March 6, 2007
SEEING THE LIGHTROOM
The pictures of a good portion of amateur photographers--and I'm thinking of everyone from the birthday party point-and-shooter to the more serious photographer who doesn't derive an income from his work, but who practices as a hobbyist--eventually wind up in shoeboxes: unorganized, uncared for, and impossible to retrieve when necessary. This is moreso the case in the age of digital photography. Thousands of photos either accrue on multi-gigabyte memory cards or are occasionally dumped onto computer hard drives with only the slightest thought given to organization. Even worse, once deposited in a huge digital pile, most photos never reach their full potential because the simplest steps to make good photos extraordinary and marginal photos acceptable aren't taken. And then there is the final hurdle. Even when sorted and improved, hundreds or even thousands of photos wind up languishing in the privacy of your computer instead of being openly shared with friends, family or the public.
There are a number of solutions to all of these challenges, both sotware programs and online services. I've recently been using a program that's only been available for a few weeks called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom; a screenshot of the application is pictured above. For the record, I consider myself an earnest point-and-shoot hobbyist street photographer. I use a fairly simple sub-compact digital camera that's several years old and only 3.2 megapixels, and I'm not sure one can even purchase 3.2 megapixel cameras anymore. Nonetheless, I carry it with me almost always, take a lot of pictures, and with some careful digital processing manage to get the occasional nice piece of work that has been chosen for people's Christmas cards or featured on well-trafficked online sites. Having used Lightroom for a few days, I'm giving it a huge thumbs up. I think an amateur photographer of any level is going to find it extremely useful. More experienced photographers will find it indespensible in managing their photos and getting the most yield out of their digital crop. I can't imagine a professional photographer would want to proceed much longer in his work without Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom is currently priced at $200--a price many might balk at. But after paying $300-$500 for the latest point-and-shoot camera or well over $1,000 for most digital SLRs, wouldn't you like to be able to actually save and share most of the pictures you will eventually take?
There are some incredibly salient features in Lightroom (LR), like its non-destructive editing processes that leave your original image files intact and not degraded, that for the purposes of this review are too technical and beyond the scope of my limited understanding of digital photography. Those with a greater understanding of the nuts and bolts issues behind the medium should certainly look into the advantages of LR, because it's my understanding that they are significant.
The five modules above control every aspect of LR. Library is a total content management system for your photos. Develop is where one can make light, color, and cropping adjustments to photos. Slideshow allows the formation of slideshows that can be shown in LR or exported for display elsewhere. Print gives a wide array of formats and configurations for those who are paper printing themselves. Web enables the design of Internet-ready galleries in Flash or Html that can be exported directly to a group or individual's site.
The LR screen is divided into four primary sections: left and right panels, the center viewing area, and a filmstrip along the bottom. The left panel is essentially the home of the your photo management system. When importing pictures into LR, one can place them into a folder of your creation or choosing. If more than one person will be using LR, this is a good way to segregate users' photos. Or if a single user wanted to separate personal and work photos, he could do that.
Once photos are imported, many steps can be taken to categorize your photos. MetaData, like the creator, camera, lens, file type, and date of each photo, is automatically sorted here and one can search photos under any of those criteria. Or one can assign Keyword Tags to individual or groups of photos. If one just imported a bunch of photos from a birthday, you could create a Keyword Tag "Jen's Birthday" and assign it in one stroke to every photo in that batch. In the future, these photos would be returned if one did a keyword search of either "jen" or "birthday". Or one could pick an individual photo from this collection and assign the following tags depending on what you notice about the picture: jen, birthday, cake, balloons, clown, party, kids, presents. The Collections function allows you to create your own specific groups of photos that you may want to later shape into a gallery or slideshow.
The center panel is where one can view the photos that one has currently selected in any of the modules. Below the viewing area are buttons that allow you to choose how you want to see your photos. From left to right there is the Grid View, Loupe View (individual picture), Compare View, and Survey View. All four of these views are configurable to a great degree. Immediately to the right of these buttons is the sorting function that lets you arrange your photos in a sequential fashion based on a number of different criteria.
The right panel pictured here shows what is available in the Library module. In the Develop module, this is where one could adjust light, color, and a number of other meters that would be reflected in the histogram pictured at the top of the panel. Although too detailed to go into here, few users would find the controls available insufficient in order to get the best looking picture they could out of their original photo. Of course, the features found in the left and right panels change depending on which module you are in. And users can make these panels appear and disappear at will as it suits their purposes.
Running along the bottom of the page is a the Filmstrip. It is a navigable row of photos featuring all the pictures that the user currently has selected. It could be every photo in the Library, every photo responding to a keyword search, or one of the user's collections. Selected photos in the Filmstrip will show up as selected in the Grid View in the center panel.
I've barely scratched the surface in describing all of the LR features that I'm aware of and I've only been using the program a few days. Adobe has an FAQ page for the program here. A video tour of features and tutorials can be seen here.
If you think this is something you might be interested in, I have to recommend just going ahead and downloading the whole program from Adobe for a 30-day trial. Play around with it for a month. The worst thing that happens is that you create some really great stuff with your photos before the program disables.
Full Disclosure: My brother works for Adobe and is the product manager for LightRoom. If you think this taints my thoughts on the program indelibly, there's nothing I can do about that. Regardless, Adobe LR is now my preferred system for photo management and photo-work, based on the merits of the program alone.
Posted by Lexiphane at March 6, 2007 6:45 PM
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