This is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer’s Workflow. Chapter Three is titled, “Importing and Editing Images in Lightroom” and it covers importing images, editing images and everything else you would ever want to know about how the Library module in Lightroom works. The e-book is available on my website. Click here to read more about the e-book and to purchase it.
For many, you might be wondering why anyone would want to use Adobe Lightroom when they have been doing just fine with Adobe Photoshop, Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). It’s a good question. I used to use Bridge to edit my images but I found it quite slow. With Lightroom, I am able to edit my images much more quickly and more accurately than with any other raw processing software—that is first and foremost. In addition to that, I find that Lightroom is a much faster interface for processing large numbers of images because I can rapidly move from image to image and sync similar images with one click of the mouse. Adobe Photoshop and Bridge still play a key role for much of my workflow, especially for continued work on images once they have been processed in Lightroom. The workflow laid out in this book is not that much different than my old workflow using ACR, it is an adaptation using Adobe Lightroom to speed up the editing process and gain more control at the same time.
There are many alternatives to Lightroom on the market including the raw processing software offered by Nikon, Canon and other camera manufacturers as well as Apple Aperture and Capture One. Aperture, in particular, has come a long way and is a real contender these days. It is Lightroom’s main competition. In my experience Lightroom is easier and more intuitive to use, has a better raw processing engine (at least for my Nikon cameras) and integrates seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop, which is a huge consideration since we’ll be using Photoshop to finalize each image. I don’t mean to give you the impression that Aperture is anything but a top-notch piece of software. If you are using it and feel comfortable with Aperture’s user interface then there is no reason to switch to Lightroom. Lightroom and Aperture share many of the same tools and features.
Nikon Capture NX2 is another option for Nikon shooters and it is a powerful raw processing software, which does a phenomenal job processing Nikon’s raw image files but the interface leaves something to be desired. Similarly, Canon’s DPP does an excellent job of processing Canon’s raw image files but the software is so slow and obtuse as to be unusable. Capture One is yet another excellent option for photographers looking for a high end solution, especially if you are shooting with the Phase One medium format cameras. In my experience, Lightroom works just as well as Capture One and integrates better with Photoshop and Adobe’s other applications.
One of the big reasons I chose Lightroom and continue to use it is the speed with which I can edit thousands of images, the ability to apply local corrections to raw images non-destructively, the ability to recover highlight information with accuracy and also because of my familiarity with Adobe Camera Raw. For photographers that have used Adobe Camera Raw in the past, which is the most popular and well known raw processing software anywhere, moving over to Lightroom is painless. Lightroom is basically a modified version of ACR with an excellent browser and simplified Slideshow, Print and Web modules refined and recast from Photoshop. And with Lightroom 4 we now have two new modules: the Map and Book modules. Because Lightroom seamlessly integrates with Photoshop and ACR we can easily move back and forth between the two programs without skipping a beat, and keep all of our image files in one database.
There is also no other software that I have seen or used that is faster than Lightroom in combination with such high quality full resolution previews for editing large number of images. Aperture, when I last tried it, is a bit slower but does have high quality previews. Photo Mechanic, on the other hand, is much faster than Lightroom for editing images but the previews are seriously lacking in quality. As someone who shoots a lot of sports, and hence, shoots a lot of images on every assignment, the speed and image preview quality that Lightroom offers allows me to spend less time editing and ranking images—which is why I use it.
Of course for those of you that don’t generate as many images you might be wondering why you need Lightroom if you are currently getting along just fine with Photoshop. My recommendation for those of you that aren’t generating huge numbers of images or who are not spending hours on end editing and ranking images is to continue using Bridge and Photoshop. If that is the case then please note that this book is not a complete waste of time as all of the controls we’ll be talking about in Lightroom are the same in Adobe Camera Raw. And you might just find some other features in Lightroom that you can’t live without, chief among them is the Digital Asset Management (DAM) capabilities of Lightroom, which will help keep track of the thousands and thousands of digital images (and now video files) that seem to pile up.
Copyright © 2012 Michael Clark Photography. Used with permission of Michael Clark Photography. If you would like to read more about the book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer’s Workflow or purchase a copy please visit my website. To read the rest of this chapter and the rest of the e-book purchase it for $24.95 on my website. The e-book is a high resolution PDF file.