All of my magic
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Written by Robert on February 12, 2008 – 8:55 am
Lightroom is the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife for digital photographers. It has a huge mess of tools neatly packed into a single package. In addition to instantly making several hundred dollars disappear from your bank account when you bought it, Lightroom imports, previews, performs tonal corrections, color correction, sensor spot removal, red-eye removal, straightens (are you still reading this?) and it also makes slideshows, and creates really cool web pages, just to name a few. I can see a little cloud forming over your head as you read this. What about my existing photo editor? In other words… This is probably the most asked question since the introduction of Lightroom. Adobe and others have been consistent in their politically correct answer ‘… Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the perfect complement to Adobe Photoshop.’ That answer is correct, but it is also very narrow especially when you consider that there are other Adobe applications that need to be considered when looking at what replaces what. Most users of Adobe digital imaging solutions know there is more than one overlapping solution in the Adobe library of applications. In addition to Photoshop, there is Adobe Bridge which has evolved from a modest inter-application utility into use as an image manager by many Photoshop users. Let’s not ignore Photoshop Elements which, like Photoshop, has all of the necessary tools that Lightroom does not.
So, does Lightroom replace Photoshop, Bridge, or Photoshop Elements? The answer depends on what you do. Wedding photographers I interviewed during the Lightroom beta testing told me Lightroom does everything they need for a wedding shoot and does it in the least amount of time and time is money. For myself, I shoot stock and fine art photography, so Lightroom is not enough to do all of my magic; so I need an external photo editor like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for a few of my special photos. So, while Lightroom won’t replace your existing favorites, it will change how and when these programs are used.
Probably the biggest feature of Lightroom that makes it diff erent from the rest of the digital imaging herd is its ability to make adjustments to images while leaving the original photo untouched whether you are working with Raw images, JPEG, TIFF, or even Adobe DNG. This is a very important concept, so I thought it is best to include an example.When working on images with a traditional photo editor, you want to preserve the original image so that you can return to it after the client tells you that what they asked you to do isn’t what they meant at all. Isn’t communication fun? The duplicate image method is the best way to ensure that you always have a copy of the original to return to. It also fi lls up the hard drives pretty fast. The Lightroom approach is to apply the changes to a small fi le called a sidecar fi le that is kept with the image. When the fi le is displayed in Lightroom, the image displayed refl ects the changes you made. The original remains untouched.
There’s more. Back to Photoshop, if you wanted to make several versions of an image treatment to show a client, it requires multiple copies of the image. In Lightroom you can make a Virtual Copy of the image. While it appears that there are multiple copies of the image, there is actually only one with multiple sidecar fi les reducing the amount of hard drive space needed. The example shown next is a photograph of a couple of Cuban cigars (it’s legal to look at them, you just can’t bring them into the US). It appears that there are three identical photos showing several different treatments. The original fi le size is 15 MB, but, even though there are three different variations (you can only see three of the variations in the fi gure), the total fi le size is still roughly 15 MB. Had I done the same thing in Photoshop, the total of the four variations would have been over 60 MB.
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