Adobe Lightroom Question

I currently have Adobe CS6 with Adobe Bridge. I'm thinking about giving Lightroom a go as I don't really like using Bridge to organise my files. Is Lightroom any better in this regard?

If it's just for organizing, you might want to consider
ACDsee 15

In either case, there are free trials and downloads.

What one works is so much a matter of taste and experience.

Example: I for one don't care much for Lightroom, and yet it is probably the most popular 3rd party RAW converter and organizing tool on the market.

Thanks, Just had a good look at all the videos on Adobes site and it seems very similar to Bridge so probably not what I'm after, as for editing I don't think it offers anything CS6 doesn't. I'll check out ACDsee 15.

As far as organizing files the only advantage LR has over Bridge is the ability to see files on off-line drives.

Lightroom is not even close to being the same as Bridge. The following site gives a very good explanation:

http://thelightroomlab​.com …room-vs-the-adobe-bridge/

LR is a DAM (digital asset management) product specifically designed for photographers. For me the switch to Lightroom was a huge step forward. I come from an engineering background where I've been using Documentum for accessing data for years, so using a database to manage my catalog of close to 30,000 images just makes a lot of sense to me.

Also, LR has allowed me to get rid of 99% of my jpegs and TIFs that were converted from RAW files using ACR. For example:

Prior to using LR my basic workflow was (using an example where the final product is uploaded to my Smugmug account):
a) Open RAW in ACR, make corrections and save as a 16 bit ProPhoto RGB TIF
b) Using Bridge open my TIFs in ProPhoto RGB working space, resize (if necessary), sharpen
c) Convert to sRGB for any images I want to upload to the web as jpeg (now I have both a TIF and a jpeg)
d) Open Send to Smugmug to upload any images I want to upload to my Smugmug account

Now it's:
a) Make corrections to my RAWs using the develop panel
b) Go to the Library panel and "Publish" the images to Smugmug without ever creating a TIF or jpeg


Using my Smugmug example, if I ever re-edit a bunch of images LR will show under the Smugmug publish service the ones that need to be re-uploaded.

One feature which is truly uniquely powerful about LR is the fact that you can take ANY COLLECTION of random photos and put them into a Slide Show without moving them out of their original folder. And the same photo can belong to more than one Slide show.
For example, an photo of a Model T at the Golden Gate Bridge could belong to a slide collection of 'classic cars', to 'scenic tourist spots', and 'San Francisco' slide shows.

While it is true that the Raw editing and converting side of LR is virtually identical to the parallel version of ACR, LR has more convenient batch printing and better soft proofing. And in another year it will be a lot cheaper to upgrade to LR5 than to PSCS7.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #15720049
If it's just for organizing, you might want to consider
ACDsee 15

In either case, there are free trials and downloads.

What one works is so much a matter of taste and experience.

Example: I for one don't care much for Lightroom, and yet it is probably the most popular 3rd party RAW converter and organizing tool on the market.

Care to tell us why you don't much care for Lightroom?

The most important thing with any DAM system is to properly embrace it to get the best from it. From an Adobe point of view if you are using more parts of the CS suite than just ACR/PS then you will probably need to carry on using Bridge for at least part of your work. If you are just (or mostly just) a photographer then LR has a shed load of advantages over Bridge/ACR/PS. Yes the RAW editor has exactly the same tools, but the fact that it is fully integrated is a big benefit. You can move from sorting images in the Libary modual to editing by simply hitting a single key shortcut (D), or and this is not one I had thought of before you can go stright to the crop tool by hitting R as in many cases the shortcut keys are the same in all the modules.

To get the best out of LR you also really need to use keywords, they can make sorting the images really easy, it is a pain if you have to go back and add keywords to existing images, but once it is sorted then you can easily add keywords for a whole shoot during import. With keywords comes the ablity to auto sort in to collections by those keywords. Images can also be in multiple collections at the same time. Smart Collections can also sort on almost anything you can think of that is in the EXIF data. Camera (by serial number as well as model), Lens including specific focal lengths for zooms are just a couple off the top of my head. As well as Smart Collections,which are effectivly saved searches you can just run a search on these items. So I could quickly find ALL images taken with a particular camera body by S/N, using a 70-200mm lens at 150mm at f5.6 and 1/125s with ettl flash used.

The output modules are also very powerful. If you print with borders, use watermarks or logos on your images then all you need do is open the Print module and pick your chosen preset, which is also easy to customise on the fly if you want to make a change to a colour or logo or any other part of the print. There are also web, slideshow, and Photo Book output modules. Yes you can do all of this in PS but it is much harder to do especially as LR will allow you to work on 1 or even all of your images at the same time.

Storage space is also reduced compared to Bridge/ACR/PS as for a lot of images now you do not really need to go to PS so you only have to store the original RAW image file along with the "processing recipe" which is held as text data in the database.sending an image to PS is easy and the PSD (or TIFF) file is automatically added to the catalogue next to the original RAW file ready for output. You only need produce a file for output at the time it is needed, once it is used (emailed, up loaded to the web or whatever) it can be deleted from the local disk. As LR can also manage direct uploads you may not even need to produce a local file at all. No more worries about is this JPEG file the most up to date version. LR will even handle producing the exact output requirements needed for any particular use of the image.

There are lots of other good things about LR but they are some of my favorites. Even so when I am working on web sites using Dreamweaver then I still use Bridge, it is probably the best tool for THAT job.

Alan

Wilt wrote in post #15720423
One feature which is truly uniquely powerful about LR is the fact that you can take ANY COLLECTION of random photos and put them into a Slide Show without moving them out of their original folder. And the same photo can belong to more than one Slide show.
For example, an photo of a Model T at the Golden Gate Bridge could belong to a slide collection of 'classic cars', to 'scenic tourist spots', and 'San Francisco' slide shows.

You can do the same in Bridge. The only limitation is the files have to be on a on-line drive in Bridge.

On top of what has already been said, you can create a ton of different recipes for processing the image using Virtual Copy in LR, without ever having to store an additional file on your hard-drive. The same goes for Soft Proofing ... you can create soft proof recipes for different papers and outputs, and since they are also virtual copies, no files need to be created.

For images from my digital cameras I rarely ever need to go into Photoshop. For me Photoshop is used for photo restoration (scanned negatives/slides), removing blemishes when doing family portraits and removing distracting elements from an image. Before Process version 2012 and some of the newer higher DR cameras I used to use layers to improve shadow and highlight areas but now I find the shadows/highlights sliders in LR or ACR do most of what I need.

LR will save you a tons of HD space vs PS. When you make edits in PS you then have to export them as a JPG or TIFF or something and then store them on your HD which takes up a ton of space, especially if you are duplicating layers etc.

LR uses non destructive editing and creates kb's of text info on what the image should look like. You can create tons of different versions of the same photo with different looks without taking up any more HD space and without affecting the original file. That way you only have to create another file like a JPG or TIFF if you need to use it somewhere specific and don't have to keep it on your HD. Once you have uploaded it or burned it or whatever purpose you exported it for, you can delete that JPEG or TIFF and clear the HD space because you can just create another one out of LR at any time.

Bob_A wrote in post #15721706
Before Process version 2012 and some of the newer higher DR cameras I used to use layers to improve shadow and highlight areas but now I find the shadows/highlights sliders in LR or ACR do most of what I need.

Process 2012 and the new sliders in ACR work so much better. I can do so much more in ACR now that trips into PS are getting rarer.

Bob_A wrote in post #15721706
On top of what has already been said, you can create a ton of different recipes for processing the image using Virtual Copy in LR, without ever having to store an additional file on your hard-drive.

5ifty mm wrote in post #15721778
LR will save you a tons of HD space vs PS. When you make edits in PS you then have to export them as a JPG or TIFF or something and then store them on your HD which takes up a ton of space, especially if you are duplicating layers etc.

LR uses non destructive editing and creates kb's of text info on what the image should look like. You can create tons of different versions of the same photo with different looks without taking up any more HD space and without affecting the original file. That way you only have to create another file like a JPG or TIFF if you need to use it somewhere specific and don't have to keep it on your HD. Once you have uploaded it or burned it or whatever purpose you exported it for, you can delete that JPEG or TIFF and clear the HD space because you can just create another one out of LR at any time.

You can do the same with Snapshots in ACR. You can create several different versions and the info is saved in the xmp file. Export, upload, and delete the jpeg/tiff just like in LR. Go to Snapshots and make another if the need arises.

D Thompson wrote in post #15721890
You can do the same with Snapshots in ACR. You can create several different versions and the info is saved in the xmp file. Export, upload, and delete the jpeg/tiff just like in LR. Go to Snapshots and make another if the need arises.

Well, there's no soft proofing ability in ACR. And while it's great that we can create snapshots, in order to do anything with the snapshot created in ACR you need to create a file. With LR you can virtually do away with creating jpegs and TIFs.

I have both LR and CS6 and there is no way I'd ever use ACR or Bridge again unless I was in a situation where I was forced to or if I were also using InDesign, Illustrator, etc. Bridge's strength is it's ability to interface with all of Adobe's Creative Suite products.

When I tired the LR3 trial I hated it. Without researching the product I found it too odd an approach compared to Bridge and also couldn't see the advantage over Bridge. A year later I looked at it again then had my ah-ha moment. I enjoy the workflow so much that I've gone through almost every RAW file I've processed since 2005 and re-processed them using LR and Process 2012.


Forgot one thing ... Under Publish services LR shows every folder uploaded to my Smugmug site. When I sync the Smugmug folder LR quickly finds the RAW file associated with the image that I uploaded, no matter where I have it stored on my system.

Snapshots are fine, you can do them in LR too, but they are nowhere near as useful as Virtual Copies. You can only see one snapshot at a time, where with VC's you can "see" all of them all of the time. You can also make VC's from any of the supported file types. So if you had to send an image out to PS to do some serious pixel bending, that's fine it then comes back into the LR catalogue where you can produce VC's for softproofing/output to several different devices including custom crops. Or even do a B&W conversion from the PSD rather than having to have various different PSD files for such variations.

The only real difference in usability as a photography oriented file management program between the functionality of LR over Bridge is that you have to tell LR to explicitly look at image files on the computers drives, and if you use some other file management program to move files you have to tell LR where to look for the file afterwards. The additional power of the database approach means that LR needs to keep it's file index separate from the file system.

Alan