I have the Adobe CC “Photography” plan, which is a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom. I never use Photoshop, so really I’m just paying for Lightroom.
My usage is pretty basic. I use Lightroom to:
[ul]
[li]Import photos into my catalogue[/li][li]Group photos into collections by subject (e.g. “Trip to Portugal 2020”)[/li][li]Further group within subcollections into “all pics”, “keepers”, “in process” and “finished”[/li][li]Edit the RAW images categorised as “keepers” - this is usually basic exposure and colour tweaks. Once I’m happy, the images are added to the “finished” subcollection.[/li][li]Export the finished images as JPEGs[/li][/ul]
There’s a lot of functionality in Lightroom that I’m not using. Since I’m always keen to simplify my workflow where I can, I was curious whether there is other, less complex software out there which can do the same thing. I don’t mind paying for software, particularly given that I’d lose the Adobe subscription if I replaced Lightroom.
For the record, I take my photos on a Fuji X-T20 (which produces .RAF raw files) and an iPhone. The Fuji is usually set to RAW+JPG mode, although I tend to only import the raw files into Lightroom. The iPhone pics generally don’t get treated in Lightroom either - but if I’m rethinking my workflow, I’m attracted to the idea of handling the iPhone “keepers” alongside the Fuji images. Those won’t need as much editing though.
As well as recommending possible alternatives to Lightroom, I’d love it if this thread became a general discussion on photo-handling best practice.
Thinking about this a bit more, I use Lightroom for two different jobs: organising, tagging, etc (what I believe the kids call Digital Asset Management) and editing.
I’m open to these two jobs being done by different bits of software.
I’ve used LightRoom for years, and have the Adobe subscription. But I’m not crazy about the “catalog” aspect; I prefer to organize by file folders that I manage myself.
So I’ve been using DXO PhotoLab for the past couple of months. I’m happy with it. It has a good reputation. I think I got the Elite version for around $80 on sale, which they run on occasion.
I’m not sure I understand this. LR doesn’t move anything around. You can keep your folders where they are (which is how I do it.) Now the original versions of Aperture forced you to do it The Apple Way ™ and imported everything into a centralized location, but even they got away from that in later iterations, IIRC. I started out on Aperture and switched to Lightroom because I hated how Apple imported the pictures into a centralized location.
If you’re talking about all the corrections being stored in a separate catalog file, you can save that information as sidecar .XMPs as well that will go into wherever your original photo folders are located. Under Catalog Settings there’s a place where you can tick “Automatically write changes into XMP.” Note: This method will not save your edit history but it will save your develop settings. This is good to keep on so if your Lightroom catalog corrupts for some reason, you have all your develop settings saved in your original folder and you can just reimport that folder into a new catalog and LR will apply the last changes you made on an image.
To clarify, my point was that, for me, the cataloging (including keywording, rating, and so forth) is not a feature that I make significant use of, yet that aspect of LR’s behavior does slow workflow down a bit.
In the folder organization, I have found times that when I reorganize folders outside of LR, it takes quite of bit of jiggering to get LR to accept the new structure. This can be avoided by only doing these things within LR, but as I said, that isn’t my preferable method.
Hey, I think LR is a great product, and I still use it, and since photography is my #1 hobby the $120/year for the package is a pretty good deal. But I also researched and experimented with a number of other products this past year. I found that for me DXO PhotoLab does, generally, a better job of Raw processing to my tastes, and that the beauty of the finished product x the time it takes to get there is my main criteria.
…there are a number of alternatives. Capture One ticks a lot of boxes for many. There is ACDSee, ON1 Photo RAW, DxO PhotoLab, Affinity Photo. They all (last time I checked) have free trials, so it doesn’t hurt to download and test them all to see what works best in your workflow. I did try them all and I went back to Lightroom. The Lightroom publish service is an essential part of my workflow (being able to put 400 images into a gallery and being able to upload them directly to my photoshelter site with a click of the button) and it changed everything for me. But everyone is different, so I suggest just giving the other options out there a try
Just a note on my workflow: I do all my metadata tasks, culling etc in Photo Mechanic first. I rate the images in Photo Mechanic then import into lightroom then filter by rating. I import all of the images (even those I didn’t rate) because sometime I change my mind whilst making adjustments. Its a heck of a lot faster doing those tasks in Photo Mechanic than Lightroom.
Lightroom does feel bloated and slow to me. I started flirting with Capture 1 this weekend, and it seems like a nice product. Everybody seems to say the colors are better than Lightroom, but I haven’t played around with it enough. It’s unlikely I’m going to change my workflow, but it’s interesting to check it out. It does seem a bit more responsive and quick.
What I use for culling and rating images is Photomechanic. It’s just rip-roaringly fast in getting those JPEG previews from your RAW files out for you to cull – as in no delay flipping from one photo to the next, whereas with Lightroom, even if I have all the previews built (and I am in the Library module) there’s often a wee bit of a delay. It may not seem like much, but when you have to get through 4000-5000 photos after a wedding, it adds up fast. With PM, I just import the files and get straight to culling and rating, no need to wait for previews to be built or anything. Then that will get imported into Lightroom and filtered for the selects and star ratings, and is developed there. (There are no developing capabilities in Photomechanic. It is used mainly for culling and adding metadata (including captions). Oh, you can add crop marks, which will be read by and respected by Lightroom.)
OK, I think I see what you’re saying about folder structure. If you change your folder structure around after importing images to Lightroom, I guess it could get a bit tricky if you have a very hierarchical structure you want to preserve. My folders are typically just on the top level of my photo hard drives, so right clicking on the folder name in Lightroom and pointing it to where the folder got moved to usually solves the problem. But I’ve never tried doing that with a three- or four-level directory or anything like that, which I could see might take a bit more jiggering to look as you want it in the Lightroom Library module.
The tool was designed for sports photographers to be able to very quickly cull, annotate, and upload photos to the wire services over half time.
It doesn’t do the image editing or cataloging part of Lightroom, but it is super fast at culling, and culling is IMHO a far more critical step than most people imagine.
Don’t take 1000 vacation photos into LR and edit them–use PM to cull them down to 50 nice shots and pull those into LR. Bonus: you only have to store 50 RAW files, if you want them.
My pref is to shoot JPG+RAW and use the jpegs right off the card, as Fuji has excellent in-camera RAW processing. I grab the RAW only for a photo that has serious problems, such as under/overexposure or bad light balance.
Besides, I bought a license in 2014, and they kept upgrading me for free until this past year when they charged a modest upgrade fee–that’s super rare in the software world. They get my vote for being cool folks.
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Yeah, it’s very much in use by sports photographers and other journalists. I was trying to remember when I first used a version of Photomechanic. I want to say we were using it even in the late 90s, and this Facebook post does seem to support that it was around in 1997.
