I'm ready to make the investment in buying a serious photo editing tool. Before I make the purchase I'd like to reach out to those in the 365 family who have been using Lightroom 4 for a bit.
If you can briefly lay out the pros and cons to this I'd be most grateful. I have read some online reviews and they are so conflicted that I hesitated purchasing it. Some love, some claim it is too slow. What are your thoughts?
I'd also be interested in hearing from others who use a different program that they think might be the better way to go.
I don't have much in the way of disposable cash, so I want to make sure I make the right choice before I pull the trigger.
I love Lightroom....my one BIG Con is the that you can adjust the whole photo, but at least as far as I can tell, you can't take the edits off portions like you can with PS Layers and Masks. If I want the whole photo darker, except the face I can't go in and remove the edit from the face.
@hopess13 You can't [i]erase[/i] an edit, no. But you can paint a mask onto the face - or not-the-face - and adjust that. That said, the one thing I keep wishing for is to be able to invert a mask. Hey-ho. The graduated filters make up for that. Mostly :)
It is an awesome piece of software but you can download a 30 day trial. You have a great deal of flexibility and best if you shoot in Raw as you have complete control and unlike PS if you make a mistake in your edit you can click rest and it takes you right back to the original image. You can adjust all or small parts of a single picture using a range of tools incliding a brush tool to highlight certain parts or even graduated filters which I find incredibly useful. To cut a long story short it is FANTASTIC. I have trialed both this and the full CS6 and couldn't justify CS6 as I like to try and get it right in camera and only edit if necessary. I could write a book and don't want to bore you but please email me on blacklabphotography@gmail.com if you want to know anymore.
@cromwell I'm a big fan. It's fairly intuitive and I keep discovering new things about it! Fantastic programme. I've never used photoshop so I can't comment on the comparison.
@hopess13 Rachel, there are various ways of achieving what you want to do, probably easiest is to adjust the whole photo to your required brightness, then use the adjustment brush to paint over the areas you want brighter. I think that's what Malcolm was saying as well???
LR is free with Open University Course T189 Digital Photography.
Photosho Elements is pretty good too.
I think LR scores in cataloging, tags, and raw support
But a lot of the time I am lazy and just use Picasa which is free and pretty good for most basic edits and albums.
These are your photos. These are your photos on Lightroom. Get Lightroom. It is the single most valuable piece of equipment I have in my photography arsenal, and it's 1/2 the price it used to be. Did I mention it's super easy to use?
i use Aperture because I use a Mac and it is cheaper. The same sorts of presets and plugins for Lightroom are also available for Aperture. it is six of one, half a dozen of the other
ooooooh, no... Lightroom 4 exceeds what Aperture can ever hope to do. The best thing about Aperture is that it integrates into my iOS, I can share photos to my iPhone, HD television (via AppleTV), and iPad (maybe one day). But not Lightroom. That's its biggest drawback.
Hopefully v5 will allow cloning and inverting masks, and more cloning tools to match Photoshop. I use both, and they integrate nicely since Photoshop CS 5.5, not so much before).
I don't use Lightroom as much as I used to now that I alter settings like contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc in camera, but there are still things I rely on it for even though I also have PSE and use Picmonkey too. Each one has their merits and their limits. If you don't want to do anything artsy to your photos and want an overall editing program that will do most of what you could want (other than those photoshoppy effects), then I highly recommend Lightroom. The graduated filter is one of the greatest things since sliced bread.
Also love Lightroom - all of my photos are edited using it. Graduated filter and clarify tools are my favourites. Have rescued many photos with those two. It doesn't do anything like HDR / stitching / focus stacking though - you would need to get plugins or something else to do that if that's something your interested in.
Pro: good for quick workflow and such. Can perform mass changes on all photos you selected. One of the best noise reductions software solutions out there. Now cheaper! Can easily mask out areas (paint) and fix small areas. Integrates with photoshop. Easily imports raw photos for editing.
Cons: things like the spot removal tool isn't that great when compared to photoshop like tools. Learning curve. Database got curopted once but you can periodically back it up. Not a full photo editing program like photoshop.
Basically, Lightroom 4 will do just about everything you can possibly want when you're starting out with photo editing. For the price of Lightroom 4, there is no other program out there that is more powerful. You can check out the 30 day trial, and make sure you're shooting in RAW or else you'll miss out on a LOT of the value of it. After 30 days you won't be able to turn back, so you can save yourself some effort by just buying it up front... mark my words!
I use LIghtroom to import all my photos and organize them. I will edit most of my photos exclusively in Lightroom, though there are some times where I need to pull them into CS6 to do use layers and some of the more complicated corrections. Photoshop is really complicated and hard to navigate though, especially for someone learning to edit photos. Even though I have both, I find myself using Lightroom a lot more often, because for most applications it's just as powerful, and it's much simpler to use.
i have lightroom and haven't even begun to explore it's capability... i do use it, but only a little... i have a much better handle on PSE and of course much of my editing is done in nik silver efex...
i frankly do not find lightroom to be intuitive... someone here told me to expect a steep learning curve, and i've found that to be right on the money... that said, i haven't invested the time in learning it properly... there are tons of tutorials on the net that can guide you thru it, so if you apply yourself, i am sure you will not be sorry!
Hey Crom, I use PSE and have got to know it rather well over the last few months and still have more things I want to learn. I have been contemplating trying lightroom too, but by the sounds of it, it is not any easier to use than PSE.
Would the pro's scoff at PSE and Lightroom? I wonder. For my portrait (people) shoots I am thus far happy with PSE, I think they all have a learning curve...PSE 11 is on sale right now for $50 bucks at Costco and I saw it on Amazon for that price too but only for a short while...good value for money, I think I paid $130 for PSE 10 last winter.
If your machine runs Windows, you may be interested in having a look at Raw Therapee. If it's a Mac, there's Darktable as well. Both are free and the development teams are active. Your 50D will certainly be supported by either programme. http://rawtherapee.com/blog/featureshttp://www.darktable.org/
I love LR and I upgraded to 4 a few months ago after my PC crashed and I got a Mac instead. I always hated PSE and I do not have a ton of money to invest in full photoshop and since I hated PSE was not sure I wanted to anyway. I think it is super user friendly...I probably would have stuck with 3 had my computer not crashed but I really like 4 and all the newer stuff it can do.
Crom, I love your photos, and I know your sitch... I'm going to send you $50 to help with the cost. I always knew you should have Lightroom, the Stormtrooper's deserve it.
We'll hook up offline to work out the details, just dedicate your first edit to me, eh?
Thank you for all your support these past months over at 365Project.org.
@cameronknowlton -- Well, that's a very kind offer, but I will have to decline. However, if you can send me your women instead I may just have to bend my No Charity rule. It's gonna be cold tonight.
Love my LR4, and there are some great tutorials out there , freebies from Adobe (Julianne Kost) and Laura Shoes' video series..this is one you have to buy , but for me it was well worth it. I did the trial download as mentioned above , and did the tutorials during that period. No regrets here, and I've barely scratched the surface.
@cromwell Heck you're funny. BTW, GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ is really a powerful free editing program. I use this program at times. I'd get the Lightroom and learn a little about GIMP if you haven't tried it before.
I LOVE it, Crom! I'm still finding new things with it... had the 30 day trial and bought it... I got a package deal and got PS also... which I don't really use much unless it's something that LR doesn't really do... and so far, it's not much. LR is easy to get the hang of and I have a link for some useful youtube help :) My main use of it is exposure and just tweaking balances and noise reduction... I really don't do much to most of my shots, as you'd be able to see :)
Lightroom is the de-facto standard photographer's tool. As a photo processing and organising thing, it's unbeatable. Sure, full blown Photardshop has a lot more in the way of doing advanced fancy-pants manipulation stuff, but for the much more common (for photographers) task of making the image you took look as good as it can (without shooping tigers into the background) there's really no substitute. I also remember hearing that "layers" were going to be a thing in the next iteration.
I'm not a big fan personally. As a developing tool for RAW files, it's fine as far as it goes, but it never goes quite far enough. Of course it's not going to manage to do everything Photoshop can do, but it's missing even quite basic features such as a clone tool, only offering a very basic and seldom-good-enough spot removal tool.
As such, I find myself having to send images to Photoshop to finish them off anyway, and that defeats a large amount of the value of Lightroom, cost-effectively -- Adobe Camera Raw, which is a free download for Photoshop, provides exactly the same development functions as Lightroom.
As such, for anyone who needs to use Photoshop, Lightroom fairly quickly moves from an image editing package to an image library package, and in that respect I (and plenty of others) find it slow, unreliable and prone to crashing.
Unfortunately, Adobe have recently realised this as well. After providing Adobe Camera Raw for Photoshop Elements for long enough, they have this year stopped releasing it, because too many people were finding Photoshop Elements + ACR did everything, editing-wise, that Lightroom could offer, plus a whole lot more, for less than half the price. So in order to try and bump up sales for Lightroom, they have ceased providing Adobe Camera Raw for Elements, only providing it for the very expensive CS version of Photoshop.
So it boils down, for me, to three main options.
1. If you are happy with the limited editing abilities of Lightroom, and like the idea of a library system as well, it's probably a good choice.
2. If you want more editing functionality, then you probably need to buy Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, and accept that you're paying Adobe $100 more than you had to last year for the same function. But at least you get a library system, even if it's only so-so.
3. If you already have, or think you need, Photoshop CS, then you have to seriously consider whether Lightroom is worth it, when Adobe Camera Raw provides all the Lightroom editing functionality, with an arguably nicer user interface.
Whatever your decision, I'd certainly advise trying the trial version first.
Black Friday special: With coupon code BF2012, Adobe gives 40% off on Photoshop Elements 11, 20% off on Photoshop Lightroom, and 15% off on Acrobat Pro.
Ok, I am hoping to get a new photo editing tool. After reading so many positive comments on Lightroom I thought I would do the 30 day free trial. If I like it I would purchase it. I heard that Lightroom has all the basics that photographers need (Photoshop isn't even close to my budget at this time). I've used Picmonkey alot for editing portraits, burn, curve, etc. etc. but I'm not going to pay a monthly charge to use it. I also use Ipiccy but I thought I would get some additional cool feathers.
I'm usually pretty good at figuring out how to work a software (at least to get started). I finally figured out how to download a photo (although it took everything on my external drive) but now I don't see hardly any edit options at all??? White balance, turn to b&w sepia etc., but very, very few editing options. Where are all those photo editing tools hiding????
Am I suppose to download some more stuff with the free trial?
I realize that it doesn't do layers and planed on using something else that is free. Economy sucks so my available funds are limited.
You actually only have a few tools, Lightroom's magic is in it's sliders. Believe me, it works great.
In the Develop (D) module, you can do edits:
1. against the whole image
2. along a graduated filter/mask (M)
3. to a specific area with an adjustment brush (K)
The edits include:
a. white balance
b. exposure (tone)
c. presense (clarity, vibrance, saturation)
d. sharpening/noise reduction
Additional edits you can do across the entire image (1.) include:
e. hue/saturation adjustments
f. split toning
g. lens corrections (vignetting, distortion)
h. raw colour conversion
i. spot removal (Q)
j. cropping (R)
Work top to bottom in the right hand tool bar (although I recommend you set the Lens Correction right at the start).
Do some basic edits across a bunch of photographs, then start delving into further detail in the areas that interest you most. You'll find youself spending more and more time exploring "what does this thing do"?
Remember, Lightroom is non-destructive, so you can eliminate any step you like, or go back and modify an adustment at any time.
Using a combination of these is what makes Lightroom so powerful.
The video tutorials will give you the idea in just a few minutes. You'll find there are some things that you'll still want Photoshop/Elements/etc. for, but most can be done in LR.
Kathy, if you're anything like me, you're going to learn best through experimentation. I used to be intimidated by the gradient filter tool, but once I started playing with it to see what the various options do when using it, I realized that for gradients, LR is superior to PS and it was silly to ever feel intimidated by it. Also, lets say you take a bunch of photos all with the same settings and then when you upload them, you decide they need some editing and you play around and you find the right combination to make your photo pop.... you can save the settings as a preset and then apply it to all your photos. The more you play around and explore, the more you will like it.
I love LR because of the workflow process that it gives you for managing alot of images and the editing tools.. They're generally quick, easy and does most of what you'd need. True, you cant do things that you can do in PS (eg liquify).. but i find that the % of time i need to PS images is very little compared to the number of images I need to go through.
@hopess13 you can adjust the whole or small parts. In your example, i'd darken the whole image by using the exposure or brightness slider to the left and then hit the "k" button, paint a small selection and bring up the exposure / brightness
Thank you for answering my question - I am doing the trial version and considering Lightroom. (again budget is limited and will not be able to get Photoshop).
Regarding presets - Are there some basic presets to download that are either free or fairly inexpensive that is important? I really don't see anything for doing portraits similar to those in Picmonkey.
Do you have links to some good and helpful presets (either free or reasonably priced?)
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@hopess13 You can't [i]erase[/i] an edit, no. But you can paint a mask onto the face - or not-the-face - and adjust that. That said, the one thing I keep wishing for is to be able to invert a mask. Hey-ho. The graduated filters make up for that. Mostly :)
@hopess13 Rachel, there are various ways of achieving what you want to do, probably easiest is to adjust the whole photo to your required brightness, then use the adjustment brush to paint over the areas you want brighter. I think that's what Malcolm was saying as well???
Photosho Elements is pretty good too.
I think LR scores in cataloging, tags, and raw support
But a lot of the time I am lazy and just use Picasa which is free and pretty good for most basic edits and albums.
Hopefully v5 will allow cloning and inverting masks, and more cloning tools to match Photoshop. I use both, and they integrate nicely since Photoshop CS 5.5, not so much before).
Cons: things like the spot removal tool isn't that great when compared to photoshop like tools. Learning curve. Database got curopted once but you can periodically back it up. Not a full photo editing program like photoshop.
I use LIghtroom to import all my photos and organize them. I will edit most of my photos exclusively in Lightroom, though there are some times where I need to pull them into CS6 to do use layers and some of the more complicated corrections. Photoshop is really complicated and hard to navigate though, especially for someone learning to edit photos. Even though I have both, I find myself using Lightroom a lot more often, because for most applications it's just as powerful, and it's much simpler to use.
i frankly do not find lightroom to be intuitive... someone here told me to expect a steep learning curve, and i've found that to be right on the money... that said, i haven't invested the time in learning it properly... there are tons of tutorials on the net that can guide you thru it, so if you apply yourself, i am sure you will not be sorry!
Would the pro's scoff at PSE and Lightroom? I wonder. For my portrait (people) shoots I am thus far happy with PSE, I think they all have a learning curve...PSE 11 is on sale right now for $50 bucks at Costco and I saw it on Amazon for that price too but only for a short while...good value for money, I think I paid $130 for PSE 10 last winter.
I think you should get it. Price for LR4 is great right now:
http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-65164937-Photoshop-Lightroom-4/dp/B007BG9VLK/ref=sr_1_2?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1353543911&sr=1-2&keywords=lightroom+3
There is whole bunch of free presets you can download.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/845955-REG/Adobe_65165061_Photoshop_Lightroom_4_Software.html
Thanks, for all your input guys. I think I'm convinced Lightroom is the way to go!
http://rawtherapee.com/blog/features http://www.darktable.org/
We'll hook up offline to work out the details, just dedicate your first edit to me, eh?
Thank you for all your support these past months over at 365Project.org.
As such, I find myself having to send images to Photoshop to finish them off anyway, and that defeats a large amount of the value of Lightroom, cost-effectively -- Adobe Camera Raw, which is a free download for Photoshop, provides exactly the same development functions as Lightroom.
As such, for anyone who needs to use Photoshop, Lightroom fairly quickly moves from an image editing package to an image library package, and in that respect I (and plenty of others) find it slow, unreliable and prone to crashing.
Unfortunately, Adobe have recently realised this as well. After providing Adobe Camera Raw for Photoshop Elements for long enough, they have this year stopped releasing it, because too many people were finding Photoshop Elements + ACR did everything, editing-wise, that Lightroom could offer, plus a whole lot more, for less than half the price. So in order to try and bump up sales for Lightroom, they have ceased providing Adobe Camera Raw for Elements, only providing it for the very expensive CS version of Photoshop.
So it boils down, for me, to three main options.
1. If you are happy with the limited editing abilities of Lightroom, and like the idea of a library system as well, it's probably a good choice.
2. If you want more editing functionality, then you probably need to buy Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, and accept that you're paying Adobe $100 more than you had to last year for the same function. But at least you get a library system, even if it's only so-so.
3. If you already have, or think you need, Photoshop CS, then you have to seriously consider whether Lightroom is worth it, when Adobe Camera Raw provides all the Lightroom editing functionality, with an arguably nicer user interface.
Whatever your decision, I'd certainly advise trying the trial version first.
I can not live without it for its easy of sorting and categorising image and its ability to modify images within my same workflow.
When you combine it with Photoshop you have a killer team.
Ok, I am hoping to get a new photo editing tool. After reading so many positive comments on Lightroom I thought I would do the 30 day free trial. If I like it I would purchase it. I heard that Lightroom has all the basics that photographers need (Photoshop isn't even close to my budget at this time). I've used Picmonkey alot for editing portraits, burn, curve, etc. etc. but I'm not going to pay a monthly charge to use it. I also use Ipiccy but I thought I would get some additional cool feathers.
I'm usually pretty good at figuring out how to work a software (at least to get started). I finally figured out how to download a photo (although it took everything on my external drive) but now I don't see hardly any edit options at all??? White balance, turn to b&w sepia etc., but very, very few editing options. Where are all those photo editing tools hiding????
Am I suppose to download some more stuff with the free trial?
I realize that it doesn't do layers and planed on using something else that is free. Economy sucks so my available funds are limited.
In the Develop (D) module, you can do edits:
1. against the whole image
2. along a graduated filter/mask (M)
3. to a specific area with an adjustment brush (K)
The edits include:
a. white balance
b. exposure (tone)
c. presense (clarity, vibrance, saturation)
d. sharpening/noise reduction
Additional edits you can do across the entire image (1.) include:
e. hue/saturation adjustments
f. split toning
g. lens corrections (vignetting, distortion)
h. raw colour conversion
i. spot removal (Q)
j. cropping (R)
Work top to bottom in the right hand tool bar (although I recommend you set the Lens Correction right at the start).
Do some basic edits across a bunch of photographs, then start delving into further detail in the areas that interest you most. You'll find youself spending more and more time exploring "what does this thing do"?
Remember, Lightroom is non-destructive, so you can eliminate any step you like, or go back and modify an adustment at any time.
Using a combination of these is what makes Lightroom so powerful.
The video tutorials will give you the idea in just a few minutes. You'll find there are some things that you'll still want Photoshop/Elements/etc. for, but most can be done in LR.
Hope this helps. Merry Christmas.
@hopess13 you can adjust the whole or small parts. In your example, i'd darken the whole image by using the exposure or brightness slider to the left and then hit the "k" button, paint a small selection and bring up the exposure / brightness
Regarding presets - Are there some basic presets to download that are either free or fairly inexpensive that is important? I really don't see anything for doing portraits similar to those in Picmonkey.
Do you have links to some good and helpful presets (either free or reasonably priced?)