Adobe Lightroom 2

[Leia]

Adobe has put together some very nice video tutorials.

See here: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Online Video Tutorials


I wish I had gone there about five hours ago


If there is one thing that you think others might benefit from in learning this, please feel free to share.

 

[BobH]

Lightroom is a wonderful program. While not as complex as Photoshop, it still has a learning curve.

I strongly suggest getting a copy of this book:
http://www.photography-bookstore.co...Digital-Photographers-Voices-That-Matter.html

Scott Kelby is a Lightroom guru, and that book will teach you things like file organization and workflow. It's excellent, will save you lots of time, and reasonably priced at about $26.00 (List price $45)

Well worth it, and a great reference.

In The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers, Scott walks readers through the basics of Lightroom use, leading them to a brilliantly devised and super efficient digital photography workflow that dramatically improves productivity and allows photographers to spend less time processing photos and more time shooting them.

 

[Leia]

That is the book that I have. I wish he had posted the link to Adobe's videos at the front of his book instead of his own (very uninformative) intro video.

I found his book is very helpful when used with Adobe's videos.

I will most definitely be using LR2 to download, sort, preview, tag, name files. I will also use it to delete files, and then rate the remaining ones which proved helpful in my tests today.

However, I am really very comfortable with Photoshop CS4 and am thinking once I choose my images to edit, I will then extract them to TIFF (the format I normally edit in) and edit in CS4. I am much faster navigating CS4's commands/menus/options instead and I think Adobe itself put it well saying the two work well together. This way, I still will only be saving my images to JPG once each and my images will be more organized.

*looking forward to the organizational aspects of LR2*

 

[BobH]

However, I am really very comfortable with Photoshop CS4 and am thinking once I choose my images to edit, I will then extract them to TIFF (the format I normally edit in) and edit in CS4. I am much faster navigating CS4's commands/menus/options instead and I think Adobe itself put it well saying the two work well together. This way, I still will only be saving my images to JPG once each and my images will be more organized.

*looking forward to the organizational aspects of LR2*

That's all fine, and it's the way a lot of people work.

There's no need to export to tiff however. Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop both use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to read raw files. So the results would be the same in either program.

Simply choose "Photo > Edit In > Photoshop CS4" from the menu and open the raw file in Photoshop. Edit that, and then export the results as jpg. That way you get the full benefits of raw. Unless there's an advantage to using tiff I'm un-aware of, I'd just work directly from the raw file.

However, there is one reason to edit in LR instead of photoshop, and that's the format painter. It allows you to apply the same change to a whole range of images. Let's say you discover all of your shots are slightly under-exposed. You can adjust the exposure on one, and then apply that adjustment to a range of images. Much faster and easier.

I do a lot of my edits in LR, but I still use Photoshop and Nikon Camera Raw for the "heavy lifting" work.