Just wanted to drop in to say many thanks for this- I wasn’t aware it existed and was about to drop $80 for the most recent PS Elements.
I switched to Office 365 a while back and even if it didn’t include cloud storage I’d never go back to the regular program installation. This is basically the same thing for Adobe it seems.
Elements is a good tool, but it has all the faults of a tool that is updated at cost fairly often.
The difference between PS Elements and PS The Real Thing is almost entirely that the light version lacks all of the CMYK color management. This is of absolutely zero consequence to the amateur user and nearly all photography users… but it is the essential engine that makes PS irreplaceable at the pro level. No one - absolutely no one - has the decades of developed engineering in the 4-color management engines and tools that Adobe does. Even most of the other specialty color software tools just license Adobe’s components rather than develop or maintain their own.
It’s not quite the same. Subscription Adobe tools do not run on a remote or cloud server like a Google app. They are locally installed and completely standalone - the Photographer package might work a little differently, but I can run my complete CC set for as long as a month without a network connection, then it will whine and want to check it to see if it still has permission to stay.
I am not at all comfortable with tools that ONLY work with a sufficient network connection. My kids are moving to Google apps because those are ideal to get them through high school and college with maximum flexibility; the Mrs and I will stay with locally-installed MS Office because we neither work on our stuff from a variety of random locations nor could tolerate being cut off from tools by a net outage.
I highly recommend the subscription. I have been a subscriber for a year and a half, and I haven’t found the “catch” yet.
As far as Lightroom goes, as others have said, go to Lynda.com and enjoy the extensive material there. It’s worth paying for a few months just to get some of their key courses. I ended up paying for a full year when they offered a very good deal on their premium package, and I really enjoy doing the courses.
I look at it this way: A year of Lynda.com cost me less than a new lens, and I get far more out of it then one lens would provide.
Regarding Lightroom: It is nothing more than the love child of Bridge and Camera Raw: The adjustments in Lightroom are the same ones available in Camera Raw.
The bonus you get is that it is focused specifically on Photography, whereas Bridge has a wider audience (e.g. illustrators), so Lightroom is tuned better to the photography workflow.
One thing I really like about LR is the plethora of presets available. I use VSCO presets all of the time, and they add a beautiful look to my portraiture.
For Mac users, I would compare LR to iPhoto or Aperture–if you use either of those apps for your photo collection then you would enjoy LR.
It feels less “Mac-like” and it took me awhile to switch from Aperture, but I’m glad I did.
For me, LR is the workhorse and PS is for doing the occasional artsy looking photo or as a wrapper to Silver Efex Pro, or merging some group shots until everyone’s eyes are open.
On the topic of several hundred photos, even LR isn’t good enough for that–it takes forever to preview large numbers of raw files for focus.
One tool that was worth every penny (to me) for culling is Photo Mechanic. I rarely shoot events, but when I do, I have several hundred photos, and I don’t have patience to load them in LR. Photo Mechanic lets me cull about a hundred times faster, instantly showing me 1:1 previews of my raw shots to check for focus. Then, once they are rated I select the keepers and drag them into LR, the PM ratings come over.
Since I use it so rarely, I feel like a real poseur using a hard-core pro tool like that, but when I need it, I smile. (PM is really intended to be used by sports photographers who need to get their stuff culled and uploaded to the wire services at halftime)
…lightroom is freaking awesome. I’m continually figuring out new ways to make my workflow more efficient.
But there is a conceptual leap that you have to take first. Its essentially working to a new paradigm. Lightroom can only see images that you have told Lightroom they exist and where they are. In order to see those images they need to be “imported” into Lightroom. If those images are on a memory card, Lightroom will firstly import them physically onto a disk that you select either on your computer or an external drive, then Lightroom puts those images into its own internal database. If images already exist on your computer or external drives, then Lightroom skips the first step and only puts those images into its internal database.
Once an image has been imported into Lightroom, then if you need to physically move it from one place to another best practice is to do that in Lightroom. Click and hold that image, then drag it from one folder to another. If that folder doesn’t exist in the real world, it can be created in Lightroom and then the image dragged into that folder. This is the thing that trips most new users of Lightroom up. In best practice if you decide to start using Lightroom: then all your moving of images should be done in Lightroom and not use any other programmes. Otherwise Lightroom looses track of the image, and then things get much harder and messy as you try and find them again.
As minor7flat5 mentions: Lightroom isn’t great for the initial cull, so I cull in a programme called Fast Picture Viewer. I cull first, then import into Lightroom adding a unique ID number (based on the event I’m shooting) into the keywords. I use the Collections feature quite extensively. Collections are “Virtual Folders.” Rather than waste disk space creating a folder for each event I set up a “Collection Set” for an event, a “Smart Folder” inside that Collection Set that looks for the unique ID number in the keywords and puts those images in it, and I set up another Smart Folder that shows only those images that have been rated in Fast Picture Viewer and have the unique ID number. This is great for organising my images. These are “virtual folders”: they don’t exist in the “real world” but work exactly the same way. The images stay in the folder they were physically imported too but I can move them around virtually as I need too.
So I start importing the images, set up the virtual collections for the event and all the rated images pop into their own virtual folder automatically and I can start editing right away. If I need to do more extensive edits, I right click and choose what programme I want to use. If its photoshop, a virtual duplicate image is created to be edited in photoshop, and when that is saved that edited image is kept in the Lightroom database and Collection Set.
Once I’m done with the editing process, delivering/sharing images is another simple process using the Publish feature. I create a folder in the Facebook Publish module, drag the images into that module, then click publish, and that image (or group of images) publish directly to facebook with whatever watermarks or borders (I use a plugin for borders called LR/Mogrify 2) I have already preset. To get those images to Flickr, I do the same thing in the Flickr Publish module. To get the images to my clients, I use the Photoshelter Publish module. I do the same again. Upload to my website, then send the link and password to my clients.
And the great thing about using the Publish Module is that I don’t need to create JPEGS and waste space on my drives. The Publish Modules create a temp image, upload that image, then deletes it.
So thats why Lightroom works so great for me. It fits perfectly into my workflow.
…office 365 is Microsoft (Word, Excel, etc), not Google, and it works the same as Adobe with locally installed software.
I may have acquired some confused ideas from the Outlook variants - isn’t the newest iteration of Outlook cloud/web/virtual rather than a local app? And aren’t there web/virtual versions of Office either in the offing or available?
…there is outlook (part of office 365 and locally installed) and there is outlook.com, the replacement for hotmail/live. They are two different things and don’t even talk to each other (not since I last used outlook anyway) but they share the same name. :smack:
This is office 365:
Same here and with most photographers I know. The initial import is into Lightroom or Aperture (although that is no longer supported by Apple), and then Photoshop for the heavy editing. Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software and a hell of a lot more efficient (for me at least) than Adobe Bridge. And it’s a great piece of organizational software. My 2014 catalog has over 100,000 photos in it, and it’s quick and easy for me to pull up any picture I’ve taken in the past year or years previous. 95% of my images are worked on in Lightroom and don’t make it to Photoshop (or Silver Efex/Color Efex/Portraiture/etc.)
As for initial culls, plenty of people do use Lightroom for that. To make it efficient, you need to render your previews, otherwise it can be a little slow. I did that for many years, but now I use Photomechanic for the initial ratings, as it is blazing fast in reading the embedded JPEG previews in raw files, and then import into Lightroom and sort by star rating.
But everyone has their own system. I personally could not imagine doing the cataloging, rating, and batch processing in Bridge, although the interfaces are somewhat similar.
Another thing I love about Lightroom is the lightweight “Smart Previews” they have. So, if I want to work on my photos off-line (I store the bulk of my images on the server), I can create smaller “Smart Previews” for my raw images. For example, once a year, I go to visit my inlaws, and I may have a few thousand photos to edit. Instead of having to lug around an extra drive with the full-resolution, I can render smart previews, store them locally on my SSD, edit them to my heart’s content on my compressed raw files, then when I’m reconnected to my server, the changes are applied to the full-resolution raws. It’s great.