Some thoughts on Lightroom

Guys, I've been playing around with Lightroom for the last week or so. Thought you might be interested in my first impressions.

My mate Rich - a semi-pro photographer - is now using it primarily for portfolio management - tagging. The demonstration he gave me as to how he's using it to manage his workflow was excellent, and at some point I can see me going through my 40,000 image library to do the same thing.

But what's really impressed me is the speed of use for post-processing and subsequent final image management. It's very easy to assign levels/curves to an image, tweak until you get something you like and then apply those changes to a whole photo shoot. Furthermore, the mono conversion is absolutely awesome - much more flexible than using the channel mixer. For instance, if you want to do that classic Ansel Adams blue skies-> black thing, in photoshop you'd apply a channel mixer adjustment layer with the channels at (say) r+150, b-50, g+0. Which is fine, but you can get some odd results with faces or brickwork. In Lightroom there are a number of sliders for more specific colours so you can wack the blue right down to make the skies black but tweak all of the other sliders to preserve the tonal range of the rest of the image.

Split/duotoning is similarly powerful. I haven't tried many third-party presents but there are a lot of them out there, too.

But where it saved me literally hours was for post-processing the wedding photos for a shoot I did for a mate a few weeks ago. I set up for or five different presets with wildly different results - straight colour, straight mono, sepia, contrasty mono and weird draganised colour. I just applied each preset to the whole directory one by one, and hit "export" after each. It started exporting in the background and let me get on with setting up the next one, and the next... then I just left my PC alone for 45 mins and it just churned away in the background, saving each of the post-processed versions in a different directory. When it was done, I just burnt the lot to a DVD and gave them to this guy.

The integration with Photoshop is also very nice. You can just right-click on an image that you've part-processed in Lightroom, and it'll export a copy as either a TIFF or a PSD to open in Photoshop. You'd want to do this if you had more specific cloning work to do - there's a spot removal tool which works well but you can't do big clone tool/healing brush work. Also, the curves and conversion is applied to the whole image - there's no layer masking so you'd want to go to PS for that.

The other interesting thing is that it means you don't have to save multiple copies of files at different resolutions. You just keep the master, managed in Lightroom, and generate web-sized versions, full-sized jpegs etc. as you need them. The export feature lets you set these up as templates which makes it all very fast. You can also ask it to use a customised template for how the file is named - date stamping, serial numbering etc., and also to carry over a serial number from the original file - so the RAWs from my camera come off with filenames like CRW_8259.CRW which you can tell Lightroom to automatically convert into something like wedding-20070707-8259.jpg

In short, I'm very impressed.

G