Basic lightroom questions

PixelMagic wrote in post #11054392
Here's how it works. When one image is selected in the filmstrip the buttons are labeled Previous and Next to enable the user to navigate the images in the filmstrip via mouse clicks.

I'm not sure about next as I've never used it, but when you click on previous it applies the settings that you just used from the previous image, it doesn't take you to the previous image.

I typically don't even use Auto Sync, just because I'm more in the habit of working on one image until I'm happy with the changes and then just doing the Synch and if needed adding or removing elements in the Synch dialog. It's the way I do things in ACR as well. One or two extra clicks is not big deal to me.

tonylong wrote in post #11054851
I typically don't even use Auto Sync, just because I'm more in the habit of working on one image until I'm happy with the changes and then just doing the Synch and if needed adding or removing elements in the Synch dialog. It's the way I do things in ACR as well. One or two extra clicks is not big deal to me.

it depends on what you are working on. For most of my stuff I don't use it, but when I do team portraits I have it on. I cull the images and choose my picks. Then I select all the picks, and with autosync on, make my adjustments to the first image. I then browse each shot to make sure nothing strange happened and fine tune if needed. When you do 30 teams a season those extra clicks add up.

I'll have to mess with Auto Synch -- does it slow things down at all? That may have been the concern that has kept me away from it, developing a three-year-old habit pattern!

tonylong wrote in post #11055456
I'll have to mess with Auto Synch -- does it slow things down at all? That may have been the concern that has kept me away from it, developing a three-year-old habit pattern!

I've not seen any speed decrease. My image files are stored on my server so I have a slower setup in that regard as well. I guess if you maybe had lots of files selected you could see speed issues during rendering, but as soon as I am done editing and switch to the next file it has been rendered.

Thanks for the help and thoughts everyone, I appreciate it.

Auto sync works well, i'm not sure why you'd turn it off.

I've been having a play, and I can't see that Lightroom would offer any real advantages over Bridge for how I work. If I didn't have Photoshop/Bridge it'd be very valuable, but I can't see that i'd gain any significant features or productivity.

I don't much like lens correction either, it seems to go a bit far with the corrections for the combos i've tried.

tim wrote in post #11056097
Thanks for the help and thoughts everyone, I appreciate it.

Auto sync works well, i'm not sure why you'd turn it off.

I've been having a play, and I can't see that Lightroom would offer any real advantages over Bridge for how I work. If I didn't have Photoshop/Bridge it'd be very valuable, but I can't see that i'd gain any significant features or productivity.

I don't much like lens correction either, it seems to go a bit far with the corrections for the combos i've tried.

True that ACR has all the Raw processing stuff, you can keyword in Bridge, and now with CS5 Bridge has a little Export utility. I like LR because you are not having to deal with all the plug-ins of PS and have the integrated interface, and I do like some of the utilities of LR -- Tim if you want to mess with cool stuff, try the Virtual Copy function and mess around with History, but with CSx if you are happy with the setup, well, no problems, except that LR is much less expensive to update!

That's a good point, LR is a lot cheaper to keep up to date. I'll probably process this weekends weddings in FastPictureViewer/Brid​ge and keep playing with LR.

tim wrote in post #11056487
That's a good point, LR is a lot cheaper to keep up to date. I'll probably process this weekends weddings in FastPictureViewer/Brid​ge and keep playing with LR.

Hey, it can't hurt -- those free trials are pretty cool!

Ooop...my bad...you're absolutely correct.

I had a bit of a brain freeze and ended up talking about the navigation arrows on the toolbar when I really meant to talk about the Previous and Next buttons.

In2Photos wrote in post #11054823
I'm not sure about next as I've never used it, but when you click on previous it applies the settings that you just used from the previous image, it doesn't take you to the previous image.

Heh, heh. They are actually Previous and Reset buttons. Reset changes only when Alt/Opt is pressed, when it changes to Reset Defaults, and Previous changes when more than one image is selected to Synch or Auto Synch according to switch position.

tim wrote in post #11056487
That's a good point, LR is a lot cheaper to keep up to date. I'll probably process this weekends weddings in FastPictureViewer/Brid​ge and keep playing with LR.

This is another reason why I like LR. I paid $100 for the first version (Academic) and have paid $100 to upgrade each time. So I have $300 in 3 versions of software compared to what, $1500-2000 or more for 3 versions of CS. If you don't do much work at the pixel level it makes sense to switch to LR and just use an older version of CS for the few times you need it. But if you edit at the pixel level a lot then CS is likely the better option since you are very comfortable with Bridge.

For me the real gain was speed, I got my life back when I went from processing in Photoshop to processing in Lightroom.

Yeah, makes sense, I do 99% of my work in ACR.

Shockey wrote in post #11057897
For me the real gain was speed, I got my life back when I went from processing in Photoshop to processing in Lightroom.

Bridge, which comes with Photoshop, gives you similar features and speed. Editing large numbers of photos in PS is madness.

Yeah, the move from the "Photoshopping workflow" to the Raw workflow was the game-changer for me. Once ACR became capable of doing so much of what we photogs needed with Raw files, it was truly liberating -- and then, of course, when CS3/ACR/LR took on jpegs/tiffs in the Raw processor then it became liberating whether you shot Raw or not!

But Tim, seriously check out the LR Virtual Copy and History tools, and Snapshots -- Bridge/ACR make it a bit clunky to work with alternate versions of an image, but with these tools it is quick, easy, and resource-efficient to have multiple versions you are working on simultaneously. So, for example, you can have versions that are cropped differently, processed differently (B&W, etc) all in front of you for messing with.