Why Lightroom?

Based on some of the articles you've posted, I gather that you use Lightroom extensively. Can you speak to why you've added it to your toolset. How has Photoshop and Bridge, for example, not been enough?

— Dennis Allshouse

Whew! How do I answer that one?

First, I do understand the question in as much as I had the same doubts about Lightroom when I first heard about it. It seems, at first blush, to be a limited version of Photoshop — sort of another run at Photoshop Elements. At least, that's how I perceived it. I'm a serious photographer, so why would I be interested in a feature-reduced tool?

Then Adobe complicated my decision with a really stupid marketing decision by officially calling it "Photoshop Lightroom" rather than just Lightroom. They wanted to piggy back on the strength of the Photoshop brand, I guess.

But Lightroom is not to Photoshop what Notepad is to Word. The hard part about Lightroom is that it is a completely new paradigm. It took me a while to grasp what that paradigm was, but once I figured it out I was convinced. Boy, was I! Lightroom is now 80% of my imaging workflow and Photoshop has been reduced to about 20%. I would've never guessed.

So, what is it? Several things that I find incredibly useful.

Database

I learned one of its chief advantages when I returned from a week of photography in North Dakota with 1,800 digital exposures. Keep in mind, in my sheet film days, a good week was 50 sheets of film. I had no idea — and no tool — to view, organize, and start working on 1,800 exposures. Lightroom is the answer.

Why not just use Bridge? Bridge is a pretty good viewer, but not a full database. Lightroom has key wording, stacking, virtual collections, and instant zooming. Lightroom allows you to view your images by any subset of the metadata you want. It's selection tools are very robust allowing you to compare similar images and narrow your selection to the one you really want to use. Ranking, color labeling, picking and rejecting are all possible. Bridge does some of this too, but you'll find Lightroom a much more powerful way of doing all of this.

If that were all Lightroom did, Bridge could be a competitor. But Bridge can't do any of the following.

Working an Image

Often, my work with an image is limited to a little cropping, some tonal adjustments, and sharpening. Using Photoshop for these tasks is like using an atom bomb to kill a fly. Lightroom handles 80% of the image adjustments I ever need to make, without having to pass the file on to Photoshop. But if you need to for complex editing, you can — with or without the Lightroom adjustments applied. Photoshop and Lightroom are cross-compatible and aware of each other.

In addition, Lightroom has one truly magic button — Sync. Once I make adjustments to one image, I can apply them — or just a selection of them — to a bunch of images with one click. Try doing that in Photoshop.

One Master, Many Uses

Native commands in Photoshop change the data in the image file — so-called destructive editing. Once you change the pixels, you can't go back. You can always use layers to preserve the original pixels, but at the expense of increasing file size tremendously. You can make copies of the Photoshop files, but all your editing is then only in that one copy. And then you've got the same image scattered in various copies all over the place.

In Lightroom, all the image editing you do is nothing more than a series of instructions describing what you'd like done to the image — but nothing is actually done until you output the image from Lightroom. Tell Lightroom you want to use your image (with adjustments) in a web page, Lightroom makes the image editing adjustments and creates the required low-resolution web page image. You can then use the same set of instructions on the master file to make a high-resolution print, create a new file in any format, open the image for more complex editing in Photoshop, in short, create a new use for the image in any way you want and Lightroom applies all your editing adjustments to a new copy of the digital file. Edit once, use many times in many ways. Again, brilliant. The master image is preserved in tact, but you can produce from it anything you want without harming the original.

Here's a real-world example. When we've selected a portfolio for publication in LensWork and LensWork Extended, we add the photographers submitted image files to our LensWork Lightroom database. These may be JPEGs, TIFs, or PSD files. They may be grayscale or RGB. They may be any ppi and any size. We need to repurpose these original files for our two separate and distinct uses — 400ppi duotone PSDs for LensWork in print and 200ppi RGB JPEGs for LensWork Extended PDFS. I have presets for each of these uses. Once we select the individual images we will publish, I can output the entire issue's files we need for each use with, literally, four mouse clicks. Lightroom outputs the entire set of images exactly as we need them with the correct resolution, correct size, correct color mode, correct file format to any target location on our hard drives. All of them, just like that. It even applies our duotone curves using a Photoshop "droplet" applied to each file via Photoshop after the output is complete.

Projects

Lightroom Collections are a gift from God. Simply brilliant. A collection is a virtual selection of images. Say I'm working on a project of photographs of chairs. I've been photographing chairs my whole life. I have scans of negatives with chairs, I have digital files of chair photographs, I have chair images from the 1970s and from last week — and they're scattered all over my hard drives. Without moving any of the files, without making copies of any of the files — in short, without messing up my archives organization — I can gather all these images (virtually) into a Lightroom Collection and start the serious work of development, editing, and even website building my project of chairs. And the original files remain where they are supposed to be and where I'll be able to find them a year from now.

Another Example, the Uchiwa-e folios

In my three weeks in Japan and China last fall, I made 12,000 exposures — 4,000 compositions with triple bracketing. I uploaded each day's images into my netbook using Lightroom. I could review the images of the day on the spot and start the process of key wording, organizing, and thinking about what I needed to shoot the next day.

After I returned from the trip, I merged this "field database" with my master database and all the images were uploaded and integrated instantly. Well, not instantly, it took several hours for the computer to copy and crunch the volume of stuff, but while it was doing so I took in a couple episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

Using Lightroom Collections, I then started the process of gathering images into "themes" that I wanted to explore for possible folios. I simply added all the images that might be potential candidates to the various collections, sometimes building 100 or more image candidates for a 10-print folio. Then using the "Survey" function in Lightroom, I narrowed down my candidate images to a more reasonable 20 or so for each folio. To these I then did first-draft image editing — cropping, tonal adjustments, white balance, etc. — and then printed test prints.

Once the final 10 images were selected for each folio, I made final edits to tweak the images to their full potential (sometimes needing to do complex edits in Photoshop) and then output the Master Images to an archive folder on my hard drive. These are the images that I used in my InDesign layouts. These files also function as a permanent archive for this project in the individual project folders for which they apply.

The photography took place in late November and early December. The folios are now finished and available on my website here in the first week in March. From photography to finished project in roughly 100 days. From zero to sixty finished images in six completed folios in just over three months. I know that neither volume nor speed are virtues in the production of artwork, but then again neither are delay nor sloth.

In short, Lightroom allows me to get stuff done. I am more productive now as a photographer than I have ever been in my forty years in photography — largely due to Lightroom. Is that testimonial enough?

Comments

[Adam Maas]

Bridge actually offers most of the editing capabilities of Lightroom via the ACR plugin (which can be launched in Bridge), including the ability to sync edits across multiple files. It lacks the selective editing though, you need to use Photoshop with that.

Personally, after testdriving Lightroom I happily moved back to Bridge. Bridge doesn't require me to conform to how it wants files organized and allows me to stick with my long-standing backup strategy Which involves shuffling folders full of files around, something LR doesn't much like. Most of the extra value in lightroom comes from its keywording, search and organizing fcilities and I personally find them to range from more trouble than they're worth to actively interfering with me.

Bridge also allows much easier use of non-Adobe products such as CaptureOne.

[Brooks Jensen]

Adam,
Each to his own. Glad you have a workflow that works for you.

However, lest your comments influence people's thinking, I do want to point out that Lightroom does offer moving/copying whole folders easily and in doing so it preserves all the key wording, development settings, etc. It also can rename multiple files at once, delete files, and rearrange folders all from within Lightroom's Library module.

Also, any external editor — including CaptureOne — can be added to Lightroom's preferences so files in Lightroom can be directly opened in the external editor. In fact, Photoshop AND another external editor can be configured so you have two choices for external editing outside of Lightroom.

And finally, yes, ACR is a powerful tool. The same basic engine that drives ACR also drives Lightroom. I think anything you can do in ACR you can do in Lightroom — but not vice versa. ACR, for example, does not have Lightroom's ability to paint areas for masked edits, nor can ACR do the spot removal or graduated masks available in Lightroom.

Like I say, to each his own and I certainly would not want to discourage anyone from using ACR if it fulfills their needs.

Brooks

[Edd Fuller]

I have been considering moving to Lightroom and your comments have been most helpful. I sort of agree with Adam that you stole a base by ignoring the capabilities of ACR in your original post, but your clarifying comment is also helpful.

Right now, 95% of my post-processing takes place in ACR. I rarely do anything in Photoshop except a little output sharpening prior to printing.

The extra processing capabilities of Lightroom over ACR and the ability to print from Lightroom, thereby removing Photoshop from my work flow as a print engine are the real selling points for me. I would buy Lightroom to replace ACR, not so much to replace Bridge. Of course you never know until you try--I might, like you, fall in love with Lightroom as a file management tool.

[Dennis Allshouse]

Thanks so much for taking the time write such a detailed answer!! More information is good. I've recently read the Fraser/Schewe sharpening book and it got me thinking about PhotoKit Sharpener. Then I reread some of the included material about Lightroom which seems to cover the capture and output stages of sharpening. Now all of this gives me more to think about in terms of new software tools.

[Neil]

Dennis, if it helps any I used to use PhotoKit sharpener in Photoshop for all of my images. I now use Lightroom exclusively. It is missing the creative sharpening aspect of the sharpening workflow Jeff and Bruce describe, but honestly for most of my images it's not really necessary.

Brooks, you mention you loaded the images onto your netbook. Which one are you using? I've tried a couple of times using Lightrom on my HP Mini 110, but it's just not up to the task.

[Dennis Allshouse]

Neil, thanks for the info. Economically speaking, saving on PhotoKit makes Lightroom more doable.

[Bob McAnally]

LR does have creative sharping. The Brush tool includes a sharping slider. It is not as refined as the Detail sharping or PhotoKit, but it is there and later release could provide even better control.

[Bahi]

Brooks, I'm sure the key to your happiness with Lightroom is that it makes all its functions accessible and natural seeming. It rewards your intuition and gets the clutter out of the way.

As others have pointed out, the local adjustments, including both brushes and gradients, are available in the current version Bridge, via ACR. Likewise the ability to copy and paste develop settings across pictures.

It all tends to feel a little kludgy—not so in Lightroom.

I should say that Aperture 3 is also a strong player and finally produces high-quality conversions. Anyone who swore never to go near it again after seeing the results of exposure compensation in version 1 and who isn't comfortable with Lightroom might give Aperture another look. I don't believe it's strong enough to lure away existing Lightroom users but there are Mac users tired of the Bridge/ACR/Photoshop thing who doesn't enjoy the Lightroom interface…

Thanks for the blog and the podcasts. They show very different aspects of your thinking.

[Bahi]

To Bob McNally: you're right about the creative sharpening existing in LR2 but it's fairly weak. Something about the algorithm used for the local sharpening brushes just doesn't cut the mustard. Try the same function in the Lightroom 3 beta to see how it should work. (While you're at it, look at how much better the colour NR is if you shoot at higher ISOs.)

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/

It's a beta, there are bugs, it doesn't read yr Lightroom 2 catalogue, it expires in April, etc., etc.