Julieanne Kost Lightroom demo

I was at the Adobe Lightroom show-and-tell today, hosted by everyone’s favorite Photoshop evangelist, Julieanne "I’m really not a nerd" Kost. "You want to see the boring public beta version, or the really cool new version the engineers released two days ago?" she asked us. Then, "Any bloggers in the room?" What I wished I had responded was, "Whatever you say that shouldn’t leave this room, I’ll be sure to note in the blog."

The conceptual place for Lightroom is to consider it the mother of all photo applications short of selective pixel manipulation. That will always remain Photoshop’s job. But Lightroom wants to be everything else: a relational database for an image collection, the most robust raw processor in the room, and the best print/slide show/web output program out there. It is still a work in progress.

I have not spent much time in Lightroom. It is such a broad and conceptually challenging program that I was not able to make a lot of headway to accomplish anything close to the demos I’ve witnessed in the past. The raw processing engine is really, really slow, at least on v.3. It’s a lot slower than Adobe Raw Convertor. There have, of course, been improvements in the latest version, namely, you can use the native file hierarchical tree as a point of entry, instead of being completely closed off from the way you organize your image folders now. They’ve imported the highlight recovery function from RawShooter, which is really cool. You don’t have to massage the Exposure and Brightness sliders to some uneasy compromise to save those blown pixels. There are more robust editing functions for raw processing than ACR. I wish I could give you some personal feedback, but I have been unable to get v.4.1 to install on my Windows machines. There’s a ddl registry problem. Oh well, it’s a beta.

Julieanne really pushes conversion to dng format right off the bat, which Lightroom can do. It gets rid of those pesky sidecar files, which are problematic in any cross-program application. I don’t like it for my workflow however, since I see dng as an archive format, not a working format. She claimed that changes in dng files from Lightroom will be read in ACR, but only in alterations made in settings common to both programs. It’s at least a step better than v.3, which doesn’t display your changes anywhere but Lightroom. But it’s not good enough.

There is a lot on the Lightroom interface, and you really need a big screen to use this program well. What’s nice about Bridge is that you can keep the display super clean. This is not the case in Lightroom. Yes, you can "F" key and "Tab" to clear up the display, but you usually need all your options available, and there’s not a lot of space to put them.

I am way impressed with the slide show and print features in Lightroom. Color management is, of course, fully supported. However, it requires a commitment to the full Lightroom workflow to take advantage of these functions. You could say that about the whole range of possibilities offered by Lightroom. To get all the goodies, it requires something of a monogamous commitment. I know I’m still playing the field.

Here appears to be the future as Adobe would like to see it unfurl. Adobe Bridge and Adobe Raw Convertor will cease to be the primary mechanism for professional and serious photographers to interact with their raw files. It will become the province of those people who are using all the creative suite applications, who need a "bridge" for importing various and sundry. They want us photographers to all migrate to Lightroom.

By the way, CS3? Spring 2007.

Comments

[Ricardo De Lima]

I really wish the performance problems were at the top of Adobe's priorities but through the two betas I've gone through this doesn't seem to be the case. I'll give it another shot but they are losing me over here as a potential customer. I can live with Phase One Capture One and ACR.