Loving Lightroom - so far.......

[mark1616]

I've just forced myself to actually use Lightroom. I've been a user of Canon DPP for a long time and never been able to get myself away from it as I know the prog inside out and could edit a wedding pretty quickly. However, with things being a little quiet for a few weeks I decided that today should be the day to actually try and break the back of lightroom (well start to at least). I spent the morning watching videos from Apple TV and a few other places to get my head around short cuts and also what was even in Lightroom and I'm pleased I did. Usually I'm typical man, just try to use it and that's that..... this was my method past tries at LR and I played for a few minutes and just went back to DPP.

I did come across a few things I couldn't do in the process, but after a quick Google I found the solution and got back onto it. I would love to just be able to copy the conversion info from a file and paste it to another rather than having to use the sync method but that's my only major gripe so far.

I'm yet to export to jpg so possibly I'm getting excited too soon, however if things come out the way they are looking so far I'm happy. I can already tell with the speed of cropping/rotating compared to DPP and the grad filters/minor healing etc that things are going to be edited faster than the old way which is great.

Why didn't I invest the time sooner to get to grips with this?!?!?!? I did the same in 2010 where I played with PS but never could get myself away from PaintShop Pro which I had been using since I can remember, now I could never go back.

 

[garryknight]

I would love to just be able to copy the conversion info from a file and paste it to another

You can. Highlight a photo in the film strip at the bottom. Click the Copy button that's at the bottom of the left-hand panel. Select the adjustments that you want to copy. Highlight a number of photos in the film strip and click the Paste button. I think you can also select photos in the Library's Grid mode and paste from there.

I'm yet to export to jpg so possibly I'm getting excited too soon

It can just be a matter of selecting photos in the grid then right-clicking one of them and selecting Export > Full Quality JPEGs (I think that's the wording). Or cilck the Export button and select what you want to do from the list, or create a new set of Export settings using available templates.

There are videos on how to do most things at the Adobe Video Workshop and Adobe TV, and I can recommend Martin Evening's book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book. Scott Kelby has written a book on Lightroom but a) it doesn't go into anything like as much detail as Martin Evening's book, and b) it contain's Scott Kelby's "humour".

 

[mark1616]

Thanks Garry, I hadn't spotted the copy paste LOL. Worked great thanks

I know I could have exported a few but guess I just wanted to get through the wedding I was editing and relied on the fact that most Pro's are using LR so it should have been up to the job.

I'm pleased to say the finished results are great, much better than I had out of DPP, the colour correction has gone really well, I'm actually going to go over a few parts of 2 recent weddings and edit them with LR as I wasn't too happy but couldn't improve on them using DPP. So it's been a great success, I didn't have to do any editing in Photoshop so my print ready images are all done in less than a day and that's including watching the videos on how to use it. I will admit it was a long day and didn't stop until 1am but still I'm very pleased!

 

[the888account]

I've also been really pleased with LR. Its taken me a while to get used it - more from a workflow point of view I think, but once youve mastered it, its pretty easy and quick to go through a days shooting - keeping the keepers and editing them.

The copy paste function of the tweaks is really great I find.

I found the Lightroom book by Kelby pretty good (some reviewers hated it), but for me it tells you what you need to know, how to do it without too much faff.

LR also works great with a couple of plugins I use - such as Silver Efex Pro. Right click the image "edit in" and your off in to Silver Efex / Photoshop CS etc etc.