Popagandhi

I’m an amateur photographer who doesn’t count herself as “seriously advanced”, but serious enough to bother about digital workflow, colour management, and things like that. I also have the unhealthy hobby of liking to check out every other app I can get my hands on ââ�¬â�� more so if it’s by Adobe. I use Adobe products everyday: peek into my PowerBook at any point in time, and you’re likely to see Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop CS2 open. For my part time job I’m working in a digital photography workflow involving ACDSee and Photoshop CS2 (Windows) and BibblePro for RAW files.

I constantly wish it could be easier. Easier and faster. My beef with DSLRs has no puritanical strain of old school/film-trained bias; I do appreciate shooting slides and black and white film, but do not appreciate the cost of processing or scanning or printing, nor have I the technical knowledge and time and willingness to do it on my own. Thing is, digital photography should be getting easier. The ability to shoot RAW is great and insanely helpful � imagine all those times you had a great shot, but wrong exposure or wrong white balance � or those times you had this shot you really had to take but could only reach at the far end of your crappy cheapy super telephoto Tamron lens, only to find vignetting � technically anyway, you can get your image back. But we shoot hundreds of images in one sitting (or shooting), and even the most advanced of us will have trouble getting the hang of such a tedious workflow.

So I’m a Mac user and I shoot with an entry-level Canon DSLR. At this point I have long given up on iPhoto, am infatuated by but not entirely convinced with handing over the moolah to pay for iView Media/MediaPro, and the other option I’m testing now is a trial of Camera Mechanic. I’m in low spirits. I’m used to my software working and working excellently in every area ââ�¬â�� except in photo management. The ACDSee + Photoshop CS2 + BibblePro combination I’m weaned on at my workplace works decently. On my Mac I don’t have any photo management tool reasonably comparable to ACDSee, Photoshop is of course the same, and Bibble for Mac is laughable. So I go for second best: Bridge for organization (though I have a love/hate relationship with it), Photoshop for colour correction and everything else. But it doesn’t feel complete. I want one of the big boys to give me a hand at this. Apple comes in with Aperture and I think, salvation, finally? But those specs: the bulk of the photography I’m interested in happens on the road, when I’m in some Third World country, and a 12″ PowerBook is really all I can take along with my entire equipment bag of cameras and lenses. I really can’t take a G5 along with a perfectly calibrated Cinema Display that Aperture is built for.

What next? Nobody expected Adobe to sit quiet, since Apple’s overture to digital pro photographers can be reasonably viewed to be some form of.. encroaching on their territory, even if it is said that Aperture does NOT compete head on with Photoshop. Adobe jumped in today with the public beta of Lightroom. I’m excited. Very excited. So I took Lightroom for a spin.

Test Machine: 12″ PowerBook/ 1.33Ghz/ 768MB
OS: 10.4 (Tiger)

Disclaimer: This review is solely from the user perspective. I am not a professional, only somebody interested in both photography and technology (and Macs, of course). Admittedly my review does not go into great technical depth ââ�¬â�� and that is because I am testing this product as I would use it myself, not as a technical photography website might present it. I don’t have the technical requirements needed for Aperture, so I can’t give a comparison between the two.

Warning: lengthy, and image-heavy. I have screenshots accompanying most parts of my review.

First Impressions
On mounting the disk image provided by Adobe, it is immediately apparent to someone who has been working with Adobe products for some time, that there is something.. different. Colour scheme (I don’t remember black ever featuring too prominently on any other Adobe app)? UI? Even the installation image is obviously sleeker. Easy drag and drop install, as with any other app made for the Mac.

Install disk image

Importing
But first, to import photos into the Library. I selected a folder of photographs from my trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I liked being given the choice when it comes to how my files should be handled: in this case, Lightroom offers the option of leaving the files in their existing location, copying and/or moving image files into Lightroom Library, or copy as a DNG (digital negative). I chose the first option, not knowing what my future usage of this application will be.

Importing and options

At the stage of import, slider allows one to browse through the images to be imported, and metadata (keywords, shoot name) can be added at this point.

Lightroom Library
After the import, this is what the library looks like. Selecting one image leads to the preview on the top right, with the necessary information under it (histograms, settings, etc).

Lightroom Library with filmstrip and other modules.

Selected image, settings display and the all important histogram.

Library and its functions are laid out fairly intuitively. Grid does the obvious, of laying out your images in a grid in the size and columns you prefer. Loupe allows you to get in to inspect images. Compare lets you command click to compare images in a panel.

Develop
This is the part of Lightroom where I’m not sure what Adobe wants to achieve, having already established Photoshop as the industry standard. It looks like a more polished version of Camera Raw in Photoshop, with the same slider toggles for white balance and sharpening and hue/saturation, lens correction, camera calibration. The Curves component also appears to utilize the slider approach, so Photoshop junkies used to adjusting the curves will be somewhat shocked. An important component of my own digital workflow includes colour correcting through curves, thresholds, and colour sampling, and other things Photoshop is so good at. I’m going to have to either rethink my workflow, or choose the option of clicking to edit in Photoshop, so I’m not too sure about Lightroom’s “Develop”. I’m sure most photographers will feel the same.

Part of Develop’s right pane.

The left pane allows one to apply presets to the image. Default presets include Grayscale Conversion, Medium Contrast Tone Curve, Sepia, among others. This seems to be fairly limited: nobody can seriously create a proper digital black and white image (is that an oxymoron? “digital black and white”, haha) through grayscale conversion. Perhaps Adobe intends for it to be easy to create and make one’s presets (which begs the question of why, since Photoshop Actions and scripts are so powerful and indispensable), but at this point this are all the presets which are available are hardly usable and there are no others to use.

Develop’s left pane.

Overall, the Develop component comes up as fairly weak. Since this is beta software, one wonders how far Adobe will improve this; then there is also the question of how they will do that without undercutting Photoshop.

Develop, full screen.

Slideshow
Straight from the Library you can select images for “Impromptu Slideshow” ââ�¬â�� the official Slideshow function gives you more control. There are template presets, and all the customizations you can want to make, and the ability to export to HTML, PDF, and Flash.

Slideshow customization.

I tested the Flash export function and was pleasantly surprised that it produced a decent Flash web gallery. There are other tools for this ranging from the elegant Slideshow Pro to SimpleViewer. If putting up Flash galleries is your thing (it’s not mine), check out the sample gallery I made with 20 photos. It took a total of 4 minutes to create, at 90% quality, at a 3.2s duration.

It is possible to upload through FTP, an option I did not try, as my server is SFTP-only.

Print
Possibly useful though I admit I haven’t given this my full attention. It looks like there are templates for page layouts to choose from, ruler settings, print options; possibly useful stuff when you need them, but not very interesting otherwise. Nevertheless, a gratuitous screenshot:

Lightroom: Print, with template.

Last Words
“Adobe Lightroom is the complete, elegant environment for the art and craft of digital photography, from raw capture to creative output.”

It has been elegant and a pleasant environment to work in, compared to what we are used to. It is not fair to speak of feature sets until the product has matured and comes out of beta. Organizationally, Lightroom will appeal to those advanced amateurs or pros for whom it makes sense to “think” in form of Shoot Name and Collections and keywords, for we certainly differ in this area from your average family snapshotter. Lightroom is fast and responsive, even on a 1.33Ghz Powerbook with just 768MB of RAM; perhaps having to do with it being written from ground up in Cocoa? Search is fast. Toggles are quick. The user interface has been well thought out. I’m not about to move all my digital images into Lightroom ââ�¬â�� or any other beta app ââ�¬â�� but I’m waiting. And seeing.

I’m just one of those photographers who think Aperture will be too much for me in terms of features and cost and requirements. Please, Adobe, do good to Lightroom so as to wean me off my bad Bridge habit?

Links
Lightroom First Look
Project Lightroom
John Nack Introducing Project Lightroom
The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story