Yesterday, my 14 year old daughter JuJu and I spent the entire day at Studio 314 in Midtown St. Louis learning Adobe Lightroom 4. I’d been using Picasa for organizing my photos, and Picasa/Photoshop for processing. Lightroom is an incredible package –it allows you to quickly sort through your photos and also to “develop” them using sophisticated controls that allow for individual tweaks and batch processing. It’s a professional tool, and even after a day of studying it and most of a day (today) continuing to study it and use it on my own, I only think I’ve tapped into 50% of what the program can do. Not that knowing the controls is being proficient at using the program either. I’m sure that I’ll be picking up lots of tips and efficiencies over the next six months or so (there are tons of Youtubes and other videos offering instruction in Lightroom). What I’ve already noticed is that I’m turned some mediocre shots into decent shots and I’ve turned many decent shots into impressive images. Lightroom offers far more flexibility than the free photo organizing and processing programs out there, such as Picasa and iPhoto. Lightroom 4 is only about $100, so it’s well in range of amateur photographers like me.
Today I spent a couple hours at the St. Louis Zoo capturing images, so that I could have something interesting to process in Lightroom 4. I’ll paste a couple of my photos below, but also offer a gallery (you can get to the gallery by clicking on the title of this post if you don’t see it). I invite you to click on the photos below to see them in much better detail.
So far, so good. I’m definitely going to incorporate Lightroom into my workflow.
[These images were taken a Canon S95 and a Sony HX10V, two modest priced cameras, nothing fancy].
Erich
Once you discover how easy it is so sync profiles across multiple shots, and how easy it is to get insanely great results quickly, you will become a lightroom junkie. I love it.
I am still using Lightroom 3… I may upgrade but I am loath to spend money when “it ain’t broke”.
I do prefer photoshop for some things, for applying ‘contrast masks’ and such, but lightroom generally makes almost everything simple, easy, repeatable, and revertable.
I need to get back into spending time on photography…. travel and work and family take a lot of time…
Tony: I am becoming a Lightroom 4 junkie. It’s amazing to see how many photos I would have deleted that are not merely passable, but enjoyable one I take a bit of time to adjust them. And there are many decent photos that turn out to be excellent. It is a matter of taking the time to do it right, so this hobby, of course, does infringe on family and other callings. Lucky for me, I don’t take huge amounts of photos. But even if I did, Lightroom’s survey feature invite you to quickly cull those down.
On that same topic, I’ve spoken with several wedding photographers who take several THOUSAND photos that their gigs. They absolutely must have a tool like Lightroom to have any change of having a real-work workflow.