Adobe Lightroom

Wilmar Boer

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I do - seems stable on my PC - but you do need lots of memory. Great for batch processing and collections etc. Also good for normal adjustments as needed, but it isn't photoshop. If you don't need to do lots of PP, but have lots of pics to deal with its the business.
 
Hi,

I used it recently to process photos of my nephews wedding. I have to say, personally I like it better than Rawshooter Essentials or Olympus Viewer. I have had no problems with the Beta's stability.
 
Allows many different types of adjustements to RAW files. It is slow in some operations and have had the occasional crash.

Had to increase RAM on my PC from 512MB to 1 GIG. Am benefitting from this upgrade with all programs I am running.

Will be buying the product (if not too expensive) when shipping version is available.

Recommend you download the free Beta and play with it.
 
Runs fine on my intel Mac too as long as you have plenty of RAM.

It was slow as a snail with 512mb. Works fine with 2GB. 1GB is the recommended minimum.
 
I find the color that Adobe produces from ORF files to be poor however. My nice golden sudden sets (as seen in Oly Studio) come out cheez whiz orange.

Its got a good workflow - but I still need PS to make more detailed corrections.
 
I shoot only raw.

In general, I fiind Lightroom:
  • stable
  • slow relative to RSP and Bibble, hard to compare with Studio.
  • colors for E-1, like Bibble and RSP, are good, but not as good as Studio.
  • colors for E-330, unlike Bibble and RSP, are good, but not as good as Studio.
I find color support frustrating. While RSP and Bibble finally got close on the E-1 after enough people asked for it, I think Adobe gets closer the first time out. The E-330 colors in RSP and Bibble are way off, imo.

Marc
 
Love the workflow, nondestructive editing & the concept of integrating all of that with some DAM functionality. However, thus far, the image quality is no where near Studio, IMO. I REALLY hope Adobe can match Studio image quality in the initial release of Lightroom because I'd love to use it as my RAW workflow environment. Right now (Beta 3), it falls short in color and in rendering of fine detail.

--
Scott
http://smwhittemore.smugmug.com/
 
I find it slow merely because of the wide options available for adjusting images. But it isn't slow at all & on my machine (was 1gig memory, now 4gig) it is faster than using Viewer for RAW development, and the batch processing is quite nice. On my machine it comes closest to replicating Viewer RAW development images from my E1 than any other program that I have tried, so that's a plus. Also, it alllows extensive work on JPGs without introducing unwanted effects. On the other hand, I think the learning curve is pretty steep (which is why I'm slow with it). For basic PP work, however, I generally stick with Paint Shop Pro because I know how to use it and it produces reliable results. I will probably buy Lightroom if it is not expensive (ie., less than $100 US), because it's options certainly allow for fine-tuning an image in more ways that PSP.

Cheers,
HS
--
http://hestamm.smugmug.com
 
I've used it on a PC and it's stable. It's also slow, only 756 mb, may be faster on 1G and better.

All comments made seem compatible with my experience.

It's free now, download and try it.
--
Allen C.

Travel in RV when not home.
 
. . . . 1GB of RAM. I'm (non-scientifically) comparing what I see with the three other softwares that I use in my workflow . . . these would be Faststone, Capture One and PSEv3.

In any of the tasks I have tried with Lighthouse, the difference in "speed" is VERY noticeable. I do think it is "user friendly". Perhaps the next version will be faster.

Have you frequented the Lighthouse forum ?

Best . . . .

Paul
Vancouver, WA . . . (USA)

galleries at: http://www.pbase.com/spdavis
 
I've found lightroom to be very slow on my machine which has 1.5GB RAM.

I haven't heard of anyone claiming that the program is fast on ANY machine until just now...

Perhaps If I had a new Core-Duo based system with 3GB of RAM it might not feel as slow(?)

In spite of its slowness, I do quite like a lot of the features but wish that there was some dodge/burn capability. As it is, Lightroom allows you to label/tag, crop, resize, adjust curves and color, sharpen and de-noise which are 90% of what I do to my photographs but I wish it had a few more tools to make it an all-in-one package instead of having to export from one program to another frequently.

I thought this product was advertised as a complete streamlined solution for the Digital photographer's workflow (as opposed to the Bridge-ACR-Photoshop mess)..
 
as has been stated in the Lightroom forums over and over again - Lightroom has not been optimized for speed - at all.
Lightroom will be faster when v 1 hits the shelves.
(How much faster is hard to tell though).

Some people like to disable the "Build previews in background" option found in the General tab in LR preferences. If you do this LR will build the preview for a file on the moment you zoom in on a image.

It will take a bit longer to access a specific image but you will not have the initial slow down after import.

(It's also this initial preview generating background task that in the current beta 3 slows down the app considerably - if you let the task finish you will ha a speedy LR again).

And Beta 4 is near release… with some new features like "vibrance" and "fill light" and more…

Check the LR forums for more info…
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Andreas

--
http://www.pixels.nu
 
as has been stated in the Lightroom forums over and over again -
Lightroom has not been optimized for speed - at all.
Lightroom will be faster when v 1 hits the shelves.
(How much faster is hard to tell though).
Some people like to disable the "Build previews in background"
option found in the General tab in LR preferences. If you do this
LR will build the preview for a file on the moment you zoom in on a
image.
It will take a bit longer to access a specific image but you will
not have the initial slow down after import.
(It's also this initial preview generating background task that in
the current beta 3 slows down the app considerably - if you let the
task finish you will ha a speedy LR again).

And Beta 4 is near release… with some new features like "vibrance"
and "fill light" and more…

Check the LR forums for more info…
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Andreas

--
http://www.pixels.nu
Also if once you have sorted out the photos, put a few of those into quick collection as that speeds things up when you are working on them.

Window users: If you read the release notes fully it tells you the windows version is slower than the mac version at the moment. This will be sorted out in the future.

As for colours you can set your own presets and save them.

The advantages over studio is the amount of extra control you have. It has more control over colour than even Photoshop.
 
As I stated above, LR is faster than Viewer on my machine. It's just that its options are so many that I'm slower using them, but that's user error, not the application's problem. :-) I have a WinXP machine by the way, and have never had a problem with LR speed. It builds thumnails faster, too, than Viewer, and is just as fast importing folders as Thumbs Plus, which I use for a thumbnail/slideshow application.
--
http://hestamm.smugmug.com
 
. . . . . told us that it's GONNA BE S-L-O-W !!!

Best . . . .

Paul
Vancouver, WA . . . (USA)

galleries at: http://www.pbase.com/spdavis
Adobe did say, several times on the forum, the podcast and the windows version release notes. Trouble is a lot of people tend to not bother to read/listen to them but just spend ages complaining its slow and the reasons it might be slow even though Adobe have said why.
 

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