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Adobe Lightroom Review
onethumb writes "Andy over at Digital Grin got his hands on a pre-release copy of Adobe's hot new app 'Lightroom' last week and has a nice review up. Adobe Lightroom, is designed to go head-to-head with Apple's own recently released Aperture. Is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?"
Is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?
Both tools are very clearly aimed (and labeled as such) at the professional market. Pros will always have a need for more in depth features than a typical consumer or home user. With the ability to properly use those tools comes a need to understand them (aka, a learning curve). So, to answer your questions: yes on the powerful part, no on the easy part.
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I think most photographers enjoy working on their own photos.
If your time is so valuable, you could just hire a photographer to take the pictures for you and skip that chore as well.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Yes, I know it's an Alpha-Beta (non-feature complete Beta) but it's missing a lot of stuff you'd expect even from a first draft at this kind of app:
* No PSD support for external editing of files (16-bit TIFF)
* No "Copy Image" (much less Versions or Stacks as Aperture has them).
* No Crop or Rotate
It does have some nice features. The printing and slideshow part are well done. The Lightroom take on Levels is rather interetsing and I think easier for people who do not use Photoshop much to use.
However Aperture at this point has a serious lead out of the gate, that combined with the Lightroom team also having to try and support a Windows build eventually may let Apple not only keep but increase the lead.
Also I have to say I am concerned with the caching strategy in Lightroom - every image has a same-size JPG created along with decreasing half sizes images as well. That can take up a lot of space. And the editing information for any given image seems to only be stored in the central database, not in sidecar files alongside the image. Thankfully they do back up this database automatically.
Some people will be happy to be able to use images in-place in directories. However as there is no support for conepts like versions or stacks people may be less happy when those harder-to-map kinds of things make it in the program and start making the life of a directory more complicated.
One good thing is that the competiton between Apple and Adobe in this space should yield a pretty solid application over time. I just hope Adobe is in this for the long run, and the release (currently planned around the end of 2006 according to the FAQ) has a pretty solid product.
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Here's another page that goes into the nitty-gritty a little more.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
I'll be happy to pay up to $5 per photo (even $20 in some cases) to have them cleaned up as needed by semi-pros or even pros. I'm sure there is a market for such a thing, but I just can't find it.
The solution to your problem: take better photos.
Some of my favourite photos make it to the printer absolutely untouched from when they came out the camera. The most I ever need to do is make minor adjustments to brightness and contrast, perform some extra cropping or rotate the image slightly. I mainly use iPhoto simply for its organisational abilities - it's great for that.
Get to know your camera. Take your time over shots. Just because you have umpteen gigabytes of memory cards and take ten thousand RAW-format photos a day doesn't make you a PROPAR PHOTOGRAFER. The best lens in the world won't correct for poor technique.
If your photos need endless work in Photoshop or similar to make them worth looking at, then you're probably doing something wrong...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
That's because Aperture is doing its layer processing in real-time using CoreImage and storing it in an SQLite database through CoreData.
As for the submission:
Is digital photo editing finally getting both powerful and easy?
It already was with apps like iPhoto (easy), Photoshop (powerful), and others. Aperture is geared toward professional photographers processing RAW format images. The submitter obviously has no idea what these apps are and what they're for--they're not supposed to be consumer-level photo-editing apps. They're professional photography pre-processing applications.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The solution to your problem: take better photos.
Not helpful at all.
The solution to just about everything is to do it better.
Some of my favourite photos make it to the printer absolutely untouched from when they came out the camera.
Impossible. Every photo is processed. Whether you do it yourself, or let the various attributes of the in-camera software, printer driver settings, and printer characteristics do it for you.
If your photos need endless work in Photoshop or similar to make them worth looking at, then you're probably doing something wrong...
You are exaggerating what the OP said. He just wants someone to post-process his images.
Why shouldn't someone post-process? Even you admit to doing it (although you didn't mention adjusting curves, which is common among pros, while "brightness and contrast" is basic and crude (by pro standards)). Take any photo. Any. Take Ansel Adams' top best most perfect photo ever. Odds are it can look even better if a skilled person were to process it, purposefully adjusting various attributes of the photo. Why accept a mediocre photo if it's capable of being a great photo? Why accept a great photo if it could be a superb photo?
But your advice, just take perfect photos and you won't want to post-process, is not helpful at all. It implies dada21 is so incredibly stupid that he never thought that maybe it would be desirable to take better photos to begin with. An implication which is wholly unwarranted.
Someone already did this - Ansel Adams.
Not only did Adams carefully compose his pictures and often wait many hours and days for exactly the right lighting, he was a master of the darkroom and creating perfect prints. I seriously doubt that many people are capable of taking his originals and making them look any better than he did.
Digital post-processing is analagous to working in a darkroom processing your own prints - it takes skill and vision. Rarely do any pictures go right from the film (or raw file) to print without any sort of processing or adjustments.