Well, I blame my friend Cath….
And I am sticking to that.
It is, as always with Cath, in a good way.
The other week, a group of us went to RIAT on the Sunday this year for a good day out, and the opportunity to have some good shooting of fast jets (and not-so fast prop planes, but with the BBMF – awesome planes)
Well, about 24GB of photos later (for me anyway), some of us were sat around munching pizza and reviewing our great (and sometimes not so great, again, more referring to me here) shots.
I fire up mine in Linux using Gnome Photo Viewer, Cath fires up Lightroom, and detail freak fires up Windows 7.
Well, that’s a pretty full complement of alternatives between us.
That, in it’s own right is hilarious, and worthy of a celebration that there is that much choice about, as we have all, in our own way, taken a different path.
However, the one thing that did stand out, at least to my mind, was the power of Lightroom.
Who used that out of the three of us ? Yup, the pro photographer, and yup, of course, on a MacBook.
Opened my eyes I can tell you.
I am used to copying all my files off my CF cards onto an external hard drive.
I then write a script to go through all the files, do a little re-name on them, and then create a new directory, and then move all the RAW files into that new directory.
As I am paranoid, I then back them up to another hard drive, and then sync one of the two external drives to a NAS.
I then go through all the files using Gnome Viewer, and each time I get to a photo I class as “best” – to at least worthy of using, move it to a directory called “Best”.
If those photographs are feeling a little, “missing”, then I will fire up UFRAW, and do a “fix” or, enhancement with that, and maybe use GIMP to do a crop…
I then re-sync all 3 devices, 2 ext drives, and the NAS, so I’ve not lost anything.
Cath showed me, through the gift of Lightroom a whole new, more efficient way of working, just use Lightroom to import the RAW photos, rate them how good they are, and then process them, including tweaking/correcting them for body and/or lenses.
… Oh – and tag them with the date, context, place etc….
And sod the JPG’s from the camera, just take RAW, and process them in Lightroom to JPG if required for my web gallery. (and even print them from Lightroom)
So – guess what happened the following week at work – when my work PC decided to tell me my Adobe Flash was out of date????
Show me a link to a trial download of Lightroom – so, once home, fired up the link again, and dropped myself a copy onto my MacBook.
I’m hooked.
Completely.
… and utterly.
I put it to the test on the photographs I took at RIAT.
Out of the 1800 or so that I took, I rated them, and ended up with 255 shots that I then processed.
Lightroom also then processed them, correcting for my lens (my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8), then processed them into a web gallery, using flash to create a slideshow, which I uploaded here.
I’ve called it “OLD” as I don’t expect it to be around long, as whilst it was a good test of what Lightroom can do, it doesn’t fit in with the gallery software I use to showcase my photographs, and to be honest, much as that software has been a pain recently, I don’t think I will be replacing it any time soon.
One of the things I will say, is that there is a considerable difference between the JPGs produced by the camera and the JPGs produced by Lightroom.
IMHO, and it is very humble, I am really preferring the output from Lightroom, even with almost no “tweaking”.
Again – let me say that again – I prefer the output from Lightroom.
Is this me looking at the JPGs produced from the camera on one machine against ones on another machine – NO.
Same machine.
And – yeah, I have calibrated the screen.
And yeah, in the same program – in the case of viewing the output, this was using either Safari or Chrome on my MacBook.
The JPGs produced by the camera are too “watery”, it’s the best description of the output I can give.
They are lacking a certain something.
It’s a frustrating position.
It means that on each every shoot I need to process the shots through Lightroom (or equivalent) to get a JPG out for display in a gallery.
It’s a different way of working I guess, but, as I alluded to earlier, I think more efficient.
Well, me being an Open Source software advocate, is there something I can put onto my Linux machine that does the same thing as Lightroom ?
Would it give me the same workflow ?
I had a look around, and found a GPL’d piece of software called Darktable.
I’ve aded the Ubuntu repositories to my 10.04 LTS box (that yeah, is no longer supported, but need a bigger HDD to do a reinstall) installed it, and will report back on it’s functionality as and when.
Whilst I was looking at Darktable tonight, I looked at the status of GIMP and 16bbp editing, something that I personally haven’t worried about, until now.
At the moment, it works, but only apparently in the development versions, nothing stable.
OK – for now, putting off using it for proper manipulation.
There is one other thing that is rather interesting with all my investigation and trial work.
At *NO* point did I even contemplate going down the Windows route and whatever tools I could get on Windows – Lightroom/Photoshop included.
It simply didn’t even enter into my mind as an option, not until I had almost finished writing this entry.
Is that because I haven’t used Windows as a home tool in so long now that it is out of my conscious thought ?
Is it because I don’t know Windows well enough these days to make an informed decision ?
Actually, I don’t know, probably the former, even though I have to use Windows at work, its use as a tool for me, is just irrelevant.
With whatever the outcome of my experiments with Darktable, and the wait for GIMP to do 16/32bbp, I’ve decided it’s high time to finally bite the bullet, and go Lightroom and Photoshop on my MacBook.
I just don’t think that as a photographer, ameteur as I am, I can justify *NOT* going down this route now, not after seeing the power and simplicity that it can give me.
Even though any photo reviewing and processing is going to take some time, like it did in the days of film, anything that can cut it down, and gain me extra time in the “field” shooting, that has to be a blessing.
For the moment, for me, that is Lightroom at a minimum.
Doing it this way does give me a minor headache now though….
OSX doesn’t read my Ext3/JFS formatted disks….
That, however, is a problem I will look at another day.
Thanks Cath, I have a different photographic related problem…. x 🙂
(One I prefer to be honest)