Re: What's the scoop on this?

I've been through a lot of the material on Lightroom through Photoshop
User, and have been in some Q&A sessions on it. I'll tell you what
bubbled up for me.

Right now, nobody makes a good tool for the part of my photographic life
that pays for my film and pinhole addiction.

I shoot a lot of jazz performances, recording sessions, and events. Not
unusual to get back with a couple hundred or more images, also not
unusual to have to do some pretty heavy adjusting of the images, since
jazz clubs and recording studios seem to skimp on lights. ISO 3200 with
shutter speeds down below 1/20 and on the edge of under-exposed anyhow.
  98% of what I need to get done in post-process can be done batched,
once I've worked one or two critical images carefully and recorded the
settings.

CS2 is not a great tool for this. The "hundreds of images" part is not
as easy as it could be, nor is balancing across a range of images, so
that the guy in the blue spotlight and the guy in the red spotlight
(clubs seem to think gels only come in primary colors - sigh...) get
averaged out, and the averaging adjustments can get done while seeing
the group of images.

I guess most of my disappointment with the current beta being Mac only
is because from what I read and saw in the Photoshop User demos, this
COULD BE the tool that'll let me color and exposure balance the 200
images, winnow to the group that hits the needs of the various users,
and get the 20 or so finals sent off to the promoters, media, and
performers in their preferred formats before it's my bed time. I don't
need 20 perfect images, but the closer I can get to "wow" with those 20
images and still hit a midnight deadline, the more calls I'll get to
shoot, and the more sleep I'll get on those nights when I do shoot.

I'll still need Photoshop for the one image that goes on the CD cover,
from what I've seen in the Lightroom demos. I just finished working one
image over, changing the relative size and position of each member of a
jazz trio I shot at a nightclub recording session recently, because the
only unobstructed shooting angle I had forced the trio leader into the
background, and the drummer into an unlit corner. The work included
processing the raw file 3 times to get a perfect exposure on each face
(hard to do when there are only two lights, and the drummer only got
spillover light...) The graininess that was fine for the newspaper and
online reviews also had to get modified to a nice 1950's black and white
jazz club feeling. Two hours yielded one image; for the shoot itself,
four hours yielded 120 images which yielded 20.

I doubt I'd use Lightroom for pinhole work - on a heavy shooting day I
might have five images, and speed doesn't matter. But for the gigs that
pay for my pinhole addiction, I suspect Lightroom could be the tool of
choice, if it delivers basic adjustments in a mass-processing mode.

Ed

Dan Gerber wrote:

> Eric,
>
> If you take a look at the Adobe Labs website, they have a very nicely worded
> explanation of our thinking about where this project is coming from. This is
> a much better job that I could probably do at answering this question.
>
> http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
>
> I can say that part of the thinking behind Lightroom is that most
> photographers use about 10-15% of what Photoshop offers, so it is a Swiss
> Army knife, so to speak, and we are trying to create a "scalpel". As far as
> next generation or breakthroughs, we are trying to create something that
> will be as close to an end to end workflow product as possible, so that
> photographers can move away from having to cobble together multiple pieces
> of software that may not play so nice together. An end to end solution saves
> a lot of time and hassle, and hopefully allows you to focus on what is
> important-your images.
>
> Please let me know if you have other questions.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
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Received on Fri Jan 13 12:03:59 2006