Lightroom - General Questions For Those Using It

68lbs

68lbs

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April 2008
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Ok, am trying to work out whether I should invest in this. I have PS CS3 already, but the main attractions are my current lack of organisation with images and the ability to do completely non-destructive pp. If i'm right, this includes cloning etc? Can you do masked curves and levels layers too?

I also find it's too easy for me to spend ages in CS3 farting about, when my time would be better spent learning how to get it right in camera.

Couple of other qu's...

1. Is there anywhere i'm likely to get it cheaper, or is £190/£200 what I'd have to pay?

2. I have a daughter aged 5. Any way of getting educational discount? ;)

3. Would my Mac cope with all those raws or does lightroom create little jpeg previews so that when you're viewing a library you dont have to wait forever for it to load everything? At the minute, if I open say 50 raws in CS3 using the ACR plugin it can be a little slow drawing the thumbnails. I dread to think what would happen if I was using some software that had access to 000's of raw files. My Mac's a G4 tower (looks like a pro, but not anywhere near as fast), but cant remember processor speed etc.

4. Am I right in thinking I can organise everything just like flickr. ie: add tags, give titles, groups, etc?

Ok, think that's about all... sell it to me peeps :D
 
68lbs

Have you looked at Aperture it is cheaper and only cost 129.00 and if very good in my view, plus there are quite a few plugins emerging for it at the moment.

With aperture you can do all of the meta data tagging you like, when you import it produce a small preview JPG and then when you create versions it just stores a small side car file with the image adjustments, I think that is the same as Lightroom.

I find it a very versatile bit of kit and sits very nicely with CS3 on my Imac.

Regards

Nigel
 
2 - I remember reading about a chap who used his 4 year old daughters name to get hold of an educational discount on Adobe Photoshop, so yes, it should be possible

3 - Cant see it being a problem, LR2 needs RAM though, I have found it a lot better since I whacked 4gb in my macbook pro. It does create jpeg previews for the images, my image library has a smidge over 5k RAW images in and flicks through them all no worries.

4 - Not quite like flickr. You can certainly group, tag, flag and rate them - dont think you can add titles and descriptions though. You can get Lightroom to bulk rename files on import so the filenames are more meaningful than DSC05069.NEF.

BTW - have you tried the demo of it? I ran the demo of both Lightroom and Aperture for a month to see which I preferred.
 
Thanks for the comments. According to Apple website Aperture needs a dual processor G5 or greater, which I don't have. So I'd pretty much discounted that. I also thought that LR would probably integrate better with CS3 since both are Adobe.

I will have a look at downloading a Demo tonite. I didn't know I could :) That sounds like the most logical next step, so i'll do that first. It'll give me an idea of how well the mac copes too! Thanks
 
Amazon is about £186 with I think free delivery.

You may have trouble with the Education discount as the authorisation has to be signed by a tutor from an approved course. That may be a stumbling block.

Lightroom needs to import the images into it's library and database. It then renders the previews you see on the screen so it does take a short time to get up and running. However I don't think its much slower than loading and previewing in bridge.

Best bet, as suggested earlier download the trial version of LR 2.0. There is a release candidate 2.1 around as well, but I'd stay with the ver 2.0. for the trial.

30 days really isn't such a long time so it may be an idea to trawl the net for some video tutorials before you start. That way you can get the most out of the 30 day trial. Try the NAPP site

Tip You can download a serial no direct from Adobe, in exchange for your credit card. However having the boxed version helps as you have the serial no. and a CD should you ever need to reinstal after a major crash, and all the data in on the crashed computer!!!
 
Most of your questions have been answered above, but I'll add that you can add titles and descriptions to images, they are on the right hand side in the Library module in the ITPC/Metadata area. If you have the Flickr uploader these fields can be copied to Flickr too which avoids the need to name/describe twice.

I think your best bet will be to download the trial and see how you get on!
 
Craikeybaby said:
Most of your questions have been answered above, but I'll add that you can add titles and descriptions to images, they are on the right hand side in the Library module in the ITPC/Metadata area. If you have the Flickr uploader these fields can be copied to Flickr too which avoids the need to name/describe twice.

I think your best bet will be to download the trial and see how you get on!
Click to expand...

Learn something new every day - cheers for that!
 
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