Opinions on Adobe Lightroom (beta 4.1)
For those of you who read SMH’s Tech section, there was an article (more like a review, really) of Adobe Lightroom beta 4.1.
Now, since I shoot almost exclusively in RAW, I’m always on the lookout for something that helps speed up my workflow when mucking around with photos. Currently, I pretty much use Digital Photo Professional since I find that it fits most comfortably with my workflow. It’s also free since it came packaged with my camera, and I like free. Right now, Adobe Lightroom beta 4.1 is also free (until February 28) and so I decided to download it and give it a try.
The first thing that I noticed was how incredibly slow and sluggish it was. Any operation I try to do, even simple operations such as adjusting exposure, would result in my machine chugging on me. Upon startup, this monstrosity sucks up 160MB of memory on my current folder of 613 RAW images. This is compared to a more humble 53MB for DPP. I must say that the layout is pretty nice and offers the user with a rich set of tools for processing RAWs. However, one thing that I’ve found Lightroom to be sorely lacking, is its inability to batch process white balance. Normally, I’d normaly take a bunch of photos under consistent lighting. Hence, I should be able to set the white balance for the entire group of images in one go, rather than having to set it manually for each individual photo. Oh, and it also crashed a few times.
In summary, this is what I think of Adobe Lightroom beta 4.1:
Pros: rich feature set, pretty layout, workflow from RAW to print/web.
Cons: fat resource hog, inability to batch process white balance, not free (at least the final version won’t be), stability issues.
Overall score: 3/5
Hence, I think I’ll be sticking with DPP for the time being.
I wonder how Lightroom compares to Aperture?
Thanks for the review, Keith.
I think I read a review of Aperture that said it is much simpler than Lightroom. Is there a version of Aperture for PC?
I don’t think there’s a PC version of Aperture. That, along with the fact that I don’t have a Mac, means that I’m unable to test it out.
Playing with RAWs is a very subjective area and different people will come to different conclusions about different products based on their workflows, and also the quality of the decoder. Since Canon uses their proprietary decoder in DPP, it’s no surprise that it also yields the most accurate results. However, other decoders out there (like ACR) give you much more features so that you can tweak more stuff. Some people like it, some people don’t find it useful. At the end of the day, just use whatever is most suited to getting the job done.