Adobe v. Apple
Right. So. It appears that pro and wanna-be photogs are the hot new market segment for software. First Apple releases Aperture (with it’s somewhat obscene minimum requirements), and now Adobe has released a public beta of it’s new Lightroom. The cost for trying Aperture is $500, thank you very much, and the reviews of it’s performance on Powerbooks have been guarded, so I’ve given it a pass. Lightroom, on the other hand, I downloaded and have spent all of an hour mucking about with.
First up: performance. I’m running one of the very first aluminum Powerbooks (1.25 GHz G4) with 1.5 GB of RAM. Basically two-year-old technology that should only show it’s age on computationally intensive software (i.e., memory ain’t going to be the problem). Lightroom was a little slow. This is a public beta so I’ll give it a pass on that…and I’ve got to say, it was fast enough for me.
Next up: functionality. I like the way Lightroom arranges things in “shoots”; I mean, that’s the way I work. I also like the integration with the rest of the Adobe suite (ratings being the big one here). The absolute coolest thing to me so far though is that, under the Develop tab, white balance can be set for JPEGs as well as for RAW files. Yes, Bill (art director friend), a real man can do this in Photoshop in any number of ways, but I, I am not a real man. No, I’m a geek and I’m supremely lazy…and I’m o.k. with that. I also understand color as a function of degrees Kelvin. That’s probably the root of why I don’t have many dates, but I digress. The bottom line is that it’s supremely cool to be able to open a JPEG and decide that, no, I really didn’t mean for it to have a white balance of 5000K and instead I want it to be 4800K. Lightroom allows me to do this without fear of crushing the original JPEG (if you’ve ever had 500 JPEGs from a shoot that you needed to post I think you’ll share my fear of the “oh-shit-I-didn’t-mean-to-write-over-the-original!” moment. Hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m waiting). The downside to Lightroom’s crush-free® technology is that it creates a TIFF. Fantastic image quality, but oy vey! the file sizes. Oh well, rotating media is cheap these days.
Lightroom also allows for you to browse your shoots even if the media the originals are located on is disconnected (a la Portfolio). The previews it captures are good. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the disk with the original images mounted you can’t run a slideshow. I don’t like that. I shoot a ton due to my basic insecurity about missing “the” shot, and I like to take the slideshows of these massive shoots with me without taking the original files (yet another reason why I probably don’t date much: “let me show you my slideshow!”). Don’t know if they’re planning on changing that for the gold release, but I’m going to ask for it.
Well, that’s it for the first look. Take a look yourself. I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to drop Portfolio and use Lightroom for all my workflow/DAM needs.