Specifically, why I should (or shouldn’t) get excited at a 24-hour discount offer I just received to get it at 50% off the retail price - $149.99 instead of $299.99. I’ve heard good things about it but nothing concrete from a user’s point of view.
As for me, I got my first DSLR in March of this year and started shooting/editing RAW images with it a few months later, a (used) Canon Rebel T2i (aka the EOS 550D). I have been using the bundled “Canon Digital Photo Professional” software use it to adjust my pictures primarily for light exposure, intentionally undershooting “to the dark side” in tricky conditions rather than using the on-camera exposure compensation (which requires repeated menu iterations), and occasionally color corrections or enhancements. And of course for cropping and rotating images. I then convert to JPG for publishing and sharing. I find the DPP workflow and interface pretty intuitive, I have never really had to read a manual or anything to use it.
I did a Google search for “Canon Digital Photo Professional compared with Photoshop Lightroom” but almost all the discussions that turned up on the first several pages were from 2008 or earlier. The most recent direct comparison I could find was from someone’s blog posting in 2009 that concluded they’re pretty much equivalent, with DPP sometimes better, and for free. And both software packages (Lightroom and DPP) seem to have been upgraded since then.
Adding to my confusion is exactly what is meant by “Photoshop Lightroom”. From Adobe’s own website, this is not “Adobe Photoshop” as I think of it (but have never had a copy of), the image editing software that apparently can do magic like fill in different backgrounds or foregrounds on images and whatnot, which might be fun to play around with. From what I can tell, Lightroom “hooks up” with Photoshop but is not, in fact, Photoshop. It seems to be pretty much what my free Canon “DPP” software already is.
So, why should I consider dropping $150 for Lightroom 3? What would I get out of it that DPP doesn’t give me already? Is this price cut because Lightroom 4 is coming out or something?
That Photoshop is supposed to be regarded as a part of the Photoshop family, i.e. that it’s a photo processing program from Adobe.
I haven’t used DPP (I’m a Nikon guy myself), but I’m a big fan of LR.
LR isn’t only a post-processing program, it’s also a pretty powerful database for managing your digital photos. It treats your original files with reverence, you never change anything in your original raw or JPEG file. Just like we tried to keep our analog negatives pristine and unchanged. This means that any edit, any change is 100% reversible. What’s unfamiliar and sometimes confusing is that you never save the original file (as we do in Photoshop, MS Word etc.). When you need a processed image, you generate a new file (similar to making a wet darkroom copy from the original negative) according to the instructions stored in your LR catalog file. No need for storing multiple versions of the same image, you just keep different processing instructions in the catalog. No quality deterioration of JPEGs due to multiple saves. Image files from different cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc.) can be cataloged and post-processed in the same UI.
You can download an evaluation copy of LR from Adobe and play with it for 30 days to see if it fits your workflow. You can also look at photo discussion fora like photo.net to get some impressions from there.
First of all, Robardin, if you qualify for academic pricing, you can get LR 3 here for just $89.
I do a lot of photography and would pay several hundred $ for Lightroom. **2square ** covered a lot of what makes it special. I also have Photoshop; I would estimate that >97% of my images need Lightroom only.
LR does dovetail nicely with Photoshop, though. You just click ‘edit in photoshop’ and Photoshop auto-magically opens up and places your image there for advanced editing.
Aside from the most excellent editing capabilities, LR is also a top-notch file organizer, sorter, manager, etc.
Although it’s easy to use, I never really appreciated its capabilities until I got a hold of this book. It really is an amazing piece of software.
Ha, I’ll give that a try. However judging correct exposure (compensation or otherwise) can be hard to do based on the viewfinder, and I may not have time to fiddle with multiple shots at multiple settings to get the right setting - I find it easiest just to underexpose as I shoot in shots with high contrast situations (like someone in the shade of a tree with sunlight coming through in bands), use some fill flash, and then play with the brightness level in post-processing. Since overexposure = clipped whites = no way to recover.
I did download a trial version of Lightroom 3 at one point but casual fooling with it once or twice didn’t highlight for me what was so special about it. Basically part of me feels that DPP “works just fine” for me, why pay $150 or $90 or whatever for Lightroom, especially when it’s not “fully” Photoshop? (I probably do qualify for academic pricing through my wife, who’s a professor, though that feels like I’m gaming the system a bit.)
In terms of organizing / sorting, that may be nice. Right now I import photos from my camera using the Canon software and it pulls it in to a folder sorted by month and date. As I edit them, I create a sub-folder under each month/date folder called “edit-publish” and convert to JPG there, renaming the file as I do so from IMG_xxxx to something more descriptive. I only ever save changes from the original to JPG, the raw files remain untouched (except maybe for brightness changes which are still undoable - not cropping). If I take pictures over multiple days in a common theme (like a vacation trip) then the “edit-publish” folder becomes its own labeled folder as such. Then, I copy the folder (original files and published JPGs) to my backup network drive, and publish the photos to Webshots or Flickr or Facebook or wherever.
If the LR software could streamline that whole shebang then I’ll take a closer look. I guess I’ll start by browsing that book at B&N some time this week
As for what Photoshop is vs. Lightroom - is Photoshop a superset of Lightroom, or a companion? If it’s a companion, how is it that you only need it for 2.5% or so of your photo-editing needs, yet it costs so much more?
That last comment sort of captures the point of my OP, I guess. For what I can see LR’s core offering is - digital format conversion from raw to JPG, photo editing like adjusting exposure, colors, and cropping/rotating, and photo management with a DB layer - well, I haven’t really ever felt the lack of such while using the free Canon software I got (DPP) plus my own workflow for managing folders and filenames and backups that follows suit with my convention of many years with other cameras, and music files as well.
So on a purely “how is LR > DPP”, I have reservations. On the other hand, I have never used Photoshop and I know it has a reputation for awesome powa! when it comes to doing digital photo editing. It seems to me I should look for some PS+LR bundle to explore this, but the costs for that go way higher than $89 or $150.
So either LR has some of that PS functionality for the money they want for it, or there’s something about LR that I’m missing?
And what’s “Photoshop Elements 8/9/10” vs. “CS4/5”?
LR and PS/PSE are different tools for different purposes.
LR is a tool for developing and managing all your digital photos. For raw file conversion, it basically has the same functionality as the Camera Raw plugin/module (ACR) in PS. It excels on workflow and management and has quite decent publish functions (web, slideshow, printing). You have some dodging/burning and limited retouching (spotting), but LR lacks powerful image editing (pixel editing). It also lacks masks and layers.
PS (CS) is a photo editing program. Retouch, warp, mask, remove backgrounds, composites, panoramas. If you need to do heavy post-processing, PS is the choice of the pros and the enthusiasts.
PSE is the light version of PS, targeted towards the amateur. It’s weaker on layers and plugins, and it has limited 16-bit support. It also has a rudimentary database, but that’s not at all comparable to LR.
As MMM says, PS (and, BTW, PSE) dovetails nicely with LR. But for those of us who don’t do heavy image editing, LR covers +95% of our post-processing.
AFAIK, quite a few people are happy with DPP or Nikon’s CaptureNX. Others prefer LR, with PS or PSE for the occasional heavy edit. It’s a matter of taste and perceived need. But since I have different brand cameras (Nikon dSLR and Canon compact), I appreciate PP’ing all my raw files in the same program. AFAIK, DPP and CaptureNX only accepts their own camera brand’s raw files.
Lightroom is comparable to Aperture in the Macintosh world.
As such, I am not a Lightroom user, but I have been using Aperture for several months now and I love it.
These tools fit in a sweet spot between consumer-level photo software (Picasa and iPhoto) and heavy duty photo editors such as Photoshop.
Lightroom and Aperture are meant for fairly extensive tweaking of the photographs, with retouching, color and light adjustments, contrast, and other such things.
These tools do not include full image editing (e.g. copy/paste of a section of an image; writing text on the image; painting with a brush; other actual image-creation bits)
These tools do provide extensive metadata management, such as copy and paste of edit settings, copyright data, location data from one image to other images. They also provide image handling tools such as “stacks” which let you group photos into sets with one “best shot” that is shown and the others hidden.
These features are exactly what I need. I don’t want to create artwork; I simply want to fix my photos and maintain metadata.
And both of these tools allow you to use high quality plugins to do some pretty nice stuff.
I use two plugins: one for fixing lens distortion (possibly already in LR), and the second plugin is my favorite, Silver Efex Pro: the gold standard for B&W conversion.
I’m not sure this is how you meant it, but lest anyone get confused, I’d just like to point out that Lightroom is available for the Mac as well. I’ve used both, and prefer Lightroom a little bit (although, it wasn’t a clear cut winner - they’re both very capable at what they do).
Regarding the diffs betwixt Lightroom and Photoshop:
LR was specifically designed for the photographer. PS was not.
There is no reason to fear buying LR first, then later smacking yourself and wishing you had bought PS instead. They are two different programs that work together (if desired). LR is a workflow, image management, and image editing tool. PS is a higher-level editing tool that does not manage your files. If you want to add a prettier sky to your landscape or put Aunt Martha’s head on Uncle Ernie’s body, you’ll need PS.
robardin - I recommend you hop on over to youtube and search for both LR and PS tutorials to get an idea of how they operate.
Here is a pretty good one on LR; look for info on the developing module around 27 minutes in.
Final word (yeah, right :)): as a photographer, I would much rather own LR without PS than PS without LR. And, if you can afford it, owning both is even better.
mmm
Thanks for making a distinction that I neglected to point out.
It is nice that two such high quality products are available to a Mac user. I spent quite a while studying both of them until I settled on Aperture. They are such equally matched tools that the decision was not easy and came down to me living in a more Mac-centric world, so I was looking for the integration.
And the plugin scene shouldn’t matter much: most decent plugins come in Aperture and Lightroom flavors.
