Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 – A Photographer’s Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] If you've spent much time behind the lens of a digital camera, be it your point & shoot or a full-frame SLR, odds are that you have quite a lot of pictures. If you're anything like me, where photography steps away from "dude with a camera" and turns into a very expensive and passionate hobby, then you probably have even more pictures. You are then cursed with the task of organizing, labeling, sorting, deciding which ones get edited, printing, emailing or Web-hosting them for family, friends or even potential clients. This is where I welcome you to the often-neglected level of pro-sumer. The avid hobbyist who knows nearly as much (if not more) than a professional photog, but does it as his passion instead of his living. The issue with being the pro-sumer is that you know enough to want (or even need) the BIG toys, but have the limited budget of a hobby that doesn't pay for itself. I feel your pain - I'm in the same boat. The most stark difference between pro-sumer and professional is often seen in workflow. After all, lenses and bodies are the same no matter who buys them. We all use the same tools to get the image into the camera - it's what happens afterwards that sets each group apart. Professionals either do a few quick edits or even (occasionally) get the luxury of simply handing off the shots to a team that does it all for them. The ones who do it themselves MUST get their workflows down to a science, because time is money and wasting a lot of it on post-process doesn't get you anywhere. Pro-sumers, on the other hand, often have a slow, plodding workflow that makes it hard to compare shots or do real edits. Much of the time is spent simply getting the pictures off of the camera and trying to choose keepers from those that should be tossed in the digital trash can. Much of the software used today that caters to professionals has been distilled down (and made affordable) to the pro-sumer level. For instance, Adobe has released Photoshop Elements (which we'll look at as a tool for the digital darkroom versus its very expensive big brother) for well under $100 USD. But one area hasn't really moved - the actual "workflow" bridge that simulates a light table and loupe. The software in this category can be very expensive, and for most people (even professionals) it drops to one of three choices - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom at a hefty $299.95, Bibble 5 Pro for $199.95, or Apple Aperture at $199.95. If you are a Windows user, your decision just got simpler - Aperture is not available for Windows, and Photoshop Elements is (making much of what makes Bibble so great turn into redundant and clunky). Adobe recently released its third version of Lightroom, which promised a bunch of tweaks and updates (though few new features) over its very loved predecessor. Today, we'll look at this - but instead of from a simple feature list, we're going to look at it from a usability standpoint for those of you who may not familiar with (but really need) a photographic workflow. After all, if you're going to drop $300, you don't just want to know what's new - you want to know what it will do for you. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=The RAW Workflow, Explained][Top Ad] For most of you who shoot with a digital SLR, I'm going to start by asking who shoots in RAW format. Go ahead, raise your hands! Ok, those who know why you should shoot RAW, keep them up... the number got a lot smaller, but I'm glad to see we're training people well. For the uninitiated, RAW is a straight dump from your camera's sensor. This is in contrast to a JPEG, where the camera (and its itty-bitty little computer) automatically compresses the image in a very lossy format before ever trying to store it. In fact, you lose at LEAST a third of your color sensitivity right off the bat if you're not shooting RAW, plus a whole host of white balance and exposure information that you could be tweaking later. Why should you care? Well, for starters, color fidelity - a camera's sensor is at the very least 12-bit, vs. a JPEG at 8-bit. Now, I don't know about you, but I'd rather that my big, intelligent computer that I spent a lot of money on choose how to compress an image instead of my itty-bitty camera. Second, a camera only has limited control over white-balance, whereas a computer can fine-tune every shot individually. Finally, that compression from 12-bit to 8-bit really stings your ability to fix or tweak exposure settings later - by blending seemingly similar shadows in the JPEG algorithm, you create blocks and blobs of color that can't be lightened well later if your shot came out too dark - and whites are worse by an order of magnitude (JPEG is notoriously poor at handling white vs. near-white). This means that when you blow out your highlights, you can't recover them... at all. The problem with RAW is that you actually need a professional program to work with the files - like Lightroom. One of LR3's biggest improvements was that it ships with Adobe Camera Raw 6 (the same as in Photoshop CS5), which hosts a substantial amount of benefits over its predecessor. Now, I hate to link another website in our own review, but if you want the skinny on just what kind of difference this makes, you should check out Ars Technica's great "features" review of the update. For the most part, what you can expect is some fantastic noise reduction on your higher ISO images, as well as a lot brighter colors. Much like Dave at Ars, I was always finding myself bumping up the saturation on images processed through ACR5, so that change is a nice touch. The excellent noise reduction is another great boon, as I'm not a very big fan of third-party fixes like Noise Ninja. Lightroom 3 imports RAW files just like any other image, which makes getting all of the benefits of RAW completely transparent to the end user, with no extra steps required. The import window itself had a bit of a re-skinning with LR3, as well - it used to be just a cobbled-together window based on the OS, which looked somewhat out of place against the polished, dark look of LR2. The new importer seems to "fit" better thematically, and actually runs a bit more quickly. To get to it, simply plug in your camera with Lightroom open - it will do the rest for you, including making automatic (and non-destructive) adjustments to your pictures based on your lens and camera combination. The biggest of these is the newly updated automatic lens distortion removal, which pulls from a database (or you can create your own profile) of lens/camera combinations and automatically fixes barrel and pincushion distortion. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Organizing Your Shoot][Top Ad] The beauty of a well-made piece of workflow software is that it is designed to be your main "hub." It should know where to go and how to handle all of the basic tasks of producing a final product, starting with importing from camera and going all the way to Web pages, slideshows or printing. In between these two tasks exist the two reasons we need this software to begin with - we need to sort through what we took, and then whether for artistic purpose or just to fix a booboo, we need to edit. LR3 breaks these processes into chunks with a beautiful tab interface - the Library, for sorting and choosing; the Develop area, for adjustments; and then the export tabs - Print, Slideshow and Web. Organization in particular is truly where Lightroom shines over all other products in the field, especially over its rival Aperture. The Library has copious amounts of ways to sort your images - whether you just want to look at the newest imports, search by keywords, equipment, color tags, rating or simply date/time. The search bar is integrated into the top of the window (though it can be minimized), and is intuitive to use. To the left side of the library is an improved "Collections" area, where you can create groups of images for later retrieval, and even have them update themselves based on criteria you set so that new additions are always where they should be. This takes a ton of work out of the manual process of adding images to more than one collection. On the right is a panel showing information about the selected image, including all of its metadata. Images here can be grouped, flagged, and quickly viewed at four zooms ranging from thumbnail to 1:1 pixel ratio. They can then be compared (any number, side by side) to determine the best shot of a series, and removing the unwanted ones is as simple as hitting the letter X (to flag as rejected). This interface hasn't changed much since Lightroom's first release, but it has received a multitude of tweaks - and LR3 is no different. The search bar is now more intuitive for helping quickly sort a shoot between picks, rejects and "hmmm... keep but don't worry about." Different people familiar with the old interface may like or dislike these tweaks, but to me they make a lot of sense. Much of the time that I need to worry about really organizing is wasted on determining which out of a series of shots is the keeper, and anything that gets me to working with my top shots faster is a good thing. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Developing Your Masterpiece][Top Ad] Picture editing is something that everyone needs from time to time, and some of us simply live for. To be perfectly honest, this is the hardest part of the review to write for me, as most of my pictures are taken with the intent of going through such a degree of editing that I rarely use Lightroom's features for long. That being the case, I had to force myself to do a shoot that I could stay inside of LR3 entirely for, in order to give it a fair shake. As such, please pardon me if I miss something here - I'm a Photoshop person and one of the greatest things that LR ever gave me is the ability to just hit a hotkey to send a nice, 16bit TIFF copy of my image (including all LR adjustments) into Photoshop, while grouping it with my original in the Library and copying all...

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 – A Photographer’s Review

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