Monday, November 22, 2010

First Impressions of Adobe Lightroom 3.0

So I decided to make use of the 30 day trial of Adobe Lightroom to see what gives. I've been looking to replace some of the software I use for two reasons:

  1. To make my workflow somewhat faster. I invariably spend hours going through photos I've taken and at times it's a bit of a chore; I'd rather spend more time taking pictures!
  2. I was/am using Nikon's ViewNX software to go through my RAW files, decide what to keep and do initial adjustments (white balance, exposure etc.). The biggest problem I've encountered is that this software seems terribly unstable and leaks memory on Windows 7 64-bit. I've even tried running it using Windows XP emulation mode but with little improvement. As an aside, I'm wondering when Nikon will wake up to 64-bit software. Even their RAW codec is 32-bit only...

Lightroom has been installed for four odd days now so I've still got to get to grips with it. Already though, I can see some of the benefits to it. If you do master it, then I think one would be able to minimise the use of other software (cost saving?) and the associated time wasted loading pictures and editing them. As a concept, it's a sort of one-stop-shop for post processing and could work well for me unless I'm doing HDR or Photostitches.

That said, there are a few things I miss/am annoyed at/haven't yet figured out...

  • One feature I miss from ViewNX is that you can right click on an image and copy/paste GPS data. There seems to be no equivalent in Lightroom. I used to find this feature particularly handy as often I'd shoot several pictures from the same exact spot but only a few would have GPS information (e.g. due to tall buildings nearby etc.). With this feature, I could easily make sure all my images had GPS data. I can't seem to find an equivalent in Lightroom.
  • I can't seem to figure out if/how to set Lightroom to auto synchronise with my pictures folder. I've added all my pictures folder to Lightroom and it built up it's data just fine but now it seems that whenever I add new pictures to the folder, I've got to manually synchronise Lightroom? Maybe it's because I'm somewhat old school and like placing pictures in appropriately named sub-folders manually (so I'd rather not have Lightroom auto-import pictures and place them in the My Pictures folder automagically). Those of you who have use Google's Picasa will know what I'm speaking about. Picasa seems to watch the My Pictures folder (or any folder you set for that matter) and automatically update it's own database when you fire it up.
  • Whilst it's got a few presets for creating vignettes, I can't seem to figure out how to manually tune these (surely there's a way!). For example, what if I want to adjust the opacity of the vignette or place the focus off centre?
  • The clone tool seems to be very good at what it does. You first encircle what you want to cover and then, with a second circle, you choose where to clone from. One can resise the circles as well as move the source circle around to choose the best spot to clone from. For cloning out 'spot' objects it therefore works great. That said, there seems to me to be no easy way of cloning out non 'spot object/things that aren't confined in a particular area. For example, with panorama photostitches, I frequently need to adjust the horizon (especially if it's a seascape) as this comes out jagged form the stitching software. To this end, I can't seem to find a way to drag the destination clone circle along my horizon so that I even it out.
  • I'm not fond of the flat structure with which all the photos are present in the photostrip at the bottom. As alluded to above, I usually seperate pictures into various subfolders in the My Pictures folder. I then like viewing pictures in a given subfolder alone as the subfolder typically represent sone shoot/collection. With Lightroom, once I imported all of My pictures into it's database, what I get is a strip at the bottom with all of my photos in the My Pictures folder. I can't seem to find a way to get it to display only what's in a given subfolder.
That's about all I've got to say about it. I don't want to give a wrong impression here; doubtless Lightroom is a very good piece of software and the main issue here is that yours truly hasn't quite mastered it yet. I'll give it some more time and then maybe blog about it at a later date once I've learned the ropes a bit more. Thought I'd jot down my initial quibbles in case anyone else has noted them or, better still, has a solution for them!

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