5 Months with Adobe Lightroom

First impressions can change. In fact, when it comes to software, I’m that itchy-fingered beta tester who likes to dive into early versions of software, and either comes away terribly disappointed by the bad implementation of a great idea, or overjoyed by the final product (usually the former).

For those who are late to catch on, Lightroom is “Adobe’s effort to engage the professional photography community in a new way”. It is, for the moment, available only as a beta for the Mac platform, though in stark contrast to Apple’s Aperture, its only direct competitor, the final product will be available for Mac and Windows.

The first question one struggles with, is how to place Lightroom. Is it for image management? Yes, but that’s not all. Is it for post-processing? Lightroom’s Develop capabilities exist, and are indeed capable, but then there’s also Photoshop. To my mind, it is now clear (it wasn’t before), that Lightroom provides that conduit for getting your images off your digital camera, and into the final stages of presentation. That may not sound like much, but digital photographers have had excellent tools for a long time (i.e. the myriad of great digital SLRs and other products), but few effective methods of working with the content they produce. I won’t say Lightroom provides that solution, as yet, but I can say without hesitating: this is the closest that anyone has come close to.

Lightroom’s greatest strength, since the day the first beta was released, has always been its speed. Speed that even the most modest system requirements can experience: my test machines have been the 1.33 Ghz G4 PowerBook with 768MB RAM, and the 2.0Ghz iMac G5 with 512MB RAM (I know, getting around to giving it more RAM). Very modest, and common setups. Lightroom has performed admirably on both machines. Import is fast. The option to reference files in existing location, instead of copying or moving to the library in a local volume, is a fantastic feature. I have 3000 shots in my Lightroom Library (mostly RAW or large JPEGs, at 10MB and 4MB per file respectively), entirely referenced from a folder in an external 300GB hard disk (Firewire). At no point does the library choke: everything flies.

Working with JPEGs and RAW files in Lightroom is a breeze. For a long time I avoided shooting RAW because working with RAW within Adobe Bridge, and with Camera Raw (the old way), was such a time-consuming process (not to mention the horrific UI on Bridge and Camera Raw). I am so confident that Lightroom has changed my workflow, that I have happily appzapped Bridge. Lightroom’s speed can even be witnessed in the usually terrifying process that is batch-changing metadata on hundreds of files, especially hundreds of files that huge. Keywords, titles, captions, are all quickly modifiable. EXIF data is always a glance away, which can be instrumental when making snap comparisons between 10 shots of the same scene.

One of Lightroom’s best features is its Lights Off mode: hit the L_ key to view images in an overlay over a darkened background, hit _L once more to have the background completely darkened. It helps make the process of viewing and editing hundreds of pictures, much easier on the eye.

Thus in aspects of image management and organization, Lightroom is king: nimble, and powerful. ACDSee Pro was excellent, but doesn’t feel as slick or quick as Lightroom (and also, Windows only). I did not expect its Develop capabilities to be so surprisingly useable, having already possessed a fairly developed Photoshop digital workflow. Lightroom allows you to make quick and effective adjustments, especially for white balance and exposure, crop and straighten, adjust levels, for both JPEG and RAW. When you’re going through hundreds of shots per shoot, in RAW, this is going to save you a couple of hours.

Well, Lightroom just improved its Develop module, in tonight’s latest release of Beta 3. Having Before and After views while tweaking midtones, or adjusting levels, is insanely useful. So is the new History menu, and the ability to rollback to any previous state at any step. The new Web module promises to let you easily create web photo galleries, even in Flash if you like. Print and Slideshow help you quickly present your work in the best manner possible. With such big strides and improvements, one can only wonder how great the final product is going to be, and with much optimism: this is a product that is, after all, touted to be “truly built from the ground up by photographers for photographers”, with actual photographers’ input and feedback at every stage. The strides made so far up until Beta 3, is testament to that.

It’s a great application with a level of intuitiveness that I haven’t seen on any software, other than Mac-specific software. I’m pretty much able to work in Lightroom with one hand firmly on my keyboard, doing much of the navigating (changing from grid mode to loupe, setting up images for comparison, changing the light mode), and the other hand on a mouse rotating images, starring them, adjusting and making the necessary changes. I still rely on Photoshop for the heavier editing work, but significant steps have already been cut from that process.

It may be a bit too early to call the game, but Adobe looks like they’re going to win this one. Apple needs to realize that it can’t win the battle for digital photographers with the same approach it used for video — no matter what kind of photographer you are, wedding, photojournalist, landscape, professional, casual — the chances of us all working exclusively on a high end machine in a studio that can run Aperture (as compared to the video guy sitting in front of a few Power Mac towers with a ton of RAM, using Final Cut Pro) are slimmer. Then again, Apple is the one company I like to see defy logic and convention. No matter which way it turns out, this sort of competition is certainly excellent for us digital photographers.

My Desert Boys in Jaisalmer: view by keywords (left), filmstrip in XL mode, library in grid view, Quick Develop and Info/Metadata pane on right