[Leica] photoshop CS3 stuff

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

Lightroom and Aperture are about workflow, Robert. The tasks you
assign to Photo Mechanic would be taken over by either of these
programs. They provide a powerful set of tools for quickly looking
through your images, sorting them into some sort of order, selecting
the images that are the ones you want to work with further, and
applying a wide variety of meta-data to those images in addition to
those written in by the camera/scanner/whatever.

They really shine when you begin to apply your own meta-data to them.
Maybe you chose to have a keyword for dogs with a heirarchy of
keywords such as puppy, combos, play, formal, exhibitions, inside,
outside. You can apply all of these to images quickly and easily. THEN
say three months from now you can ask to find all puppy images playing
outside and have them retrieved for you to browse through.

The images themselves, the masters, can reside where ever you like.
Both Aperture and Lightroom allow you to either use a central database
holding the master image, or to keep that image in a location where
you desire, either on-line or off-line. They do keep thumbnails of
some degree to make it easy to look at off-line images.

Both programs allow for non-destructive editing of the image. You can
apply changes in terms of sharpening, RAW conversion, B&W conversion
and the original master image remains unchanged, the operations being
required to manipulate the image being stored as a list of operations
that the software can VERY QUICKLY apply to your image. (This is why
having a fast graphics card is very important.)

If you want to use Photoshop on an image to do things that cannot be
down within the program itself, then you can spawn a new version and
send it off to PS to be worked and, the new image imported back in for
you and tracked. It's all VERY slick. (Takes LOTS of memory too. I
have 4GB and it's about right.)

Hope this helps give a sense of what they do.

If you want an overview of Aperture you can look to the Apple site -
there are some excellent video introductions to why you'd use
Aperture. I'll bet Adobe has the same for Lightroom.

Adam


On 2/1/07, Robert D. Baron <robertbaron1@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wade Heninger has been very kind to help us all begin to understand
> Adobe Lightroom and its relation to Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3, and
> he says in pertinent part:
>
> > Why the overlap? Bridge is a file browser. LR is a file organizer.
> > Different beasts.  That is the official line.
> >
> > My personal opinion (because I don't care about party line, I care about
> > elegant solutions) being involved in all of these products mirror Scott
> > Kelby's:
> >
> > http://www.photoshopuser.com/?page=lightroom/faq
>
> Although I am admittedly just beginning to scratch the surface of
> Lightroom, here is where I get confused:  say I shoot and fill up a
> compact flash card.  I use a usb card reader to copy the images to a
> folder on my computer.  I then use Photo Mechanic (my browser of choice)
> to quickly open up that folder to evaluate and select the images I want
> to manipulate further in Photoshop. I can go back and open and view
> other folders as many times as I want. (I could have done that in
> Bridge, but up to this point it has been too slow.)
>
> Now, if I am using Lightroom, I have to *import* selected images into a
> Library module, where they are put into a....what, a volume?....created
> by Lightroom and they are now [in Lightroom] categorized (filed) by
> Lightroom and not the way I originally filed them and the way I have
> traditionally accessed them.
>
> If this makes sense, it shows why I am confused.  If it doesn't, I am
> more confused than I thought.
>
> Thanks again, Wade.
>
> :-)
>
> --Bob
>
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