Slashdot Log In
Adobe Lightroom Review
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jan 09, 2006 04:52 PM
from the photo-editing-for-the-common-man dept.
from the photo-editing-for-the-common-man dept.
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?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Dumb Question? (Score:2)
And it wasn't before?
Re:Dumb Question? (Score:4, Funny)
Now that's some powerful software -- it can crop itself!
One more adjective (Score:2, Informative)
(http://symbii.com/)
requirements (Score:4, Interesting)
Sigh...misinformed submitter. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit OT]? (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
I'm an amateur photographer (I just have a D50 right now as my first DSLR but was an SLR user for almost a decade beforehand). I love the new line of DSLRs, they are completely a step ahead of the SLRs for my needs and the quality is amazing. I've ruined a few rolls of film in the past, so I'm glad I'm much safer with the digital storage.
My off-topic question that sort of remains on-topic is this: With all the cheap labor available online (from students, amateurs and those trying to build portfolios of work), does anyone know of good websites where I can upload my photographs and let others "compete" openly to making them look better?
Time is "expensive" for me, I try to live my life by time preference. I don't mind paying someone to do something better than I can, especially if the cost saves me time. I don't believe that time is money, the opposite is true: money is time. 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.
Anyone know of a decent site, as well as what the popular software is for the "doing it for income" photo editor?
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.bernsrite.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 27 2005, @11:36PM)
If your time is so valuable, you could just hire a photographer to take the pictures for you and skip that chore as well.
How about this idea? (Score:4, Funny)
...
I pay to have my lawn mowed. I pay to have my house cleaned. I pay to have my food prepared. I pay to get driven around (sometimes). Why not pay to have my photos "corrected" or "enhanced"?
Why don't you pay someone to find the answer to your original question?
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/)
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...
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
professional tools (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My homage to Red Rose Tea commercials... (Score:2, Interesting)
Lightroom really lean on features (Score:5, Informative)
* 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.
Since the Xara Xtreme announcement... (Score:2)
Like I said, they've announced that the whole suite is going GPL so it should end-up in most distros very quickly; but it's not released yet.
Adobe's Mighty Fall? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.friendwich.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 09 2006, @12:05PM)
InDesign was created to take Quark Express down and Photoshop Elements was to prevent companies like ACDSystems from getting a foothold.
The idea is to store, organize and evaluate quickly with reasonable color accuracy. Editing comes later. Does anyone else think it has so many editing features because they're built into a code base they are reusing?
I doubt a legitimate threat to them exists in any of their markets. Could they be classified as a monopoly?
"got his hands" on it? (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
FYI, that's not exactly a difficult feat. Adobe's been giving it away for free to the public on their website. [macromedia.com]
Lua! (Score:2)
(http://www.cmason.com/)
Lua the programming language
It's cool to see folks like adobe using nifty languages like Lua [lua.org]. I've never used Lua but have been intrigued by it.
Anyone know how Lua is used in Lightroom?
-c
Another (p)review (Score:5, Informative)
PPC Code (Score:2)
I prefer... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.ldc.usb.ve/~ciro)
Meh, I prefer Fireworks to do batch photo editing, and I'm still hoping for some great improvements on the next version...
Oh, wait...
Finally getting easy? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://quotes.homeunix.com/)
if that's not easy i don't know what is. if i can do it drunk and stoned first time, i'm sure joe six-pack can do it in half an hour. another good area where things keep getting easier is music production, where programs such as reason mean i know someone (drummer in one of my bands) managed to finish a whole song in reason, while on the same day asking me the brain exploding question of "where is the shift key?"
Aperture is awesome (Score:1)
(http://www.ibuymacs.com/)
Great App - get Aperture (Score:1)
(http://thinkingman.com/slash | Last Journal: Saturday January 17 2004, @03:04PM)
Adobe: superior compatibility with Photoshop CS2 (or so I've read)/available for major platforms.
paint shop pro (Score:1)
Julien. http://free.hostdepartment.com/8/81fortune/ [hostdepartment.com]
Really a Macromedia app? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.clarke.ca/)
I have absolutely zero inside knowledge of this, but it would be interesting to know how much inside knowledge Macromedia had of Apple's Aperture, how much input Adobe actually had in the Lightroom product, and what impact, if any, Lightroom had on Adobe's decision to purchase Macromedia.
Or maybe Adobe just thought Macromedia's site was better for hosting betas.
So this is why they bought Macromedia. (Score:1)
So this is why they bought Macromedia! Web development software is not one of Adobe's primary markets. Apple caught them off guard with Aperture, Macromedia's Lightroom now fills this gap. So theirs still hope Adobe will kill off Flash by replacing it with SVG!... or opening the Flash spec, like pdf's.
---
Sign my petition to get a native Flash player for FreeBSD! [petitiononline.com]
Beta? Or stable pre-alpha rushed out the door? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://loewald.com/)
Is this perhaps some engineer's hobby project that is being rushed to market in response to Aperture as a placeholder while they figure out what to do?
After all, would Adobe seriously ship a product with such poor Photoshop integration?
Just watching the demo the "we have lots of features to add" comment gets bandied about so often it's not funny. How is this a "beta"?
Capture One? (Score:1)
http://www.phaseone.com/ [phaseone.com]
Great now OSX has 2 great photo apps :) (Score:2)
easy? (Score:2)
Digital photo editing is as hard as it ever was: you still need to understand color, composition, etc.
It just seems like things are getting easier because Photoshop's UI sucked so badly that it got in the way. Finally, Adobe may (!) be getting around to designing less stupid UIs than they have in the past.
Aperture VS. Lightroom (Score:1)
Those that complain about Aperture should avoid Lightroom until they speed it up. Without Core Image on the same hardware it is NOT smooth. (I'm on a dual 2.3 G5 w/3G RAM and Radeon 9650.)
It is also such a knock-off of Aperture I'm suprised.
The Gimp anyone? (Score:1)
(https://vehris.com/)
Y'all are killin' me... (Score:1)
OK, I give up.. I've typed about 3 different rants, but none are polite enough to post.
:( sad, but true.
I'm embarrassed to call myself a Photoshop expert... I'm ashamed I have a degree in Web Development... I'm nauseated at the thought of talking one more IDIOT who doesn't know when to say "Hmm, I don't know."
/hattip adobe.
I'll summarize...
1. Don't think this is easy, thinks are never as easy as a professional makes them seem. We have put our lives into our professions and all we ask is respect for it.
2. Learn what you DON'T KNOW!!! Before you run off to earn a buck with Photoshop, learn what you don't know about the software so that you know what your limitations are! If you don't know colorspace, file formats, levels, curves, pathing, proper masking, how NOT to use filters to compensate for lack of artistic ability... If you have never calibrated your monitor or printers... If you don't understand how inks react to paper or how light is displayed on your monitor... If you don't know how to stop when you don't know something and find the proper way of doing things... then maybe you should sit back and read another book.
3. Don't think this is cheap work. I can promise you I would laugh your ass to the street if you thought I might retouch your images for $5. You can't even get a carwash for that! Hell, that's 2 cups of starbucks coffee! Remember, you get what you pay for. You pay for the $5 quick-wash, they make your car wet!
4. If you really have a love and passion for digital art (productive or creative) then take the time to learn it. Not just Photoshop, but any modern software. Just because you can afford it (or steal it from the internet) doesn't make you good. Take classes, join associations like NAPP (National Assoc. of Photoshop Professionals) and maybe take a class or two or intern for a while. Just please actually know what you're talking about before you claim you do! Please!?!
Lastly, forgive my bluntness, but I am more than fed up with the incompetence of my own industry. almost to the point where I want to start over and go learn another profession.
ON TOPIC: This is yet another powerful new tool that will help quite a few prof. photographers.
Pro Photographer (Score:1)
Need something done well, and do not have the time or expertise to do soemthing. Then expect and accept it is going to cost. Do not skimp and get some half assed person to do the job if you want that job done well.
If you want quality (particularly for a service) then it costs. If do not bothered about quality then hire someone who has never done it before, and pay them minimum wage. Decide what you want up front.
The work performed by someone doing it for the first time will need to be redone quicker than you may think, it may be less expensive and a better experince to get it done well the first time..
Yes we have limits (budgets, time, etc) but the reality is getting somone to do something well is going to take time and resorces; This is the current relality.
RawShooter Premium is an alternative (Score:1)
(http://andypiper.wordpress.com/)
Why Lightroom Aperture (Score:1)
(http://www.neodude.net/)
Adobe has an immense lead on Apple here; they have a very mature RAW converter, backed by loads and loads of research. Features like Stacks and Versions can be copied easily by Adobe, but Apple will have a hard time with their own RAW converter's quality.
This means, Adobe screwing up aside, Lightroom will eventually, a few versions down the line, be much widely used than Aperture.
And of course, Lightroom is supposed to be eventually available for Windows...
cool (Score:1)
(http://destefano.wordpress.com/)
Now, can we please have a similar app for video production?
Patience, Grasshopper (Score:2)
Odds are, the Windows version is still just too buggy for a public release, beta or not.