Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

LIGHTROOM-

It's shipped, released, and for the last few weeks I have been testing
and using Lightroom. It's good, eventually could be superb. Not ready
for network or multi-user use yet, it's on for a free 30 day trial.

It's pretty much a streamlined RAW processor with a database structure,
and there are also a lot of tutorials out there to give a boost up the
learning curve, which isn't huge. Lots of depth for a product only a few
years old, still some bugs to work out.

I like it a lot, and wonder how many here have taken a real look at it?

--
John McWilliams

"John McWilliams" wrote:
LIGHTROOM-

It's shipped, released, and for the last few weeks I have been testing and
using Lightroom. It's good, eventually could be superb. Not ready for
network or multi-user use yet, it's on for a free 30 day trial.

It's pretty much a streamlined RAW processor with a database structure,
and there are also a lot of tutorials out there to give a boost up the
learning curve, which isn't huge. Lots of depth for a product only a few
years old, still some bugs to work out.

Uh, that's "for a product only a few _DAYS_ old"...

I like it a lot, and wonder how many here have taken a real look at it?

I like it a lot, too. It's got everything one needs in a raw converter, even
dust removal, rotation and cropping (for dizzy photographers such as
myself), and vignetting correction (for FF users and folks with cheap
consumer DX lenses). It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!). Fill light, highlight rescuing, and vibrance work _better_
than in RSP (antoher loud halleluiah!).

It's a tad sluggish though. But nothing a 4GHz quad CPU PC with 16 GB of RAM
and four large, fast, internal disk drives wouldn't fix, though. Pity no
such PC exists...

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

David J. Littleboy wrote:
It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!).

Hmmmm...
I'm just thinking about Capture NX and wondering whether when converting
a raw file it makes any difference whether the NR is done after or
before sharpening - either in which order the software deals with a
conversion, whether it's kind of "absorbed" in to the whole demosaicing
raw conversion process, and whether the order in the user selects
workflow matters. My gut feeling is that it makes no difference.
Like Lightroom, Capture NX sharpening is superb. But it's still a
clunky ******* of a program to navigate compared to the version of
Lightroom I trialed.

"frederick" wrote:
David J. Littleboy wrote:
It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!).

Hmmmm...
I'm just thinking about Capture NX and wondering whether when converting a
raw file it makes any difference whether the NR is done after or before
sharpening - either in which order the software deals with a conversion,
whether it's kind of "absorbed" in to the whole demosaicing raw conversion
process, and whether the order in the user selects workflow matters. My
gut feeling is that it makes no difference.

Sharpening aggravates noise. Unless it has a threshold setting, and even
then that only helps for relatively low-noise images. So you want to apply
sharpening to the noise reduced image when any noise is present; trying to
noise reduce sharpening-aggravated noise is going to just lose more detail.
For ISO 100 dSLR images this isn't an issue. But it becomes an issue at some
ISO for any camera.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

"Lionel" wrote:
"David J. Littleboy" wrote:

I like it a lot, too. It's got everything one needs in a raw converter,
even
dust removal, rotation and cropping (for dizzy photographers such as
myself), and vignetting correction (for FF users and folks with cheap
consumer DX lenses). It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!). Fill light, highlight rescuing, and vibrance work _better_
than in RSP (antoher loud halleluiah!).

Yeah? Other than the highlight recovery, they seem about the same as
RSP to me.

Fill light in RSP reduces highlight contrast as well, so having those
separate is a big improvement, I think. Vibrance in LR seems more subtle
than in RSP; in RSP anything over about 10 was off the wall, but the whole
range of the control seems useful in LR. Also, I think the histogram is more
accurate in LR than in RSP, i.e. when you export a file and look at it in
Photoshop, RSP often needs more levels adjustment that I thought reasonable.

But the halleluiah and it's loudness were largely for not losing anything; a
slight improvement on something good is superb news when one was worrying
that one might be moving backwards.

It's a tad sluggish though. But nothing a 4GHz quad CPU PC with 16 GB of
RAM
and four large, fast, internal disk drives wouldn't fix, though. Pity no
such PC exists...

It's performing reasonably well for me on a Dual 3.4GHz Xeon (2MB
cache version) with 4GB of fast RAM.

That's good to hear. My PC is a single CPU 3GHz/2GB system, and LR takes
painfully long to load an image. This is worse in Develop than in Library,
so the trick is to (do what you are supposed to and) use Library mode for
looking through things. In particular, Library mode gets to 1:1 view much
faster than Develop mode when you first switch to a different image.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

Lionel wrote:
On Fri, 9 Mar 2007 14:53:16 +0900, "David J. Littleboy"
wrote:

"John McWilliams" wrote:
LIGHTROOM-
It's pretty much a streamlined RAW processor with a database structure,
and there are also a lot of tutorials out there to give a boost up the
learning curve, which isn't huge. Lots of depth for a product only a few
years old, still some bugs to work out.
Uh, that's "for a product only a few _DAYS_ old"...

Eh? It's been under development for about a year, & the 1.0 release
was weeks ago.

And I was counting the time to include the pre-public beta; it was the
public beta on Mac which went on for about a year, and about 7 months on
PCs.

I like it a lot, and wonder how many here have taken a real look at it?
I like it a lot, too. It's got everything one needs in a raw converter, even
dust removal, rotation and cropping (for dizzy photographers such as
myself), and vignetting correction (for FF users and folks with cheap
consumer DX lenses). It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!). Fill light, highlight rescuing, and vibrance work _better_
than in RSP (antoher loud halleluiah!).

Yeah? Other than the highlight recovery, they seem about the same as
RSP to me.

It's a tad sluggish though. But nothing a 4GHz quad CPU PC with 16 GB of RAM
and four large, fast, internal disk drives wouldn't fix, though. Pity no
such PC exists...

It's performing reasonably well for me on a Dual 3.4GHz Xeon (2MB
cache version) with 4GB of fast RAM.

It's quite decent on a MacBookPro, 2 Gigs RAM. There are things that can
be done to avoid "congestion" if the app is processing bunches of files.

One interesting aspect between the betas and release v1 is that sidecars
are done away with for all but RAW files. So even JPEGs can be edited
non-destructively and the edit data and metadata written into the
headers. Same for TIFFs, which is not surprising, and DNGs.

--
John McWilliams

I see Lightroom as Adobe crippleware.
A limited raw converter.
A display/organization program with features available elsewhere, for free
in many instances.
I cannot understand the price tag Adobe has placed on it.

"nsag" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
I see Lightroom as Adobe crippleware.
A limited raw converter.
A display/organization program with features available elsewhere, for free
in many instances.


We are waiting for this looooong list.
Better each one has at least the same features than Lightroom, or we will
laugh.
Don't forget, they must work with both: RAW **and** JPG.



I cannot understand the price tag Adobe has placed on it.

On Mar 9, 6:11 pm, "Saguenay" wrote:
[snip]
Don't forget, they must work with both: RAW **and** JPG.

And TIFF.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/photography/

David J. Littleboy wrote:
"frederick" wrote:
David J. Littleboy wrote:
It would be nice if the sharpening happened _after_
noise reduction, but the sharpening is remarkably free of halos
(halleluiah!).
Hmmmm...
I'm just thinking about Capture NX and wondering whether when converting a
raw file it makes any difference whether the NR is done after or before
sharpening - either in which order the software deals with a conversion,
whether it's kind of "absorbed" in to the whole demosaicing raw conversion
process, and whether the order in the user selects workflow matters. My
gut feeling is that it makes no difference.

Sharpening aggravates noise. Unless it has a threshold setting, and even
then that only helps for relatively low-noise images. So you want to apply
sharpening to the noise reduced image when any noise is present; trying to
noise reduce sharpening-aggravated noise is going to just lose more detail.
For ISO 100 dSLR images this isn't an issue. But it becomes an issue at some
ISO for any camera.

Yes, but I suspect raw converter may not do sharpening then nr as
separate operations - for example to produce a bitmap internally from
the raw image, use something like USM on that bitmap, then NR before
saving as a tff or jpg. From what I see of Capture NX, the order
doesn't matter. The old rawshooter NR was pretty good, but I never
liked the sharpening.