Lightroom 3 & Photoshop CS5 question

[mlfrank]

Newegg has Lightroom 3 for $99 today. I have been using various verions of PS (currently CS5) and iView (for organizing) for a while. I was wondering what extras LR3 would give me that would make this deal worth it?

michael

[tahoedrew]

If you currently shoot in mostly RAW format, or would LIKE to shoot in mostly RAW format, LR3 is ABSOLUTELY worth it! If you don't shoot RAW very much it will not give you a huge benefit.

I paid $150 for LR3 and it was worth every penny. I'm also planning on buying Aperture to compare as I hear tethered shooting is better with Aperture and I'd like to start doing some shoots tethered for better client viewing when they're on-site.

~A

[mlfrank]

Yeah, I started shooting RAW several years ago when one of the PS updates made it easier. Right now I use Adobe's Digital Negative Converter. Would you say that LR3 has a better handle on RAW files than the Converter?

[mlfrank]

Found an interesting summation of LR3 vrs PS while doing a search for more info:

"I like to use the analogy I got from a few folks at Adobe:

PS was built by a team of image processing computer science folks and later improved with the addition of a bunch of graphic artist types. There wasn't a clear definition of WHO the product was designed for, photographers, graphic artists, designers; pros or amateurs. Bridge was bolted on the side as an attempt at catalog management by the same type of folks.

LightRoom was built by photographers, for photographers. Period. Now being part of Adobe, and part of the PS product line, they were able to reach out to and tap into that core team of really smart computer science types to do the low level bit twiddling work, so it's awesome at that. But the product had a single design point, a single customer base, and a single driven purpose." by cabbey @ photo.stackexchange.com

Good enough to give it a try.........

[laarree]

A couple of things about Lightroom: it makes using an application like iView unnecessary, as you can view, organize and add metadata to photos within Lightroom itself. It's much easier to make sweeping image adjustments to entire photo shoots if need be within Lightroom than using Camera Raw in Photoshop or with Bridge. But my favorite aspect of Lightroom is that, if you need to do edits that can only be done in Photoshop, such as convert to CMYK or composite with other photos or graphic elements, you can take your Lightroom-adjusted photo and open it as a Smart Object layer in Photoshop, which actually embeds the raw file and non-destructive edits made in LR in a Smart Object layer. Once having done that, you can continue editing this Smart Object in Camera Raw (which has the exact same image adjustment features and engine that Lightroom has). This can make adjusting color, contrast, etc. incredibly powerful and flexible.

DNG Converter can convert a batch of raws to DNG file format, but you can alternatively import a batch of raws into LR and choose to have LR convert them all to DNGs on the fly as they are importing, so it makes using DNG Converter unnecessary too.

I manage my personal photos with Lightroom 3.5, and have about 30,000 raw files in one catalog, which originated in LR1 and has grown with each passing year. I think it's excellent software.

[Article Accelerator]

mlfrank wrote: LightRoom was built by photographers, for photographers

...who were, um, inspired by Apple's Aperture.

[Mr645]

Lightroom does only a few things that Bridge and ACR don't already do. Lightroom does a great job organizing your images, but as for RAW processing, Bridge and ACR do the same thing, use the same processing engine.

[Uncle Wig]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=mlfrank]LightRoom was built by photographers, for photographers

...who were, um, inspired by Apple's Aperture.
I doubt that. Lightroom was under development as early as 2002.

[Article Accelerator]

Uncle Wig wrote:
[quote=Article Accelerator]
[quote=mlfrank]LightRoom was built by photographers, for photographers

...who were, um, inspired by Apple's Aperture.
I doubt that. Lightroom was under development as early as 2002.
I wonder when development began on Aperture. It was officially released in November 2005. Lightroom was released in January 2007, 14 months after Aperture; even Lightroom's initial public beta was released 5 weeks after Aperture's version 1.