Adobe Lightroom: Bringing Fun Back to Digital Photography

Berin Loritsch — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:56:00 +0000

Adobe Lightroom is a vast improvement over Photoshop Elements, to which a hundred of you will chime in and say “no duh!” and another hundred of you will chime in and say “wait till you try Aperture!”. The truth is that all the adjustments I need are taken care of in Lightroom and Aperture. I’ll have to wait to try Aperture until I get my own Mac. The family Mac is used all too much for me to have time with it. My wife is doing transcripts, my son is creating and editing music, and my daughter is playing with video and her own canned music. That says something about the utility of the Mac out of the box. Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, etc. pay attention, the set of software included in a Mac is both fun and useful for a family. Not the load of crap that slows down the PC and gets in the way.

Back to Lightroom. All my complaints about tagging and organizing my photos has been addressed in this piece of software. It’s how things should be. Of course, it does highlight a problem I noticed about my tags—over time some of the supporting players on my son’s team had their jersey numbers change. I shouldn’t have included the numbers in the name tags. The cool thing is that I was able to tag and organize my pictures from a game in about half an hour. Considering I am tagging the pictures with the players that can be seen, that’s better than Flickr. I’m sure that Aperture is equally cool in this regard. I just can’t play with it yet.

It’s important to point out that when you make things that people have to do fun, they are in turn more productive. They also have a certain loyalty to the brand. I thought it was interesting to point out that with the O’Reilly experiment to have their Lightroom columnist try Aperture for a week, and vice versa, that both columnists were loyal to the app that first made managing their pictures fun. They appreciated several features of the application they weren’t used to, but because they work differently they had to relearn how to do the same things they already knew how to do—which is never fun. It’s like a baller fixing their shot. They already know they can shoot, and they continually fall back into their old shot until they have practiced so much that the new shot becomes natural. It’s work and work is not fun. The only thing that will help them pursue the change is that they will become even better. With both Aperture and Lightroom, they suit different styles of working with your pictures. Aperture is very non-linear, and Lightroom is more structured. One avoids forcing a workflow on the user, and the other encourages a workflow.

Structure can help people make sense of their world, but the wrong structure can get in your way more than it supports you. If your discipline is to organize the pictures before you spend any time touching them up, then you will enjoy Lightroom. If you like to make multiple passes and organize on the fly as you touch up the pictures (a much more organic process), then Aperture will better suit you. Lightroom forces you to adapt to its way of thinking before you can enjoy it. Organize, then touch up. I tried organizing, and touching up the pictures one by one and that took too long. I adapted by organizing, selecting the top 10 and then touching them up one by one. It was annoying to have to change modes to change pictures, but it was more productive that way. I prefer a more organic approach. I’ll definitely try out Aperture (which is at a nicer price point anyway) in the near future.

The bottom line is that when the cost per picture is fairly low you will take more pictures. You then have to do something to manage them all. With large format photography, you have a much lower production pace because it takes longer to shoot, costs more per frame, and you usually don’t have to compromise to get a “close enough” picture. You can manage it efficiently with proofs and notes on paper. The whole idea of a program like Aperture and Lightroom is unique due to the demands of digital photography.

Software Artisan: Adobe Lightroom: Bringing Fun Back to Digital Photography

Adobe Lightroom: Bringing Fun Back to Digital Photography