates to a "collection" and keep track of them that way. In Aperture, I can drag them to the light table and keep track of them that way. In Bridge, I have to assign a keyword or label to them and then do a very time consuming search to find them again (a search that takes 3-5 minutes).
EDIT: I answered my own question by watching one of the videos on Adobe's site. Lightroom has "collections". They look kind of like collections in Elements in concept in that they can hold any arbitrary set of images. They aren't tags on the image, but containers. An image can be in multiple collections. It sounds like RAW files will even be able to have different RAW settings in each collection if you want.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
And will it be cheaper than CS2 (which I'd like but can't afford)?
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]
No $$ have been announced but yeah, IMO it'll be less than CS2.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
The best part is the system requirements. My laptop doesn't meet the minimum system requirements for Apples Aperture, and it runs Lightroom quite nicely.
I put some screenshots on my blog this morning, but Andy has pretty much covered it all. I'm going to try printing from the app today and see how well that works.
Dave
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
All I ever do is light tweaks and print.
can't wait to get home away from this PC dominated lab and load it up.
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]
Andy, great preliminary review to this beta.
When will it be available in Windows ?
JimWilson www.416-1100.com
By the end of 2006 according to Adobe.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/09/2044210
Very cool. Wireless - please don't leave the data center
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
I guess I can't play with cables today, eh?
On a serious note, hooray for Andy being /.'ed and writing a great review! I've been envious of those who have the ability (macs) to play around with this!
I knew I forgot to mention something in the previous post...the whole point was supposed to be to mention the possible "Slashdot effect" on the way...
Jeepers, Andy, terrific work, I know that must have taken some time.
How'd you get an early copy?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
Thanks Sid! I really appreciate that. I have a tremendousnewfound appreciation for the reviews done by Phil Askey, Michael Reichmann, Uwe (Outback Photo), Ars Technica, and the rest of the usual suspects. Reviewing, is damn hard! I honestly spent 40+ hours over three days with the product and writiing all yesterday. I wanted to be thoroughly familiar with it, before I started writing.
We got a copy from Adobe, early, and I had to keep mum about it until this morning
On to the next big thing! Thanks Waxy
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
I about died, processing 629 raws in the last 24 hrs using Bridge and iView. out of 1200 shots in 2 days. Need industrial strength stuff! Wouldn't pay for the iView3 update, way overpriced.
Galleries here Upcoming Ranch/Horse Workshop
I'm disappointed, but mainly because of speed. Changes in the develop tab take quite a while to take effect. I think maybe the old Pbook has bitten off more than it can chew?
And why do I yet again feel like an OCD driven fool because Lightroom is trying to organize stuff for me? Ugh. I feel like my desire to drag files from one window (cf card) to another window (new folder I make for a certain shoot/set of photos) is outdated and I should let it go. But, then I look in my finder and I see that even though I asked it to just reference my photos, the few folders I imported have been cataloged somehow and I'm done over 400mb in space. Where did it go? to some aglib file? And what are all these unviewable thumb files for in this new Lightroom folder in my Pictures directory?
Fresh start tomorrow should fix issue 2, but i don't know what to do about issue 1, speed. People complain about File Browser being slow, on this machine, Lightroom is waaaay slower.
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]
Which is?
How many images did you import at once? If you import a large number, Lightroom is slow as it tries to build thumbs and cache the data. I found that if I just import one shoot at a time, Lightroom is able to get through the business very fast, and let me get down to business.
Maybe a little more time with the program will help relieve some of your frustrations. There is quite a bit hidden behind its simple looking interface.
My speed may also be different since i'm working with jpg scans of film, and not camera raw files.
Dave
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
I agree, I need to spend more time, for sure. It looks great, really does.
Just one thing though: can someone please convince me that this app is basically geared towards moving all your files into "its own library"? Because, I viewed that tutorial and I was excited when George explained how this was so different because you could leave files where they were, in pre-existing directories. Yeah, but some form of copy gets created in the Lightroom directory. So, do I just need to buckle down this weekend and reorganize everything by importing it in and having Lightroom move all the files into its own libraries? This has been been my gripe with iPhoto forever. I'm a VERY organized person already, I make directories by shoot, sort them by month, by year, etc. Then I just work on the files in PS. LR wants to do more, why? What benefit am I missing?
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]
I have not updated either, they do charge way too much for existing customers. iv3 is really fast, but i cannot open my wallet to do it.
Unlike Andy I was interested in comparing Lightroom to Aperture. I have only spent a few hours with Lightroom and even less writing the review, but if you're interested in such a comparison you can find it at:
http://www.frostbytes.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/LightroomReview
jimf@frostbytes.com
Really awesome comparison. That answered a lot of questions I had. I've never played with the apple version, not even in the store. It doesn't run on my laptop, so I never wasted my time. With the announcement of the new intel based macs today, that could change
Oh..I completely agree with you about the printing interface. I spent a lot of time today playing with it, along with all the options. I had some customer prints to get out this week, and this was the perfect opportunity. The print quality is great. The colors match up with what I was getting in PS. Nothing strange going on there, just good quality prints. I love it!
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
I've run into some issues with importing. It doesn't recognize my 75-150mb images out of the scanner. I'm not really sure what's going on there. They are just 16 bit TIFF images with the sRGB color profile embedded. This could be a real problem for me. Once the image has been opened and saved by PS, the program doesn't have a problem with it...
Second thing is speed. With the initial 50-75 images in the library, things were pretty fast. They were mostly huge jpgs from scanned images. Some equaling 30-50mp camera images for large prints from medium format. Once the library got over 100 pictures, things really started to slow down. I know lightroom wants to create medium and large thumbnails for every image, so I gave it time to complete the tasks. It was still slow. Quitting and restarting helped a little, but it started to slow down a few minutes into it.
Third, I love printing from this application. It just works, with a lot of great options and very easy to use. It's light years ahead the print box in PS CS.
Dave
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
Andy: Any ideas on when Beta 2 is coming or can you not say?
I like to have all my photos in a central place (like iPhoto) but with iView Media Pro, I'm concernced I am going to loose images (with seperate catalogues) and I can't view my entire library at once :-(
Maybe it is time to start using Lightroom properly ;-)
Seb
Why can't you have all your images in the same catalog on iView? I have all mine in one, and there haven't been any problems with lost images.
Dave
http://www.lifekapptured.com (gallery)
I've been using Lightroom and I just love it! I've done sone classy prints and 'referenced' all my photos in from iView Media Pro. The time consuimg bit is generating the thumbnails. On my Mac Mini, the CPU is 100% and the fan is running at full belt (never heard that before) while generating those thumbnails. After this, it is quite speedy for use. Unless I experience any major problems, I might just use a mixture of both and move to Lightroom as it stabilizes.
Thanks for all your help
Seb
Thanks Andy. Looks like Lightroom's sharpening tool is just a simple slider with very few controls. Is this a viable alternative to going into PS and using USM?
Had more time to get to know Lightroom a bit better today, and I'm a bit happier about it. Got the swing of working with shoots and importing better. But I have a few comments:
1) I import a bunch of images off the CF card to a new shoot, but there's lots of them that are crap, I want to delete them. LR lets me delete them from the shoot, and they disappear from the library as well, but only as far as Lightroom goes. Go into Finder to check on what LR is doing, and the files still sit there on the hard drive - in the directory that I let Lightroom create. A bit wasteful no?
2) I would like to be able to rename files that already exist in the LR library. Can't seem to be able to do this unless I re-import to a new shoot.
3) LR adds steps to my workflow for putting images on smugmug or otherwise on the web. I was excited that I could do batch processing to a whole shoot, then upload to smugmug. Yeah, not so much, because the processing steps are saved somewhere in a parallel dimension but not actually applied to the files. My choices are to open each on in Photoshop with the changes applied (as a duplicate TIF file thanks to LR) or to export the shoot to a new directory. The latter is appealing, but to me, I don't need to have the original of each jpg image sitting somewhere for posterity, so now, I've got duplicates.
Am I missing easy fixes to my above issues?
moderator of: The Flea Market [ guidelines ]