Posted by Dottie Short on August 25, 2012 at 10:11 PM
I've been using ACR and Photoshop for about 2 1/2 years and thought I should give LR4 a look. I've had some many people tell me that LR is made for photographers so I downloaded the LR4 app. After looking at tutorials on Adobe TV and working with several images for the past three days, I'm just about crazy. I would like to hear from some of you out there that have started in ACR and moved to LR. What are some of your experiences, frustrations, & questions. Were you successful and continued using LR or did you give up and go back to ACR. Any other comments, suggestions would be appreciated. I have so many questions and some of the tutorials have frankly discouraged me from continuing to try and figure out a workflow. I'm trying to duplicate my ACR workflow into LR and maybe that's not how I should be thinking.
Thanks for any help that you may provide.
Posted by John Mumaw on August 26, 2012 at 12:08 AM
Well, ACR and the 'Develop' feature in LR are virtually identical, so I'm not sure what the problem may be.
In fact, that's the main reason I have stuck with PS. The sole advantage with LR seems to be with cataloguing a large amount of images. I can do all of that using Bridge in PS. I don't take hundreds of images at a time anyway, so I don't need that capability. So to me, LR makes sense if you don't have PS, but not vice versa.
Workflow in LR 4 is simple and easy. as stated above ACR 7.1 and LR Develop module are practically the same. I PP in LR about 98% of my images and only use PS when needed. I have found when I switched to LR from ACR back in 2008 that I had no problems and with the new update to me LR is wonderful
Posted by Wick Smith on August 26, 2012 at 9:29 AM
Dottie,
I made the switch earlier this year & still have some regrets. I had used Bridge & ACR & had gotten used to it. Lightroom gave more controls (at the time). The biggest issue I had to get used to was the "import" and "synch" functions. With Bridge, if the photo was in a folder, it showed in Bridge. With LR, you have to import any folder that contains the images, and if you create jpg files or other output from your work, you have to synch the folder for LR to see it. I find that a pain in the ^%#@$.
If I had it to do over, I would have stuck with the latest version of ACR as that was what I was after in the first place. With Bridge & ACR, the flow was a lot simpler!
Posted by John Reed on August 26, 2012 at 10:38 AM
Dottie,
I agree that having to import to LR is a giant pain. I also use PS for most of my work. Lately however I have discovered two big benefits to LR4 that have made my life a little simpler. The first one is that, as stated already, the LR adjustments are the same as the latest ACR so for "fast and dirty jobs" that do NOT require extensive cutting/pasting/layers/etc, I can easily adjust the images in LR and then export them en masse to a new folder. I can export them as jpg of any quality or tif and then they're ready to burn to CD and give to customer. The second advantage, for me, is that I can now easily search every single digital capture I've ever made and search for a specific keyword. For example, recently I had a request for alligators and I searched my entire LR catalog (every photo since 2003) and had it find every gator photo while I did other work. In Bridge, I could also search for a specific keyword, I can only do it for specific folders and not all my folders (unless someone can tell me how to do that), So to get the same results I got with a single search in LR, I'd have to do hundreds of searches in Bridge. These two things have proved very, very helpful. Other than that, I still like Bridge and PS much better than LR. Hope this helps. JR
Posted by Keith Bauer on August 26, 2012 at 1:59 PM
Dottie:
I'm a huge fan of LightRoom. Many of the issues people are describing above are generated by not using Lightroom properly. Yes, you have to import into Lightroom, but there are huge advantages to doing so. Think of the Lightroom catalog like the card catalog in your library. That catalog is a reference to the books on the shelf, not the books on the shelf, but a reference to the books on the shelf. The LR catalog is a reference to the images on disk, not the images on the disk. Importing builds the catalog of information. Bridge just knows what's on disk and to doing any searching, has to run through the directory to find anything. LR using the catalog for all of its' references. It is much faster, especially when the number of images grows. As many of noted, the develop module in LR provides the same functionality as ACR. It is the same engine underneath the covers. The difference is in the user interface where LR is much more intuitive than ACR. There is a reason LR has become such a popular piece of software. I teach LR and wish I could provide you direct one on one tutoring as I'm confident you'd quickly find LR is superior to ACR and Bridge.
Discussion
5 repliesThanks for any help that you may provide.
In fact, that's the main reason I have stuck with PS. The sole advantage with LR seems to be with cataloguing a large amount of images. I can do all of that using Bridge in PS. I don't take hundreds of images at a time anyway, so I don't need that capability. So to me, LR makes sense if you don't have PS, but not vice versa.
I made the switch earlier this year & still have some regrets. I had used Bridge & ACR & had gotten used to it. Lightroom gave more controls (at the time). The biggest issue I had to get used to was the "import" and "synch" functions. With Bridge, if the photo was in a folder, it showed in Bridge. With LR, you have to import any folder that contains the images, and if you create jpg files or other output from your work, you have to synch the folder for LR to see it. I find that a pain in the ^%#@$.
If I had it to do over, I would have stuck with the latest version of ACR as that was what I was after in the first place. With Bridge & ACR, the flow was a lot simpler!
I agree that having to import to LR is a giant pain. I also use PS for most of my work. Lately however I have discovered two big benefits to LR4 that have made my life a little simpler. The first one is that, as stated already, the LR adjustments are the same as the latest ACR so for "fast and dirty jobs" that do NOT require extensive cutting/pasting/layers/etc, I can easily adjust the images in LR and then export them en masse to a new folder. I can export them as jpg of any quality or tif and then they're ready to burn to CD and give to customer. The second advantage, for me, is that I can now easily search every single digital capture I've ever made and search for a specific keyword. For example, recently I had a request for alligators and I searched my entire LR catalog (every photo since 2003) and had it find every gator photo while I did other work. In Bridge, I could also search for a specific keyword, I can only do it for specific folders and not all my folders (unless someone can tell me how to do that), So to get the same results I got with a single search in LR, I'd have to do hundreds of searches in Bridge. These two things have proved very, very helpful. Other than that, I still like Bridge and PS much better than LR. Hope this helps. JR
I'm a huge fan of LightRoom. Many of the issues people are describing above are generated by not using Lightroom properly. Yes, you have to import into Lightroom, but there are huge advantages to doing so. Think of the Lightroom catalog like the card catalog in your library. That catalog is a reference to the books on the shelf, not the books on the shelf, but a reference to the books on the shelf. The LR catalog is a reference to the images on disk, not the images on the disk. Importing builds the catalog of information. Bridge just knows what's on disk and to doing any searching, has to run through the directory to find anything. LR using the catalog for all of its' references. It is much faster, especially when the number of images grows. As many of noted, the develop module in LR provides the same functionality as ACR. It is the same engine underneath the covers. The difference is in the user interface where LR is much more intuitive than ACR. There is a reason LR has become such a popular piece of software. I teach LR and wish I could provide you direct one on one tutoring as I'm confident you'd quickly find LR is superior to ACR and Bridge.