Can I beg ignorance and ask what it is that I'm missing about Lightroom? I downloaded the public beta and bought one of the super-discounted copies of LR3, but in an hour or two of messing around with it, I don't understand the general switch from Photoshop to Lightroom in the last few years. Lightroom, to me, looks like a glorified front-end for Adobe's Camera Raw -- how is it different from using ACR in Photoshop?
Sorry; I don't mean to hijack the thread, but if you or anyone else can point me towards a deeper explanation, I'd appreciate it.
Nice work on the Horseshoe bend shot!
Posted by Jack Garrett on March 7, 2012 at 2:00 AM
Oh boy, I'm not technical enough to explain Mark. I just import the RAW file into LR and use the sliders and tone curves to brighten things up, then use the luminance and sat sliders...etc. I guess you could say it is advanced RAW. I then generally go to CS5 for additional adjustments and resizing. I did everything but resize for this on in LR as an example. Oh yeah, it's also non-destructive editing.
For me, the biggest advantage of Lightroom is the Library module, which allows you to organize your images. If you have 10's of thousands of images like I do and you've organized them in Lightroom, you can quickly find any image. Keywording can be done rather quickly in Lightroom because you can assign common keywords to numerous images at once. Also, if you have several projects you're working on, you can quickly group images into different collections and view just the group of images for that project. You can do this without having to make copies of all the images and put them in separate folders, thereby using up extra hard drive space and having different copies of the images floating around.
As for developing, it saves every adjustment you ever make to an image, so you can quickly go back to any previous state of the image while taking up almost no extra memory, something I don't think you can do with ACR. Obviously, if you have Photoshop and ACR, you can do many of the same things in developing the image. But if you can't afford Photoshop or don't want to keep upgrading, Lightroom is a much less expensive option, though there's still certainly benefits to owning both.
"Lightroom, to me, looks like a glorified front-end for Adobe's Camera Raw. How is it different from using ACR in Photoshop?"
Short answer...it's not. The RAW conversion engine in LR is exactly the same as ACR in PS. LR's main advantage is in cataloging images and a few other peripheral uses, many of which are available in PS Bridge.
If you already own PS, I don't see much advantage to owning LR unless (as Grant noted) yoiu have hundreds or thousands of images to catalog.
Posted by Todd Caudle on March 7, 2012 at 10:40 AM
What? You're supposed to organize you photos??? Oh crap!
Mark, I also bought the super-duper low-priced LR3 and thought the exact same thing as you. I take Grant's point, and John's confirmation of it, as gospel, but if you already have a method of organizing photos that you like, I don't see much reason for LR at all. That being said, I'd love to keyword and catalog my images much better than I do, regardless of what program I use.
Jack, it's a beauty of a shot, but the sunlit reds look clipped big time, rendering no detail, a common "feature" of Canon's picture styles (most notably, Landscape, but others as well).
Posted by Richard Olsen on March 7, 2012 at 11:11 AM
Nice photo Jack, and a good example of Lightroom's quick adjustments.
Another advantage of Lightroom, is the changes made are stored in Lightroom only and not on the original file. Those changes can be sent to PS if wanted. This way the original file is there in it's original format. This is big for me because my skills at editing are changing on a daily basis.
Posted by Tom Stermitz on March 7, 2012 at 11:48 AM
What Grant said: Lightroom excels at cataloging, key-wording and keeping track of your images.
I happily used Bridge, ACR and Photoshop for a long time, and really appreciated that combination. You can keyword pretty well in Bridge, but only on images within one directory. Trying multiple directories totally bogs down your computer, while Lightroom handles thousands of files across many directories.
ACR in Bridge works almost as easily as LR, but again, LR has the advantage when you start working with multiple files.
Other than the organizational properties of LR, it doesn't sound much different than Canons DPP (sliders for various parameters, conversion, etc). Or, am I missing something?
I find that with each incarnation of DPP, it offers more features. And it's free! (always good).
Thank you, guys, for confirming my initial impressions. I'm willing to keep looking into LR, but -- honestly -- I was completely baffled at first. I didn't understand what all the hoopla was over LR when it seemed like it was just a different user interface for ACR. And, indeed, that seems to be what it largely is. I get that there are some incremental upgrades in ACR itself this time around ("highlight" is supposed to work better than "recovery", for example), but I'm glad that there's not some huge feature set that I'm missing out on. It's nice to know that I'm not hopelessly behind the times in using Bridge, ACR, and layers in Photoshop for a non-destructive editing path.
Jack, I apologize for taking over the thread. And again: looks like it was worth it for you to make that trip down to Arizona. It's not too common to get any clouds above Horseshoe Bend, so be happy about those. Hope you got some good work from Antelope as well...
Posted by Jack Garrett on March 7, 2012 at 9:37 PM
No need to apologize Mark...this was good for me too. I just posted this to show how easy it was to improve an image quickly. For me, I find LR4 much easier to use than ACR (maybe it's the way the sliders are laid out) and I do feel I have a little more control over it in general.
I do not have LR, but hope to some day. I probably need quite a few more images to have a need to catalog.
I just have PS3 and would need a whole new computer system to be able to run CS6 or LR4.
Discussion
12 repliesCan I beg ignorance and ask what it is that I'm missing about Lightroom? I downloaded the public beta and bought one of the super-discounted copies of LR3, but in an hour or two of messing around with it, I don't understand the general switch from Photoshop to Lightroom in the last few years. Lightroom, to me, looks like a glorified front-end for Adobe's Camera Raw -- how is it different from using ACR in Photoshop?
Sorry; I don't mean to hijack the thread, but if you or anyone else can point me towards a deeper explanation, I'd appreciate it.
Nice work on the Horseshoe bend shot!
As for developing, it saves every adjustment you ever make to an image, so you can quickly go back to any previous state of the image while taking up almost no extra memory, something I don't think you can do with ACR. Obviously, if you have Photoshop and ACR, you can do many of the same things in developing the image. But if you can't afford Photoshop or don't want to keep upgrading, Lightroom is a much less expensive option, though there's still certainly benefits to owning both.
If you already own PS, I don't see much advantage to owning LR unless (as Grant noted) yoiu have hundreds or thousands of images to catalog.
Mark, I also bought the super-duper low-priced LR3 and thought the exact same thing as you. I take Grant's point, and John's confirmation of it, as gospel, but if you already have a method of organizing photos that you like, I don't see much reason for LR at all. That being said, I'd love to keyword and catalog my images much better than I do, regardless of what program I use.
Jack, it's a beauty of a shot, but the sunlit reds look clipped big time, rendering no detail, a common "feature" of Canon's picture styles (most notably, Landscape, but others as well).
Another advantage of Lightroom, is the changes made are stored in Lightroom only and not on the original file. Those changes can be sent to PS if wanted. This way the original file is there in it's original format. This is big for me because my skills at editing are changing on a daily basis.
I happily used Bridge, ACR and Photoshop for a long time, and really appreciated that combination. You can keyword pretty well in Bridge, but only on images within one directory. Trying multiple directories totally bogs down your computer, while Lightroom handles thousands of files across many directories.
ACR in Bridge works almost as easily as LR, but again, LR has the advantage when you start working with multiple files.
I find that with each incarnation of DPP, it offers more features. And it's free! (always good).
Jack, I apologize for taking over the thread. And again: looks like it was worth it for you to make that trip down to Arizona. It's not too common to get any clouds above Horseshoe Bend, so be happy about those. Hope you got some good work from Antelope as well...
I just have PS3 and would need a whole new computer system to be able to run CS6 or LR4.