Abandoning Lightroom

[The View]

I switched to digital only this year, and LR was the software I picked for RAW conversion reasons and speed (LR is much more forgiving if you haven't got the latest and best hardware).

It is an extreme pleasure to work with, and more than once I added a session just after midnight ("just one more image") , but finally worked until four in the morning.

LR has issues, but that's normal in early versions. They aren't crippling.

Hardware demands are up with 1.1, that's for sure. My G5 iMac 2.1 Ghz is getting slow with its single processor, but it's still fun.

Issues:

1. cyclically the loading times of images go up to six seconds, and after a while go back to 2 seconds when you leave the application, and restart it (or for some other reason, sometimes it speeds up all by itself again)

2. Library and develop modul less separated. I would like to have access to Metadata in develop.

3. A compare feature of snapshots in develop.

This is all no reason to say goodbye.

I just hope they will fix point 1) soon.

If you look at Aperture, you can't see the curve to really adjust contrast, just the contrast slider, there is no vibrance, and I like the screen appearance of Lightroom more. It's just more elegant.

So, Macgyver, maybe this is just a moment of frustration everybody experiences once in a while, but I guess it's more your old G4 that deserves it than this application.

[madmanchan]

It did take me some time to get used to the database system in LR. I was coming from Bridge in CS2, which was more of a file browser.

But now I really like the database-driven system in LR even though it requires an initial import step. Makes it much easier to organize and find images taken a long time ago, assuming thorough keywording (which I have become pretty proficient with).

My main beef right now with LR is actually the sharpening ... while LR 1.1 has improved sharpening a lot and I appreciate the efforts that Jeff Schewe and others have made in explaining (with examples) how the new tools and sliders work, I still find I'm getting consistently better results in Photoshop, usually either with PhotoKit Sharpener or with my own tools. I think it's great that LR has an on-the-fly masking system now for sharpening, but I also find that often the edge mask isn't well-suited to the particular image, in that the method in which the mask is formed doesn't quite pick out the edges the way I prefer. It may seem like nit-picking, but I bring it up because I find that for important prints I'm still going into PS to do the capture sharpening, whereas I really would prefer to do it all in LR --  better workflow.

[Mark Graf]

I personally haven't seen much of a difference between copying images from a card to my hard drive or using Lightroom to do the same thing while at the same time importing the images to a database.   It really doesn't seem like an extra step to me.

Except for an occasional crash, LR is actually performing decent on my P4,3GHz,3 GB RAM ancient system.

I would expect it would be quite an adjustment to go from a database driven image management system to one of purely using file system folders and keywords.