Adobe Lightroom 3 Review

Photo Management

Adobe Lightroom has many ways to organize, tag, and filter photos. It provides the user with multiple systems of managing and tagging photos. With these systems you can easily pick out what photos you want to keep, and what photos you don't.

Importing Photos

To get photos into Lightroom, the user needs to use the import function. In the import menu, you can select either Copy as DNG, Copy, Move, or Add from the source (a camera or folder) to Lightroom. Also during import the user can specify file handling, file renaming, and bulk settings. 

File Handling

Here you can choose whether or not to import duplicates and render previews on import. If render previews are enabled, the program doesn't have to re-render a preview when you view the pictures. 

File Renaming

If enabled, files that are imported can be renamed to a template. For example, you can put in the date that the photo was taken as the file name, or custom text and then a sequence number. The possibilities on this are endless and can be customized to however you want.

Other Settings

You can also choose to apply effects to the imported photos. These effects could be custom actions or preset effects.

Another thing that can be done when importing photos is adding adding keywords to their EXIF metadata. This can be very useful if you want to be able to easily search your photos.

Photo Organization

The first system and probably the most simple one is the ability to set a photo's flag to either "pick" or "reject". You can easily do this by using the hotkeys "P" for pick and "X" for reject. After you have a list of photos you have picked, you can go to filter out all the photos that have been flagged as picked. Also you can go to filter out the photos that have been rejected to delete them if you wish.

The second system that Lightroom has is the ability to give photos a rating, similar to that found in Adobe Bridge. This is a good way to narrow down the good photos in a collection. One method of using this system is to first go through the collection and give the ones you like 3 stars. After you have picked all the ones you like, go through the collection again and this time only looking at the ones that have 3 stars (you can set a filter for this). In each of these photos, if you like a photo over the rest of them, add one star to the photo, and vice versa if you don't like it going through the second time. If you want to narrow the photo selection even more, then look through the ones that you have marked with 4 stars and give them 5 stars.

The third system Lightroom has is the ability to color-code photos. This is useful if you want to group photos together. Another way this could be achieved is with system called keywording. Keywording is a way to add in words to a photo and be able to search for the photos with the keyword. An example of this in use is for wedding photography where the names of the guests can be added in as keywords. Then the names of the guests can be searched for and the photos where they are in will come up. One note however is that keywords are NOT stored in your photo's metadata. Rather it is stored in a separate file that Lightroom makes. If you do export your images to JPG you will not be able to access the keywords unless you are in Lightroom.

One unique feature of Lightroom is that it has a tool called the painter. With this tool you can "spray" all items that you want to mark. For example, if you see a group of photos you want to reject and they aren't necessarily in order then the painter will do great. Just hold down the mouse button and drag over any picture that you want to select. With this tool you can also set colors, flags, stars, etc. While a neat feature, we hardly use it because it seemed easier to use the old fashioned ctrl+click to select multiple photos.

The filtering toolbar

The filter tool in Lightroom is exceptionally powerful, it gives the user the ability to pick out any combination of photos, from the flags to filtering by the metadata in the photo.

Workflow

One thing to note about Lightroom is there is no "save" button, as all your changes are versioned in the history panel. This is a great feature because it allows the user to quickly move onto the next photo without having to worry about saving their work. This comes in handy if a person is going through and changing minor things to all their photos, such as changing the exposure. Many times the exposure needs to be changed manually for each image, you cannot sync the changes throughout all your photos because each photo requires a different setting. With Lightroom's auto-saving feature it is a lot easier to go through photos make changes quickly.

Thanks to its intuitive modes and clever file browser, Lightroom speeds up workflow by minimizing the amount of time you need to spend looking for and selecting files.  Batch actions and automated file naming are just a few examples of tools that Lightroom has to make your life easier.


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