Lightroom 2.0 upgrade

[hwblanks]

Since the Lightroom 2.0 upgrade has come out, I've been wondering if it would be worth it to spend the money and upgrade. I got my September issue of Outdoor Photographer today and they had an article on it that made me really start wondering about upgrading.

Photoshop Lightroom 2: For Nature Photographers - Outdoor Photographer | OutdoorPhotographer.com

What do you Lightroom users think?

Thanks!
Heather

[mithrandir]

There are a whole raft of new features that make use of other software even less necessary.

[bigben91682]

I don't have 2 yet, but have been using the beta for a while, which is very similar. Lots of nice features over the 1.x version. Dodge & Burn features are really nice and very easy to use, especially with a wacom....

[Eaglerapids]

Imho it's a huge jump. I bought a laptop just a couple of days before LR 2 came out. I wanted a small lappy, not a desktop replacement, that would, I was hoping give me much better (faster) processing in Lightroom. So I bought a 13.3 incher. Well the laptop screen is pretty worthless for photo editing so I've hooked it up to one of my desktop LCDs. Then LR2 came out with a second monitor support, which is very cool. The new Lightroom adjustment tools are very cool, everrything seems better to me. I know a lot of people here don't seem to like Lightroom, but I do, a lot. Yes it was kinda expensive but it's a great proggy and seems to keep getting better. It needs a bit of horsepower to run good but we're working on pretty big files here.

[Peter Zack]

Ok I'd like to know why you like it and what makes it worthwhile. Like a dope I downloaded beta 2 and then had to go on a long work trip and hardly had a chance to test it out. So currently I'm doing everything with either PS or paint.net. But some projects will have 1200-1500 image to wade through and it's time consuming.

So how could Lightroom speed things up?

[Eaglerapids]

Well, first off Peter, LR is a data based driven app so it's quite at home dealing with many pictures and keeping track of them. As you probably know all it's edits are non-destructive so you can instantly go back to the original image if you need to.
There are many ways of doing things in LR but as an example, if you've shot a wedding and have a series of photos that all need a specific WB change, or exposure compensation or whatever, you can make the changes to one of the photos, copy the settings and then apply those settings to however many of the others you desire.
You can quickly go through a whole series of photos and mark the keepers and rejects and then delete the ones you don't like en masse. It's rating system is awesome. For example I might go through and mark the pics I want to burn to a disk the color red and mark the pics I may want to print the color purple. Then I can filter for the color purple and there are the pics I want to print. When I go through a shoot I'll give an ok pic a rating of, let's say, a three. If a particular picture is really well exposed and sharp or I really like it, I may give it a 4 and if there is one that really stands out for me, it may get a rating of 5. I can then filter my whole catalog for 5's if I want and those pop up. Or the ones with a rating of greater than 4, etc etc. If I have a folder of many photos from a shoot, I could just filter that folder, it's really quite amazing.
If you keyword deligently and thouroughly you're in like Flint because now you can find anything with your keywords.
LR's collections are really neat and now with LR2 we have smart collections where you can set up a collection and pics are automatically added if, like say, "wildlife" is a keyword you have picked for that smart collection.
If you have several external drives, LR knows what pictures are on what drive. Or DVD disks.
There may be other apps that are better at organizing but they don't develop, or better at developing but maybe they don't organize, Lightroom just does so many things right in the one app, I think it's an incredible program. I don't regret the expense of it at all.

[LaRee]

Originally Posted by Peter Zack

Ok I'd like to know why you like it and what makes it worthwhile. Like a dope I downloaded beta 2 and then had to go on a long work trip and hardly had a chance to test it out. So currently I'm doing everything with either PS or paint.net. But some projects will have 1200-1500 image to wade through and it's time consuming.

So how could Lightroom speed things up?

Lightroom 2.0 is miles better than the beta version was. The most important thing I've done is to break my gazillion files into catalogs. It's improved Lightrooms performance greatly. I love the selective editing functions. The only thing I have to open up pspx2 for is serious purple fringe removal. (the DA 10-17 can be a bit rough in that regard in bright direct light)
I couldn't live without Lightroom now. It is the fastest and best way to organize photos and enables me to find them again easily. There are multiple ways to keyword your images and you can also search by almost any parameter you can think of.

oh and if you like using plug in filters to start you off in a certain direction in your pp, there are a whole lot of free plugins that are quite nice for Lightroom.

[Peter Zack]

Well I hope that helped Heather as well. Thanks both of you for the explainations. It helped me to narrow this down as well. It looks like the solution I've been looking for.

[hwblanks]

I didn't realize there were any plug-ins for Lightroom. I didn't think that plug-ins worked in LR. If Noise Ninja would work with LR, then that would be wonderful.

I just hopped on Noise Ninja's website and discovered that they just released a plugin for Aperture, so maybe there's hope for us LR users. I sent them an email asking them if they had one in the works for LR.

Heather

[deejjjaaaa]

Originally Posted by hwblanks

I didn't realize there were any plug-ins for Lightroom. I didn't think that plug-ins worked in LR. If Noise Ninja would work with LR, then that would be wonderful.

Heather

Lightroom Journal: Plug-in or External Editor?

[LaRee]

Originally Posted by hwblanks

I didn't realize there were any plug-ins for Lightroom. I didn't think that plug-ins worked in LR. If Noise Ninja would work with LR, then that would be wonderful.

I just hopped on Noise Ninja's website and discovered that they just released a plugin for Aperture, so maybe there's hope for us LR users. I sent them an email asking them if they had one in the works for LR.

Heather

Well NN isn't a plug in but there are many many development "presets" I guess that is what I was technically referring to rather than a plug in. There are plug ins that I use, like the export to Zenfolio, Smugmug or Flickr plug ins are excellent and I wouldn't work without them.

Here are a few links and with digging around you'll find lots of things.
Timothy Armes Photography
Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)
Timothy Armes Photography
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips Presets
Free Adobe Lightroom Presets on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Lightroom Presets Directory. Free Lightroom presets and where to find them for free
Google presets and you'll find all kinds of cool stuff to play with. I have a list of presets a mile long and I like them each for a different starting point. It is fun to experiment and get to know them. It helps me vision things as I shoot to have the pp treatment I'll use in mind. Adds to the fun for me.

[hwblanks]

Well, it looks like I'll eventually be shelling out more $$ for software--$99 for the Lightroom 2 upgrade and $70 for the Noise Ninja Pro standalone version. If and when they do come out with a plugin for LR, I'll upgrade my license at that point.

Thanks for all the help!
Heather