Lightroom initial review
Been playing around with Lightroom a little more. Mainly using it to edit down a wedding I shot a couple weeks ago. By and large, it's a very good application for something that has just hit version 1.0. That said, there are a few things that still need to be worked out. My main gripe is that I run into "Out of Memory" issues from time to time. This appears to be a Windows only thing and doesn't seem to be related to the actual amount of memory in the machine. (Possible culprit is Norton's real-time anti-virus protection, but that remains to be confirmed.) These errors don't seem critical and simply shutting down and restarting the application (not the entire computer) seem to get everything humming along again. By and large, it's very quick to do cropping, color correction, keyword input and making picks and discarding rejects. Way faster than anything else I've used before. Admittedly, I've only toyed around with a few other tools, but compared to Adobe Bridge combined with Camera Raw that I had been using, it's measurably faster. Another item that Adobe needs to come up with a solution for is the ability to transport libraries between different computers. Right now, that doesn't appear to be possible. I've seen a few hacks around the net, but nothing that I would want to try for fear of royally screwing things up. I wouldn't be surprised if this improvement is close to the top of the list of things the engineers are working on. Most shooters I know use a laptop for in the field and on location, but then dump to a desktop machine as soon as they are able for heavy lifting and archive purposes. A final grip is that lack of a function in lightroom that drives a batch process in photoshop. As a specific example of where this would be nice, in the wedding images I'm processing I want to a apply a mild soft focus to each image. Lightroom doesn't have that so I created an action in Photoshop to accommodate the desired effect. Trouble is, the only way I can get the edits and selections I made in lightroom over is to export plain files from that applcatoin and then run a separate batch in Photoshop. It should be as simply as making my selection and then telling lightroom which action in photoshop I want to run with the chosen images. I'll bet that's not too far away either. All and all, it's a solid start for an application. Still have a few bugs to work out to make it as stable as I would expect and then a few improvements to add to get it on down the path to more expected functionality. Still, it's saved me a ton of time running the wedding, so money well spent.