I’m really going to love adobe lightroom

I have been looking for a good, comprehensive, cool looking ;-) and easy to use image management tool for ages. I had a look at IMatch and iView Media Pro and the latest incarnations of ACDSee, but all failed at certain points. As I am very used to the whole adobe product family (accept Camera Raw and Bridge) I was very pleased to see the evolution of Adobe Lightroom. I already was a bit disappointed that Apple's Aperture is and will only be available for OSX. Adobe Lightroom just fits into that gap.

You can look at Adobe Lightroom from many perspectives. Some (like me) see it as an image management tool (the library is the heart of Lightroom) with some nice and easy developing and exporting tools, while others emphasize on the improved RAW Workflow capabilities (there are some cool new color control features for RAW conversions). As I'm am very happy with my current RAW workflow, which includes Breezesys's Downloader Pro, PhaseOne's Capture One and Breezebrowsers, I wasn't on the look-out for a new RAW converter, but at first glance the Adobe Lightroom develop module seems quite interesting (but I will need a new PC for that).

So for now I will use Lightroom only to catalogue all my processed images. That has two benifits: first the library won't grow like hell with all the RAW images - as the processed images are already a selection of the RAW images - and second I only have the final images in the library, which are not only developed but also sometimes edited in Photoshop. That means I'm completely discarding the develop module (well let's see what comes in future ;-).

What makes me really happy is that it's very easy to sync the library to different places. As I do have two external Maxtor 250 GB firewire hard-drives full of images connected to my desktop PC (where I do all the editing and now cataloguing work), I would like to sync the library of low resolution images to the laptop for travel. Now I can have both. I know that is working with IMatch and iView too, but I found it clumsy to setup. Now I just sync the whole library directory between the desktop and laptop using SyncToy from Microsoft and I’m all set. You get the library with all Metadata and the low resolution images within the library folders. That means I don't need to switch on the external Maxtors when browsing the catalogue and I can carry the catalogue with the low resolution images on the laptop. I can use the slideshow module to prepare a quick slideshow and the print module to print a contact sheet. That's exactly what I need.

Another nice feature of Adobe Lightroom is that it comes with a lot of shortcuts, which is great when working on a laptop without a mouse. I'm used to the Photoshop shortcuts and getting to know the Lightroom shortcuts was easy. I really like the "L"-shortcut to dim the working space to show the image. If you hit it first it makes the working space darker, but still visible and on a second press the working space is black. You can than just use the arrow keys to browse through the selection. Unfortunately I haven't found a shortcut for resizing the thumbnails, that would be great. As I'm already mourning the things I miss I have to add that I miss sharpening for the preview images. I really like the instant sharpening of Breezebrowser.

Unfortunately Beta 4 is still a bit buggy. I couldn't setup the identity plate correctly on both systems. Trying to change the color and font of the custom identity failed both times (desktop and laptop): it always sticks to black 10px system font. Lastly, sometimes the whole program just crashed without reason or error message.

So that's for now...

 

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