{"id":60,"date":"2007-05-17T01:33:50","date_gmt":"2007-05-17T00:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/uncategorized\/working-with-adobes-lightroom\/2007\/05\/17"},"modified":"2008-10-18T10:13:38","modified_gmt":"2008-10-18T09:13:38","slug":"working-with-adobes-lightroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/post-processing\/working-with-adobes-lightroom","title":{"rendered":"Working with Adobe&#8217;s LightRoom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, after some delay (PC blue-screening etc.)  I&#8217;ve had a chance to play with LightRoom.<br \/>\nI love it.<\/p>\n<p>I was happy with Photoshop Elements (&#8220;<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">PSE<\/span>&#8220;), so what are the main differences ?<\/p>\n<p>As I indicated in the <a href=\"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/post-processing\/fuji-e900-workflow-overview\/2006\/12\/24\">Fuji Workflow note<\/a>, edited photos had to be save in .PSD format, and these were starting to eat all my hard disks. Bigger RAW files meant that memory was constrained.<br \/>\nNow I can work on .DNG files (created without the original embedded), and all the changes are stored as xmp,with the image. It even does &#8220;virtual copies&#8221; &#8211; so I can have a full sized image and a crop. Same master file, just described differently.<br \/>\nSo, because I&#8217;m working with smaller files, everything&#8217;s much more &#8220;agile&#8221;. The pictures load faster, and are quicker to edit. Non-destructive editing means that I can go back to a &#8220;snapshot&#8221; without having to click &#8220;undo&#8221; all the time, or reconvert the file.<\/p>\n<p>White balancing is as powerful as with Elements &#8211; in fact more so. The &#8220;recovery&#8221; and &#8220;fill light&#8221; functions let you get to detail not available in PSE.<br \/>\nIf you don&#8217;t get it quite right, you can adjust it without having to start all over again (PSE only allowed it on the initial conversion).<br \/>\nAnd you can apply it to JPGs. I normally shoot RAW underwater, but had the camera set on JPG by mistake for one dive. This gave far more flexibility than the &#8220;remove colour cast&#8221; funtion in PSE.<\/p>\n<p>I can save output templates, so I don&#8217;t have to redefine web output parameters every time.<\/p>\n<p>Colour tagging is nice. I tag all my cropped images yellow, for example, so I can assign a distinctive file suffix.<\/p>\n<p>I do find the Keyword Tag hierarchy a bit &#8220;clunky&#8221;. I use a lot of tags (fish species), and want to exclude the family (e.g. &#8220;Butterflyfish&#8221; &#8211; which I use as a parent category) from export files. I&#8217;ve got to uncheck &#8220;Export Parents&#8221; on all the tags, and I know I&#8217;ll miss one.<br \/>\nAdobe reworked this after the last public beta, so it&#8217;s one of the bits that hadn&#8217;t really been &#8220;road-tested&#8221;. I have managed to convert PSE tag export files (XML) into LightRoom import files (tabbed text), so it could have been worse <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">(although &#8230; why change it , Adobe?)<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Another late-breaking idea was apparently the clone\/heal tools in the &#8220;Develop&#8221; module. I really haven&#8217;t got to grips with these yet, but the source area can seem a bit random. Must read the manual.<\/p>\n<p>One other late-breaker (I think) which does work is multiple library databases, although album selection is made by holding down the <strong>CTRL<\/strong> key as the program opens. Again, it&#8217;s a bit clunky, and if nobody told you, you&#8217;d never guess.<\/p>\n<p>However, in summary &#8211; this really works for 95% of my photos.<br \/>\nAnd for those photos which need pixel-level cleanup, I&#8217;ve still got PSE to delve into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What works with LightRoom .. and the niggles about what doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[83,82,84,133],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/muttznutz.net\/muttzblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}