After attending a seminar today, I’m in tech mode. So, please forgive my geeky rant. -jan

Earlier today, I attended a one-day seminar on Adobe Lightroom given by Photoshop master Scott Kelby. I’ve seen him in action on his podcast and his work is quite amazing. I’ve been using Lightroom now for about 3 months and it’s been such a great tool for handling my RAW images. I still shoot JPEG and use iPhoto (which I L.O.V.E.) for all my personal images but for all my portrait sessions and weddings, I shot RAW and needed a capable system.

I tried using Apple’s Aperture for one shoot and I was pulling my hair out. As an Apple worshiper, I will always give their products a shot and really want to use them all. While I love the interface and the organizing features are awesome, it is slow and the batch options for tonal adjustments are clunky. I haven’t tried the latest revision, but from what I hear, the batch features that I was looking for has not appeared. So, I dumped Aperture and was using Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW to process and organize all my images. But since Lightroom was released, it has been a great tool for me. While it’s organizing features are not the most intuitive, Lightroom is amazing for making batch tonal adjustments and even some new tonal adjustments not available even in Photoshop (Recover/Vibrance). But since you cannot make selections in Lightroom, making fine-tuned touch ups are just not possible. No feathering, no softening, no blurring, no stam tool, no filters. So, there is still a definite need for Photoshop. I was thinking about changing my proofing system to incorporate Lightroom tonal adjustments only but in some cases I need my selection tool!

RAW Tools, I have used: (Clockwise from top left: Bridge (w/ Camera RAW), iPhoto (for personal stuff), Lightroom (my current tool of choice) and Aperture (beautiful interface but clunky editing).

While I enjoyed the seminar and Scott’s presentation, I was a little bummed that it was geared towards beginners. I knew most of what he was showing, but it was still a good reinforcement of my decision to go with Lightroom. Eventually, I did learn some cool new things that I never really bothered to delve into. I guess, sometimes, it’s just nice to know how other professionals work. I do like how Scott uses Photoshop with Lightroom. I used to always export the files into another folder, work on them in Photoshop and just leave them there. Now, I realized that it’s ok to edit them using Photoshop and save them back into Lightroom. I was always worried about the extra file it creates and the file size problems, but I guess that exporting them was doing the same thing. iPhoto uses the exact same system when using an external editor. But, there was one thing hat Scott preached that I disagreed with. For choosing images, he is an advocate of the Pick/Reject Flagging method while I prefer to stick with the Stars/Labels method.

For picking images, I use stars but with a twist. Lightroom uses a 5 star rating system, but I only use stars 2-5. After backing up and importing all image files, I assign stars to every image. Two star photos gets deleted, 3 star photos are proof worthy, 4 star photos are slideshow worthy, and 5 stars is album stuff. So, for a typical wedding, I’ll have about 600-900 3 star photos, 80-120 4 star photos and about 30-60 5 star photos. For me, it’s a little more flexible that just flagging yes/no. I also use the color labels to determine which photos I use for the blog or which I want to print. I’ll usually end up with 15-25 blog picks with a red flag.

Below is what Lightroom looks like in my desktop. You can see the ratings on the images and the red label on a few of them.This is the grid view of the Library but it is filtered to show only 4 stars or higher:

Below is Lightroom in the Develop panel. I really love the way Lightroom handles batch changes (Copy/Paste Presets or Sync/Auto-Sync). It’s really a time saver. I’ll still make small tweaks here and there, but most of the time, it’s good to go. I’ve set up a few of my personal presets on the left panel.

It’s funny because while using Lightroom for the past few months, I’ve made some cool discoveries like the Recovery and the Vibrance settings which I thought were just amazing. Then, today, Scott says how they are just the greatest things on earth. So, I’m glad that I’m on the right track with those tools.

For me, the best things in Lightroom are:

1. Presets,Presets,Presets (individual photo or batch)
2. The preview thumbnail on the top left corner
3. Adding vignettes using the lens correction panel
4. Easy split tone adjustments
5. The little click and drag/eyedropper adjustment tool on the Curve and Hue/Saturation/Luminance panels
6. Recovery and Vibrance tool

So unless Apple steps up and makes Aperture more useable (for me, at least), I’m with Adobe on this.

Geeky rant is done!

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