Lightroom/Elements/Photoshop??

TRNC

TRNC

TRNC

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What is the point of lightroom??

I know it evolved from Raw Shooter, which I owned the pro version of and it had a clear role as a raw processing package before using photosho/elements to do final polishing of the image.

Does lightroom only do this or is it meant to replace photoshop/elements completely??
 
Lightroom replaces photoshop for 99% of my photos.

For the 1% that need pixel level manipulation I have stock piled wait until I buy PS, but now I don't think I will bother and just process with the Gimp.
 
The point of Lightroom and similar programs such as Aperture is to act as a way of cataloguing all your images in a library. Photoshop is purely an image manipulation programme and doesn't offer this feature, while you can edit your pictures with it, you have to manually organise everything and can't pull images up quickly to compare.

Photoshop does have it's place though... as while the majority of work can be processed in a programme like Lightroom, there may be the odd photo you want to manipulate with more precision. Say you wanted to replace a sky or something? You can usually roundtrip to Photoshop and back with most of these bits of software.
 
Lightroom is meant for photography only. IMO, Lightroom is essentially a mixture of Camera Raw and Bridge. They've taken features which photographers will commonly use and packed it into a neat all in one application for them to collect, process, manage and export their photos.

Photoshop is a raster/pixel image editor, Lightroom is not. If you don't do any pixel based modifications to your images then it's possible to completely replace Photoshop with Lightroom for a more streamlined photography workflow.

I don't use Lightroom personally. I've tried it, but I just keep going back to my old method of managing my collection with Bridge, processing with Camera Raw and photoshopping with Photoshop.
 
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Hmm, food for thought. I wonder if I can find my old license for lightroom 1 and get an upgrade to v3 rather than paying for a full new version.
 
i recently moved from 100% photoshop workflow to 90% lightroom and 10% photoshop.

my ability to process quicky but still with all the accuracy etc has improved ten fold. i did spend time developing some of my own presets though, this is very much an ongoing task. im continually refining as i go in order to improve my workflow and processing quality.

if you need photoshop its very easy to take a picture from LR into PS and vice versa.

i have also got my photos (over 25k) all in a searchable database which i very handy if you ever have to find a certain picture.

i sound like a sales rep for LR lol if i could have heard myself a year ago. i was a die hard PS only user then...
 
TRNC said:
What is the point of lightroom??
Click to expand...

Lightroom is a photographic WORKFLOW tool.

it enables you to run through the whole processing sequence very efficiently:

Read media and manage libraries
Compare, select and label
Adjust levels and crop
produce slideshow
Print
Export to web, flickr, facebook

It doesn't do anything that you can't do elsewhere. It doesn't have the full power of photoshop (but it works with photoshop easily).

But it does do 95%+ of what you need to do to photos very quickly and efficiently.

it solves the problem of "I've got 3000 images to process through before i can go to the pub".

Andrew
 
Damn, I need to check out these workflow tools. When I was shooting regularly, I just did each image individually through photoshop and I was losing the will to live. This sounds much better.
 
I generally use it more the Photoshop just because everything you need is right there for photography and doesn't have all the options you don't really need in photography like photoshop, just makes the workflow more simple.
 
I'd pay the money for lightroom 3 for just how powerful the luminance noise slider is. I've always used Acr when I've had a indoor picture where I wanted to + the exposure I would get too much noise that acr couldn't deal with even at 100% noise reduction. Lightrooms luminance slider dials that out at about 40% on the slider.

I wish I'd found it earlier!
 
If you haven't got anything already and photography is the main area then Lightroom and Photoshop Elements could be a good combo.

For the few instances of wanting to clone out something etc on a photo Elements has not let me down and Lightroom is so simple, yet advanced at the same time.

Never got on with using GIMP but I know it can be quite powerful.
 
The best thing about Lightroom is the cataloging, workflow tools and the power of the presets which you can tailor to process your photo into almost anything.


Only thing i noticed going from LR2 to LR3 is LR3 is a MASSIVE power hog compared to LR2. I could run LR2 on my 1.6Ghz Pentium M laptop with 512Mb of ram. It wasn't fast but usuable for the odd image edit. LR3 is completely unusable on it.

Adobe were doing a 40% off promotion recently. Although i got a full LR 3.2 retail copy from a popular internet sites Black Friday promotion recently for £120 :)
 
Yeah, Adobe have been doing a 40-50% off recently. Is Lightroom 4 on the way?

Really tempted to grab a copy to to use with/replace Capture One express, the database capacity and noise reduction is soo much better.
 
Glad I got CS5 for free because I cant remember the last I actually booted it up let alone used it.

Lightroom is so much more friendly and a joy to use.
 
I'll keep my eyes peeled for a good deal on lightroom then as I already have elements and cant find my free version of lightroom 1 adobe gave out to all raw shooter owners :(
 
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