Are you having trouble figuring out which of the Adobe Photoshop products are right for you? Check out Scott Kelby’s discussion on his blog. Regular readers of my posts on Lightroom will not be surprised by Scott’s conclusions.
Even if you don’t agree with Scott I hope you can get a better feel from Scott’s post on where the main photo editing products from Adobe fit in.
Technorati Tags: railroad, trains, photography, photograph, photoshop, lightroom, camera RAW, adobe
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Over the holidays I considered converting my photo catalog from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Photoshop Lightroom’s Library. There are lots of reasons to convert but the overriding item for me is how the Library and Develop pieces are more integrated than in my current work flow. On top of that Lightroom allows me more access to meta data which as time goes on will be more and more important. After I set up a test catalog in Lightroom to see how things would look I found the steps I used to catalog images in Organizer would be about the same in Lightroom. At that point the decision was made.
Now to convert. I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to convert because Lightroom has an “Import from Elements” option built right in. Software developers you can stop reading here, you know what happens next…
As with any conversion there are some things which must be done to the ‘source’ data to make it more usable in the ‘target’ system. I carefully read several posts on the preparation needed and once done I fired it off. Happily I could sit and watch as Lightroom imported my photos and tags and went about the process of organizing every thing in the Library. In a geeky way it was fun!
When the conversion finished the first thing I noticed is that some of my Organizer Tags did not land in the Lightroom keywords in the same hierarchy. As I snooped around some and I found the keywords outside the hierarchy were simply duplicated so deleting them would solve that issue. Various discussions around the Adobe Lightroom forum confirmed my conclusion. At that point I estimated 30 minutes or less to correct. So far so good.
The next thing I noticed was the captions were missing. Oh oh, that’s not good, that’s my record of train symbols and other miscellaneous facts at the time the photo was captured. Back to the forums I went looking for how to convert the captions. After hours of digging it became apparent the captions on RAW files just weren’t converting from the Organizer database to Lightroom. Lightroom’s conversion was always taking the caption from the image meta data instead of pulling it out of Organizer’s database. Some quick math told me I had just over 5,000 images with captions. To quote Aaron “That’s a lot of copy and paste”.
Lightroom is a fabulous product and it is where I want my catalog to end up. With each version it becomes more and more bug free so my hope is in one of the upcoming releases this conversion item is addressed. If its not, I will likely make the decision to convert anyway and do the copy and paste. Hey, my daughter is always wanting to earn money maybe she’d do it?
For now I’m back to Organizer.
Where’s my caption?
Technorati Tags: adobe, convert, elements, lightroom, organzier, photos, photoshop, railroad, trains
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I don’t really hide that fact that I’m a geek. I work with computer software for a living and enjoy checking out random tech gadgets. I’m quite into blogging. I write at a few other blogs. And I read blogs. 258 of them is the current count.
It’s interesting to watch the railfan world overlap with tech. Last year I discovered Steve Sloan’s blog. He’s helped Vic with Winterail for quite a few years. Like many others, I also read Robert Scoble’s blog. He’s a former Microsoft employee who’s now involved with a podcasting startup. As one of the most-read voices in the blogosphere, he has some interesting things to say.
Like today, when Robert posted I Like Trains Too, admitting he’s a railfan. He specifically mentions the new version of MS Train Simulator being created and points to one of the developers’ blogs.
It’s great to see my various interests collide. We’ll have to see about getting Robert up to GorgeRail at some point…
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A couple of Saturday’s ago I went to a railfan slide show (not a multi-media presentation) in Portland that was attended by many nationally and regionally known railfan photographers. It seems in the past few years at these gatherings, a discussion of film vs. digital always breaks out. This time was no different and the discussion this time made me more aware of one of the barriers to entry into the digital world. One of the film photographers commented he’d attempted digital but has been less than impressed by the results. The common theme was the images just didn’t look as good out of the camera as slides.
I’ll agree with him on that point because DSLR produced digital images (as we know them today) need post processing. I have to believe that this is the most complicated transition point for a film shooter who is used to the images arriving in a yellow box fit for showing.
How to handle images after loading them onto the computer can be an adventure because unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) there is no single ‘perfect’ post processing workflow. My film friends should not be frightened by this though because there is help available. I have found three workflow tutorials that I return to over and over for guidance. These are Workflow Guidelines on the Fred Miranda Post-processing & Printing forum and Luminous Landscape tutorials A Digital Workflow Primer and An Image Processing Workflow. All three are written for the full version of Photoshop (6, 7, CS) so using a different tool requires adaptation, however the general concepts still apply.
These tutorials will probably not make new digital photographers experts overnight, but I hope they will help others improve their output like they helped me.
One last note on the film vs. digital discussion. Most of the traditional film photographers agreed that digital will likely take over eventually. Until it becomes impossible for them to use film most agreed that they’ll be sticking to it for the foreseeable future. In my opinion this is just fine as they are comfortable with the medium and they still produce long lasting quality images.
Technorati Tags: film vs. digital, workflow, digital, photography, post-processing
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You probably saw the announcements this morning about Adobe’s Lightroom Beta 3 for Windows. So, what is Lightroom? Lightroom is a workflow and editing package which is one part Photoshop, one part photo organizer, and one part import tool. Adobe calls it a ‘project’ at this point because as they describe, the software is being ”built from the ground up by photographers, for photographers”. According to Adobe the goal is to provide a flexible streamlined work flow adaptable for any photographer or photographic style.
As a Windows user, this is my first opportunity to get my hands on this and see what it can do for me. I’m excited about this because from what I’ve heard from my Mac friend this software is spectacular and really improves the import functions. My current photo editing tool is Photoshop Elements 3.0. This software is certainly adequate for the amateur photographer and has served me well. I’ve long been thinking about jumping to CS2, but on the average foamer budget that isn’t necessarily possible. According to what I’ve read, Lightroom is supposed to be priced somewhere between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. So, if the price is right and the features are focused to photographers this could be the right thing for advancing the state of the art in my room.
If you are serious about your digital railfan photography and digital processing, go check out the 20 minute overview video on the Lightroom site and see what you think.
Technorati Tags: camera, software, workflow, lightroom
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