I’ve been smitten with Adobe Lightroom.
Over the weekend I spent a lot of hours working in Aperture, and while I got a lot of work done, I always felt a bit awkward with the whole thing. Like bringing a kitchen sink to a knife fight.
And so I turned to its closest competitor, Lightroom. And literally in minutes I was sold.
It’s faster, easier and out of my way in just about all respects. The cropping tool alone beats Aperture to a pulp, while laughing manically.
Anyway, hop on over and check out the first batch of photos from our Paris trip, most of which has been through Lightroom.
If you plan on importing lots of photos into LR, I can warmly recommend the tutorial from Luminous Landscape;
http://luminous-landscape.com/videos/LR-V1.shtml
I’ve been using LR since the first beta, and have about 40.000 photos imported into it.. and this video has made consider redoing it from scratch. The good part about that, is that LR can export all your tags and develop settings to XMP, so it can easily be imported again.
If you do consider buying the Tutorial (at $15), I’d also recommend spending the extra $5, and getting the combo with LLVJ15, which includes some absolutely amazing footage from Bangladesh.
I tried Lightroom after reading your post – yeah, just a few hours ago. Thank you. It’s an absolutely amazing piece of software that has almost completely eliminated my reliance on Photoshop. Again, thank you.
I’ve been banging away at LR for a few weeks. Aperture is nice, but Adobe has really locked in with the features and usability I covet. So I love Photoshop and now I too love me some Lightroom.
A few weeks ago I set out to make a proper comparison of Lightroom vs. Aperture. It only took me a few minutes to find a clear winner since Aperture could not even run on my laptop…
I too used some of the early beta versions of Lightroom, but wasn’t too enthused. With the final version, however, they have addressed pretty much every concern I had. I know I will plunk down the dough for Lightroom, it’s just a question about when.
Ooh that’s nice.
9 points.
I’m still a bit torn between LR and Aperture. I love the import tool, the light table and magifying loupe in Aperture and the way it organises my library, but it crashes a bit too much for my liking and uses far too much CPU.
LR on the otherhand feels much more lightweight, but it’s Library feautres and importing tools feel primitive in comparison, but I do agree the cropping tool is much better and having background export is very nice. I’ve yet to find something like Flickruploadr for LR though.
I tend to agree. I never used to the light table, but the loupe in Aperture is just really really nice.
What about the import tools in LR doesn’t work for you?
Flickr integration in LR? Yes please!
After reading your post I FINALLY opened up that Lightroom disk image, from one of the early betas that was just sitting on my desktop :P I’ve been using Aperture for quite a while now but after using Lightroom for a bit, I decided it was pretty nice. I have to try it out some more now to see if I’ll make the switch.
Good choice, I switched from Aperture to Lightroom beta (2nd beta version), and have been happy (and lighter) ever since. The color controls in the Grayscale Mix section can also be found as an Adjustment Layer in Photoshop CS3 beta. The two together are amazing.
I’ve noticed a lot of comparisons with light room and aperture, while I’d like to try out aperture I don’t own a mac. I’m personal not overly impress with light room myself. After using Capture One for over 2 years in my last job I felt hands down it had much better image quality over Photoshop or light room.
I first started using Capture One, long before light room was out. I like it for it’s outstanding batch processing and powerful colour management (a must when all the photos were printed in house). Real colour management is an areas Light room and camera raw plug in fall way short.
While Capture One is clunky on the PC when compared to the MAC version I just find hands down it’s image quality is much better then light room. Light room does have some extras that saving you having to do extra work to your processed files. I felt the way Capture One handled noise to just be more to my liking, just the right amount of chroma and luma noise without knocking out detail or spoiling the image.
One of the interesting aspects of Lightroom is that it has a full plug-in interface. Can’t be long before plug-ins such as Noise Ninja comes to Lightroom.
It’s good to hear some positive feedback from other people. I tried out the beta of Lightroom for a bit and was amazed at how many photos I was able to process in such a short time period. And that was with minimal learning – I can only imagine how great it would be if I really dive in and import the thousands of photos I have waiting on my hard drive.
Now I just have to figure out if I can afford it. Considering how much money I’ve spent on my camera equipment, another 200 bucks should be well worth it considering the end results.
I’ve got to agree. I’ve never been a huge fan of iPhoto and have always been a user of a wide range of Adobe tools (mostly the backend stuff that used to be Macromedia and Allaire). I installed Lightroom and it’s just a natural fit.
I can’t wait to get my new D40X now!