Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Lightroom”
Addendum to Yesterday's Post About Leaving Lightroom
Two redeeming bits of news for RawTherapee (even though one of them means there’s still something to be solved before I can switch completely to this new bit of software).
- When updated to the latest RawTherapee (the version in Fedora 21’s official repositories is old), the issue with pink images disappears
- RawTherapee is indeed preserving the metadata in the JPEG. The problem is that it’s doing so in a manner that Digikam does not read through the exiv2 library. I’ve filed a bug report and hopefully this can be resolved. Once that’s done, I’d be able to leave Adobe Lightroom behind. If I wanted to, I could use the new software now, safe in the knowledge that the metadata was being written, but until it’s time to replace my photo hard drive (later this year), I won’t be moving the photos over to Linux.
Thinking About Moving Away from Adobe Lightroom
Last Fall I started considering moving away from Lightroom after having used it for nearly a decade. Back then I was making use of the student price to actually be able to afford it. Competition from Apple Aperture and other programs caused it to eventually drop to $150 per version. But Adobe seemed to be moving more and more towards a subscription-only model. Lightroom is still available standalone, but it appears the rest of the CS suite (including, for example, Photoshop) are on the treadmill now. While there are surely some benefits to being able to rent Photoshop and Adobe’s awesome video editing software when you need to do a project rather than for a thousand-plus fee, one way I’ve afforded Lightroom is not upgrading every year. So while it’s cheaper to pay monthly than buying outright (at the prices they had when they went subscription), I rarely found the upgrades worth is and so was able to save some money. I started considering alternatives. But I’d had Lightroom 5 on my wishlist and someone bought it for me for Christmas. So I figured I’d be a Lightroom user for a few more years.
My RAW Workflow in Adobe Lightroom 5
I wanted to record this as it may make future discussions on forums, mailing lists, and even on this blog make more sense.
[video width=“1280” height=“720” mp4="/images/2015/05/My-RAW-Workflow-in-Adobe-Lightroom-5.mp4" webm="/images/2015/05/My-RAW-Workflow-in-Adobe-Lightroom-5.webm"][/video]
For those who are sight impaired or have low bandwidth limitations, essentially:
- Import RAW files (And I forgot one important step - rename them!)
- Rate them
- Edit in Develop Module
- Create Virtual Copies if want to do things drastically different - like make the image black and white
- Export JPEGs
- Maybe upload to blog or flickr using flickr uploadr
Using Digikam from the Point of View of Lightroom User
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old. That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums. I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing. Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially. Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders. Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date. Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date. However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos. 2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo. It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.
Apparently I mostly shoot wide
Heard about Jeffrey Friedl’s lens focal length plot plugin for Lightroom and decided to check it out. Here’s what it produced from my entire library.
[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]
Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide. Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results. I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with. The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.
Lightroom 2.0 - it just keeps getting better and better
The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it! First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started. I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much. But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.
One more look at Adobe Lightroom (this time 2.3)
I just wanted to really elaborate on why I think Adobe Lightroom is a program any enthusiast to pro user should own. Although, as I related here, LR has grown on me, going through the photos I shot at my cousin’s wedding has really cemented my love for Adobe’s product. Here are my two favorite features. You may want to open up the images in a new tab at full size so you can follow along.
Adobe Lightroom 2: Further Use
So I did a test and found that as long as I save the metadata to the file, Adobe Bridge (even with CS2) can correctly read the changes. So I decided to work in Lightroom to see if it was worth buying. I can say that I am really loving it! I’ve been able to adopt my usual RAW workflow with only some small changes. Now I can’t see how I could ever work without LR!! (It’s no wonder why Adobe gives a 30 day free trial!)
Adobe Lightroom Initial Reaction Review
For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom. Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose. Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines. The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine. Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year. So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program. My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me. It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.