RAW software update

Portrait of Vincent, a real craftsman who makes and repairs musical instruments with enormous care, love and dedication. And he doesn't use any software to do it. Click the image to see a larger version.

The topic of which RAW converter to use for your digital images files is as hot as ever on the Internet. A while back I wrote an article comparing different packages and I've seen that the article is regularly read.

So for those of you who are curious here's a little bit about my latest experiences.

I used Lightroom 1 from when it came out and quickly became a big fan. All my digital workflow went through Lightroom and Photoshop for the final processing. About a month ago two things happened. I got a laptop and I've ended up using it for most of my work. And I decided to give Lightroom 3 beta a try on my new laptop.

Now I know Lightroom is Beta and all that but the slowness of opening an image, waiting for it to render sharply on the screen and run through each process started driving me nuts. So when I was in a rush, which is usually the case, I opened Adobe Bridge and used it to organise my images and then from there opened RAW files straight into Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and then into Photoshop itself if the image needed more work.

Processing images in this way has speeded up my workflow tremendously. For example when I click the magnifying glass in ACR I instantly see the enlarged image. I don't have to wait a minute for the image to clarify and become sharp as I did in Lightroom 3. Each operation is much faster. And the development engine is essentially the same as in Lightroom so there are no differences in quality between images developed using the two different forms of software.

Lightroom is prettier. It's got additional features and tools. But for the way I shoot there's nothing that I feel I'm missing by using Bridge, ACR and good old Photoshop CS3. I can achieve the same or better results a lot faster than when I used Lightroom 3 Beta.

Everyone has their own workflow and way of doing things and I'm just sharing my personal experience here. But I think it is wise to always ask questions and to never assume that because something is new it is going to be better for you. And you could save yourself some serious money by not rushing ahead to get the latest in everything. I'm sure people using very powerful machines will not notice any speed issues with Lightroom 3 but on my laptop I certainly did.

Hope you find this article useful.

Yours,
Paul
www.indigo2photography.co.uk

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Unknown said…

Only Issue I face with LR is that it does not support auto update of falders. For example If I finish a photo and save it in a folder as a new version LR does not show it until the folder is cataloged again.
But ACR works instantly.

09:45

G Dan Mitchell said…

I'm with you.

I had a very early version of Lightroom and also had Aperture for awhile. I now have the LR3 beta. It is pretty and it works pretty darn well. I like it for quickly putting up a set of images on the web.

But I'm still trying to figure out why I would want to move away from the Bridge --> ACR --> Photoshop workflow that is so powerful and which works so well for me. I really _want_ to be convinced to like LR, but so far it just isn't compelling.

Dan

04:13

Steve Gravano said…

Nice blog, came from Lidija at SiLa PhotoArt. I'm new to LR2 and Aperture2. I've been using Aperture2 for about a year and find the sliders more accurate. Just me really.

21:19

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