Why Lightroom?

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

tony field said:

The speed / smoothness of Bridge 4 is as good as Lightroom overall.

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Maybe so (I'm not that familiar with B4) but I can say that you've
got your LR set to be very slow and awkward.

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All of my comments regarding Bridge have clearly be stated to be based upon CS4 edition. Bridge 3 was slow, had many problems and was inferior to Lightroom.

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

Thus, if you have CS4, there is no advantage to use Lightroom.

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So you maintain, based on a small LR experiment with really horrible
settings.

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No - the only "horrible" thing I mentions was the possibility of generating large cache files and in other notes on this thread I also stated that the Lightroom cache size could be controlled by the method of caching you used. This can be from quite small to quite large.

Bridge can also generate large cache files as well.

The whole point of my comments in this thread was that If you have CS4 then there is no advantage to Lightroom. If you feel otherwise, could you please show me what Lightroom does that cannot be done in Bridge 4 - other than some aspects of "content management".
--
tony
http://www.tphoto.ca

tony field said:

could you please show me what Lightroom does that cannot be done in
Bridge 4 - other than some aspects of "content management".
--
tony
http://www.tphoto.ca

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Tony,

There's a FAQ page for Adobe Lightroom that answers your question "what can Lightroom do that cannot be done in Bridge?" More specifically, it points out the differences between the two.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/faq/

Thanks for the like, Bill. That page certainly shows the differences among the products. In essence, the principle difference is "asset management" - the ability to catalogue the images in various and sundry ways. This is something I am familiar with. In addition, Lightroom can be somewhat faster than Bridge for some operations.

The principle advantage, from my point of view, of Lightroom is the ability to work intelligently with off-line (i.e. archival) files - something that is not easy within Bridge.

The processing aspects of image editing and manipulation are quite similar between Lightroom and Bridge/ACR. For example, within Bridge/ACR I can easily process 2000 images from a shoot, do necessary image selection, edit the images, generate client CDs, and generate a web page without having to use Photoshop - essentially in the same way that can be done in Lightroom. Yes, you can argue that Lightroom is a simpler workflow - but not "significantly".

For many applications, Bridge provides adequate asset management - although some folks require more.
--
tony
http://www.tphoto.ca

tony field said:

Joseph S Wisniewski said:

tony field said:

It seems that, if you are processing raw files, two caches
are generated.

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Not as far as I can determine.

tony field said:

The first is the "relatively" small lightroom cache
and the Camera Raw cache.

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I can't see what Lightroom has to do with a "Camera Raw cache" at all...

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ACR is used by lightroom to decode the raw files.

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Ahhh...

I see where the problem is, now. Lightroom uses its very own version of the Camera Raw engine, CameraRaw.dll. Although built from the same code base, it is compiled differently, and doesn't use the .8bi PhotoShop plugin interface. (the .dll is faster).

It lives in Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

tony field said:

You can see how
this is created by lightroom in the Raw Cache file.

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Except that it isn't.

tony field said:

The location can
be found in Bridge by looking at "edit / Camera raw settings" menu
item. On a windows system, this is in

Documents and settings/ Local Settings/Application Data/Adobe/Camera
Raw/Cache.

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My Lightroom 2.1 installation doesn't create this directory.

tony field said:

It is convenient to delete the files in the Cache directory when
playing around with how Lightroom uses it.

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?

tony field said:

You can see files added with the name of "Cache000000nnn.dat" as
Lightroom processes files.

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Are you sure that isn't a resident portion of CS4 trying to keep Bridge synchronized with LR?

tony field said:

This will grow during "develop" and "Library" operations.

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Again, not on my system.

tony field said:

In the slide show, you can see files added to
this list if you click on various thumbs.

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--
Rahon Klavanian 1912-2008.

Armenian genocide survivor, amazing cook, scrabble master, and loving grandmother. You will be missed.

Ciao! Joseph

http://www.swissarmyfork.com

tony field said:

RedFox88 said:

I'll take larger cache sizes if it allows me to switch between RAW
files and have functions/adjustments be processed quicker! That's a
no brainer!
...
A large cache size is only a problem if you're worried about cache
size or on a slow computer with limited resources.

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The speed / smoothness of Bridge 4 is as good as Lightroom overall.

My present Bridge cache contains 410,000 images and is 150GB in size.
I have not tried to use Lightroom for this process since Bridge 4
does virtually everything I need.

Thus, if you have CS4, there is no advantage to use Lightroom.

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Except that CS4 is what $600? And LR2 is just $200. I've used PSE in the past and now have hardly any use for PSE except for printing which I haven't tried to do yet in LR2.

I use Lightroom 2 as well. Used the program since it came out,.. and workflow-speed is much better than Photoshop.

I shoot fashion etc, and mostly humans,..and use Presets a lot. Basically I create different presets for my models to get different looks/moodes,.. it makes the rest of the image enhancements in CS4 a lot easier and faster.

Also the UI of LR2 I find very easy,... I find myself doing more and more initial work in LR2, where I used to spend a lot of time in CS before the LR-days ;o)

BR
Jan

--
Studio and on-location photography - http://www.jh67.dk

Standard Vista still can not use more than 4 Gig no matter how many processors are in the machine. If the application is 32 bits then even in Vista 64 it can not have access to more than 3 Gig. If you have Vista 64 and a 64 bit application then the sky is the limit (at least the sky we know of today )

Des