Cats Sunset

Cats Sunset, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Workflow woes

I ranted the other day about trying to manage my pictures from a RAW to finished JPEG.

This may be because of my newbie status, but I really like Googles “Picasa” Software for browsing my pictures, deleting some and making basic adjustments such as straightening horizons, cropping and I also find Picasa’s ‘Gradient’ tool really simple for making skies more dramatic. I then use Photoshop for the more complex dodging/burning/levels/etc. Also with Picasa, you can upload pictures to your personal online webalbum with one click (rather than 31,000 clicks in Flickr)

However, on advice from fellow-photographers, TWIP and assorted other sources I recently began shooting almost exclusively in RAW, this mostly because I’ve fallen in love with HDR’s but also because of the flexibility in post processing that RAW allows.

The downside of Picasa as my ‘workflow’ manager is that whilst it understands what an Olympus RAW is, Picasa cannot make intrusive (save-able) changes to it, and forces you to save a JPEG copy.

I don’t like Adobe’s ‘Bridge’ software (too clumsy, too difficult to see pictures, doesn’t display Olympus RAW files) and I loathe, no I despise…no I detest Olympus Master – the abundantly awful bundled software that I got with the camera.

So….enter Adobe Lightroom. I’ve downloaded a free trial and it seems to be what I’m looking for. I played with it for a few hours last night and the above picture was one of the results. Some great little things:

* It’s quick – even the 10mp RAW files load fast.
* It looks good, the menus are fairly intuitive.
* It’s clever…you can ‘stack’ tasks, so instead of waiting for a RAW conversion, the conversion ticks away in the background and I get to work on the something else. I had 11 tasks working away last night! Olympus master implodes after one.

Some really annoying little things:

* Adobe are paranoid about ‘intrusive’ changes. Which is a good thing…unfortunately they seem to have taken this a tad too far in Lightroom, there doesn’t’ appear to be a ‘save’ button….you can ‘export’ pictures, create virtual copies, update catalogues, tweak libraries but you can’t actually save anything. This makes me nervous that the changes I’ve done to an image haven’t actually been applied.


* The whole catalogue & library thing is probably the most counter-intuitive thing about Lightroom. I just don’t understand it and to be honest I don’t think I need to. I’m very fussy about disk management, delete hundreds of unwanted pictures and I have a filing system that works. The catalogue seems to mean ‘folder’ and the library seems to translate as ‘a database full of your photo folders’. I could be spectacularly wrong about that…

I’ve yet to try tweaking jpegs in it. Essentially Lightroom is Picassa with RAW integration, but I like more and more each time I use it – I’ll keep you updated.

Anyway enjoy the pic - over 90 views of 'Greenweed' on flickr...must be doing something right!