Adobe has introduced a new photography workflow tool called Lightroom (it's in beta, beta 2 at this point). It's a workflow tool, designed to aid the photographer in going from raw images off the camera to final publish- or print-ready images. It incorporates what I would call "Camera RAW on steroids", plus some other pieces of Photoshop that are particularly appropriate (a very nice grayscale mixer, for example).
I'd tinkered around with it, but not really tried to use it for a real project, until Saturday. I took some senior pictures for a friend and retouched them in Photoshop, but I was never happy with the tones, and doing the work in Photoshop, everything is a one-off, I can't apply my changes in a meaningful way to any other files. So enter Lightroom... in 3 hours I had images and prints I was quite happy with. Lightroom let me work in a way that is much more intuitive and much more productive. All my changes are non-destructive and I can see/edit them all at once. So I'm not running a filter or plugin that modifies pixels and then running another one to modify more pixels and then comparing where I am to where I was. Instead, I'm seeing the results of an aggregate set of changes that I can modify any one of at any time, i.e. there's no sequence. That's huge!
I hadn't really "gotten it" with Lightroom (and Aperture, being similar) until that sunk in. But wait, there's more... once I had "developed" the first image, I went to the print stage of the workflow, adjusted the image to fit 8x10, turned on output sharpening, and printed it. It looked great, but it was a little bright. No problem, I clicked back to the develop stage, tweaked the midtone brightness and highlight compression, back to print (one click, again), and printed a new image. This time I love it. I'm done with that one.
Now comes even more brilliance... I saved all of my adjustments as a preset. I had 3 other images that were lit similarly, and I just went to them and applied the preset. Done. Maybe a tweak here or there, but they were already at 98% with one click. Perfect.
I'm totally sold. I don't think Lightroom will be a total workflow solution (maybe by 1.0 it will be, but it's not now), but I think it will be my primary work environment. Aperture is very interesting because it works similarly to Lightroom, but has a bunch more features that I like (at this point, anyway), but I really dislike that the RAW conversion is married to the OS and that it appears significantly sub-par at this point. Lightroom's conversions are top-notch because it's basically using Camera RAW (which I've written about in the past). I'll save my writings about a complete workflow for another post.
The one thing Lightroom won't do, and isn't intended to do, is replace Photoshop. Lightroom becomes the hub of your work, and Photoshop becomes the power tool used when needed (e.g. for retouching, where Lightroom isn't useful).
Lastly, the Lightroom beta is a free download and Adobe invites feedback via pretty active forums on their labs website. Very cool. Apple, take notes.
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